Tommy CheeMou Yang
Tommy CheeMou Yang is Special Faculty in Architectural Design at Carnegie Mellon Architecture. He is a founder of locating.matter studio and co-founder of the HMoob Stories Project. He joined Carnegie Mellon in 2021 as the recipient of the 2021-23 Ann Kalla Professorship in Architecture. He teaches studios and seminars in the school's design programs and is the coordinator for the Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) program’s Poiesis Studio sequence.
Tommy’s design research and teaching focus on bridging the disciplines of architecture, ecology and the humanities through storytelling and ethnography. His work unpacks how ordinary stories and rituals cascade into architectural and urban changes using methods in fieldwork, oral/public history, material landscapes, vernacular wisdom and construction, in addition to visual narratives.
Tommy’s research and community empowered projects have received multiple recognitions and support including the PJ Dick Innovation Fund Faculty Grants Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, Wisconsin Historical Society, Urban Systems Lab at The New School, and Urban Field Station Collaborative Arts Program (now the NaturePLACE Collaborative Arts Program). These works have included embedded research on Hmong refugees re-making their homes in Wisconsin, Thai villagers maintaining their worlds within the rapidly urbanizing city of Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the morphogenetic growth of immigrant communities in New York. His design research has been published in "dense," "Nature-Based Solutions for Cities," "The Nature of Cities" and exhibited internationally, including in Wisconsin, New York, Chiang Mai University and Chiang Mai City Heritage Centre.
Tommy received his professional Master of Architecture degree with distinction from Parsons School of Design at The New School and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
News
February 5, 2025: Assistant Professor Vernelle A. A. Noel and Special Faculty Tommy CheeMou Yang receive 19 submissions for their 4S 2025 panel on "Embodied Knowledge(s), Technological Distancing, and Experience."
Fall 2025 Teaching
This design research seminar explores vernacular and folklore as a point of departure to frame the theoretical position of the architect as an integration of socio-ecological systems.
This studio seeks to recover the spatial entity of the Mae Kuang (Mother River Kuang) and its distributary offspring, believing that contemporary urban and architectural practices can be recalibrated with the embodied knowledge of everyday stewards, ultimately transitioning object-based approaches to address systemic issues that frame water-based resilience.
Spring 2025 Teaching
This design studio nurtures a way of making and thinking in design that aims to cultivate the practice of architecture as an act of creative citizenship. Cultivating an approach to appraise cross-cultural study of how people perceive and manipulate their environments can help us understand architecture and urban design from different and diverse perspectives.