Profile
Scott Colman is a historian of architecture and urbanism and a theorist and critic of contemporary design. He studies transformations of urban and architectural forms and their relationship to changes in cultural beliefs and practices. His research is characterized by an understanding of architecture’s interactions with the other arts, the humanities, and the natural and social sciences.
Colman’s recent book on the German-American urbanist, Ludwig Hilberseimer—Ludwig Hilberseimer: Reanimating Architecture and the City—is the definitive account of a figure central to modern architecture’s relationship to avant-garde art and contemporary architecture’s environmental conception of the city. It is a substantial development of his doctoral work, which considered Hilberseimer's and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s engagement with prominent figures in the humanities, planning, social science, and philosophy in mid-twentieth-century Chicago. Colman is currently completing a manuscript on the influential English-American architect Colin Rowe as part of an effort to excavate the origins, lacunas, and assumptions of recent Anglo-American architectural thought.
In addition to these larger projects, Colman is the author of numerous book chapters and journal essays that consider the attitudes and concerns underlying contemporary architectural and urban practices. These include the postscript to Lars Lerup, The Life and Death of Objects, and contributions to: Center, 25, Activism at Home: Architects dwelling between politics, aesthetics, and resistance, Plat 9.5, The Architecture and the Public: On George Baird’s Contribution to Architecture, Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches, Plat 9.0, Melbourne, Sydney: References, Reflections, and Remarks, and Acculturating the Shopping Centre.
His practice, in Australia and the United States, has ranged from work for an office of government architects to a firm engaged in heritage conservation and pro bono work for indigenous clients.