About Me
I’ve been a writer and editor for my entire adult life. I’ve written one-point-five books: The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home, published by Viking in 2006 and Angry Graphics, written with Steven Heller, published by Gibbs Smith in 1992.
I write about cities, buildings and other man made things for a variety of publications. I’m currently a contributing editor at Architect Magazine and a frequent contributor to Curbed. Recent favorite articles include ones about the house architect Anne Tyng built for herself in Philadelphia and a proposal to turn the New Jersey Meadowlands into a national park.
In the past, I was a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure where many of my articles dealt with architecture-related destinations, like the world’s tallest hotel or major new developments like CityCenter in Las Vegas. For ten years (2004-2014), I wrote a monthly column for Metropolis, “America,” about how ideas and strategies in architecture and design play out on the landscape.
I was the founding editor-in-chief of Dwell, the magazine about modern residential architecture and design.
Prior to launching Dwell in fall of 2000, I was the architecture critic of New York Magazine, and I’ve written about design, technology, and visual language for many periodicals including The New York Times, ID, and Fortune. In the early 1990s,
I was the founding executive editor of Benetton’s Colors Magazine.
I was a contributing editor at House & Garden, where I blogged about architecture for the magazine’s website, until it folded in November 2007. I was a contributing editor at Metropolitan Home where I wrote a series of features on innovative approaches to houses and housing until it folded in November 2009.
I hate it when magazines drop dead on me.
Since 2008, I’ve been a faculty member at the Design Research, Writing and Criticism graduate program at the School of Visual Arts. I teach a course in which I send students out onto the streets of New York City and try to teach them to judge for themselves the difference between a good building and a bad building, and to understand how the city changes over time.
Here are some things I’m always interested in doing:
* Teaching workshop versions of my SVA class. I’ve taught my “Truth & Beauty” workshop at Otis College of Art and Design in LA and the University of Texas, Austin. Each summer, I teach it as part of the Design Research summer intensive in New York.
*Give talks and participate in panel discussions. I’ve spoken at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston about man made nature and at the Form Contemporary Design Show in St. Louis about urban beauty in 21st Century America.
* I would love be a paid blogger again, writing about visual culture, housing, or architecture for the website of a smart publication or organization. And develop quality content for non-print formats.
*And, yes, of course, I’m always open to magazine assignments and interesting copy writing gigs.
I live on the border between Windsor Terrace and South Slope, Brooklyn and can be reached via email: itinerant.urbanist [at] gmail.com.