Robert McCarter is a practicing architect, professor of architecture, and author. He is the Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at 
Washington University in St. Louis.

As a practicing architect, professor, and author, Robert McCarter analyzes architecture as it is
 experienced by the inhabitant, with particular emphasis on the occupation of interior space, the methods and materials of construction, and their interrelationship. In the overwhelming majority of 
existing architectural studies, critical events in the history of architecture, and the buildings that embody them, have most often been scripted in stylistic or purely formal terms. Yet in order to make 
an appropriate and comprehensive analysis of architecture, another definition is required a definition much less concerned with style and form, and much more concerned with the tradition of building 
and the making of places. In this understanding, architecture is concerned much less with what a building looks like, and much more with how its spaces are ordered, with how it is built, and how 
these affect what is experienced by those who inhabit it. It is this comprehensive analysis of the experience of inhabitation, and of the design process that leads to its realization in architecture the 
beginning and the end of architectural design that has been the focus of McCarter's teaching, research, and scholarly publications.