Joseph L. Clarke

I am fascinated by the ways architecture teaches people to live and work together, generating new forms of communication and community. I’m equally interested in how architects think: how spatial reasoning generates insights that aren’t obvious to other fields, and how the design process itself can become a form of research. My scholarship combines archival detective work with close analysis of built environments, informed by my professional experience at Eisenman Architects and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, along with a healthy skepticism toward intellectual fads.

My award-winning book Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) showed how centuries of acoustic experimentation were entangled with architectural form, type, and visualization. My current project, Factory of Decisions: Architecture, Teamwork, and the Transformation of the Open Office, examines how experimental workplaces in the 1960s created our ideals of collaborative knowledge work. For a parallel project, I’m investigating modern church design, and how sacred architecture engages the contemporary without reducing the mystical to an aesthetic effect.

My teaching and graduate supervision span various topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture. I welcome PhD students who approach architectural history with curiosity, methodological seriousness, and an aversion to overly simplistic explanations. Our Art History PhD graduates have secured tenured faculty and leadership positions in architectural history at major North American universities. My students benefit from the rigorous historiographic training of the Department of Art History, where I currently serve as Chair, as well as close connections to the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, where I am cross-appointed. I also organize the Architectural History Working Group.

Recent Courses

• Introduction to Modern Architecture (undergraduate, FAH272)
• Architectural Modernism, 1890-1968 (undergraduate, FAH373)
• Art and Ideas (undergraduate, FAH102)
• Modern Architecture and its Representations (graduate, FAH1759)
• Acoustic Space (graduate, FAH1756)
• Architectural History I (graduate, ARC1031)
• Architectural History II (graduate, ARC1032)

Selected Publications

• Echo’s Chambers: Architecture and the Idea of Acoustic Space (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). Winner, 2022 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Awards. 
• “‘A Facility Based on Change’: Architecture and Facility Management,” Journal of Architecture, March 2025.
• “Too Much Information: Noise and Communication in an Open Office,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 82.3 (December 2023).
• “Ear Building: Zuhören durch moderne Architektur,” in Listening/Hearing, ed. Carsten Seiffarth and Raoul Mörchen (Mainz: Schott, 2022), 235–51.
• “The Electronic Campanile at Ronchamp,” in The Sound of Architecture: Acoustic Atmospheres in Place, ed. Angeliki Sioli and Elisavet Kiourtsoglou (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022), 131–44.
• “Acoustic Naturalism,” Aeon, October 5, 2021, https://aeon.co/essays/on-the-art-and-science-of-making-buildings-sound-....
• “That Great Brouhaha: Picturing Sound in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Impressionism in the Age of Industry, ed. Caroline Shields (New York: Prestel, 2019), 50–59.

Honours/Awards or Grants Received

• Visiting Scholar, Centre André-Chastel, Sorbonne Université, Paris, 2024
• Research Fellow, Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal), 2021
• Learning & Education Advancement Fund Grant, University of Toronto, “Canada Constructed: Teaching Canadian Architectural History,” 2020–23 (with Christy Anderson)
• SSHRC Insight Grant, “Open Office Design and the Acoustics of the Knowledge Economy, 1960–1980,” 2018–22
• Visiting Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin), 2018