About Dr. Zhao
Dr. Windy Zhao
Wei (Windy) Zhao is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she earned a doctorate degree in Architecture. Zhao’s research focuses on the relationship between people and place in everyday buildings and landscapes. Specifically, Zhao works with underrepresented social groups, such as rural residents in China and Chinese communities in the United States, to examine interconnected issues of spatial justice, cultural diversity, identity, and social sustainability within the context of globalization and urbanization. While everyday buildings and landscapes form the core subject of Zhao’s work, environmental behavior studies provide the primary analytical lens for understanding how people experience, interpret, and shape their environment through the integration of architectural and ethnographic methods. Racial studies and tourism studies further contribute theoretical and methodological frameworks for different projects. Grounded in critical heritage studies, Zhao’s research addresses contemporary challenges and future possibilities, seeking to develop design and management strategies for vernacular settlements as living heritage sites sustained by cultural practices. Ultimately, Zhao’s work seeks to empower marginalized communities by giving them a voice, enriching the meaning of place, and fostering more sustainable futures.
Zhao has published two books: Historical Path of Yanxia (Tsinghua University Press, 2013) and Home beyond the House: Transformation of Life, Place, and Tradition in Rural China (Routledge, 2023). The second book was honored with the Environmental Design Research Association Achievement Award in 2024 and the Architectural Research Centers Consortium New Book Award in 2025.
Zhao has received numerous grants, including the Michael Brill Research Grant in Urban Communication and Community Design from the Environmental Design Research Association, the Transdisciplinary Global South Community-Based Learning Program Development Grant, and a grant from the Endangered Wooden Architecture Programme.
In addition to research, Zhao is a licensed architect in the United States. Zhao also runs a multidisciplinary design, research, and consulting practice, MPlacez, aims to provide innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to making places that are culturally rooted and socially sustainable.
Education
- · Ph.D. in Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- · Master of Architecture, Syracuse University
- · Bachelor of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Research and publications
Ongoing and upcoming research
Ongoing Research
Between Black and White: Race, Place, and Chinese Grocery Stores in the Mississippi Delta
This project documents, examines, and re-presents the built environment of Chinese-owned grocery stores in the Mississippi Delta across urban, architectural, and personal scales. Linking digital architectural representations to the lived experiences and memories of current and former store owners, this project aims to scrutinize the dynamics of racial segregation and placemaking within the social landscape. As the first architectural study to focus on this subject, this project sheds new light on how race is inscribed in everyday places and individual identities beyond the Black–White framework, offering fresh insight into the multilayered processes of racialization in the United States and beyond.
Rural Cosmopolitanism by Design: Librairie Avant-Garde, Placemaking, and Social Transformation in Rural China
The project examines how Librairie Avant-Garde’s rural bookstores have transformed remote rural areas since the opening of the organization’s first rural bookstore in 2014. Often housed in renovated historic structures, these bookstores have not only attracted tourists, stimulated new businesses, and repopulated “hollow” villages, but also fostered new social networks, cultural practices, and ways of life. This project is part of a broader research agenda that examines the concept of “the rural” in contemporary China, where rural revitalization policies, rapid urbanization, heritage preservation efforts, the emergence of new cultural institutions, and the influence of social media have transformed rural landscapes into cosmopolitan spaces in which individualism, universalism, and multiculturalism coexist
Woo’s Market in Inverness, MS
Librairie Avant-Garde’s first rural bookstore in Bishan village, Anhui Province.
Recently Completed Research
Home beyond the House: Transformation of Life, Place, and Tradition in Rural China
Based on extended fieldwork and archival research conducted over 12 years, this project examines the meaning of home for people living in vernacular settlements in rural China, who belong to a social group that is underrepresented in scholarship and underserved in modern China. Drawing upon over 600 photographs taken by residents along with their life stories, the study links the concepts of place, home, and tradition into an overarching argument: the meaning of home rests on the ideas of tradition, including identity, consanguinity, collectivity, social relations, land ownership, and rural lifestyle. More importantly, this study empowers rural residents by giving them a voice.
Transforming Shophouses: Transpacific Cultural Exchange between Southern China and Western North America
This project examines the transpacific cultural exchange as manifested in shophouse designs in southern China and Western North United States, and their representations of cultural identities. The project traces the development of shophouse in southern China, and the transformation of such a built form in Seattle. This project argues that Chinese-owned single-room-occupancy residential hotels in Seattle not only functioned as “home” for Chinese immigrants, but also were an assemblage of Chinese culture and a representation of immigrants’ identities through embodying the ideas of the shophouse in southern China.
Home Beyond the House cover, 2023.
Selected publications
Books (Peer Reviewed)
Zhao, Wei. Home Beyond the House: Transformation of Life, Place, and Tradition in Rural China. New York: Routledge, 2023.
Zhao, Wei. 岩下老街 [The Historical Path of Yanxia]. Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, 2013.
Book Chapters (Peer Reviewed)
Zhao, Wei. “Images as Voice: Empowering Place by Using Photographs Taken by Local Residents.” In Documenting the Built Environment in the Digital Age: Between Human and Machine Learning, edited by Wei Zhao and Joseph C Williams. Accepted for publication.
