Professor of art and history of architecture at the Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. His areas of research are: the history of architecture and design from the 19th century until the present, 21st-century architecture and the new media, relations between politics and architecture (especially in Germany, Austria and the former Soviet republics), sociology of art. In 2005 he published the book Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890-1920.