Field of interest: Mycelium-Based Materials, Biodesign, History and Theory of Architecture, Design and Science

Research 

Since 2024, she has been developing compressed myco-bricks for architecture in collaboration with UCD Engineering Professor Valeria La Saponara and working with Dr. Danting Sun, Prof. of Environmental Design at Yunnan Arts University, Kunming, China, on Mykos.  Mykos is a longterm project by invitation to build a “mycelium village” or small complex of structures built from myco-bricks (or as Mykos calls them, MykoBricks). This project was developed with our students in 2025 for the Biodesign Challenge:  see www.mykotecture.com

In 2019, she finished her second monograph,Toward a Living Architecture? Complexism and Biology in Generative Design, and she is now researching and teaching facets of biodesign theory and practice. Since 2018, she has prepared student teams from UC Davis to compete in the Biodesign Challenge Competition. She works with living materials to teach students to think differently about design practice, life cycle analysis, and sustainability. 

Publications and Work

She is the author of Toward a Living Architecture? Complexism and Biology in Generative Design, on generative architecture and design in relation to recent scientific theories of self-organization and emergence, development and evolution, and complex adaptive systems (University of Minnesota Press, January 2019); Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (2010/2004), winner of the 2006 Edelstein Prize for outstanding book on the history of technology; and co-editor of the anthology Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s (2006).

Her work is included in the anthologies

• Now, Next: Designs for Different Futures (2019)
• Routledge Handbook of Biology in Art and Architecture (2016)
• Politics of Parametricism (2015)
• Keywords in Disability Studies (2015)
• Visual Culture and Evolution (2011)
• I Have Seen the Future – Norman Bel Geddes Designs America (2012)
• Art, Sex, and Eugenics (2008)

Her work is published in the journals

• Research Directions: Biotechnology Design
• Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies
• Technoetic Arts
• American Art,
• Boom: A Journal of California
• Design and Culture
• American Quarterly
• Volume
• Design Issues

Teaching

Christina Cogdell is Professor of Design, specializing in biodesign and history, theory and criticism of architecture and design. She is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California at Davis.

At UC Davis, she has taught interdisciplinary classes in Design history/ theory/criticism, Biodesign, Art History, Cultural Studies, and American Studies. Most recently, she focuses on biodesign:

• “Biodesign Challenge Course, Part 1 and 2: Biodesign Theory and Practice, and Biodesign Experimentation and Prototyping” (DES 128A & DES 128B, Winter and Spring quarters each year)

Her large undergraduate lecture courses are:

• “Energy, Materials and Design across Time” (DES 40A) 
• “The History of American Architecture” (AHI 188B)

She previously has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, College of Santa Fe, and California State University – Fullerton.

Curriculum Vitae

CURRICULUM VITAE

Christina G. Cogdell

CONTACT INFORMATION

Department of Design                         

University of California at Davis                    

One Shields Avenue                                       

Davis, California 95616                                  

Email: cgcogdell@ucdavis.edu

Email: christina.cogdell@gmail.com

Cell: (505) 670-6107

Web: https://arts.ucdavis.edu/faculty-profile/christina-cogdell

CURRENT ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS

Professor, Department of Design, University of California, Davis

EDUCATION

Postdoctoral Study with Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship (June 2011-August 2012): Summer 2011 studying architectural software at UC Berkeley; Fall 2011 in Emergent Technologies and Design (EmTech) program at the Architectural Association, London; Winter and Spring 2012 studying Physics, Evolutionary Biology and Self-Organization, and Philosophy of Science at UC Davis; Two independent studies in the history and philosophy of science with Evelyn Fox Keller (MIT emeritus, Fall 2013) and Eva Jablonka (Tel Aviv University, Summer 2012).

Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin (2001), Art History

M.A., University of Notre Dame (1994), American Studies with Highest Honors

B.A., University of Texas at Austin (1991), American Studies with Highest Honors

RESEARCH

Books and Journal Special Issues

• Toward a Living Architecture? Complexism and Biology in Generative Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019)
• Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, 2010), winner of the 2006 Edelstein Prize for outstanding book on the history of technology, awarded by the Society for the History of Technology; also nominated for the 2007 Charles Eldredge Prize for outstanding book on the history of American art.
• Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, co-edited with Susan Currell (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006). 
• California Design, special issue of Boom: A Journal of California, co-guest-edited with Stuart Kendall 2:1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, March 2012).

