Cities for an 'Open Society': The Aesthetic Politics of American Urban Design, 1940-1975 This research project explores a fundamental shift within Anglo-American urban design practices, from a relatively closed model of a hierarchically ordered, 'organic' city to a relatively indeterminate model of an open-ended, pluralistically constructed city.Explaining this shift entails posing two interrelated questions: How have Anglo-American urban planners and architects generally conceived the shapes of cities for complex, pluralistic societies in the postwar period? How were their psychological, aesthetic and political assumptions about urban citizenship shaped by the context of the Cold War? In order to frame these questions, I invoke the phrase 'open society' in its historical signification as that which opposed totalitarianism, in particular, and political utopianism more generally. This work builds on the conclusions found in my recent publications.

Current Work

• "The Limits of Counterculture Urbanism: Utopian Planning and Practical Politics in Berkeley, 1969–73."
  Journal of Planning History 23, issue 1 (Winter 2024): 49-70 https://doi.org/10.1177/15385132231193389
• “Ecology as Architekturwissenschaft: Sim Van Der Ryn and the Soft Science of Radical Design,”
  in Juan Almarza Anwandter et al eds., Architekturwissenschaft vom Suffix zur Agenda,
  Forum Architekturwissenschaft, volume 5 (Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, summer 2021).
• "Educating a ‘Creative Class’: Anti-Disciplinary School Architecture in the Early 1970s."
  Childhood in the Past 13, issue 2 (2020): 138-152 https://doi.org/10.1080/17585716.2020.1791498
• “From Statecraft to Stagecraft: The Visual Politics of Britishness at the South Bank Exhibition,"
  in Ortenberg, Paperny and Devos eds., Architecture of Great Expositions 1937-1958:
  Reckoning with Global War (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) 115-132.

• “From Spatial Feeling to Functionalist Design: Contrasting Representations of the Baroque in
  Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture,” inThe Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880-1980,
  ed. Andrew Leach, John MacArthur, and Maarten Delbeke (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) 173-184.

• "Urban contrast and Neo-Toryism: On the Social and Political Symbolism
  of The Architectural Review's Townscape Campaign,", Article published in Planning Perspectives
• "Simulating Spatial Experience in the People's Berkeley: The Urban Design Experiments
  of Donald Appleyard and Kenneth Craik,", Article published in Design and Culture
• "Civic Art in an Age of Cultural Relativism: The Aesthetic Origins of Kevin Lynch's Image of
  the City,", Article published in the Journal of Urban Design

Dissertation

• Sites of Lost Dwelling: The Figure of the Archaic City in the Discourses of Urban Design, 1938-70. Abstract of Dissertation.
• Table of Contents. for Dissertation.

• Previous Work

• “Swarm of the Metropolis.”Article published in JAE.
• “Mirrors within the Wall: Enlightenment Authority and the Dialectics of Visual Desire in
  Ledoux’s Project for the Saline de Chaux.” Article published in Chicago Art Journal.

  More Details

  • CURRICULUM VITAE: CV Updated 1/11/11, also available as pdf.

• Art History 72 - Design in Society. Undergraduate introduction to the theories and practices of design, including industrial design, graphic design and interior architecture.
• Art History 160 - Modern Architecture: 1750-Present. Survey of architecture in the contexts of social, technological and aesthetic modernity.
• Art 201 - Professional Writing in Contemporary Art. A Graduate seminar in writing artist statements, exibition catalogs and art criticism.
• Art 282B - Empathy and Embodiment in Contemporary Art. A Graduate seminar in theoretical approaches to contemporary art.

Courses Previously Taught