Geoff Manaugh
Manaugh regularly covers issues related to cities, design, crime, infrastructure, and technology for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, New Scientist, The Daily Beast, Wired, Wired UK, and many other publications.
His 2016 feature for The Daily Beast—about a Los Angeles bank robber allegedly sent overseas to plot heists against al Qaeda—was optioned for development as a feature film for Sony Pictures’ Studio 8. His 2017 profile of an experimental intelligence-gathering unit at the Los Angeles International Airport, published by The Atlantic, was optioned for development by Lionsgate Television.
Manaugh’s short story “Ernest,” published by VICE in October 2017, is currently being adapted for film by Legendary Entertainment, with Christopher Landon attached to direct.
Since 2004, Manaugh has been the author of BLDGBLOG (“building blog”), exploring architecture and the built environment through an expansive lens, including technology, literature, crime, history, archaeology, acoustics, science fiction, warfare, subterranean space, the planetary sciences, and more.
In 2009, The BLDGBLOG Book, based on the blog, was released by Chronicle Books; it was also chosen by Amazon.com as one of their “Best Books of 2009.”
In 2013,Wired named Manaugh one of “the 18 people who will tell you everything you need to know about design.”
He has been Editor-in-Chief of Gizmodo (2013-2014), a Contributing Editor at Wired UK (2009-2013), and Senior Editor of Dwell (2007-2009).
He has taught graduate architectural design studios at Columbia University (2010-2013), the University of California–Berkeley (2018-2019), the University of Southern California (2010), and SCI-Arc (2017), and he has lectured at venues and events around the world, including the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Australian National Architecture Conference, the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Bauhaus Universität, the University of Pennsylvania, Google SPAN, the Strelka Institute, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, among many others.
He has contributed essays to multiple books, exhibition catalogs, and artist monographs, including publications by photographers David Maisel, Bas Princen, Reuben Wu, Christoph Gielen, and Michael Wolf; artist Ai Weiwei; and architects Philip Beesley and Bjarke Ingels.
He can be contacted via the name of his blog (BLDGBLOG) at gmail dot com.
[All images courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress, with the exception of the fault map, which is courtesy of the California Division of Mines and Geology.]