My research interests revolve around issues of design, especially as regards the ancient period and the classical way of building. I like to understand why and how certain forms and patterns came into being and endured. Various research projects have benefited from funding from the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust and the AHRC in the UK, along with the Graham Foundation and the Samuel Kress Foundation in the US. Principles of Roman Architecture (Yale UP 2000) is the only book to have been awarded both the Banister Fletcher Prize by the RIBA and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians (UK). Another book with the same press, Origins of Classical Architecture, was published in 2014, while The Pantheon in Rome from Antiquity to the Present, co-edited with Tod Marder (Cambridge University 2015) won the American PROSE for best book of that year.

Aside from miscellaneous publications (including on the design of the Parthenon in Athens), my primary current research relates to the funded three-year fellowship for the project Emulation to Replication. Shifting Modes of Architectural Design.