Zhongjie Lin Named Benjamin Z. Lin Presidential Professor

As a young architect in 1990s Shanghai, Zhongjie Lin witnessed the city’s rapid rise as a global financial center following a series of economic reforms implemented by the Chinese government. The transformation was “a bit chaotic,” he says, and it impressed on him a different way of thinking about cities.

“I began to view the city as an organism rather than just land or property awaiting development,” Lin says. “Rather it’s something that is performing and transforming, and it has its own laws in this process.”

Lin changed gears himself, coming to Penn to earn a PhD in City and Regional Planning at the Weitzman School, where he studied with Gary Hack, emeritus professor of city and regional planning and a former dean of the School. After earning his PhD, Lin worked as a professor of architecture and urbanism at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He returned to the Weitzman School in 2019, and this year was named Benjamin Z. Lin Presidential Professor.

The appointment was made possible by a gift from Benjamin Z. Lin (W’05), a Wharton School alum, venture capital investor, and member of the Weitzman School Board of Advisors. Benjamin Lin, a son of Chinese immigrants who grew up in New Jersey, now runs the real estate investment platform Coral and splits his time between Tokyo, Boston, and New York.

At Weitzman, Zhongjie Lin directs the Urban Design concentration in the Department of City & Regional Planning. He also leads the Future Cities Initiative, a research lab focused on sustainable urbanism, urban mobility, city form, public space, and nature-based infrastructure. He is the cofounder of Futurepolis, an international design consultancy.

For Lin, who has studied China’s new town movement as an expression of global image-making and the development of mega-cities in Latin America, urban design research is a tool to harness the potential of new technologies for the benefit of city residents. Without planning, technologies like autonomous vehicles could end up dictating how communities develop, the way that the advent of motor vehicles did a century ago, he says.

“We have to come up with proactive design and policies before it really proliferates across the whole country,” Lin says. “Otherwise, we will be busy dealing with all the issues it creates.”

Lin says he was drawn to Penn partly because of its strong international collaborations. In 2022, he helped curate the exhibit Building in China: A Century of Dialogues on Modern Architecture. The exhibit highlighted a group of Chinese architects and designers who studied at Penn in the early 20th century and went on to develop a modern Chinese architecture style that advocated for historic preservation. The cohort, including husband-and-wife designers Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, became household names in China. Lin Huiyin was awarded a posthumous Bachelor of Architecture by the Weitzman School at the University of Pennsylvania on May 18, 2024.

The exhibit and posthumous degree, Lin says, “really inspired and encouraged our alumni and students that international study and collaboration are valued in this school.”

Presidential professorships at Penn are an effort to attract and retain renowned scholars in endowed positions. Benjamin Z. Lin—no relation to either Zhongjie Lin or Lin Huiyin—was born in Fujian, the same part of China where Lin Huiyin was raised. He grew up in New Jersey after his parents emigrated to the US, and was the first person in his family to attend college. He worked on Wall Street after graduating from the Wharton School and has since invested in a series of tech and real estate companies. Two things inspired him to make a gift to establish the new position: an appreciation for the opportunities afforded to him by his Wharton education, and a conviction that design education should incorporate a range of disciplines.

“It’s actually a cross-disciplinary endeavor, where you put everything together—technology, finance and design,” Lin says. “That’s how you end up getting things done.”

He hopes his gift will help the school produce young designers who can bring a knowledge of finance, technology, material sciences, and other fields into their work. Zhongjie Lin says the appointment bestows a degree of “prestige” to his research agenda that he hopes will catalyze more research collaborations on the future of cities.

“It allows me to get all this energy together, and I think international collaboration is something that this appointment will help me pursue,” Lin says.
 

To discuss opportunities for giving, contact Jeff Snyder, Assistant Dean for Development and Alumni Relations, at 215.898.8738, or jsnyder2@design.upenn.edu.