Brief background/experiences
It has taken running through three prior universities and twice as many majors/concentrations to finally arrive at Hampshire College in 2007/2008 and become dedicated to architectural study. My experience with architecture prior to transferring had been largely literary, using architectural theory, analogy, and history in academic and personal writing. Whatever creative endeavors were engaging me, such as installations, curating, permaculture projects, artist's books, jewelry, and graphic novellas, I always circled back to using architectural forms and methods, completely lacking any formal background.

At my first university, interest in art, in every and any of its permutations written, visual or otherwise, political and social theory, ecology and environmentalism, and activism, fused with past travel experience and its effects translated into a self-designed major. This was a fusion of book arts, semiotics, social and environmental activism through 'sustainable' art and design, and community development. With a new university, place-based art, art education, and sustainable community development, were the key phrases framing another self-designed major. This narrowed my focus on sustainable urban models and architecture, on translating these abstracts into a formal, structural language. Still, I had not taken a singular architecture class.

After testing out my idea(l)s through embodiment (becoming a member of a collective gallery/community space, living on communes, working on kibbutzim, learning green building techniques in the league of hay-bale, rammed earth, etc.), and getting slapped with a need for reassessment, I found my way to Hampshire. Here, I was able to take architecture and landscape architecture studios, and a graduate seminar for architectural research and writing. Outside of studio, my focus was getting a firmer grasp on philosophy so long a subject of flirtation in my academic career, and challenging foundations and assumptions of “sustainability,” as it is packaged, sold and propagated today. Still, my education lacked, and still lacks, basics.

Why you chose your school/program
Hampshire College was chosen mainly for sake of its unique academic requirements, proximity to a social base of friends and family, and for its participation in Massachusetts' Five College Consortium. At Hampshire, each student develops their own concentration and, essentially, curriculum, with individual projects, internships, job and life experiences all incorporated as academically viable and essential. This means that interdisciplinary study is not simply encouraged, it is the foundation and core. As a result, students are able to Live their education; they come to appreciate that academia's abstracts are embedded within and enacted by us at all times. Being a part of the Five College Consortium, all the resources of University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Amherst College, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College are available to Hampshire Students, without being forced to adhere to their traditional policies (like, for example, grades!).

The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies I chose as a way to shock myself into the architectural field. Both Smith and Umass Amherst offer architectural courses, yet these are unfortunately limited in number and the content's scope. There is little allowance for an interdisciplinary approach to the design process itself, design studios are more architectonic, more engineering oriented, than anything else. An independent course/think tank hosted at a small firm in New York, The Institute redefines immersion- former attendees have referred to the program as "architecture bootcamp." It was clear that in order to continue pursuing what is obviously a passion for architecture, my mind would need to be whipped and knocked into shape with those aforementioned basics as intensely as possible, as fast as possible. Knowing myself, a normal intensive preparatory program would not do. A suitable program must place itself in a greater historical and theoretical context, must be open to redefinition and open-ended investigation. Originally run by Peter Eisenman in the late 1960s, this is the second iteration of a unique experiment in architecture, urbanism, pedagogy and epistemology. I needed to take part.

Architecture interests
My interest lies where politics, language, aesthetics, and sustainability meet, their enmeshment revealed. Production of space as a political act, and as a discursive act, is well established, and concerns over sustainability are ever increasingly integrated into quotidian speech and life. I would like to take a step further in addressing community, space, and sustainability, using interstices of these subjects to frame an investigation of the methodology involved in fusing social and ecological responsibility in architecture, for community development through design, complicating and fleshing out sustainability discourse in the process. Using lens of biopolitics to examine architecture up to postmodernism, an interest of mine is in probing architecture's relationship with politics, culture, and economics in and as archived and indexed memory/history, and how this narrative, altered or simply examined, could redefine our present and future. Analysis of the discipline itself, of the discourse on architecture, perpetually interests me. Hopefully, with greater practical experience, that topic will begin to open to me.

These are a few questions I will be asking this semester: How do architects, as producers of culture, giving structural flesh to individual and collective narratives and histories, participate in allocating power and cultural agency? How could architectural process and implementation facilitate constructions of a thirdspace, spaces of liminality, intersubjectivity, hybridity, and potential? How might these ‘other’ spaces refuse and redefine distribution of power, allowing for constant growth, redefinition and rupture? How would these spaces appear and affect, and would attention to sensory and symbolic dimensions of landscapes interior and exterior, or natural, built, imagined or otherwise, be sufficient in their growth? How do/could these ambivalent spaces function on multiple scales, in multiple realms, continuing processes of construction- where can practical, actualized examples of these design techniques and theories be found? What other practices may be integrated into architectural design to truly hybridize space, create spaces in/between, indefinite, multiplicitous, and proactive?

Other interests
Political sociology and philosophy, geography and landscape, linguistics and rhetoric, gastronomy (molecular, traditional) and food justice, networks and virtuality, craft and design, active and responsible living.