I am an award-winning architectural historian. My book Echo’s Chambers: Architectural and the Idea of Acoustic Space is the first major English-language study to explore how designers have conceived sound as a dimension of architecture, beginning with the early modern philosopher Athanasius Kircher’s proposal for a new field he called “echotectonics.” Echo’s Chambers was named a 2022 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. Alongside my scholarly work, I’ve written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Aeon, Triple Canopy, Frieze, and Log, and I’ve been an architecture commentator on podcasts, radio shows, and CBC national television news.

I am an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Currently I serve as Chair of the Department of Art History, one of the largest and most dynamic art history departments in North America.

My newest areas of research and writing are open-plan office design in the mid-20th century and modern sacred architecture. I co-direct an ongoing research project on the history of Canadian architecture.

In all my work, I help people see how architecture is entangled with money, power, and technology—indeed, it’s rightly been called “politics in three dimensions”—but is also a distinct cultural practice with its own forms of knowledge and artfulness. This means the perspective of architectural history is not reducible to the frameworks of economic history, environmental history, social history, or the history of technology, as valuable as these fields are. Architectural history is a synthetic way of understanding buildings as architecture, as integral built works, and it has much to contribute to the great debates of our time.

Born in Florida and raised in Ohio, I was trained as an architect and worked at Eisenman Architects and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. I hold degrees from the University of Cincinnati and Yale. As a faculty member at the University of Toronto, I stand by the convictions that ideas are universal and worth studying for their own sake and that sustained engagement with challenging and even disturbing works is essential to learning.

Email me at joseph.clarke at utoronto.ca.