Brief background/experiences
I moved to New York in 2002 to attend The College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) at NYU where I majored in Urban Design and Sociology. In the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I conducted research in Kampala, Uganda, spending the tail-end of the summer and all of the fall semester ('04) studying post-Colonial road infrastructure for the Kampala City Planning Commission, concentrating on the existing system’s incongruities with the daily lives of the Kampala resident. The study formed the basis of my Senior Honors Thesis and was incorporated into a 2005 Street Masterplan & Capital Improvements Prospective for the Planning Commission that was submitted to the IMF for an increased budget; personally, the time led me to believe that I wanted to go back to school for Urban Planning.

Immediately after school I began two part-time freelance jobs; the first as a researcher for a livable streets study for Transportation Alternatives and the second with the architecture firm Perkins Eastman. Once I finished the research for TA and grew tired of organizing colored pencils at Perkins Eastman, I enrolled in a CAD certification course and starting working as a draftsman for Urban Architectural Initiatives, a small New York firm working primarily on supportive housing projects.

After a year out of school and a year working, I applied to multiple M. Arch programs and ultimately chose to stay in New York for Columbia. After my first year, I decided to take a year leave-of-absence to work in Copenhagen, Denmark, for a firm I followed closely throughout the year, the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). The first assignment—generating content for a fall exhibition of BIG’s experimental residential projects in Copenhagen for The Storefront for Art & Architecture—consumed the summer. I worked on a 250,000 piece Lego model and produced video content for the exhibition. The show has since seen iterations at The Graham Foundation and at The 2008 London Festival of Architecture. As a side project (and to protect my belief that I could design without top-down directives), I started working on architecture and design competitions on the weekends. The first, a submission to the IFHP Futures of Cities World Congress, was shortlisted, exhibited at the Danish Architecture Center, published in the Danish architecture magazine Arkitekten, and the cash prize helped pay the rent for a while. The following two entries, one to the Bright LED competition organized by Designboom and another for the 2G Magazine Venice Lagoon Competition, went unrecognized but kept my interest piqued in the meritocratic format of the open, anonymous competition.

By December, it was clear that I had been pigeonholed at BIG as the in-office video guy and hoped to get some more architectural design experience. I traded Copenhagen for Rotterdam to work for Rem Koolhaas/OMA where I worked on several projects. Most notably, an exhibition pavilion for Prada in Seoul followed by a 150,000m2 mixed-use building in The Lagoons Development, Dubai. From the beginning of my time at OMA, however, I spent free time working on personal and collaborative side projects. First, in March, I collaborated with a RISD M. Arch to found and develop The Laboratory for Research, Architecture & Design (labRAD), a student think-tank and design hub (see Archinect Links section for more information and visit www.lab-rad.com I was fortunate to work with several collaborators from various architecture programs (M. Arch students from RISD, Yale, Architectural Association & GSAPP, Columbia) in completing four or five competitions, including White House Redux and CityRacks among others.

I'm back to school as second-year M. Arch and looking forward to approaching it with a bit more brevity, but certainly plan to continue working on competitions and building on labRAD. Additionally, I’ll be the TA for a joint Historic Preservation/Architecture Studio (taught by Theo Prudon and Craig Konyk) and conducting research for the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) run by Laura Kurgan.

Why you chose your school/program
I live in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. During the first week of classes when, for the first time, I started regularly commuting 300 blocks uptown with 3 subway transfers (G to the L to the 2/3 to the 1 train) to school, I couldn’t help but think that I had mistakenly downgraded my quality of life. I remember, however, talking to a third-year about Columbia and he said that the best part of Columbia is that “everyone’s got their own hustle.” Refreshingly, I found that to be the case. While students at other programs certainly enjoy more space and facilities, Columbia tends to thrive on its inadequacies, particularly its density. I had to hustle to get basic things done for pin-ups and lectures—printing, especially—and concede to the rule of constantly violated personal space in studio. Yet, everyone else was doing the same thing, professors and critics included. It breeds a healthy level of competition and an often-productive forced-cum-chosen collaborative atmosphere. In that way, Columbia has grown on me as microcosmic of the New York design scene generally which is oversaturated with talent and offers the opportunity to sharpen your knife on its grindstone.

Columbia has rapidly pulled itself out from under the stereotypes it suffered under for years, notably that the student work is full of graphic masturbation and digital fetishism. That positive shift away from stereotype is largely attributable to the size and diversity of the faculty. To me, there seems to be competing schools within the school: digital enthusiasts arguing with experimental theorists, construction and design/build gurus at odds with “paper architects,” those with healthy firms and those with secure tenure. The clash leaves a residue in its wake that students can scoop up, analyze and use as a springboard towards freely forming personal opinions on architecture and design rather than digesting uncontested dogma. I buy into the school's advertised goal of facilitating the development of "the expanded architect."

Architecture interests
Generally, I’m drawn to what happened before architecture and what happens after architecture. In other words, built architecture as an outgrowth of global cash-shifts or political stability/instability and, after construction, the life a building assumes as a symptom and signifier.

I believe construction techniques are lagging well behind the architect’s imagination and, with that in mind, I’m interested more in the rapid progress in systems of representation than the relatively stagnant systems of building realization.

Other interests
I spend a good amount of time exploring New York searching for irregularities and informalities within the grid. When I get the chance I look for unexpected bits of nature around Jamaica Bay: Cross Bay, Breezy Point, the unexpected houses hoisted up on pilings. I read a ton of design and architecture blogs but rarely make comments. I do the NYT crossword puzzle on the train and take my bike for a ride around Prospect Park every once in a while. I’m a political junky and take in an unhealthy daily dose of pundit commentary. Whenever Seinfeld is on TV, I don’t change the channel.