Lecture: Catty Dan Zhang, “Clouds on a Leash”

In Clouds on a Leash, Catty Dan Zhang begins with an impossible proposition: to put clouds on a leash. They aren’t tethered to anything—not to a movement, an aesthetic, a time period, or the ground. Architecture captures, directs, and exploits clouds. Architecture measures drifts, models changes, and creates bounds. 

Framed around the digitization of air, the lecture traces how elusive media and technological systems both organize environments and generate new environmental imaginaries. Less a taught restraint than a loose apparatus, leashing clouds positions design as a diffuse practice distributed across bodies, machines, representation, and environmental systems.

Clouds emerge here as atmospheric forms, architectural elements, and epistemological devices. Through experiments engaging industrial labor, climatic data, and collaborative cloud-making, “clouds on a leash” takes architecture for a walk through the unsettled territory between atmosphere and infrastructure, imaginative and technological realities, the vast digital sphere, and traditions of craft.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Associate Professor Antonio Torres.

Free and open to all.

Wednesday, October 7, 4:30 pm
Room 1100 A+DS
845 W. Harrison St.
Chicago, IL 60607

Catty Dan Zhang is the school’s Herbert S. Greenwald Distinguished Professor in Architecture for Fall 2026, and associate professor of architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the founder of Temporary Office, a practice that engages architecture, culture, and the environment through design and digital media. Using smoke, images, and objects as generative media, Zhang explores architecture’s mobile relationships with its users and the planet.