Design scholarship and scholarship of design are usually posed as opposites — making versus analyzing. But the binary is a false choice. Designing Scholarship works inside scholarly sites — archives, libraries, primary sources — using the visual and spatial tools of architecture to find what written analysis alone cannot see.
Every drawing, model, diagram, and map is a rigorous articulation of an idea — not a loosely aesthetic gesture. A section cut is an argument about what matters in a building. A site plan is a claim about the relationship between architecture and context. The question I press in every studio, every seminar, every mentoring relationship is the same: what are we arguing, and how does this work make that argument visible?
Chincoteague, Virginia · 2024
Karen Lewis is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Knowlton School, Ohio State University, where she has taught since 2009. Her research develops forensic methods for reading the built environment — using architectural evidence to generate new historical and geographic knowledge.
She holds degrees from Wellesley College and Harvard GSD. Her work has been exhibited at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Thompson Library at Ohio State, and the Columbus Metropolitan Library. She is the author of Graphic Design for Architects (Routledge, second edition 2026).
She lives in Columbus, Ohio.
John Tyler Memorial Highway, Virginia · 2024
Mapping Performance
Watch the lectureThe House within the House
Watch the lectureTracing the Underground Railroad
Explore the mapChase City, Virginia · 2024
The Newberry Library, Chicago
An independent research library that is elegant, serious, and absolutely unpretentious. Do you want to see the entire set of Topographic Engineering Surveys? They will wheel you a library cart with the complete fifteen-volume set. Kindness, quiet, beautiful green lamps, big spaces that smell of old books, an elegant marble stairwell that winds down to Walton Street and the park across the street. Nested in the Gold Coast. Meet up with the Map Guys for lunch at Il Tempio and talk about cartography over a Hollywood Salad. Best archive with the best people ever.
Anni Albers, Weavings, 1920s–70s
Color built from structure, not applied to it. Every thread a decision — material, tonal, spatial — and the weaving the record of all of them at once. I have been looking at these for decades and they are not finished with me.
Lauretta Vinciarelli, Watercolors, 1980s–2000s
Light as structural argument. She was trained as an architect and it shows — these are not atmospheric washes, they are spatial propositions. The watercolor medium is doing the opposite of what watercolor usually does: instead of loosening form, it is making it precise. I keep returning to them because they prove something I believe about drawing: that restraint is not absence. The empty room is full.
A comprehensive guide to the visual communication tools architects use — diagramming, mapping, typographic systems. Used in schools worldwide.
Routledge, 2026