ARCHITECTURE NEVER SETTLES.

I approach both my career and my teaching as a series of experiments, explorations, and experiences. Each one opens new paths, in design and in life, and each stopping point should leave as many options open as possible. My teaching is organized around three ideas: manifolds, trajectories, and optimization. Together, they move students away from hunting for “the right answer” and toward reaching “the best possible conclusion.”

Manifolds: Architecture Is Curated Value

In topology, a manifold is a collection of points forming a space that looks simple up close but can take a complex shape as a whole. I borrow the term as a metaphor because it is inherently spatial. In my teaching, a manifold is a collection of data, influences, and impacts that together form a set of values.

Architecture is the physical record of the world’s intangible forces: cultural, political, social, environmental, and economic. Each force is its own manifold, and together they shape our history, our present, and the futures we imagine. Over time, an architect absorbs and curates these forces into a personal set of values. On every project, those values meet the project’s external context, and the design emerges from that collision.

Every student arrives with a different background, a different manifold. Architecture school then exposes them to many, sometimes conflicting, approaches to design. Once students recognize that they are responsible for their own development, those approaches become terrain to experiment on and limits to push against.

I make it clear that building their values is in their hands. I design studio problems around clear dichotomies or subtle contradictions that must be resolved. Each tension is a chance to research the facts and to weigh the ethical limits involved. Decision by decision, students define their own values. Those values won’t be finished by graduation, and they shouldn’t be.

Trajectories: Architecture Never Settles

A trajectory is a path of development. In architecture, every resolved problem becomes the starting point for the next. Both teaching and practice are in constant motion.

In a culture of consumption, it’s easy to value objects over the people who make them. I want students to understand that makers, not the things they make, drive architectural thinking, imagination, and innovation. Each student’s path through the discipline is unique, and it never stops: moments of resolution immediately become new points of departure. Cultures keep changing, so their architecture must too. Idleness breeds complacency.

For a student, the design process is closer at hand than any building. Most students, and many architects, only ever approach built form indirectly. So I teach process as a designed system, an architecture in its own right. This lets students carry their approach from project to project, building a network of experiences that continually refines their design philosophy. I ask them to study the paths they take from uncertainty to resolution, and to treat the process itself as their most valuable work.

Optimization: Architecture Is Not “Correct”

To optimize is to make the best possible use of something. “Correct” implies something final, but architecture is never final. Buildings emerge from balancing material, political, cultural, and social forces, and over time they accumulate into a record of how people relate to their environment and to each other.

That relationship is always imperfect, and the imperfection is useful. It keeps the conversation going between people and the places they inhabit, and it pushes us to design for needs beyond the immediate. Since we can’t predict the future, the best we can do is aim for the optimal.

Many students feel bound to find the single right answer, or they get stuck in indecision. Alongside the knowledge an architectural education provides, my priority across the five-year curriculum is helping students build a design process that gives them confidence in their decisions. I teach that good architecture is the best possible resolution of complex forces: social, cultural, economic, political, and material. For many students, aiming for the optimal rather than the correct is a new idea, and a freeing one.

Onward

These three ideas share one goal: helping students develop a flexible, resilient design philosophy that grows with each new challenge. Beyond that, I ask students to define architecture’s role in society and to recognize its power to drive change, for better or worse. Above all, I want them to understand the responsibility architects have always carried, and will continue to carry, in shaping cultures, societies, and civilization.