Francis Ching
Professor Emeritus
Professor Ching received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1966. After several years of professional practice, earning licensure and serving as a VISTA architect in the Cleveland Design Center, he began his teaching career at Ohio University in 1972. Since then he has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Washington, where he has spent the last 20 years teaching a beginning design studio and a sequence of design drawing courses. He has been a Visiting Faculty at both the Tokyo Institute of Technology and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Although retiring from active teaching this past year, Professor Ching will continue to write, draw, and offer the workshops he has periodically offered in the U.S. and Canada, as well as internationally in China, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Turkey, Colombia, Portugal, Mexico, and the Netherlands.
Professor Ching’s publications, which focus on clarifying and communicating architectural elements, principles, and relationships, include: Building Structures Illusrated, with UW colleagues Barry Onouye and Doug Zuberbuhler; A Global History of Architecture (w/ Mark Jarzombek and Vikram Prakash), Building Codes Illustrated (w/ Steven Winkel), Design Drawing (w/ Steve Juroszek), A Visual Dictionary of Architecture, Sketches from Japan, Drawing: A Creative Process, Interior Design Illustrated (w/ Corky Binggeli), Architecture: Form, Space & Order; Building Construction Illustrated, and Architectural Graphics. Many of these are widely adopted in schools of architecture in the U.S. and Canada as well as internationally. A number of these texts have also been translated into one or more of the following languages: Bahasa Indonesian and Malaysian, Orthodox and Simplified Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Turkish. He is currently preparing the third edition of Interior Design Illustrated as well as the third edition of Building Codes Illustrated.
Awards that Professor Ching has received include the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Design from The Nottingham Trent University; the S.Y. Chung Visiting Fellowship, New Asia College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; a Citation for Excellence in International Architecture Book Publishing; an AIA Institute Honor for Collaborative Achievement; and a National Design Award, Special Jury Commendation, from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.