Ryan Roark, PhD, RA, is an architect, writer, biochemist, and assistant professor at the UTK School of Architecture, where her research focuses on radical adaptive reuse as a strategy for urban and ecological sustainability. She studies the history of reuse, urbanism, and philosophies of (im)permanence and (im)permeability from the 16th century to the present. Before joining UTK, Roark was an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where her second-year B.Arch housing studio received the ACSA/AIA Housing Design Education Award. There, she founded the Novel Biomaterials Lab (now at UTK), developing materials—primarily from seafood industry waste—for use in retrofits. For this research, she was a finalist for the 2024 Wheelwright Prize. She has also taught at Georgia Tech, where she was the 2019–22 Ventulett NEXT Generation Fellow, and at Rice University. Roark’s writing on changing attitudes toward time, history, and life cycles has appeared in JSAH, Pidgin, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, and the books Ruskin’s Ecologies and Life Forms. She is currently preparing a translation of the 16th-century novel La Mariane du Filomène, whose urban and garden settings reflect early modern ideas about nature, artifice, and cyclical life.
Education
BA/BSc, Brown University
Master of Architecture, Princeton University
PhD, Cambridge University
Expertise & Interests
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Adaptive Reuse
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Material Ecology
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Biomaterials
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Experimental Fabrication
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History of Urbanism
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Life Cycles
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Early Modern Space