Audrey Tseng de Melo Fischer /they/them/elle/ is an architectural designer, writer, and researcher currently based in Mexico City. They co-founded Rehearsing ∞ with Chong Gu, a collaboration dedicated to framing otherness in transience ~
Their work analyses the instrumentalization of borders and binaries within heritage* and futurism**, and their potential to deconstruct and reconstruct socio-political territories.
projects
Audrey is currently the global head of research at Sordo Madaleno (Mexico City & London). Previously, they coordinated research globally at Adjaye Associates (Accra, London & New York) before serving as head of research in a foundation in Mexico City, where they led the development of the institute’s agenda on migration, territorial relations, and geopolitics, framing Mexico as a borderland. Before focusing on research, they worked as an architectural designer in firms including SOM (New York), Shigeru Ban Architects (Tokyo), Philippe Rahm architectes (Paris), among others.
They are also the curator of Obra, Sordo Madaleno’s transdisciplinary laboratory, open library, and public living room. Previously, Audrey was a resident of the Bandung Residency (New York), co-organized by Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) and Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA). They have also collaborated with various organizations, including Yale and Princeton NOMAS, queer space working group, Red Canary Song, etc. Their work has been featured in the Venice Biennale Architecttura, AIA NY Center for Architecture, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the ACSA/EAAE.
You can find Audrey’s writing on agroecology, spatial justice, and counter-extractive imaginaries published in Retrospecta (Yale), Green Revolution Cookbook (Yale), POOL (UCLA), e-flux, Pidgin (Princeton), among others. Their piece in Thresholds (MIT), and forthcoming essay in OASE Journal (TU Delft), explore migrant and diasporic homemaking across geographies and infrastructures of displacement.
Audrey holds a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from University of Waterloo (Canada) and a Master of Architecture from Yale University (United States), where they were awarded the George Nelson Fellowship for their research Stewarding Chinampas: Co-speculating Our Many Worlds (Mexico City).
curriculum vitae
*
Architectural heritage unravels the futuristic potential for both violence—of displacement, dispossession, and erasure—and abundance—of care, solidarity, and interdependencies.
**
Architectural futurism often uses heritage as a foundation for imagining worlds that either authenticate or derive alternatives to colonial, hegemonic orders.