Lauren McQuistion

Lauren McQuistion is a designer, educator, and researcher of the built environment. Her research examines the spatial history of museum institutions and their entanglement with cultural identity formation through the visual and spatial regimes of art and architecture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her scholarship has been recognized by Columbia GSAPP's Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Constructed Environment Research Network.

Her research expertise also informs her teaching, emphasizing place-based learning and the critical interpretation of sites as palimpsests of past, present, and future socio-environmental conditions. She draws connections between the history, theory, and practice of architecture in a range of design based and theoretical courses with particular expertise in the topics of 20th/21st Century Architectural History and Theory as well as studios that explore and challenge concepts of spatial typology and issues of temporality in the built environment.

Lauren holds degrees with distinction from the University of Virginia School of Architecture (B.S. in Architecture with a Minor in Architectural History) and the University of California Berkeley (M.Arch). She is currently a candidate in the PhD in the Constructed Environment program at the University of Virginia, where she will soon complete her dissertation, Between Idea and Building: Art, Architecture, and Identity in the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has worked professionally as an architectural designer in Washington D.C, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Detroit, Michigan, experiences she draws on in her research and teaching.