As Coordinator of the Architectural Studies B.A. and specialist in the history of architecture and urbanism, my teaching engages me with architecture around the world. Recent teaching projects include the study of pre-industrial "green" building principles (Architecture Across Cultures) and the incorporation of 3-D computer modeling in an introductory course in the history of Urban Design (Great Spaces). My scholarship focuses on architecture in France and Russia; recent publication projects explore architectural travel albums as media of cultural exchange and patrimony construction in the 19th century. When not teaching, researching or photographing buildings I might be found cooking, reading, swimming, or traveling with my husband, a landscape architect, and our 15 year-old daughter.
In summer 2010 Professor Jennifer Germann and I led a short-term study abroad course in Paris called "Art and Politics in Paris: Reading Power in Space and Image." In 10 intensive days we visited palaces, public spaces, and museum collections great and small, exploring ways in which visual images and environments have been used to express and contest claims to power. In collaboration with Professor John Barr of the Computer Science department, we are now developing a custom iPad app for the course, which will be piloted in Paris in May/June 2013.
I have posted a few pictures from the Paris trip in a Photo Gallery (at left), as well as some images from the Great Spaces SketchUp project.
Principal Courses
- Architecture Across Cultures
- Great Spaces: An Introduction to Urban Design
- Memorable Cities
- Architecture from Renaissance to Revolution
- The Poetry of Architecture
- Architecture as Cultural Encounter
- Tutorial: Foundational Texts in Architecture
- Art and Politics in Paris: Reading Power in Space and Image (team-taught w/J. Germann)
- Russian Art and Architecture (team-taught with C. Kramer)
Research interests:
- French and Russian architecture, 18th-19th centuries
- Architect and theorist Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79)
- Architecture as a medium of cultural encounter
