Tiffany Chan 
If you asked me to list the materials that changed American life the most profoundly, steel would certainly be at the top of the list. Ubiquitous in our modern daily lives, at the turn of the century this material completely revolutionized the fields of engineering and architecture in the 20th century.
In the mid 14th century, a powerful military leader in Japan broke a much beloved bowl. Distraught, he sent the bowl back to China to be repaired. At first, they attempted to repair the pottery with metal staples but this was deemed too unsightly. Instead, Japanese craftsmen repaired the bowl by filling the cracks with gold […]Read Post ›
It’s that time of year again, when ‘Let It Go‘ blasts from every loudspeaker across every mall across America. But there’s more to Frozen, and its queen, than meets the eye.
During the holidays it is customary for us in the States to make our seasonal sojourns home, either to families and friends or simply to have a short respite from the work of our everyday lives. Considering the home is how I first fell in love with the study of architecture and I still find domestic architecture […]Read Post ›
Anyone who saw my college dorm room knows that I love collecting vintage travel posters. It felt like I was turning my walls into a mid-century microcosm of the world by having the great cities juxtaposed with one another. Originally designed by tourism bureaus, railroad and airline companies throughout the first half of the 20th century, […]Read Post ›
Although I have always considered myself a Bostonian, I have never lived in the city proper-until now.
Throughout my undergraduate career, I have had very few academic experiences that fundamentally changed the way that I saw the world and myself in it (I could probably count that number on one hand). However, one such event occurred last spring in my Disneyland seminar: when I was introduced to the philosophies of Modernism and Postmodernism. […]Read Post ›
I first saw the film Kiki’s Delivery Service as a four-year-old at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The 1989 animated film by the Japanese company Studio Ghibli had won many accolades domestically, been dubbed into English by Disney and launched onto the international film scene. Kiki’s Delivery Service tells the story of a […]Read Post ›
in·ter·sec·tion·al·i·ty The study of intersections between forms of systems of oppression, domination and discrimination. This may seem like an elitist academic term that is thrown around for the sake of it, but it actually describes a concept that is quite simple. First coined by lawyer and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, Intersectionality asks us to consider […]Read Post ›
Art Deco (from Arts Décoratifs) loosely refers to an aesthetic that infiltrated much of the visual arts in the decades between the two World Wars (1910-1939). The sociopolitical turbulence manifested itself visually and artists tried to negotiate between several contradictory ideologies: modernism, traditionalism and exoticism. There were some artists who paid homage to advances made in technology and engineering […]Read Post ›
The Female Gaze 