Chloe Town is a writer, educator and registered architect.  She received interdisciplinary training first in film theory, psychoanalytical thought and 20th-century cultural studies, then in architecture. She holds degrees from the University of Toronto and Princeton University and has been teaching since 2003. Today she oversees her own practice, Town Office.

Prior to joining the Daniels Faculty, Town taught graduate and undergraduate design studios at the University of Pennsylvania, the California College of the Arts and the University of Waterloo.

Town’s focus is primarily on space-making, representation and cultural production and its discourses. She is interested in the underpinnings that connect architecture to other design and art disciplines; the conceit of, and necessity for, originality; and critical spatial practices (additive and subtractive, as well as the possibility of neither).

Her winning competition entry for the National AIDS Memorial Grove, a design collaboration with Janette Kim, was extensively documented in the book Emergent Memory (edited by Neal Schwarz, AIA) and was a subject in the feature-length documentary The Grove: AIDS and the Politics of Remembrance.

In New York City, where she lived for a decade, Town spent many years as an NCARB intern architect working on houses at Platt Dana Architects and Leroy Street Studio. In Toronto, where she was born, her professional expertise expanded in both scale and scope. At Moriyama & Teshima Architects and LGA Architectural Partners, for example, she compiled construction documents for, and project managed, numerous built projects including cultural institutions, social housing and public schools.

Most recently, her thinking has homed in on several lines of related interests: how architecture is used as a hegemonic prop in late-stage capitalism; how resistance to this signalling occurs through counternarratives; and design strategies that position convention, and the orthodoxies of style, against the lure of the new.