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Constance Vale



Constance Vale is an associate professor and chair of undergraduate architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. She has previously taught at SCI-Arc and the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a licensed architect and director of the architecture practice Constance Vale Studio and the experimental research office The Factory of Smoke & Mirrors. She undertakes aesthetic and conceptual investigations in the territory between architecture, art, theater, and emerging technology.

Vale is the editor and a coauthor of the forthcoming Graham Foundation-supported book, Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture, with Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich. The symposium Decoys and Depictions: Images of the Digital, which Vale led in fall 2019, builds upon this research. She is also collaborating with Dr. Yevgeniy Vorobeychik in the McKelvey School of Engineering on The Architectural Design of a Testing Platform for Autonomous Driving and recently curated the related Kemper Art Museum Teaching Gallery exhibition The Autonomous Future of Mobility. In addition, she is among the architects recently selected for the international housing competition On Olive, which will result in a commissioned house in St. Louis. In 2015, Vale collaborated with Emmett Zeifman to complete a temporary pavilion in downtown Los Angeles for the experimental opera Hopscotch. Vale’s work has been exhibited at the A+D Museum, The Sheldon, and the Farrell Learning & Teaching Center, and published in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, the Los Angeles Times, Archinect, and CLOG.

Vale earned an MArch from Yale School of Architecture, where she received the Moulton Andrus Award for Excellence in Art and Architecture and two Feldman Nominations, and a BFA from Parsons School of Design. She has practiced at nationally and internationally recognized offices in Los Angeles, New York City, and her hometown of Pittsburgh.


Work by Constance Vale

Architectural model showing roads/driving paths around several building structures.

Architectural Design of a Testing Platform for Autonomous Driving, 2020-Present

With Yevgeniy Vorobeychik.
Perspective rendering of a two-way street with buildings on each side.

Architectural Design of a Testing Platform for Autonomous Driving, 2020-Present

With Yevgeniy Vorobeychik.
Overhead view of numerous wooden architectural models, with some concrete blocks and a couple of figures interspersed.

Architectural Design of a Testing Platform for Autonomous Driving, 2020-Present

With Yevgeniy Vorobeychik.
Hard-cover version of Mute Icons standing up, with a black embossed cover and spine.

Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture, 2021

Written with Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich. Barcelona: Actar.
Book spread from Mute Icons; pages have a black background; white text is on the lefthand page, and a white architectural model of a multi-level structure is on the right.

Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture, 2021

Written with Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich. Barcelona: Actar.
Book spread from Mute Icons; pages have a white background, with a black rendering of an object on the lefthand page and two columns of black text on the right.

Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture, 2021

Written with Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich. Barcelona: Actar.
Installation photo of an architectural exhibition in a gallery space, with 3D models on white pedestals and 2D works on the walls.

Decoys & Depictions: Images of the Digital exhibition at the Des Lee Gallery, 2019

Exhibition featuring projects by more than 30 architects and artists—the majority of whom participated in the Decoys & Depictions symposium. The exhibition was directed and curated by Constance Vale.
Alt text: A series of 12 photographic stills from a performance and animation in a theater. Photographs are of cloudy and nighttime scenes.

Pictorial Material: Texture Mapping the Sky, 2018

Stills from performance in built scenic design with projected animation for Silent Sky, Insight Theater, St. Louis.
Grid of four oblique photographs from a projected animation on a built set displaying two buildings on a field with a cloudy day but the sun cascading

Pictorial Material: Texture Mapping the Sky, 2018

Oblique documentation of built scenic design with projected animation for Silent Sky, Insight Theater Company, directed by Maggie Ryan, St. Louis, 2018.
A skinny, rectangular 3D installation, in four panels on a wall, depicting four street-view scenes, some with a figure walking in them.

Autonomous City III, 2021

Produced for the Farrell Learning & Teaching Center. Research Assistants: Zhuoxian Deng and Yi Wang.
Detail of an architectural model featuring a sculpted figure walking in front of a pile of cinder blocks, with a trash can and part of a wall behind the figure.

Autonomous City III (detail), 2021

Produced for the Farrell Learning & Teaching Center. Research Assistants: Zhuoxian Deng and Yi Wang.