Faculty Research Connections Profile
Catty Dan Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at UNC Charlotte, and the founder of Temporary Office– a design and research firm exploring architecture and digital technology through the production of exhibitions, objects, drawings, animations, installations, and writings. Her work experiments with the multiplicity of techniques and mediums, translating ordinary objects into performative and synergistic systems to visualize and to modulate ephemeral forms.
Zhang’s projects have received recognitions in AN’s Best of Design Awards (2019) and A+D Design Awards (2020). She was the inaugural winner of the Emerging Designer’s Exhibition competition hosted by UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design and delivered her solo exhibition “The Moving Air” in 2020. Her recent solo exhibition “Bubble Bath / Interior Cities 0.5” has been on display at the MetroLab at Florida Atlantic University since January 2023.
Zhang’s design work has also been featured in group exhibitions at the 'T' Space, London Design Festival, Carnegie Museum of Arts, A+D Museum, Harvard GSD, among other institutions. Her recent work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, as well as several institutional grants during 2017-2022. Zhang was a finalist of the Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize in 2018 and 2021. She was awarded the first prize in the Pamphlet Architecture 37 competition in 2022 and will be authoring the next volume in the Pamphlet Architecture series titled “Active Atmospheres: On Instruments and Protocols for Medium Hybrids and Architectural Voids”.
Zhang earned a BArch from Tsinghua University, an MArch with Honors from Washington University in St. Louis, and an MDes in Technology from Harvard University Graduate School of Design where she was the 2017 recipient of the Daniel L. Schodek Award for Technology and Sustainability.
Website: TEMPO (Temporary Office)
Explore HER recent work
THE MOVING AIR: A CULTURAL-ENVIRONMENTAL PARADIGM:
Zhang's exhibition "The Moving Air" (2020) features multimedia investigations utilizing airflow as a material freely available in the environment. Developed at the convergence of computation, natural physics and architecture, "The Moving Air" attempts to explore the cultural, social, and environmental uptakes of technological investigations of ephemeral and invisible factors that create emotional impacts.
“ACTIVE ATMOSPHERES” on view in Rhinebeck, NY:
For nearly a decade, Assistant Professor of Architecture Catty Dan Zhang has been studying air as an important and active system to be foregrounded in the design process. An exhibition in Rhinebeck, New York, features tools and products of her investigations. Zhang won first prize in the competition, giving her the opportunity to produce the next book in the Pamphlet Architecture series.
"PULLED BRIDGE" A Community Distance Learning Center (JIangxi Province, China): Zang's project proposes an advanced educational prototype in the rural community which has a general uptrend in the furtherance of education with various focuses while pedagogical shifts in learning have happened globally. Located in Henglu Town by the Tuolin Lake, this community center aims to provide a transitional education facility that expands the social interaction.