About Welcome to Your World
“This is extremely powerful stuff.”
— Faith Rose, NYC Public Design Commission
“Lucidly written in beautiful prose… will stimulate and delight professionals, students, and non-professionals alike.”
— Nader Tehrani, Dean, Cooper Union School of Architecture
“Makes an otherwise impenetrable topic accessible to a wider audience.”
— A Daily Dose of Architecture
“Her fresh perspective is deep, exciting, and optimistic.”
— Booklist
Check out my latest posts on my Substack Newsletter
About me
I’ve gotten a PhD (Art History) from Columbia. I’ve been a professor at Harvard. I was the architecture critic for the New Republic for a decade. I’ve written for the New York Times and dozens of other national and international publications. My book Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives is widely credited with helping to ignite the emerging field of neuroarchitecture, which is also presented in the film I made (with Sarah Robinson and Mary Murphy), What Design Can Do. The books, essays, and the film have won acclaim and some prizes. All that is nice.
My creative nonfiction has been published in Sites and Please See Me, which awarded me winner of its 2026 mental health awareness contest for the essay “Someone Tells Me What to Do.”
What I am, above all, is a writer.
