About Nancy Levinson I like to think of architectural journalism as an extension of architectural practice. I've got a degree in architecture and spent a few years working in a design firm. More recently I've co-founded Harvard Design Magazine, acquired books for Princeton Architectural Press, and reported for periodicals like Architectural Record, Metropolis, I.D., Dwell, Graphis, and Landscape Architecture. I've written about architects in the movies for an anthology called Architecture and Film, and I'm currently collaborating on a book on the mid-century Cuban architect Mario Romanach. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which has (depending on your viewpoint) either a hyper-developed affection for traditional buildings or a hyper-developed distaste for contemporary architecture. If your tastes run to the new, as mine do, this can make for some aesthetic frustration. But it turns out that a centuries-old college town can be a good perch from which to get a perspective on a determinedly urbane, mostly metropolitan field in the midst of big changes — a field that's always wrestling with the question of how to balance new and old, and that's lately been struggling with the dilemma of how to make such solid and stable artifacts as buildings matter in a digital age, in a culture that's captivated by virtual worlds and ever on the lookout for the next big thing. Architecture is at once the most public and least discussed of the arts, and arguably it's the least understood. For those of us who write about the field, this poses the challenge of suggesting how architectural forms and ideas are influenced by — and influence — the larger culture. It's a challenge I'll do my best to meet here at Arts Journal.