Joy Knoblauch

Joy Knoblauch is an associate professor of Architecture teaching history and theory of architecture as an exploration of architecture’s engagement with politics and science. She is a member of the Design Health faculty research and teaching group at Taubman College. She is on the steering committee of the University of Michigan’s Science, Technology & Society Program and the steering committee for the Graduate Certificate in Healthy Cities. Knoblauch studies the intersection of architecture and psychology, proposing critical changes to the assumptions about humans that belong more to laboratories than built environments. Her first book was The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America, an examination of efforts to govern behavior through the environment. She is currently writing a history of ergonomics that documents moments of resistance to technologies of work, including cockpits, open office landscapes, and digital interfaces. She is also part of a team using Gen4Viz tools as a depth psychology practice to learn about what quiet spaces for work and healing look like to them.

Knoblauch earned a Fulbright Award as The Visiting Research Chair in Philosophy and Public Health from Fulbright Canada and The Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec in 2015. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Centre Canadien d’Architecture, and the Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars. She earned her Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University, a Master of Environmental Design from the Yale University School of Architecture and has worked in architecture offices in Ithaca, New York and San Francisco, California. Previously, she taught History and Theory of Urban Design as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Her work has been published in Architecture Theory Review, Manifest, covering American Architecture and Urbanism, Pidgin, and Aggregate. She co-edited an issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) on Health with Sara Stevens. Along with Stevens, she is also integrating connections between real estate development and health and climate change. In 2025, she joins the WELL MIND advisory board.