David Smiley

Trained as an architect and as an architectural and urban historian, David Smiley’s research and teaching focus on the intersections of architectural and urban theory, design and modernization. He was written about contemporary urban and suburban issues, examining large-scale urban interventions, the single-family house and multi-family housing, the re-use of shopping malls and the recent history of urban planning and urban design. Smiley is especially interested in the making of architectural and planning culture: the ways in which magazines, schools, policies, professional associations and local and regional politics continually reshape the discourse and practices of the built environment. His book, Pedestrian Modern: Architecture and Shopping, 1925-1956 (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), is a study of the ways architects interpreted shopping centers as Modernist architectural and urban projects rather than, or alongside, their role as sites of consumption.

Most recently, Smiley contributed an essay on Broadacre City to the 2017 Museum of Modern Art catalog and exhibit, Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive. He also contributed chapters to Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, edited by John Archer, Paul J. P. Sandul, Katherine Solomonson (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City, edited by Nicholas Dagen Bloom and Matthew Gordon Lasner (Princeton University Press, 2015). Smiley has also written about architecture, cities and suburbs in Perspecta and Lotus magazines, the Urban Design Review, the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Urban History, Buildings and Landscapes, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.