Prior to his ongoing studies in the Northeast, he worked for three years in architecture offices ranging in location from the north Chicago , to the south Dallas , to smack in the middle Kansas City of the Great Plains. If - together with a Master of Architecture degree from his hometown institution of Kansas State University - these experiences instilled a comprehension and devotion to classically codified core principles of the field, his experiences outside of practice and pedagogy situated this fundamental framework within a broader ecological and cultural context.
Summertime experiences restoring centuries-old Puebloan ruins, building backcountry trails, and caring for ecosystems within a National Park, National Forest, and private prairie reserve contributed to an understanding of architecture not as a hermetic realm of practice, but as an inquisitive position from which to understand and act upon the world through critical and creative thought.
An addendum to an ordonnance, a markup of a brief, a rental agreement, and a lien release form informed early projects representing the unruly forms of dolmens, mountains, apartment complexes, and the cautious leanings of a first attempt at making a bank.
As doubt, paralleled by the dialectic of flatness and content, gave way to a timid trust, advanced through architectural tricks of mass and surface, formal language yielded to acronyms ATM , compound words ComericA , and abbreviations info. Expressed as bits of delaminating foamcore, transformed into architectural mass and surface, and interpreted as vaguely familiar pop objects, the resultant urban ensemble lacks the full sentences of a written agreement but nevertheless directly invites our trust through effective grunts and awkward gestures.
Formal allusions and associations embedded within the group of mass-surface mashups - an unwrapped candy bar, a peeling banana, cardboard boxes with lid flaps aflutter - imbue these characters a kind of architectural agreement.