Articles/Chapters

• “Valorization and biorefinery of local agricultural and textile wastes through mycelium composites for structural applications,” Alejandra Ruiz, Christina Cogdell, Jacques Mak, Allison Rowe, Shuhao Wan and Valeria La Saponara, Research Directions: Biotechnology Design 2024:2:e10. Doi:10.1017/btd.2024.8
• “Sustainable Biodesign Innovation: Integrating Designers, Engineers, and Bioscientists,” KES Sustainable Design and Manufacturing Conference, Budapest, Hungary (July 2019) with publication in Springer’s Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies series v155, 23-33. Winner of Best Research Paper Award at the conference.
• “Variants of BioDesign,” Now, Next: Designs for Different Futures, exhibition catalogue for Philadelphia Museum of Art (October 2019), 112-115.
• “The Gene in Context: Complex Biological Systems as a Model for Generative Architecture,” in The Routledge Handbook of Biology in Art and Architecture, eds. Charissa Terranova and Meredith Tromble (New York: Routledge, 2016), 156-175.
• “On Complexism,” Technoetic Arts 14:1 (June 2016): 33-45.
• “Breeding Ideology: Parametricism and Biological Architecture,” in The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies and the Future(s) of Sociality, eds. Manuel Shvartzberg and Matthew Poole (Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 123-137.
• “Design” for Keywords in Disability Studies, eds. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York University Press, 2015), 59-60.
• “Norman Bel Geddes’s Theater of War,” in Donald Albrecht and Cathy Henderson, eds., I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America (Austin, Texas: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center with Harry Abrams, 2012), 316-339.
• “Explorations in Design and Disability,” in BOOM: A Journal of California, special issue on California Design, guest edited by Christina Cogdell and Stuart Kendall, 2:1 (Spring 2012): 45.
• Numerous contributions in Visual Culture and Evolution, eds. Rick Welch, J. D. Talasek, and Kevin Finneran (Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, December 2011, second prize Scholarly Journal winner in the 2012 American Association of Museums Publications Design Competition), 62-63, 88-95, 109-113, 142-149, 177-181, 190-191, 218-219.
• “From BioArt to BioDesign,” American Art (Summer 2011): 25-29.
• “Tearing Down the Grid,” Design and Culture 3.1 (March 2011): 75-84.
• “Fast Forward and Rewind,” co-authored with Simon Sadler, Counterculture issue of Volume 24:3 (September 2010): 50-52, published by Archis, The Netherlands.
• “Review of MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind,” Design Issues 25:3 (June 2009): 92-101.
• “Future Perfect? The Elusive ‘Ideal Type,’” in Corpus Delecti: Art, Sex and Eugenics, eds. Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen (Ashgate Publishers, 2008), 239-72 (reprint of Chapter 6 from Eugenic Design).
• “The Nazi Eugenics Exhibit in the United States, 1934-43,” co-authored with Robert Rydell and Mark Largent, in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, eds. Sue Currell and Christina Cogdell (Athens, Ohio: University of Ohio Press, 2006), 359-84.
• “Products or Bodies? Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology,” Design Issues (Winter 2003):  36-53.
• “The Futurama Recontextualized:  Norman Bel Geddes’s Eugenic ‘World of Tomorrow,’” American Quarterly 52:2 (June 2000):  193-245.

