Deyong, Sarah
Deyong, Sarah
Bio Sketch
Sarah Deyong is an architectural historian and educator. She received her PhD at Princeton University — writing her doctorate under the supervision of Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley on theories of postwar urban architecture — and her BArch at the University of Toronto. She taught history, theory and design studio as an Associate Professor at Texas A&M University, where her research on the post-WWII period to the present earned international recognition, and was subsequently appointed Architecture Program director at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln; she has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) and the Journal of Architectural Education. Her scholarship centres on modernism and its historiography — including the essay "Colin Rowe, Karl Popper and the Discipline of Architecture" — and her chapter for Marinic's Interior Architecture Reader extends that historiographic project to the modern interior.
Key Works
- *A history of style and the modern interior: From Alois Riegl to Colin Rowe* (2018) — chapter 2 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge); the alternate, interior-centred history of modern style from Riegl and Worringer to Rowe & Slutzky and UN Studio.
- "Colin Rowe, Karl Popper and the Discipline of Architecture" (2016) — on Rowe's disciplinary methodology.
- Rethinking Modernism: Megastructure (Graham Foundation grant project) — research rethinking postwar modernism through the megastructure.
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- style — the two modern definitions of style (Semper's craft/technique vs. Riegl's psychology of form) as the hinge of her argument
- phenomenal-transparency — the Rowe & Slutzky concept she re-reads as interior architecture
- counter-construction — the De Stijl → Mies → Garches → UN Studio strategy of form and counter-form
- optic-haptic-perception — Riegl's alternating modes of perception, with Worringer's abstraction/empathy parallel
- space-time-continuum — the modern space-time concept driving abstraction from Cézanne to De Stijl
- interior-architecture — Rowe & Slutzky's analysis read as "interior architecture conceived as an interplay between solid and void"
- historiography-of-the-interior — her "alternate history centered on the modern interior" against the canonical functionalist narrative
- modernism — the canonical vs. alternate trajectories of modern architecture
Relevance to the Core Research
Deyong supplies the wiki's interior cluster with its missing art-historical deep history. Where Hollis gives the historiography of interior architecture's founding literature and Taylor & Preston give interior design's theoretical domain, Deyong shows that the modern interior has its own genealogy within the canonical story of modern architecture — running through the psychology of perception (Riegl's optic/haptic, Worringer's abstraction) rather than through functionalism. Her chapter gives three things to the wiki's wider research: (1) a theoretical bridge between the interior cluster and the wiki's perception/phenomenology cluster (perception, aesthetic-experience); (2) a documented lineage for the claim that the interior/exterior dichotomy is as artificial as form/function — directly relevant to the interior-design-vs-architecture debate; and (3) a compositional counter-tradition (counter construction, phenomenal-transparency) that lets the wiki discuss interior spatial design on formal terms, not only as inhabitation or alteration. Her work also connects to the gender material (Loos's fur bedroom, the Josephine Baker house via Anne Anlin Cheng) already gathered under gender-and-the-interior — and, now ingested, to Karen Burns's full critical analysis of the Baker House's reception: 'A House for Josephine Baker', which radicalizes Deyong's brief episode into a theory of how criticism assigns race, gender and (denied) interiority to the building-body conflation.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
