Sara is an architectural and urban historian whose research focuses on the link between architecture and capital. She writes about the relationship between real estate developers and architects in the twentieth century, uncovering how money has shaped cities.

Sara’s first book was Developing Expertise: Architecture and Real Estate in Metropolitan America (2016, Yale University Press). Organized in two parts, it studies early suburbs and the profession of real estate development as well as postwar urban renewal in American city centres. Developing Expertise argues that real estate developers influenced public policy through their professional organizations, used design to promote investment security, and employed new financing techniques and sources of capital that avoided risk.

She is a member of the collective Architects Against Housing Alienation that curated the Canada Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.