GRANTS, FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS

• “Don’t Burn – BUILD! Prototyping Mycelium-Based Architecture from Local Agricultural Waste in Yunnan Province, China,” UC Davis Global Affairs Grant for Advancing Sustainable Development Goals (Feb. 2025).
• MycoTextile Futures,” 3^rd place, The Future is Fungi Award, EU Consortium global competition, Nov. 2023, with Alejandra Ruiz and Valeria La Saponara.
• “MycoTextile Futures,” with Alejandra Ruiz, Valeria La Saponara and myself, UCD The Green Initiative Fund, $20,000 (2022-2024).
• “Growing Biodesign Collaborations for Increased Circularity,” UC Davis Global Affairs Seed Grant for collaboration with Universidad de Desarollo Design and Exploratec, Santiago, Chile, $30,000 (2021-2023).
• “Sustainable Biodesign Innovation: Integrating Designers, Engineers, and Bioscientists,” winner of Best Research Paper Prize at KES Sustainable Design and Manufacturing Conference, Budapest, Hungary (July 2019).
• “Sustainable Biodesign Innovation: Biodesign Challenge, UC Davis, 2018,” Winner of the Community Choice and Runner-Up Prizes for Core 77 Design Awards, Design Education Initiative (2019).
• UC Davis Open Access Monograph Fund subvention grant for first online monograph publication of Toward a Living Architecture? Complexism and Biology in Generative Design, $13,705 (2018), available https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/toward-a-living-architecture
• UC Davis’s Innovation Institute for Food and Health, $1000 award for collaborative grant “Probiotic Fashion-Textile Development Using Kombucha Bacterial Cellulose,” June 2016.
• Chancellor’s Fellow, University of California at Davis, 2013-2017, $25,000.
• Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship for Self-Organizing Architecture? June 2011- June 2014, $225,000.
• Multicampus Research Grant for “California Architecture & Design,” University of California Humanities Research Institute, 2012-13 and 2011-12.
• Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center Research Fellowship, one-month archival research for exhibition catalogue essay “Norman Bel Geddes’s Theater of War,” University of Texas at Austin, 2010-2011 competition.
• Summer Salary Research Grant, University of California at Davis, 2010.
• American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Charles Ryskamp Fellowship for research on Generative Architecture (2008-11 competition), $80,000.
• Canadian Centre for Architecture Visiting Scholars Fellowship for residency in Montréal to research Generative Architecture, Summer 2009.
• Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on Generative Architecture with the Penn Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania, September 2008-May 2009.
• Edelstein Prize awarded to Eugenic Design for outstanding scholarly book on the history of technology published in the last three years, given by the Society for the History of Technology, Fall 2006.
• Wolfsonian – FIU Fellow, in residence in Miami Beach, June 2005, to research “Designing Humans:  Hygiene and the Aesthetics of the Body at U.S. World’s Fairs of the 1930s.”
• Graham Foundation Fellowship for assistance in publishing Eugenic Design, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
• Curatorial Fellowship in American Modernism for exhibit entitled Future Perfect?  Streamline Design and Eugenics in the 1930s, in residence at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Center for the Study of American Modernism, Santa Fe, NM, January-August, 2003.
• ACLS/Henry Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art, 1999-2000.
• Andrew W. Mellon Resident Research Fellow at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1999.

