Po-Yao Shih

Poyao Shih is the founder of POSITION, based in Brooklyn, New York. He is also a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute’s Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program and a faculty researcher at the Center for Climate Adaptation.

Poyao holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) (2016) and a Master’s degree in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design(2019).

Since 2011, Poyao has worked for various offices worldwide, including Kengo Kuma and Associates, Oyler Wu Collaborative, Morphosis, and WORKac. Before founding POSITION, he was the design project lead at Quarra’s Digital Fabrication Lab.

While at Quarra, Poyao expanded his expertise in digital fabrication and collaborated on complex projects with renowned artists and architects such as Höweler & Yoon, Maya Lin, and Sarah Sze. Additionally, as the design coordinator for Quarra’s new headquarters project, he was deeply involved in the design process with Snøhetta on a large-scale industrial campus.

In academia, Poyao has served as a research assistant at Harvard GSD and a lab manager at SCI-Arc Shanghai. He has lectured in several workshops in Taiwan and has been a guest critic at Columbia GSAPP, UW SARUP, Pratt, Parsons, NCKU, and Chung Yuan University. His academic work and articles have been widely published in Suckerpunch Daily, Archidog, the International Exhibition of Architecture Graduation Design, Taiwan Architecture, and Architect Magazine Taiwan.