Patty Heyda
Patty Heyda (MArch II, Distinction, Harvard University) teaches advanced studios and seminars in the architecture and urban design programs at Washington University in St. Louis. She also collaborates across the humanities, including with the departments of anthropology, sociology, and urban history. She is affiliate faculty in the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2) and holds a courtesy appointment in the American Culture Studies (AMCS) program. Heyda serves on the advisory board of The Divided City, a Mellon Foundation-funded humanities and design initiative, and governs the prestigious international James Harrison Steedman Memorial Fellowship in Architecture for the Sam Fox School.
Heyda studies American cities, politics, and design, with a focus on erasure urbanism, invisible\cities, uneven development, and racial, climate and social urgencies entangled by and with design economies. Her research maps politics of contested sites, to rethink design and spatial agency—for architects and residents alike. Recent publications include #ArchSoWhite and What About Typology? An Update for Late Capitalism (both JAE); The Façade of Redevelopment (MWMS Common Reader), and Erasure Urbanism (Architecture is All Over). Prior work includes Roman Operating System (Mutations and Content) with Rem Koolhaas and colleagues. Currently, Heyda is completing Mobilizing the Middle Landscape, a spatial account of U.S. politics of inequality based on Ferguson, Missouri.
Heyda’s Rebuilding the American City (Routledge, 2016) with David Gamble, profiles complexities and strategies of U.S. urban redevelopment in 15 different cities. Heyda and Gamble were featured guests on National Public Radio’s Here and Now, and at the BSA in Boston, the national AIA, APA, the Witte Museum in San Antonio, and the St. Louis History Museum, among other outlets. A follow-up book on American small town design and strategy is also underway (Routledge).
Heyda’s professional experiences span architecture and urban design, in Europe and the United States. Her work with Pritzker Prize-winning Architectures Jean Nouvel has been published in El Croquis, Domus, and other books and periodicals. Heyda’s independent design work is recognized with national and international awards.
Heyda lectures widely, with recent talks at Harvard University, University at Buffalo, and Women’s Voices Raised for Social Justice, St. Louis. She is quoted in local media, and has also been interviewed for Madison Wisconsin radio, and in the documentary feature film The Kinloch Doc. Her public facing work has appeared in The Conversation, Blavity, Fast Company, Salon, The Houston Chronicle, City Lab, and other outlets.
Featured publications
Rebuilding the American City: Design and Strategy for the 21st Century Urban Core
Other publications
Erasure Urbanism
In Architecture is All Over
Editors: Esther Choi, Marrikka Trotter
Columbia University Press, 2017
ISBN 9781941332306
The Façade of Redevelopment
In Material World of Modern Segregation
Editors: Heidi Kolk, Iver Bernstein
The Common Reader Vol 6, No 1
Washington University in St. Louis, 2022
#ArchSoWhite
In Journal of Architectural Education
Editors: Lisa Findley, Marc Neveu
Volume 75, Issue 2, September, 2021
ISSN 1046-4883
What About Typology? An Update for Late Capitalism
Design as Scholarship in Journal of Architectural Education
Editor: Marc Neveu
JAE Online, September, 2019
The City as Diagram Agency
In Urban Infill 5: Diagrammatically
Editors: Karen Lewis, Terry Schwarz
Kent State University, 2012
ISBN 978-1-4675-4828-1
How to Build a Roman City
In Mutations
Editors: Armelle Lavalou, Rem Koolhaas, et al
Publisher: ACTAR/ arc en reve
ISBN-10 : 8495273519
Selected projects
Laboratory for Suburbia
Laboratory for Suburbia is a think tank for critical suburban practice. In the last decade, suburbia has emerged as an urgent site of cultural, political, and spatial contestation—arguably the defining national geography. The design fields, however, have largely failed to engage this crucial space, remaining oriented instead toward cosmopolitan destination sites and inner-city creative placemaking.
Laboratory for Suburbia invites artists and architects to step into this gap. Initially designed as an open forum of online “sprawl sessions”—public exchanges and discussion—the project moves towards a culminating publication and other outcomes. Organized by Gavin Kroeber; with James McAnally at the Luminary; team members Derek Hoeferlin and Ila Sheren, Washington University
Mobilizing the Middle Landscape: A Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA
Mobilizing the Middle Landscape maps the politics of the American first-ring suburb through the lens of Ferguson, Missouri. The project details how economic, design and policy vectors embed contradictory spaces of segregation, poverty, and police violence into the built environment. Drawing by Casey Ryan.
Author: Patty Heyda
(Forthcoming, 2023)
100 maps, 280 Pages
Typology Cards for Suburbia
Sheng Yan, student design lead
JAE Online, September, 2019
Floodplan
The Anacostia Waterfront Framework Plan
Rendering CKA, WRT
Other work, essays, and news
The Quarantine Atlas
Author: Patty Heyda
In Quarantine Atlas (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2022)
Editors: Laura Bliss, Bloomberg CityLab
ISBN-13 9780762478132