I had the good fortune to land in the East Village upon graduating, when it was still affordable. The unlucky part was that Reagan was elected president, the New York Stock Exchange went from paper to electronic trading, and the first cases of what became l own as AIDS were detected. 

 

I lived in a low rent railroad tenement flat across the street from Madonna and walked to work in the 12th floor of Union Square West, under the penthouse where Grace Jones resided. My commute between two divas crossed legendary Tompkins Square Park, Saint Marks Place, Astor Place and the used book stores and f Lower Broadway.

 

As a social subject mapped in Neil Smith’s narrative of revanchist gentrification and a member of Act-Up, I could not help but develop an activist architectural practice from my DIY workspace in East 4th Street. My friends tilted more toward dance, performance and film, and the Pyramid Club, La MaMa and storefront galleries were our haunts.

 

My nightly bike rides and walks between the East and West Villages took in the passing of one queer utopia of the West side gay ghetto to the gender bending cultural mix of the East side. A corner bar, basement porn theater, bathhouse, dance clubs and piers of abandonment were common stops.

 

After working in an architecture office long enough to get licenses, I took a year off and lived in Rome. As Goethe said, to educate myself before I turned 30. I started teaching at New Jersey Institute of Technology upon my return and brought students to Rome to study for three subsequent years. Moving between the East Village in New York and Trastevere in Rome from 1985 to 1990 made a lasting impression on me and informed all my subsequent work which has focused on how cites adapt and change over time.

 

In 1991, I started to teach at Parsons School of Design where I was asked to incorporate 3D computer modeling into my teaching and I was hooked with a kind of irrational exuberance, imagining the was seizing the means of production of e-trading Wall Street. My first publication, Transparent Cities, was a set of hand drawn maps, but it formed the basis of my work through the end of the millennium, as I also became a kind of digital artist. 

 

Transparent Cities also ushered in an opportunity to teach Urban Design at Columbia University at the moment the Graduate School of Architecture was instituting paperless studios to a new global student population. While I had taken a train and bicycle tour across China in 1987, my students at Columbia inspired me to explore Asian urbanism more closely. As a Fulbright Scholar in Bangkok in 1998-99, followed by invitations to teach at Chulalongkorn University. It was during this time that I met my future husband in Bangkok, and started a very long-distance relationship..