Professor Karen J. Lewis

Karen Lewis is an Associate Professor of Architecture at The Ohio State University whose research and teaching address how visual and information systems shape the architectural, territorial and infrastructural space they create and inhabit. As an undergraduate at Wellesley College, Professor Lewis was introduced to complex spatial mapping and multi-dimensional graphics when studying astronomy. She worked in New York as a museum exhibition designer, user-interface designer, and a toy-design researcher before beginning her Masters in Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, completing her thesis on spatial logistics.  

Early in her academic career, Professor Lewis was selected as a finalist to design the Flight 93 National 9/11 Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Her proposal “Memory Trail,” was one of five chosen from more than 1,000 international entries. Shortly thereafter, she was recognized with the New Faculty Teaching Award by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Her book, Graphic Design for Architects (Routledge 2015) pedagogically positions issues of architectural representation through the lens of information design and visual communication and is one of the publisher’s best performing architecture publications of the 21stcentury.

As Associate Professor of Architecture at The Ohio State University, Professor Lewis’s has expanded her territorial and graphic thinking to the stories hidden within archives. She has held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, the Newberry Library, and through the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the 19th-century visualization strategies, maps and graphic tools of the people and technologies crossing the United States. Professor Lewis’s current research visualizes the Underground Railroad, providing critical counter-narratives through mapping, drawing, and writing. Her design research has been exhibited and highlighted by several keynote addresses at the Newberry Library in Chicago, the American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the Rumsey Center for Cartography at Stanford University.