My illustrated books of narrative nonfiction investigate art, architecture, history, and books themselves. These are hybrid works that blend diverse genres—history, biography, visual analysis, and memoir—and blur the boundaries between traditional and digital narratives. The reader chooses how to engage the imagery, essays, and marginalia. I write with scholarly rigor for the general public, welcoming them into conversations about the built environment that are vital, but often limited to a privileged few.

 

Expressing time and history within the limits of two dimensions is an ongoing obsession. Consequently, I spend a good deal of time thinking about how readers absorb information and, even more fundamentally since the advent of the Web, how the printed page is approached, read, and retained.

 

Narratives developed for the reading public are vastly different creatures than those written for a scholarly audience. They must be accessible, presuming little if any specialized knowledge. Writing about architecture, a highly visual and physical art, compounds the difficulty of explaining in words what is best experienced in person. Photographs can approximate the experience of structure, and help transport the reader from a textual to a contextual understanding, but cannot replace presence itself.