INVITED LECTURES

• “The Mykos Story: From Yunnan, For Yunnan,” invited talk at University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design & Planning, Australia (June 2025).
• Lecture series and mycelium materials biodesign workshop: “The Future of Environmental Design,” “State of the Art of Mycelium Use in Architecture, Products, and Textiles,”; “Mycelium Capacities: Biochemical Basics, Biofabrication Methods, & Basic Properties;” and “Scaling Up: Overview of Mycelium Materials in Factory Production,” Department of Environmental Design, Yunnan Arts University, Kunming, China (November 2024).
• “Unraveling the Nexus of Generative Architecture, Complexity, Biology and Sustainability,” invited lecture for Mario Carpo’s History and Theory of Digital Design course, University College London (March 15, 2024).
• “Biodesign Collaborations for Increased Circularity in Systems,” Keynote talk for Biodesign and Industry International Symposium, Universidad de Desarollo, Santiago, Chile (November 22, 2023), along with other lectures at the weeklong Biodesign Workshop there
• “New technologies applied to the discipline of Design, as seen from the perspective of teaching and research,” Keynote talk for Technology Exploration International Symposium, Universidad de Desarollo, Santiago, Chile (Dec. 9, 2020, online).
• “Designing Complexity: Pushing the Limits of Big Data,” invited talk for Columbia University’s Precision Medicine & Society Conference, New York City, and for the Architecture Lecture Series, California College of the Arts, San Francisco (April 2019).
• “The Longue Durée of Eugenic Design,” The Aesthetics of Adaptation symposium, ETH, Zurich (March 2019).
• “Towards a Living Architecture? Complexity and Biology in Generative Architecture,” Donald L. Torbert Lecture for Research in Architectural History, University of Minnesota, Department of Art History (October 2017).
• “From Eugenics to SynBioDesign: A Long Historical Perspective,” invited paper for panel Synthetic Biology and Design, Neolife Conference, Society for Literature, Science and Art, Perth, Western Australia (October 2, 2015).
• “On Complexism,” invited paper for panel Complexism: Art + Architecture + Biology + Computation, A New Axis in Critical Theory?, International Symposium on Electronic Art, Vancouver, British Columbia (August 18, 2015).
• “If Democracy Is Not Inclusive, What is Democratic Architecture?” invited talk for symposium “The Figure of Democracy: Houses, Housing and the Polis,” Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University GSAPP (May 9-10, 2014).
• “Breeding Ideology: Parametricism and Biological Architecture,” invited lecture for symposium The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies and the Future(s) of Sociality, REDCAT, Los Angeles, November 15-16, 2013, available at http://vimeo.com/channels/643760
• “Uncoiling the Knot: Understanding ‘Self-Organization’ in Generative Architecture and Complex Biological Systems,” talk for UC Berkeley History of Architecture’s NOAH (Nights of Architectural History), April 4, 2013, and for UC Davis Cultural Studies Colloquium, April 11, 2013.
• Eugenics expert consultant for Anderson Cooper: The Daily Show for special feature on forced sterilizations in the United States (March 16, 2012); also interviewed and featured on CNN’s documentary about forced sterilization in California, “Sterilization Victims Seek Compensation” (March 8, 2012).
• “Understanding Self-Organization in Complex Systems and Generative Architecture,” Visual and Critical Studies, California College of the Arts (February 2012).
• “Analog Google Earth: Norman Bel Geddes Models Scalar Geographic Vision During World War II,” Department of History, University of Sussex, UK (November 2011).
• “Eliminating Disease and Optimizing Fitness through Eugenic Design” for “The Body in History/The Body in Space” conference, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Barker Center for the Humanities, March 2011.
• Invited expert for “Evolution and Visual Culture” international online symposium, sponsored by the Cultural Programs for the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, and University of Maryland Center for Art and Visual Culture, April 5-14, 2010, available to public through blog: http://vcande.blogspot.com/ (accessed April 2010).
• “The Gene in Context: Organic Complex Systems as a Model for Generative Architecture,” invited talk for the Darwin Celebrations, conference on The Art of Evolution: Charles Darwin and Visual Cultures, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, July 2-4, 2009.
• “Writing Eugenic Design: Making and Unmaking Modernity Through Science, Technology, Design, and History,” invited talk at the Smithsonian Contemporary History Colloquium, National Air and Space Museum, May 21, 2009.
• “Growing Living Buildings through Genetic Architecture?” invited talk at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, March 26, 2009.
• “Avant-Garde Organicism: Unraveling the Rhetoric of Emergent Genetic Architecture,” invited lecture for the Inside-Out series, History and Theory of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, November 2008.
• “Tackling the Taboo: Streamline Design and Eugenics,” keynote address on the theme of taking risks in architecture and design scholarship, delivered at the annual conference of the Interior Design (and Architecture) Educators Association, Wellington, New Zealand, July 2007, and also to Design Studies students at the University of Otago, New Zealand.
• “Designer-Breeder:  Norman Bel Geddes, Streamline Design and Eugenics,” invited lecture for the symposium “Usable Pasts?  American Art from the Armory Show to Art of this Century,” University of Pennsylvania, Department of Art History, March 2007.
• “Designing Evolution,” invited lecture at “The Constructed Environment:  Design and Its Discourses of Naturalization,” symposium at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, in conjunction with the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University, October, 2004.