Joyce Hsiang is an architect, designer, urbanist, and an assistant professor at Yale School of Architecture. She co-founded Plan B Architecture & Urbanism to anticipate and rehearse new relationships between humans and the earth. She uses architectural methods and cartographic analysis to make worlds that reveal and reflect on how humans have urbanized the planet and explore the possibilities of design at the planetary scale.
Projects range from installations and buildings to landscapes, urban plans, and global models of urbanization. She has exhibited worldwide including at the Venice Biennale, Lisbon Triennial, Istanbul Biennial, and Hong Kong Shenzhen Biennale as well as in Switzerland, Iceland, Abu Dhabi, and at universities including Yale, Princeton, and Arkansas. Hsiang’s awards include support from Yale Planetary Solutions, AIA Latrobe Prize, Graham Foundation, Hines Research Grant for Advanced Sustainability, MacMillan Center, and the Franke Program in Science and Humanities as well as the inaugural Miller Prize from Exhibit Columbus. She was recently awarded a 2025 Yale Planetary Solutions Grant for the project, “Design for Deglaciation.”
At MacDowell, Hsiang developed the manuscript and drawings for a series of related essays and exhibitions that examine the architecture and landscape of the Icelandic cryosphere as phenomena of urbanization and climate change. Her writing assembled materials gathered over five years of field work to bring the sublime curiosities of the receding cryosphere into close view and reconcile human and natural forces irrevocably transforming post-glacial terrain. She also prepared text, drawings, and cartographies for “On the Ground in the Icelandic Cryosphere” and “A Polar Planet” which were presented and exhibited at the 2025 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland. She created dioramas and completed the exhibition “Scenes in Icelandic Deserta,” which then on view at Slökkvistöðin in Reykjavik. She also developed the design for “Imprint,” a large-scale outdoor land art installation that reimagines human practices that are transforming the earth and will be created in Northern Iceland summer 2026.
