I am an Associate Professor of Practice at Columbia University, where I teach courses on sustainable built environment concerns, from resilient communities to urban metabolism to just transitions for building energy. I am trained as an architect and still maintain a limited design practice, but much of my work (outside of fulltime teaching) in past years has been in collaboration with the UN Development Program in Guinea. I've completed studies of the bauxite industry, and with capstone students, a study presented at this conference on household waste management in the capital city of Conakry. At present, I am leading a funded research initiative to use remote sensing data to help communities, governmental agencies, NGOs and companies motivated to improve their current practices to track and measure the environmental impacts of bauxite mining in the Boké region. I am at work on a book that will track the material culture and architectural expression of post-war West German architecture, and another project considering the way Japanese-American architects practiced in the post-WWII era.

Research interests

Urban metabolism; tracking construction materials/embodied resources; teaching urban metabolism; defining the cultural context of material practices relative to quantitative and spatial informaiton