Todd Levon Brown’s academic path begins with architecture, but it does not remain confined to buildings as objects. His work moves beyond walls, plans, façades, and formal design. It asks how space is made meaningful, how it is read by the people who move through it, and how architecture can carry social ideas that are not always visible at first glance.
Trained as an architect, Dr. Brown later developed his career as an environmental psychologist. This combination is central to understanding his biography. Architecture gave him a language of form, place, material, and urban structure. Environmental psychology gave him another set of tools: perception, behavior, identity, memory, and social interpretation.
His research focuses especially on the relationship between critical race theory and the built environment. In this field, buildings are not neutral backgrounds. Streets, institutions, public spaces, housing, and design decisions can all participate in the production of social meaning.
For Brown, the built environment is something people experience with the body, the mind, and the imagination. It is seen, judged, remembered, feared, inhabited, and interpreted.
Intellectual formation
Brown’s education reflects the interdisciplinary character of his later work. He received a BA in architecture, a Master of Public Health, and a Master of Architecture from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Later, he earned an MA, a Master of Philosophy, and a PhD in environmental psychology from the CUNY Graduate Center.
This academic route shows a gradual widening of perspective. Architecture remained important, but it became part of a larger question about human experience and social conditions. Public health added another dimension, connecting place to wellbeing, exposure, vulnerability, and collective life.
He also studied and researched architecture internationally, including at Universidad Autónoma de San Luís Potosí in Mexico, the Universität der Künste in Berlin, and the Institut D’Arquitectura Avançada de Catalunya in Barcelona. These experiences likely strengthened the global and comparative dimension of his thinking about space.
His dissertation examined how environmental cues, including architectural design features and other physical properties, help shape a person’s sociospatial imaginary of urban space. In simpler terms, his work explored how people build mental and social understandings of the city from the details they encounter around them.
A building can suggest welcome or exclusion. A street can feel open or controlled. An institution can seem protective, punitive, distant, or accessible. Brown’s research takes these impressions seriously.
Research at the intersection of race
The strongest thread in Brown’s work is the idea that architecture and physical environments are not only designed, but also perceived and evaluated through social categories. Race, class, gender, age, institutional power, and public health can all become part of how space is produced and understood.
He works theoretically, empirically, and visually. That matters because his subject requires more than one method. Some questions need conceptual analysis. Others need data, observation, or design-based interpretation. Still others need visual thinking, because the built environment communicates through form as much as through language.
His publications sit at the intersection of psychosocial perception, race, social justice, architecture, and urban design. Among his scholarly works is the book chapter “Evaluating Correctional Environments: A Critical Psychosociospatial Approach,” published in The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Designin December 2022.
His 2019 article, “Racialized Architectural Space: A Critical Understanding of its Production, Perception and Evaluation,” published in ArchitectureMediaPolitics_Society, became one of his most recognized works. The article won a UCL Press Award for best article of the year, marking an important moment in the visibility of his research.
This recognition is meaningful because Brown’s work addresses questions that are both academic and practical. It asks how design participates in justice or injustice, and how scholars and practitioners might learn to see space differently.
Design practice and public impact
Brown’s biography is not only a story of scholarship. It is also a story of practice. He has worked to bring diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations into the design of the built environment.
As part of this work, he has provided consulting and training to design firms, including RIOS Design Collective in Los Angeles and Michael Hsu Office of Architecture in Austin. This suggests a bridge between academic theory and professional practice.
Brown has also participated in national design competitions. In 2017, he was part of a team led by architect Lisa Tsang that became a finalist in the Van Alen Institute’s Justice in Design competition, which focused on healthier jail design. That project connects directly to his interest in institutional environments and the social consequences of design.
In 2022, he joined a team co-led by Neeraj Bhatia, Ignacio Galan, and Karen Kubey that was selected for the Reset: Towards A New Commons exhibit at the Center for Architecture in New York City. Their project, “Aging Against the Machine,” focused on senior-centered, socially integrated, multi-generational housing and amenities.
These projects show how Brown’s ideas can move from analysis into spatial proposals. His work is not limited to asking what environments mean. It also asks what they could become.
Current academic work
As an educator, Brown has taught across several fields and institutions. His teaching experience includes psychology at Hunter College, urban studies at Queens College, and architecture at the City College of New York. This range reflects the same interdisciplinary logic that shapes his research.
He also served as the 2021–2023 Race and Gender in the Built Environment Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. There, he taught design studios and seminars focused on inclusion and socioracial sustainability.
The profile also presents him as an Adjunct Lecturer of Psychology at the Fashion Institute of Technology and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. In addition, it describes his 2023–2024 research fellowship with the National Institutes of Health’s AIM-AHEAD program, where his research uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to examine environmental and socioracial determinants of stress and cardiometabolic health outcomes among transgender and gender-diverse individuals.
Taken together, these roles show a scholar whose work keeps expanding while remaining anchored in one central concern: the relationship between built environments and social life.