Portfolio Agency

Board Game, at MIT, 2019
In collaboration with Cloe Yun Wang; photography by myself; exhibition design by Jeff Landman

Is architecture education becoming a commodity?

This board game examines the growing phenomenon of portfolio preparation agencies - businesses that offer specialized tutoring services to prospective architecture students, often with high admission rate to elite institutions. Over the past decade, these agencies have proliferated globally, reflecting deeper, often obscured forces shaping architectural education: branding, commodification, and the influence of market-driven value systems.

Focusing on an in-depth study of several prominent agencies in China, the project maps their operational models, target demographics, and the pedagogical norms they help institutionalize. In response, the board game serves both as an informational representation and a critical provocation - creating space for discussions around structural inequalities, social privilege, uneven access to resources, authorship, plagiarism, and the packaging of “originality” as a consumable asset.