CLUAA | Office

CLUAA [pr: clu-aa] is Clare Lyster Urbanism And Architecture, a research-based design practice in Chicago operating at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure. CLUAA focuses on designing public space and intensifying urban systems to productively invigorate collective life in the built environment through exhibitions, design projects, and publications.

CLUAA | Clare Lyster, Founder and Principal

Clare Lyster is an architect, educator, and writer. A native of Ireland, she is now based in Chicago and is a professor at the UIC School of Architecture, where she explores how metabolic and socio-technical systems territorialize the built environment and the implications of this for design. She is the author of Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Cities (Birkhauser, 2016); co-editor of Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan (ACTAR, 2017) and States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape (ACTAR, 2021).

Clare has exhibited locally at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the Chicago History Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and internationally at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale (2016), the Seoul Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism (2017), the Venice Biennale (2018 + 2021, with ANNEX), the V+A Museum during the London Design Festival (2018), and the Chicago Architecure Biennial (2025). .

Essays have appeared in venues from AD Magazine to Volume, as well as chapters in edited anthologies on landscape and mobility networks. She is also a member of ANNEX, an interdisciplinary arts collaboration in Dublin (Ireland) that curated Entanglement, the Irish Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021.

Research has been funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, UCD Earth Institute, University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Graham Foundation. She received the Douglas Gillmor Visiting Lectureship at the University of Calgary (2017), the SOM Foundation Research Prize (2019), a UIC Institute of Humanities Cutting Edge Workshop (2016-2017), the CADA Distinguished Faculty Award (2019-2021), a UIC Researcher of the Year Award - Humanities, Arts, Design and Architecture (2020), and a Chicago AIA design award for Winter Waterway, a speculative project to revitalize stretches of the Erie Canal in Upstate NY (2019). She served on the JAE's design review board from 2017 to 2020. Clare holds a BArch from University College Dublin (Ireland) and a MArch from Yale University.

CLUAA | Team (past + present)

Donovan Aranda
Trevor Brander
Laura Bowe
Camille Castillo
Thomas DeFroy
Bruna Finimundi
Patrick Finn
Juan Garduno
Frank Gossage
Charles Lafon
John Leano
Amparito Martinez
Joanna Nika
ToQuynh Pham
Alex Saavedra
Carlyn So
Valentia Zadro