PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

My fascination with architecture stems from its juxtapositions. How does the built world negotiate iconography in contrast with the mundane and experience against sustainability?  These questions and similar are at the heart of what I try to address in the work I create.  As a creator and innovative thinker I feel compelled to utilize a diversity of fields in pursuit of design solutions to these questions.  Answers may not come solely from the individual realms of sustainability, sociology, philosophy, or structural systems, but a synthesis of many disparate fields.  Moreover, architecture has the capacity to translate theoretical, experiential, and phenomenological into tangible, real, human experience.  Through architecture, I have the chance to affect the human condition.

The design process is not merely an activity I walk through casually.  I find it critical to know my project, to build and re-build it, refining it both physically and conceptually.  Within this process is the drive to create a space, a place, an idea that has clarity and can be made manifest in architecture.  To this end, I intentionally maintain the creative process through the entirety of a project.  This method of design often meanders through a variety of media and is never isolated within the restraints of one form of production.  As such, my projects vary from one another in order to best reveal the found meaning of each unique problem.

In expressing a concept, it is difficult to establish a quantifiable method with which to balance the iconic against the sublime.  This conflict of agendas is a challenge I have yet to solve within my work, but it is a paradox I use as a driving force to fuel my own creativity.  My interest is in learning the art of making those subtle moves that synthesize the ordinary and the iconographic.  How can I make a piece of furniture an icon and make a skyscraper personal?  The inquisitive drive to solve these questions is why I am passionate about architecture.  It lets me build, create, and bring my thoughts to reality.

In the process of creation it is important to me that my project be comprehensive.  This requires a fusion of experiential and sustainable qualities.  For me, it has become apparent that much of the built world is created with little thought to longevity.  Our continual practice of hasty construction has a degenerative effect on the social infrastructure of a city as well as the environment.  Without thoughtful creation and thoughtful construction, we run the risk of trapping ourselves in a loop of perpetual reconstruction.  Additionally, without genuine care and planning for our architectural landscapes, the public will not value those spaces, thus in turn will not care to maintain them.  It is through constructing well-planned, durable spaces that I believe we can begin to unite the experiential and the sustainable.  Without this relationship, there will always be a disconnect between the process I find so important, the product we create, and the endurance of our work.