Sarah Blankenbaker is an architectural designer and Clinical Assistant Professor at the UIC School of Architecture. Her research interest is in images (photographic and architectural) and functionalist thinking in the early to mid-twentieth century, especially as they relate to broader historical and contemporary cultural discourses (internationalism, subjecthood, etc.). Her 2015–2016 Garofalo Fellowship research culminated in One and Three, an exhibition that presented sets of three versions of the same thing—a photograph, a façade, and a window—as an exploration of the translation of images into architecture and vice versa.
Sarah first moved to Chicago as an undergraduate, earning a BA in mathematics and visual art from the University of Chicago. While photographing buildings and spaces across the city, she was drawn to the architecture she encountered and subsequently departed for Los Angeles to study at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). There, her master’s thesis, Superposition, was named Best Graduate Thesis.
Sarah has worked for Terreform in New York and Zago Architecture in Los Angeles. While at Zago Architecture, she was part of a team that participated in Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream at MoMA in New York. In 2011, she returned to Chicago to join the faculty at the UIC School of Architecture, where she has been teaching design studios, technology seminars, and YArch, a summer program for people who, like herself, discover architecture while pursuing other interests. Sarah’s work has been shown as drawings in Chicago and Los Angeles and appeared as writing in Log, Future Anterior, and Time + Architecture.