Sarah M. Whiting: Dynamic Wholes

The contemporary metropolis can only be multiple, simultaneous, and resonant, producing relations held together by tentacles of movement, time, activity, and economic exchange — tentacles that are ever hopeful, ever expectant, in their reach.

Sarah Whiting has been Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design since 2019. She is also a design principal and co-founder of WW Architecture, based in Cambridge, and served as the Dean of Rice University's School of Architecture from 2010 to 2019. Whiting obtained an interdisciplinary, self-directed Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale, a Master of Architecture from Princeton in 1990, and a Doctor of Philosophy in the History and Theory of Architecture from MIT in 2001. Whiting’s research and writing is broadly interdisciplinary, with the built environment at its core. An expert in architectural theory and urbanism, she is particularly interested in modern and contemporary architecture’s imbricated relationship with politics, economics, and society, and how the built environment shapes the nature of public life.