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, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design (GALAUD) program and a faculty researcher at the Center for Climate Adaptation (CCA).

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

Since 2011, Poyao has worked for various offices worldwide, including Kengo Kuma & 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.

Through both practice and research, POSITION explores spatial ideas across disciplines and scales, addressing contemporary architectural issues through innovative forms, materials, and methods of making. The studio collaborates with designers, artists, fabricators, and landscape architects on a diverse range of projects, from furniture and installations to interiors and architecture. While the studio’s work spans multiple scales, its recent practice has focused primarily on residential design, ranging from apartment renovations and townhouses to adaptive residential interiors. Leveraging expertise in architecture and technology, POSITION employs advanced digital tools to develop and realize its work, investigating how design can foster meaningful relationships between people, materials, and the built environment.

In academia, Poyao has served as a research assistant at Harvard GSD and a lab manager at SCI-Arc Shanghai. His recent teaching and research have focused on adaptive reuse, housing conversion, and climate adaptation as frameworks for rethinking existing buildings and urban environments. He has lectured in workshops in Taiwan and served as a guest critic at Columbia GSAPP, UW–Milwaukee SARUP, Pratt Institute, Parsons, FIT, NYIT, National Cheng Kung University, and Chung Yuan Christian University. His academic work and articles have been published in SuckerPUNCH Daily, ArchiDog, the International Exhibition of Architecture Graduation Design, Taiwan Architect, and Architect Magazine Taiwan.