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My research deals with the position of architecture within two information revolutions (the first in the 19th century and the second between 1960 and 1980.) In particular, I’m interested in how new ideas of culture that accompanied these revolutions transformed the architecture of cultural institutions such as museums and libraries. As part of this research I am currently working on my doctoral dissertation, which is on the 1971 design competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It examines the way in which architecture was conceived in that project as a technology for the organization and dissemination of cultural information. I recently presented a paper on some of this research at the Society of Architectural Historians annual meeting.

A second thread of my research has been in the parallel emergence of the concepts of the built environment and information in modernity, which I have explored through problems of curatorship and cultural heritage, with specific emphasis on new modes of environmental display in the late-19th century such as the open-air museum and the archaeological park. As Western culture’s view of the historic city as a collection of monuments works gave way to a vision of a total environment, it increasingly saw the world in quantitative terms through new techniques of control and communication. My argument has been that the emergence of environmental thinking and the rise of what we would today call an information society are not merely coincident symptoms of modernity but are closely related developments, which reached their fullest synthesis during the 1960s. The historical relationship between the built environment and the information society has motivated much of my work, whether in the domain of digital libraries, historical research, or (I now realize) in some of my much earlier design work.

I am interested in the spatial aspects of information systems. In some of my work I have examined in particular the potential of spatial ordering in the realms of data modeling and interaction design. In digital libraries, spatial relations between artifacts suggest semantic associations between web resources that one might not ordinarily consider, and offer a means of visualizing resource collections.

A large part of my practice involves information technology consulting for cultural organizations, most of which are non-profit. These are generally in the domains of architectural history, design, and electronic literature, and currently include the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design (where I have just signed on as a board member), the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, the UCLA Experiential Technologies Center (where I am a Research Fellow), the Electronic Literature Organization (and a partner collaboration with the Library of Congress), the Alt-X Digital Arts Foundation (which sponsored work on the Electronic Book Review), and Art Center College of Design. Previous collaborations include the journal Art and Text, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design, and various collaborations with digital media artists. My work in this area includes digital library design and construction, information policy consulting, and context-aware device programming; some of these projects are described here.

This winter I will be teaching a survey course in architectural history at the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design. Last winter I taught a seminar there called The Informational Built Environment, which treated the built environment as a vast system for the storage, transmission, and reception of information. It tracked the emergence of what we referred to as “information spaces” in European modernism during the period between 1800 and 1970. The syllabus is here.