Anjulie Rao

Anjulie Rao (she/her) is a journalist and critic covering the built environment. Based in Chicago, much of her work reckons with the complexities of post-industrial cities; explores connections to place and land; and exposes intersections between architecture, landscapes, and cultural change. She is the founder and editor of Weathered, a Graham Foundation-awarded publication focused on cities and landscapes in the wintertime.

Anjulie is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Illinois Chicago, and previously taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She was a columnist at ARCHITECT magazine, and her bylines can be found in Dwell, The Architect's Newspaper, The Architectural Review, The New York Review of Architecture, and Landscape Architecture Magazine, among others.

Awards: Graham Foundation Grant to Individuals (2021); Graham Foundation Grant to Individuals (2022); SAIC Faculty Enrichment Grant (2024).

I pose the question “how is public knowledge produced?” Within the field of urban design, I have found that knowledge, appreciation, and continued support of the design practice is a function of writing for the public; the development of our cities as habitable spaces is produced through criticality—“If there’s bad art, burn it down,” as Dave Hickey says. But what seems to be sorely lacking is a conversation about emotion—feelings that are entwined in how we experience cities, the politics of how stuff is made and built and fed to us. It’s a crucial component of public knowledge often cut from word counts.

I teach experimental nonfiction and personal essay writing as a form of building public knowledge: to understand the world intimately is to create space for clarity, experimentation, and play; in which knowledge, form, and confidence can be altered. To look at writing through the lens of the lyric, and to "sing" what one knows, these methodologies are at the core of producing a public that does more than “know" information about the built environment. Instead, knowledge about the built environment can become embodied, rooted in placefulness, and acknowledged as intrinsic to our communities.