Her father was an architect, but childhood art lessons made Yutaka Sho wanted to be a painter. The art studio where she studied shared a space with architecture students, which sparked her interest.

“I liked the fact that, unlike painting, the focus was not on you, what you wanted, but sort of managing and negotiating different forces and desires,” Sho said.

Now, Sho is a professor of architecture at Syracuse University, a job she’s held since coming here in 2008.

In high school, Sho left Tokyo due to the lack of opportunities for women and traveled to America for a foreign exchange student program. After high school, she attended the Rhode Island School of Design to receive her bachelor’s degree in both fine arts and landscape architecture.

After a stop in San Francisco working as a furniture maker, Sho went on to Harvard University Graduate School of Design to get her master’s in architecture.

In 2007, Sho won a grant for research in Rwanda after a friend’s photograph from a recent trip there inspired her to apply. The photo featured the country’s landscape.

After further research, Sho learned about Rwanda’s subsistence farming and how its society is based on food cultivation rather than money. The citizens of Rwanda use their income for basic necessities and are unable put money toward housing.

This trip encouraged Sho and some friends from graduate school to start a nonprofit design firm called GA Collaborative. The firm built two homes and six health care facilities in Masoro, Rwanda and is designing a learning and sports center.

The firm is experimenting to provide houses so recipients can focus on spending income on necessities other than housing.

“We are trying to think of the architectural equivalent to this basic income grant,” Sho said.

Sho is grateful to have found a balance between her nonprofit work and teaching because the role allows her to integrate her findings about Rwanda in the classroom. She chose to work in education because she felt it would give her the time to continue her research about Rwanda. It has become clear that teaching is a full-time job in itself.

She believes it takes time to learn how to effectively teach and requires trial and error. Students learn design through hands-on work, Sho said.

“It’s quite pleasurable because students learn more as I learn how to teach,” Sho said. “It’s not enough to simply learn something and just dump it on them — you have to make it into a meaningful experience for them within their life experience.”

Published on April 25, 2017 at 10:31 pm

Contact Chloe: cjgreenw@syr.edu