Architecture & Built Environment

As an architectural historian, I use buildings to interpret the past. Through nuanced architectural analysis and detailed social history, I offer glimpses into the past, such as double-loaded corridors (which made surveillance easy but echoed with noise), staircase plans

For someone who felt passionately about cities from a very young age, my formal education actually took place away from them. Early on I was aware of the ways in...

The book includes a 16-page color section that is a kind of visual overture of the project. This section uses a series of drawings and diagrams to address the main...

Thirtyfour Campgrounds examines the standardization and modernization of the contemporary campground as a familiar setting in the American landscape. Campgrounds celebrate a unique form of American ingenuity in which intersecting narratives...

Washington, D.C. may be the most studied national capital in the world. There are dozens of guidebooks to Washington’s monuments and countless specialized studies of individual projects, landscape plans, and...

How did a single, cramped style of apartment come to reshape an entire city's identity? This conversation traces how mid-century Chicago's subdivided "kitchenette" apartments moved from real estate boards and housing policy into fiction, drama, and the daily lives of Black families arriving during the Great Migration. It's a story about how a building type became a way of understanding a city — and the people priced into its smallest rooms.

The book’s primary intent is to portray the American inclination to experiment with forms of settlement, evident in both utopian and pragmatic efforts at reconceiving how and in what shape...

Although my training in architectural history was very traditional—I studied the history of architects, their patrons, and buildings produced with high budgets and aesthetic ambitions—I became interested in how people...

There is no question that suburbs are one of the defining features of the U.S. urban landscape, as well as the place where most Americans have spent their lives since...

Cairo has fascinated me since I was first exposed to the city’s Islamic heritage in 1973, and it has continued to keep me under its spell. This love affair began...

Painted Palaces is essentially an argument against a tenacious idea in art history – that one day around 1500, artists woke up, threw off the oppression of religion, and invented...

This book is about image-architecture and the surprising apperceptive shifts that take place when today’s culture of ephemeral images and the stolid material traditions of architecture choose to embrace. Could you...

I call the resulting breathing culture and the architecture it produced respiratory modernism. It describes a new approach to modern architecture...

There are hundreds of books about Le Corbusier’s architecture, but very little knowledge about the man himself. This book is an attempt to reveal Le Corbusier’s personality, his motivations, give...

In the book, I argue that camp spaces are an inexorable environment – one that is unique because it is always being built or rebuilt, always becoming. With this in...

A starting premise for our work was that camps, like Slab City, accommodate conditions that might otherwise remain without space. Camps are also bellwethers—early indicators of change and registers of...

A key point of the book is to show that it was once possible to build affordable housing on an enormous scale, and that we can still learn something from...

Chapter 10 relates a particularly compelling episode of how the idea of integrating culture at Ground Zero exposed the tension inherent in accommodating the dual mandate to remember and rebuild.Many...

The American Young Men’s Christian Association, which began as a Protestant evangelical voluntary association in the 1850s, built hundreds of buildings in the years between the Civil War and the...

Public Housing That Worked is one of the few upbeat histories of one of the most reviled aspects of the American welfare state: tower block public housing. Some years ago...

Post-Digital Humanism is the idea that digital tools should ultimately deepen our physical, emotional, and sensory relationship with the real world rather than detach us from it. Post-digital Humanism doesn’t mean after technology...

What did ordinary people think when confronted with a house shaped like a cube? How did city dwellers feel, a century ago, surrounded by forests of skyscrapers? What relationship existed between the human body — especially the female body, so often confined to domestic space during the twentieth century — and architecture itself?

We relate to the past (partly) through things. People and societies keep and create attachments to the past by keeping, collecting, preserving, recreating and otherwise interpreting a whole range of...

For more than a century city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but to strengthen civic ties through better design of built...

Although I was trained as a professional architect, I am principally an architectural historian, drawn especially to the social and political context of architecture and urbanism in nineteenth and early...

Reclaiming Modernity explores a pervasive but largely unexamined mental attitude, Americans’ fond recollection of the not-so-distant past, and elements of material culture associated with that near past. I call this...

What if the destruction of architecture was understood to be just as complicated, just as culturally resonant, and just as open to interpretation as architecture itself—or, indeed, as any other...

Most people associate the word mocha with coffee. For some it may be a type of coffee bean with a rich deep taste, usually from Yemen or the Horn of...

I have had some enraged responses from knee-jerk modernists. Their reaction relates to the actual ideas that this book is about, which is that in order to understand Jeanneret we...

Around the turn of the twentieth century, women began to claim Berlin as their own, expressing a vision of the German capital that embraced their feminine modernity, both culturally and...

