Alex Yuen
Lecturer in Urban Design
Visiting Faculty
Alex Yuen is an architect, urban designer, and co-founder of Collective Operations (CO-), a design–development studio in San Francisco. Conceived as an urban production studio, CO- advances an expanded form of practice that integrates design authorship with development capacity. Working across housing, public space, strategic urban initiatives, and development, the studio treats urban production itself as ground for design inquiry and intervention.
Yuen’s work examines how cities evolve under contemporary economic, political, and cultural pressures, and how design can meaningfully operate within those conditions. His recent teaching and research focus on the transformation of post-pandemic downtowns and the changing role of urban centers. His perspectives on urbanism have been featured in The Economist, NPR, and Fast Company.
He is the recipient of the Odebrecht Award for Sustainable Development, the William Ward Watkin Fellowship from the Rice School of Architecture, and multiple distinctions from the Harvard GSD, including the Award for Excellence in Urban Design and the Urban Design Thesis Award. His design work and research have been published and exhibited internationally.
At the GSD, Yuen also serves as the Urban Design Academic Career Liaison (ACL) with the GSD Office of Career Services. In this role, he supports discipline-specific professional development through focused programming and student advising and serves as a critical link between Career Services, the Urban Design Program, industry partners, and across the GSD in support of student career goals.
Prior to founding CO-, Yuen worked at Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), among other firms in the United States and Asia. He has taught at the California College of the Arts and the University of Virginia and has lectured and served on juries internationally. Yuen received a Bachelor of Architecture from Rice University and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design, with Distinction, from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is a registered architect in California.
Before teaching at the Graduate School of Design, he taught at the California College of Arts and the University of Virginia while also having lectured on architecture and urbanism and serving on juries at institutions around the world. Prior to CO-, he worked at several Architectural and Urban Design firms around the US and Asia, including Diller Scofidio + Renfro and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Yuen is a registered architect in California.