Grace Ong Yan, PhD

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Dr. Ong Yan’s research examines the intersections of architecture, interiors, urbanism, and graphic design, with a particular focus on how visual communication, media, and surface shape spatial experience in modern and contemporary built environments. Her work focuses on the mid-to late twentieth century, especially the 1960s and 70s, as a critical period of transformation in architectural and urban visual culture. She foregrounds environmental graphics, signage, and visual culture as central to architectural history, exploring how design mediates legibility, orientation, and identity at the scale of both interiors and cities. She is particularly interested in postwar architecture and urbanism, corporate modernism, and the role of graphic media in responding to the visual and social complexities of the modern city. Her current research develops the concept of a “graphic turn,” investigating how architects and designers increasingly used surface, color, and environmental graphics as tools of communication and spatial organization.

BIOGRAPHY

Grace Ong Yan is an architectural historian, designer, and Associate Professor of Interior Design at Thomas Jefferson University whose scholarship advances a critical rethinking of the relationship between architecture, interiors, and visual communication in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her research positions environmental graphics, signage, and surface as important mechanisms through which architecture communicates, organizes perception, and mediates social experience.

Her monograph, Building Brands: Corporations and Modern Architecture (2021), offers a sustained analysis of the role of corporate identity in shaping modern architectural production, contributing to scholarship on modernism, capitalism, and the built environment. Her broader body of work, published in venues such as INTERIORS: Design/Architecture/Culture and Design and Culture, as well as in edited volumes by Routledge and Wiley Blackwell, develops a sustained line of inquiry into the role of the graphic medium in shaping spatial experience. Across these contributions, she has established a distinct scholarly profile at the intersection of architectural history, design history, and media studies.

Her current book project, The Graphic Turn in Architecture, Interiors, and Urbanism, builds on this foundation by arguing that, in the late twentieth century, architects and designers increasingly turned to graphic media and surface as primary tools of communication in response to a broader crisis of architectural legibility. The project reframes late modernism through the lens of visual culture and environmental psychology, offering a new account of how interiors and urban environments were reconfigured through graphic interventions.

At Jefferson, Dr. Ong Yan teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in architectural and interior history and theory, research methods, and design studios, and advises Ph.D. students and Master of Historic Preservation students. Her teaching advances a globally engaged and inclusive curriculum, emphasizing critical and ethical thinking and the role of historical knowledge in shaping contemporary design practice. Her work also extends into public scholarship, including the research, design, and construction of Redemption: Public Art for Community Voices, a permanent, community-engaged project that explores African American histories through environmental graphics and spatial form.

Prior to coming to Jefferson, Dr. Ong Yan taught in pivotal roles at IE University, Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, Moore College of Art and Design, and as the Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. In the realm of professional practice, Dr. Ong Yan’s expertise was honed at globally recognized firms in Paris and New York. Her contributions to Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Gensler’s Branding Studio, Pei Cobb Freed and Partners, Robert A.M. Stern Architects, and Rafael Viñoly Architects are complemented by her independent design practice lauded in exhibitions and competitions, including Storefront for Art & Architecture and the Osaka International Design Competition. Her latest collaborative venture, “Redemption,” is a public artwork in Long Island, New York, paying homage to African American history—a testament to her belief in design as a medium for social narrative and remembrance. 

SERVICE AT JEFFERSON

Dr. Ong Yan is actively engaged in service at the university, college, and program levels. Her contributions include participation on university-wide committees including the Institutional Faculty Development Team, as well as service on the Faculty Affairs, Curriculum, and Doctoral Affairs Committees. She has chaired the college-wide lecture series that brought leading voices in architecture and design to campus and has served on faculty search committees. She is also a member of the Faculty Steering Committee for the Center for the Preservation of Modernism, supporting interdisciplinary initiatives in research, teaching, and public programming. She is a longtime board member and past President of DocomomoUS-Greater Philadelphia, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the documentation and preservation of modern architecture.