As an architectural historian, I use buildings to interpret the past. Through nuanced architectural analysis and detailed social history, I offer glimpses into the past, such as double-loaded corridors (which made surveillance easy but echoed with noise), staircase plans

For someone who felt passionately about cities from a very young age, my formal education actually took place away from them. Early on I was aware of the ways in...

The book includes a 16-page color section that is a kind of visual overture of the project. This section uses a series of drawings and diagrams to address the main...

Thirtyfour Campgrounds examines the standardization and modernization of the contemporary campground as a familiar setting in the American landscape. Campgrounds celebrate a unique form of American ingenuity in which intersecting narratives...

Washington, D.C. may be the most studied national capital in the world. There are dozens of guidebooks to Washington’s monuments and countless specialized studies of individual projects, landscape plans, and...

How did a single, cramped style of apartment come to reshape an entire city's identity? This conversation traces how mid-century Chicago's subdivided "kitchenette" apartments moved from real estate boards and housing policy into fiction, drama, and the daily lives of Black families arriving during the Great Migration. It's a story about how a building type became a way of understanding a city — and the people priced into its smallest rooms.

The book’s primary intent is to portray the American inclination to experiment with forms of settlement, evident in both utopian and pragmatic efforts at reconceiving how and in what shape...

Although my training in architectural history was very traditional—I studied the history of architects, their patrons, and buildings produced with high budgets and aesthetic ambitions—I became interested in how people...

There is no question that suburbs are one of the defining features of the U.S. urban landscape, as well as the place where most Americans have spent their lives since...

Cairo has fascinated me since I was first exposed to the city’s Islamic heritage in 1973, and it has continued to keep me under its spell. This love affair began...

Painted Palaces is essentially an argument against a tenacious idea in art history – that one day around 1500, artists woke up, threw off the oppression of religion, and invented...

This book is about image-architecture and the surprising apperceptive shifts that take place when today’s culture of ephemeral images and the stolid material traditions of architecture choose to embrace. Could you...

I call the resulting breathing culture and the architecture it produced respiratory modernism. It describes a new approach to modern architecture...

There are hundreds of books about Le Corbusier’s architecture, but very little knowledge about the man himself. This book is an attempt to reveal Le Corbusier’s personality, his motivations, give...

In the book, I argue that camp spaces are an inexorable environment – one that is unique because it is always being built or rebuilt, always becoming. With this in...

A starting premise for our work was that camps, like Slab City, accommodate conditions that might otherwise remain without space. Camps are also bellwethers—early indicators of change and registers of...

A key point of the book is to show that it was once possible to build affordable housing on an enormous scale, and that we can still learn something from...

Chapter 10 relates a particularly compelling episode of how the idea of integrating culture at Ground Zero exposed the tension inherent in accommodating the dual mandate to remember and rebuild.Many...

The American Young Men’s Christian Association, which began as a Protestant evangelical voluntary association in the 1850s, built hundreds of buildings in the years between the Civil War and the...

Public Housing That Worked is one of the few upbeat histories of one of the most reviled aspects of the American welfare state: tower block public housing. Some years ago...

Post-Digital Humanism is the idea that digital tools should ultimately deepen our physical, emotional, and sensory relationship with the real world rather than detach us from it. Post-digital Humanism doesn’t mean after technology...

What did ordinary people think when confronted with a house shaped like a cube? How did city dwellers feel, a century ago, surrounded by forests of skyscrapers? What relationship existed between the human body — especially the female body, so often confined to domestic space during the twentieth century — and architecture itself?

We relate to the past (partly) through things. People and societies keep and create attachments to the past by keeping, collecting, preserving, recreating and otherwise interpreting a whole range of...

For more than a century city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but to strengthen civic ties through better design of built...

Although I was trained as a professional architect, I am principally an architectural historian, drawn especially to the social and political context of architecture and urbanism in nineteenth and early...

Reclaiming Modernity explores a pervasive but largely unexamined mental attitude, Americans’ fond recollection of the not-so-distant past, and elements of material culture associated with that near past. I call this...

What if the destruction of architecture was understood to be just as complicated, just as culturally resonant, and just as open to interpretation as architecture itself—or, indeed, as any other...

Most people associate the word mocha with coffee. For some it may be a type of coffee bean with a rich deep taste, usually from Yemen or the Horn of...

I have had some enraged responses from knee-jerk modernists. Their reaction relates to the actual ideas that this book is about, which is that in order to understand Jeanneret we...

Around the turn of the twentieth century, women began to claim Berlin as their own, expressing a vision of the German capital that embraced their feminine modernity, both culturally and...