Biography & Education
Mitchell Schwarzer is a scholar, author, and educator whose research addresses the history of architectural design, city planning, infrastructure and the built environment.
As a city planner in the 1980s, he contributed to San Francisco’s Downtown Plan, its Historic Preservation Element of the Master Plan and many other neighborhood plans, providing him with direct, hands-on insight into urban development dynamics. Schwarzer transitioned to academia in the late 1980s.
Over his distinguished scholarly career, he has investigated the role of theory and philosophy as well as technologies of motion and media on those histories. In his first book German Architectural Theory and numerous articles, he examined written discourses on architecture, art history and aesthetics that grappled with the onset of industrial modernity in Central Europe. In his second book, Zoomscape, he explored how new transportation and media technologies – railroads, automobiles, airplanes, photographs, films, TV – reoriented our perception and awareness of the built environment. His university-level teaching came to encompass the wide horizons of the visual and fine arts, an exposure that contributed to his increasing role as a public intellectual.
Around the turn of the millennium, Schwarzer published two historical guidebooks to the architecture of San Francisco and the Bay Area, and contributed frequent criticism on new buildings in California in the mainstream media. During the 2010s and beyond, he analyzed the history and theory of infrastructure and, building upon earlier work, dove into the history of Oakland, resulting in the book Hella Town. He has continued writing on regional Bay Area history and contributed op-eds, interviews, podcasts, lectures and discussions to a wide array of public audiences.