Cathleen is helping judge the HOME New Zealand Home of the Year Award, which is sponsored by Altherm Window Systems. Her presentations, in Auckland and Christchurch, will be on “New American Urbanism” and will take the form of conversations with Home editor Jeremy Hansen about how architects are rejuvenating US cities, and how New Zealand can learn from them.

McGuigan, who is the second woman to serve as editor in chief, was named to the post in 2011. Under her leadership, Architectural Record won the 2012 Grand Neal award, the top American Business Media award for overall excellence, as well as being named in the Media Power 50 list in B to B Magazine. She also serves as editorial director of GreenSource, an award-winning sustainable design magazine launched in 2006, and SNAP, a products publication that debuted in 2009.

McGuigan, a former Newsweek architecture critic and arts editor, has more than three decades of cultural journalism experience. A Michigan native, she holds a BA degree in English, with a minor in art history, from Brown University.  In 1992-93, she was a Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.

Besides her career at Newsweek, where she was on staff from 1977 to 2008, McGuigan has penned articles for The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian and Harper’s Bazaar, among other periodicals. She has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale. Cathleen also serves on various design juries and sits on the board of trustees of the Skyscraper Museum in New York.

Her talks will be in Auckland on Tuesday 19 February at the Auckland Museum auditorium and in Christchurch on 21 February at the University of Canterbury (Lecture Theatre C2, Arts Rd).

Those interested in attending can book online.