Excerpts from Teaching Narrative (02.28.2011)

Where do architects and designers acquire their ideas? Are we influenced by magazines, writings, speeches, or directly impacted by schooling? Are we compelled by the beauty of Nature, the experience of site, intuition, or material culture? Or is the architectural impetus more internalized?

I view design and teaching design as a process. It is a journey to better understand, develop, and re-develop projects based on student's learning capabilities. My interest in the process of learning involves a synthesis of making, thinking, and writing in both physical and digital mediums to achieve a broader context to the historical paradigms of architecture. As a designer, I view the computer as a tool to guide students three dimensionally within their own spatial caveat of knowledge.

My teaching methodology is deeply rooted in Jungian philosophy. The prominent psychologist Carl Jung proposed that images are embedded in one's daily life, experience, and work, where the conscious reflects the subconscious. Within his development of the theory of the collective unconscious, the term 'image' symbolizes an expressive experience or event, not a solely static description as reflected in cultural terminology. Archetypal images are entrenched into a student's psyche and subconsciously affect his predisposition to learning.

I concede that these internalized images are manifested within the vagueness of the general architectural pedagogical. Therefore, my teaching style implements 'determining phases,' or a series of design variables, constraints, and restrictions designed specific to each student. Often the best methods arise from unconventional media and theoretical abstraction... From history to theory, from hand sketches to the digital screen, from researching formal antecedents to walking around campus,

the various collective educational techniques guided by each student's own parameters will motivate individual student development for greater critical assessment, encourage innovative thinking, and prepare students to act as Renaissance men and women for the twenty-first century.