Hi. I’m Ned Cramer. This is my headshot.

My keywords are architecture, building, cities, climate, design, education, equity, exhibits, media, research, technology, and writing.

Also dogs.

I’ve spent my career learning and communicating about the places we make and the ways we inhabit them. Now I help organizations create value through the language of design (which is another way of saying I’m a free agent).

Here are some of my greatest hits:

Architect Magazine

2006 – 2020

In 2006, Hanley Wood, an information company that serves the building industry, tapped me as founding editor-in-chief of Architect. Within three years of the launch, the American Institute of Architects chose Architect as its official media partner, over the 100-year-old incumbent.

During much of my 14-year tenure, I also helped steer content strategy and creation for the company’s full portfolio of media brands, across print, digital, in-person, and other platforms, first as editorial director, then as vice president, editorial.

Carbon Positive

2019 – 2020

Hanley Wood partnered with the sustainability nonprofit Architecture 2030, led by visionary architect Edward Mazria, to reset the dialogue, strategy, and tactics around green building. Through a succession of conferences and a landmark guest-edited issue of Architect, the Carbon Positive project encourages the architecture profession (and with it the entire building industry) to aggressively reduce the carbon footprint of construction materials and products.

Spontaneous Interventions

2011 – 2012

With Cathy Lang Ho and David van der Leer, I co-curated the U.S. Pavilion at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition, “Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good,” celebrates civic projects that activist architects, artists, and designers developed outside of normal channels, and it received a special mention from the jury—the first such prize ever conferred at the biennale. A dedicated issue of Architect served as the exhibition catalog.

Chicago Architecture Foundation

2002 – 2006

Prior to launching Architect, I was the first full-time curator of the Chicago Architecture Foundation (now called the Chicago Architecture Center). During my tenure there, Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin commended me for bringing “intellectual heft” to the nonprofit, and I’ve not-so-humbly been using the quote in my bio ever since.

Fun facts: I am a sixth-generation Missourian, weighed trucks at a limestone quarry during high school, and probably had the lowest GPA in my architecture school class. Nowadays I live outside Washington, D.C., with my partner, who works in theater, and our dogs Mortimer, a 12-year-old shiba inu, and Eliza, a 5-month-old Siberian husky, who are learning how to get along.