The School of Architecture has announced that architect Tiffany Xu is the Harry der Boghosian Fellow for 2025–26. Xu will succeed current fellow, Erin Cuevas and become the tenth fellow at the school.
The Boghosian Fellowship at the School of Architecture—established in early 2015 in memory of Harry der Boghosian ’54 by his sister Paula der Boghosian ’64—is a one-of-a-kind program designed to give emerging independent creatives the opportunity to spend a year developing a body of design research based on an area of interest while teaching at the School of Architecture.
Fellows play a significant role at the school by enhancing student instruction and faculty discourse while supporting both research and the development of research-related curriculum valuable to architectural education and the discipline.
Tiffany Xu
During the 2025-26 school year, Xu will teach an architecture studio and two professional electives focused on researching North American contemporary construction culture—emphasizing architecture as a layered system consisting of a skeletal frame and built-up finishes, materials based on standardized dimensions and a product-like treatment of components. Students will explore conventional framing as an area of opportunity for codification and experimentation and study how medium specific tendencies and internal conflicts might yield new approaches to design.
“The composite character of today’s construction departs from traditional architecture’s valorization of permanence and mass, and the modernists’ penchant for transparency and truth,” says Xu. “Instead, this system finds its integrity in fulfilling a localized set of objectives and rules, anchored by pragmatism, vernacular references and supply chain constraints.”
Xu’s year-long investigation will foreground material and tectonic expression, with particular attention to patterns and transitions, positioning contemporary architecture as a new medium with a flexible set of values and objectives grounded in everyday practices.
Like the nine previous Boghosian Fellows, Xu will work closely not only with faculty and students at the School of Architecture but will also explore interdisciplinary collaborations within the University and its various centers and colleges, while also continuing her research into Central New York’s relationships with modernity and material.
Prior to joining Syracuse Architecture, Xu was the 2024-25 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University of New York at Buffalo, where her work explored conventions of light timber framing, culminating in the spring installation, “Lightly Speaking.” Xu has taught architectural representation at Northeastern University and was a practicing architect at the offices of Spiegel Aihara Workshop, David Jaehning Architect, and Jim Jennings Architecture. Her designs and writing have been published in The Architect’s Newspaper, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CITE Journal and Architectural Record. She has held editorial positions at the New York Review of Architecture and PLAT Journal.
Xu received a Master of Architecture from Rice University where she was the recipient of the William D. Darden Thesis award, and a Bachelor of Science from University of California, Berkeley. She is a registered architect in the state of California.
“From this fellowship I hope to further develop my skills in pedagogy, whether at the fundamental and core curriculum level or a more experimental seminar setting, while maintaining a close relationship to building,” says Xu. “My intent is to contribute to a current discourse that strives to merge the gap between design thinking and construction and questions the polarity between everyday pragmatism and abstract study.”
The Boghosian Fellowship has helped the School of Architecture attract the best and the brightest emerging professors. Previous fellows include Maya Alam (2016-17), Linda Zhang (2017-18), James Leng (2018-19), Benjamin Vanmuysen (2019-20), Liang Wang (2020-21), Leen Katrib (2021-22), Lily Chishan Wong (2022-23), Christina Chi Zhang (2023-24) and Erin Cuevas (2024–25).
To learn more about the Harry der Boghosian Fellowship, visit the School of Architecture’s website.
