Academic Work

My work as both an architect and a cultural anthropologist explores how political ideologies materialize in design processes. Accordingly, my research intervenes in debates on materiality, mediation, governance, ideology, and cosmopolitics as they pertain to design history and theory, as well as linguistic, political, and design anthropology. I have over 15 years of experience teaching graduate and undergraduate architecture history, theory, and design in Thailand, India, Italy, and at America’s leading academic institutions. I am also an architectural designer who has practiced in Bangkok and continues to design in Cambridge.

My own research as an architect-anthropologist approaches design phenomena as cosmopolitical enactments that bring political worlds into being or obsolescence through the framework of design interactions. Anthropology and architecture converge in their scrutiny of details as active nodes in the broader systems they materialize. To study how political ideologies unfold between microcosmic studio debates over design details to macrocosmic visions for the polity, I conducted two years of ethnographic research amongst self-described ‘design activists’ in Bangkok who believed their purpose was “designing systems, not buildings.” Their object was not a building’s systems, but the comprehensive transformation of Thai social and political systems that their cosmologically-derived projects materialized.

As an architecture academic, my interests are tethered to phenomena that reveal the systemic connections that design enmeshes among the societies it materializes. This is why I find “cosmopolitics,” as an analytic, so compelling. I believe the things we design in the built environment entangle multiple cosmologies and the worlds they systematize into active debates that, on the surface and in the details, appear to us as superficial matters. However, the recognition of certain worlds and systems over others in our identification with these things (assemblages), and the conversations design actors engage in over these cosmological locusts, are also always performing a powerful occlusion of worlds and systems in the process. This fascination with the relationship between political systems and designed things has fed my research into street food architecture, cosmological design, and mud/earth/terracotta and salvaged architecture.