Soft City is on view @ the MIT Museum through February 2025!

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just practice

a collaborative practice started by Amanda Ugorji and Sophie Weston Chien

Our vision is to dream and design social-spatial liberation. This means altering relationships of power in society through the built environment and building resiliency with care.

Soft City

Textile Mapping
2021

Roxbury, Dorchester, and East Cambridge

Soft City is a large-scale textile series that maps the urban fabric of Black neighborhoods in the Boston area. The tapestries map historic (redlined) and contemporary Black neighborhoods, including Roxbury, Dorchester, and East Cambridge. The information mapped tells the story of the past, present and future of Black residents, and the ecological resilience of the neighborhoods they live in. Hard (impervious) and soft (pervious) land uses are codified using colors with overlays of Black residents and flood zones on the tapestries. The softness and materiality of tufting interrogates the traditional top-down approach to space planning and management in the city and offers new tactile ways to explore our understanding of urban space, at all ages.

We sourced our data from First Street Foundation Flood Model, FEMA, Climate Ready Boston, and the US Census.

Supported by MIT Council for the Arts Special thanks to Emma Werowinski, Mackinley Wang-Xu, James Brice and Sir Sahil Mohan <3

We were recently profiled by Thuy-An Nguyen - click here to read more

Passing On

Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition Finalist
Harvard University
2023

Passing On is an ecological installation that honors the labor of building stories. Over the 18 months, various foliage literally exterts labor by growing within the spatial conditions of the Radcliffe campus. Through a diversity and maturity of local and internationally cultivated plants, flora describes the diverse “ecosystem” of Boston in 2023.

The project explores how history is constructed through four concepts–the act of recording, creating a snapshot of story; growing narratives, acknowledging that narratives change and evolve over time; environment, situating the context of the narrative itself; and influencing, allowing historians to change the perspective and focus of the narrative.

just practice

just practice spans architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, community engagement, textile, and graphic design, as well as activist and organizing work within the design field. We think about modes of practice, the spatialization of memory, Black feminist practices, the historical role of women in architecture, and strategies for collective care. We have a current show at the MIT Museum, and have exhibited in Boston Public Library Leventhal Map Center, MIT Rotch Architecture Gallery, Yale School of Art E.I.K. Galleryand Boston Society of Architects Gallery, and indivdually in Fairbanks, AK, Providence, RI, and Rome, Italy. Sophie is from Charlotte and has a BFA and Bachelor of Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design with a minor in Politics and Policy and a dual Masters in Landscape Architecture and Masters in Urban Planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design as a Dean’s Merit Scholar. Amanda is from Cambridge and has a BA in Architecture from Brown University and a Masters in Architecture at MIT School of Architecture + Planning as a John A. Lyons Fellow.

Soft City was awarded the ingural City Talks Digital Gallery Award from the Spatial Analysis Lab at USC. Our solo exhbition is open at the MIT Museum until summer 2025!

projects︎︎︎

just practice

About ︎︎︎ Amanda Ugorji

About ︎︎︎ Sophie Weston Chien

© 2024