His research examines the reciprocal interplay between culture and space informed by specific conditions of everyday life in Southeast Asia and Latin America. He has pursued research in Indonesia and the Netherlands with grants from the Fulbright Grant Program, The Asian Cultural Council, and the Leon Hyzen Scholarship Trust. He was the Director of the Karaton Surakarta Project Office and the Local Coordinator of the 1995 Aga Khan Award for Architecture Awards Ceremony. In 2009, he organized, with Manuel Delgado, the Designing For Life Symposium with the participation of the key figures behind the urban transformations of Medellín, Colombia and Caracas, Venezuela. His work with Forum Bangun Aceh piloting an open-source model for post-tsunami village mapping, planning and reconstruction was adopted by the Aceh-Nias Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Authority (BRR).
 

He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. “The Cultural Construction of Surakarta” in The Emerging Asian City: Concomitant Urbanities & Urbanisms (2012) examines how communities surrounding the Javanese Royal Palace Karaton Surakarta in Indonesia negotiate cultural continuities through unlikely reconciliations with post-independence modernism and incipient globalization. "Constructing Discourse, Constructing Space: The Heterotopian Divide in Jakarta," in Heterotopia and the City (2008) examines the late 20th century history of Jakarta’s social transformations through the playing out of powerful forces imprinted in the physical spaces and constructed at multiple scales from master-servant kitchen layouts to toll roads. “Notes on Post-criticality: Towards an Architecture of Reflexive Modernisation,” Footprint: Delft School of Design Journal: Agency in Architecture: Reframing Criticality in Theory and Practice 4 (Spring 2009) tests the notion of an emerging “second modernity” towards emerging design attitudes and approaches, questioning the potential for architecture to deploy new tools more productively beyond formal play to address the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. 
 

Cowherd holds a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture from MIT, and a BArch from The Cooper Union. He is currently working on a book manuscript under the working title: How Cities Mean: The Cultural Construction of Jakarta, a political-economy analysis of urban space exploring the notion of “cultural construction”: the ways in which space operates not just as a reflection of contemporary values, but also as an instrument for reproducing cultural meanings and extending specific arrangements of power.