Nancy Levinson: A New Public for Design Journalism

If the design arts — architecture, landscape, urbanism — are among the most public of all the arts, then why do they have so little presence in public discourse? Why are they so marginalized in mainstream media?

Nancy Levinson, the editor and executive director of Places journal, will give a lecture on the current role and future potential of design journalism. Her talk will consider examples of how scholars in other professions and disciplines — in medicine, economics, law, and history — have emerged as influential public intellectuals, and how these could apply to the design field. She will also discuss ways that realistic models could be created for supporting the work of public intellectuals in design whose writing is at once rigorous and accessible.

Nancy Levinson (MArch'84) is editor and executive director of Places, a journal of public scholarship on architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Since arriving at Places in 2009, Levinson has led the journal’s transition from print to digital, globalized its network of institutional partners, advanced the editorial mission of public scholarship, and overseen the launch of Places Books, an imprint of Princeton University Press. Previously Levinson was founding director of the Phoenix Urban Research Lab at The Design School at Arizona State University, and before that, co-founding editor of Harvard Design Magazine at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A frequent design juror and lecturer, she has written for a range of design periodicals; in an earlier digital life, she wrote the blog “Pixel Points” for Arts Journal. Levinson has been awarded a fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and received numerous foundations grants for projects in Places. Most recently she has been appointed an adjunct associate professor of architecture at Monash University in Melbourne.