Temporary Office is temporary.
Temporary Office [of architecture, design, technology] is currently a design practice based in Knoxville, TN, exploring architecture and digital technology through the production of multimedia and immersive exhibitions, objects, drawings, animations, site-specific installations, building proposals, and writings. Experimenting with the multiplicity of mediums, emerging techniques, and novel workflows, we develop architectural vision that challenge conventional definitions of tools, measurements, and material forms, to synthesize visual effects and cultural phenomena across scales and locations. Our projects animate objects and systems that possess cultural familiarities to people in the contemporary society into active spaces that visualize and modulate intangible forms and ephemeral imageries.
The office cultivates a passion for donuts and clouds. We like to make buildings from smoke; we work towards 'non-smoking' architecture.
Catty Dan Zhang [founder & principal] is an associate professor of architecture at University of Tennessee Knoxville. She has practiced in the US and Asia for over 15 years, received recognitions in international competitions and design awards, featured in solo and group exhibitions at UC Berkeley, Florida Atlantic University, 'T' Space, London Design Festival, Carnegie Museum of Arts, A+D Museum, Harvard GSD, and so on. She was a finalist of the Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize in 2018 and 2021, and is the author of the most recent volume in the Pamphlet Architecture series titled “Active Atmospheres: On Instruments and Protocols for Medium Hybrids and Architectural Voids” (Steven Myron Holl Foundation, 2023).
Zhang recently taught at University of North Carolina at Charlotte as a tenure-track faculty during 2017-2023. She earned a BArch from Tsinghua University, an MArch with Honors from Washington University in St. Louis, and an MDes in Technology from Harvard University Graduate School of Design where she was the 2017 recipient of the Daniel L. Schodek Award for Technology and Sustainability.