Mini Chu

Faculty, School of Architecture

Mini Chu, post Master’s at UCLA, has been professionally practicing architectural design for 5 years. Her experiences have mostly been in aviation and transportation design. Some of her projects include the Incheon Terminal 2, San Francisco Airport pursuits, San Diego Airport and currently the Salt Lake City Airport. She is fascinated by airport design due to its city-like naturel airports are micro cities! With aviation design, Mini is keenly interested in elevating and transforming the passenger experience and investigating ways to reimagine traditional ways of encountering different spaces of airports.

Mini is invested in the cities that she resides in, from Los Angeles to currently San Francisco. At a microscale, she’s curious of how the cities’ inhabitants relate to, create, recollect and partake in a stake in the city as they live and experience it. She continues to participate actively in interventions in the city.

Mini is interested in the cross-pollination of this space, where professionals, students, teachers, dwellers of the city all come together to speculate and manipulate some part of the city. Returning to academia as an instructor, she hopes that this partnership will strengthen dialogues between the two worlds. This type of design culture, both in the professional world and the academic world, leads a way to foster current design conversations, stay fresh in new ideas, technologies and processes. While bringing in the pragmatics of the professional world, Mini is excited at the opportunities to continue to grow with, test ideas and mentor students in the academic world.