Dietrich Neumann is a professor of the history of modern architecture and director of the Urban Studies Program at Brown University. He was trained as an architect in Munich, Germany, and at the Architectural Association in London and received his Ph.D. from Munich University. He writes on modern European and American architecture and has organized a number of traveling exhibitions. His books have dealt with the history of skyscrapers, movie set design, architectural and urban illumination, Richard Neutra’s Windshield House on Fishers Island and the Empire State Building (a children’s book). He has just finished a study of the genesis and critical reception of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (Princeton University Press, 2019) and is working on a Mies biography (Yale University Press, 2020), as well as publications on George Nelson and Raymond Hood. Recent essays have addressed the reception of Frank Lloyd Wright in 1920s Germany, the political dimension of street lighting in Berlin and urban scenery in Fritz Lang’s movie, Metropolis. An interest in public humanities led to the creation of smart phone apps about campus architecture at Brown University, IIT and MIT.

Dietrich Neumann has won fellowships at the Centre Canadien d'Architecture in Montréal, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the American Academy in Berlin and the American Academy in Rome. He was the first Vincent Scully Visiting Professor at Yale and is a member of the Committee on Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. He won the 1996 Founders’ Award and the 2003 Philip Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award, both from the Society of Architectural Historians. He co-organized three SAH study tours to Germany, served as the local co-chair of the SAH 2004 annual conference in Providence and is serving as local co-chair for the SAH 2019 annual conference in Providence. He is currently managing the Rhode Island content for SAH Archipedia, the Society’s online encyclopedia of US architecture. He served twice on the SAH Board of Directors and as its president from 2008 to 2010.