Dietrich Neumann, Professor of the History of Modern Architecture and Urbanism at Brown University, concentrates on European and American architectural production from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—from the minutiae of building technologies to the transatlantic discourse about skyscrapers and urbanism. He also works on the history of film-set design and architectural illumination. His books include Film Architecture: Set Design from Metropolis to Blade Runner (Prestel, 1996), Richard Neutra’s Windshield House (Harvard, 2001), Architecture of the Night (Prestel, 2002), and “The Structure of Light”: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture (Yale, 2010). Two additional manuscripts are scheduled for publication: The Barcelona Pavilion (Chicago) and A Skyscraper for Mussolini: Palanti and Urban Planning in Fascist Rome.

Neumann studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and the Technische Universität in Munich, where he received his PhD in 1988. Apart from teaching at Brown University, he has held a chair as the first Vincent Scully Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture (2007-2009), and has taught at the Universidade do Porto, Portugal and the Technische Universität Munich. In 2001 he was a visiting scholar at the Centre Canadien d’Architecture in Montréal, and in 2002 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The Society of Architectural Historians awarded Neumann the Founder’s Award in 1997 and then a Philip Johnson Award in 2001. From 2008 to 2010 he served as president of the Society of Architectural Historians and is presently a member of the Committee on Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.