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Christine Boyer
Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.

5:30 p.m., April 21
Shollmier Hall

Christine Boyer is an urban historian who has published extensively on the history of the American city, from the infancy of city planning in the nineteenth century to the impact of the computer on contemporary society. In this lecture, Boyer will focus on her recent research on Le Corbusier as an homme de lettres, exploring why he wrote so much (50 books, hundreds of articles, thousands of letters) and the larger question, “What does it mean for an architect to write?”

Boyer is the William R. McKenan Jr. Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the School of Architecture, Princeton University. Her books include CyberCities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (MIT Press,1994), Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of City Planning 1890-1945 (MIT Press, 1983), and Manhattan Manners: Architecture and Style 1850-1890 (Rizzoli, 1985). In addition, she has written many articles and lectured widely on the topic of urbanism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Recent topics include "La Mission Héliographique: Architectural Photography, Collective Memory and the Patrimony of France, 1851" in Joan M. Swartz and James R. Ryan (eds.) Picturing Place, Photography and the Geographical Imagination (New York: I.B. Taurus, 2003); "Approaching the Memory of Shanghai: the case of Zhang Yimou and Shanghai Triad" in Mario Gandelsonas (ed.) Shanghai Reflections: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Search for an Alternative Modernity (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002); "Meditations on a Wounded Skyline and Its Stratigraphies of Pain," in Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (eds.) After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York (New York: Routledge, 2002); and "Chasing the Arrow of Time: Cities, Cinema and Motion" in Fast Forward, a driving perception (International Design Seminar, TU Delft, 2003).

Honors and awards include the 1995 Lewis Mumford Prize for The City of Collective Memory, awarded by the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, and a 1993 summer stipend award to visit the Le Corbusier archives in Paris, from the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.

Christine Boyer received her doctoral and master’s degrees in city planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also holds a masters of science degree in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania, the Moore School of Electrical Engineering and a bachelor of arts degree in mathematics from Goucher College. Before coming to Princeton in 1991, Boyer was professor and chair of the City and Regional Planning Program at Pratt Institute. She also has taught at the Cooper Union, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. She was a visiting professor in the Ph.D. program at TU Delft School of Design for Spring 2005.