Before joining the Cal Poly Architecture Program in 2013, I was practicing architecture for three years as a partner in Regarding Architecture in a little-known area of North Birmingham, Alabama where with a former architecture classmate (thank you Patrick Nelson), we delved into the rescue, rehabilitation and adaptive reuse within an area of the city that was all but abandoned. While practicing there, we learned about community engagement, initiating community buy-in from key stakeholders, as well as demolishing and restoring a turn of the century former bank building and adjacent A&P Grocery Store into an incubator space that included our own practice, another sole designer practitioner, a sign-maker, and a handmade soapmaker called Freedom Soap Company.
Before Birmingham, I spent the previous two years working in a local office in the City of Sydney, Australia which has much to offer in peering through a lens at night and you can discover something more than just what is seen on the surface. I was focused predominantly on residential and commercial design with a firm called Mark Hurcum Design Practice (thank you Mark Hurcum). There, I was exposed to and infatuated by the likes of Glen Murcutt, and the challenges of culturally sensitive design as it related to the native Aboriginal inhabitants, although we focused our work within urban environments, I became much more adept to being an architect.
Before Sydney, I lived and worked in Barcelona, Spain for the next three years I would work for a world-renowned design shop in Battle I Roig Arquitectes (thank you Joan Roig) where I would learn the shear significance of design to an entire culture of people, serve as design team member for a local furniture fabricator and interiors workshop in Casadevall Export SA (thank you Xavi Casadevall), and otherwise travel to the far corners of Europe, living and breathing architecture along the way. I also worked for and owe a giant debt of gratitude to my mentor and former instructor, Xavier Vendrell for leading me on this path of discovery & cultural significance.
Before Barcelona, I studied Urban Design graduate level studies, undergraduate level studies in Architecture, and minored in Interior Architecture and Economic Development at Auburn University where I twice experienced the design/build program at the Rural Studio as a 2nd year design student and later as a fifth-year thesis student (thank you Sambo Mockbee & Andrew Freear respectively) in Newbern, Alabama. I learned about the power of architecture in directly addressing the human condition and that every human deserves an architecture that is warm, dry and noble.
My thesis work was featured in the Architectural Review and the Architectural Record both in 2004, among other books and journals. I am a licensed architect that continues to practice today, and I have been a part of Cal Poly’s CAED foundational teaching cohort for over ten years now, where I recently received a Research, Economic Development & Graduate Education (R-EDGE) grant for “Mapping for Social Justice: Using Architecture and Urban Design as Agents for Change,” and look forward to new and existing collaborations with students, colleagues and academia in general.
