grew up and studied in the USA at Amherst Collage and Cornell University, where he wrote a dissertation on Victorian fiction. Since arriving in England in the 1970s he has taught at the Architectural Association, London and the University of North London, now London Metropolitan University, while writing a series of books which began with Eccentric Spaces, a wide ranging study of the imagination, and continued with treatments of primitivism, narrative and forms of the Baroque. He is the author of many books including Eccentric Spaces; Deliberate Regression (Primitivism from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Kandinsky); The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable: in Pursuit of Architectural Meaning; Reflections on Baroque and Travels in the History of Architecture. He has lectured widely in Britain, the USA and Europe, and is currently Professor of Architecture at London Metropolitan University.