ANGIE JO

From 2024 to 2025, I served as a graduate student representative on the MIT Ad Hoc Committee on Academic Freedom and Campus Expression (CAFCE). 

In collaboration with fellow committee members, I wrote the primary content for a new community website outlining the principles, applications, and dilemmas of free expression on campus.  The site launched as part of MIT's freshman orientation in Fall 2024. 

You can read this writing at https://free-expression.mit.edu/.

From 2017 to 2019, I conducted fieldwork in China and South Korea on newly built cities master-planned to drive industrial agglomeration and growth in undeveloped regions.  I was interested in whether comprehensive urban planning could work as a form of industrial policy, especially when governments and clusters of complementary firms coordinated to relocate as "first movers together" to greenfield sites.

This research became my master's thesis, and was partly published as chapters in Toward Urban Economic Vibrancy: Patterns and Practices in Asia’s New Cities, edited by Siqi Zheng and Zhengzhen Tan (MIT SA+P Press, 2020).

Boston City Hall—like many Brutalist buildings—has aroused intensely polarized receptions.  Architectural professionals have championed the building as a stronghold of “dignity, humanism, and power,” while the public has condemned it as “the ugliest building in America.”  This essay is an act of translation and empathy for both the architectural languages through which the building has been understood.  How and what does Boston City Hall mean?  What discrepancies existed between these languages that produced such violent breakages in meaning?  These questions confront an important and unresolved problem in architecture—how to create civic buildings that resonate with both those who design and those who use them.

I explored these questions in my undergraduate thesis, How a Civic Building Means: The Languages of Boston City Hall, which won the Hoopes Prize for Outstanding Senior Thesis, the Fairman Prize for Best Thesis in Modern Art, and the Bowdoin Prize for Best Undergraduate Essay at Harvard College.