In addition to her work as an academic administrator, Whiting is most commonly identified as an intellectual figure within the field of architecture's "post-critical" turn in the early 2000s.

She then attended Yale University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in architectural, urban history, and theory.

[5] Her PhD dissertation, advised by the architectural historian Stanford Anderson, was entitled "The Jungle in the Clearing: Space, Form, and Democracy in America, 1940-1949.

On July 1, 2019, Whiting was named Dean and Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Whiting notably contributed to the postcritical turn in architectural practice and discourse, often identified through her widely cited essay, co-authored with Robert Somol, "Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism," published by MIT's Perspecta journal in 2002.