Zhao, Wei. “Sense of Land Ownership and the Meaning of Home in Rural China.” In Lines of Property, edited by Peter Christensen, Lisa Haber-Thomson and Claire Zimmerman. Yale University Press. University of Toronto Press. Accepted for publication.
Zhao, Wei. “Seattle’s Single-Room-Occupancy Residential Hotels and their Chinese Roots.” In Perspectives on Asian American Places of Heritage, edited by Ashima Krishna and Nathan Swanson, Routledge, 2026.
Zhao, Wei. “店屋的转型: 中美建筑文化交流的体现 [Transforming Shophouses: Transpacific Cultural Exchange between Southern China and Western North America].” In 边非缘：中国建筑的跨文化观察 [Borders across Borderlines: Chinese and Foreign Architectural Cultures in Mutual Reception], edited by Yi Zhou, 139-163. Shanghai: Shanghai People Press, 2026.
Zhao, Wei. “System of Settings and Activities: Framework to Study Vernacular Settlements and Cultural Landscapes.” In Theorizing Built Form and Culture: The Legacy of Amos Rapoport, edited by Kapila D Silva and Nisha Fernando, 136-146. New York: Routledge, 2024.
Zhao, Wei. “Local versus National Interests in the Promotion and Management of a Heritage Site: A Case Study from Zhejiang Province, China.” In Cultural Heritage Politics in China, edited by Helaine Silverman and Tami Blumenfield, 73-100. New York: Springer, 2013.
Selected Articles (Peer Reviewed)
Zhao, Wei. “Reconstructing Daming Palace: Negotiating National Heritage and Local Memory.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 38, no. 1. (2026)
Zhao, Wei. “Shop + House: The Chinese Shophouse as a Transpacific Vernacular Form.” Buildings & Landscape 32.2, (2025): 68-88.
Zhao, Wei. “From Sacred Wu-Yue to ‘The Centre of Heaven and Earth’: Constructing an Imperial Landscape and a Global Heritage in China.” Heritage & Society 17, no. 1 (2024): 1-20. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1080/2159032X.2023.2230833
Zhao, Wei. “从聚族而居到中西合璧: 浙江方岩民居的发展变化 [From Communal House to Western Style Villa: Development of Residential Structures in Fangyan, Zhejiang Province].” 建筑史学刊 [Journal of Architecture History], no. 2 (2023): 68-78.
Zhao, Wei. “Politicized Gentrification: The New Urban Renewal Movement in Beijing.” The Plan Journal 4, no. 1 (2019): 1-20.
Zhao, Wei. “再论传统的本质：传统文化在当代环境下的生存与发展 [Re-Examining the Essence of Tradition: Sustainability and Development of Cultural Tradition in Present Day].” 遗产与保护研究 [Research on Heritage and Preservation] 2, no. 2 (2017): 46-51.
Zhao, Wei. “Beyond the Invariable Style: The Development of Residential Architecture in Yanxia Village, Zhejiang Province, China.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 26, no. 2. (2015): 41-58.
Zhao, Wei. “中国式’建造’: 以国外文化遗产研究理论来审视国内近几年开展的文化遗产保护项目 [China-Style Construction: Using the Concept of Heritage to Examine the Recent Preservation Projects in China].” 南方建筑 [South Architecture] no. 1 (2015): 24-29.
Zhao, Wei. “The Man-Made God: Thriving between Buddhism and Daoism, the Almighty God of Hugong Dadi.” The International Journal of the Humanities v. 8, no. 9 (2010): 107-118.
Selected Exhibitions
Their Homes & Their Stories: Transformation of Life, Place and Tradition in Rural China, School of Design Faculty Show, Louisiana Tech University, Fall 2022.
Architecture for Spatial Justice: Students’ Work from Arch434 Space, Place, and Spatial Justice (curator), School of Design, Louisiana Tech University, May 2022, 2023.
Urban Forms & Urban Challenges: Students’ Work from Arch411 Planning and Urban Design Theory (curator), School of Design, Louisiana Tech University, November 2019, 2021, 2022.
At the Tip of the Pencil: Travel Sketches and Preparatory Drawings of Architecture of the World, solo-exhibition, drawings, School of Architecture, University of Utah (as part of the National Conference on the Beginning Design Student), March 2017.
Chinese Vernacular Tradition: Selected Work from the World Through My Eyes, solo-exhibition (as part of Chinese Cultural Week), photography and texts, Salt Lake County Library, October 2016.
The World Through My Eyes: One Photography and One Story for Every City I Visited, solo-exhibition, photography and texts, The Illini-Union, Champaign, IL, February 2014
Rome Underneath My Feet, solo-exhibition, photography, Indi Go Gallery, Champaign, IL, April 2012
Publication Awards
Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) New Book Award, 2024-2025: “Wei Zhao, Home Beyond the House: Transformation of Life, Place, and Tradition in Rural China (New York: Routledge, 2023),” 2025.
Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) Achievement Award: “Wei Zhao, Home Beyond the House: Transformation of Life, Place, and Tradition in Rural China (New York: Routledge, 2023),” 2024.
Teaching and advising
Classes taught
- Arch 473: Senior Design Studio
- Arch 572: Health and Wellbeing: Placemaking in Rural China
- Arch 572: Health and Wellbeing: Design as Activism
- Arch 403: Place and Heritage
- Arch 591: Space, Place, and Justice