While my first architectural job was drawing a brick walled timber framed factory building in Springfield, I found a new home and work space in an old toy factory of similar vintage in the Ironbound Neighborhood of Newark New Jersey. Logistically, the Newark live-work space was ideal. Two blocks from Newark Penn Station, I could take the Northeast Corridor north to Springfield to look in on my parents, or south to Baltimore, where I began to collaborate with the Baltimore Ecosystem Study in 2002. It also was ten minutes to EWR and a flight to Bangkok twice a year, where I became deeply involved in new personal and professional experiences.
With a new millennium I started a new firm, urban-interface, llc, that sought to combine the activist damage control work of the 80s with the more techno-utopian 90s possibilities of broader communication around urban and environmental design. The practice model juggled three areas: pro-bono environmental justice work.especially with the Ironbound Community Corporation, funded urban ecological research in Baltimore, and the bread and butter of New Jersey real estate development.
It was during the first decade of the new millennium that I had an opportunity to publish two books that grew out of my teaching architectural design at Parsons and urban design at Columbia. I was never trained in urban design or planning, so I undertook the field much more in the architectural sense of Albert, that a house is a small city and a city is a big house.
CInemetrics (2007), which carefully analyzes the “sensorimotor system” of domestic scenes from three movies, became a platform for multiple workshops on street life in Thailand, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Digital Modeling for Urban Design (2008) resulted from digitizing the layered maps of New York and Rome, and adding Bangkok to the mix. The book is a treatise against the infatuation with rendered realism and a call for a more critical and analytical approach to digital modeling. This two decade time period ended with me assuming a full time faculty position and ultimately an administrative role at Parsons as the Dean of the School of Constructed Environments.
Also, with my partner, we built a house and raised a family in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where I developed a new line of research as my neighbors in the farming villages around our house, shared their stories and experiences of adapting to an urban economy. During a sabbatical leave I started bicycle-based field work covering four neighboring villages and the community irrigation system that sustained the acres of disappearing rice paddy that surrounded them 15 kilometers east of Chiang Mai. Like in Rome in the 1980s, I was able to bring Parsons and Chulalongkorn students together in workshops based in this urbanizing landscape.
We both were committed to taking care of our parents at the end of their lives, and I was able to reconnect with the region I grew up in, and found many parallels between the Connecticut and Ping River Valleys. WIth the onset of the pandemic, my husband and I moved to upstate New York, and I retired from professional practice to focus on teaching and writing.