As we address evolving cultural, technological, and socio-economic conditions and trends, we must as students, teachers, and practitioners confront the question ìHow do we embrace the world without being consumed by it?î. Conversely if we are to assert, as a discipline, our necessary value and importance in the world, we cannot continue merely to contribute to the assertion of notions of utility, and a numbing instrumentality that is pervasive in much of what we call the built environment. We will continue to marginalize our public role if we fail to have purpose beyond profitability in the things we make...

...Cultural and economic forces, real and imagined, are left largely unchallenged and untouched by the deepest and most ennobling possibilities that the broad realm of architecture, and architecture's patrons, practitioners, and educators have to offer. Contributions toward the fundamental civic dignity in our world are easily lost in the miasma, and the lives of citizens, far less ennobled by our efforts in the realm of the everyday than they should demand, are lived instead in the comforts of privatized worlds on the internet or in automobiles. Architecture imbued with local specificity and invention eludes us, only to be taken up uncritically by the purveyors of a nostalgic historicism or a soulless technological functionalism.

I believe we can invigorate the culture of the everyday object, as well as the discipline, by simply building well. In effect, I mean to enrich and provide dignity to the day-to-day experience of being in the world for all those who engage the totality of the things we make. It is my hope architecture and architectural education will retain its resolve in shaping our empathy with the world, the world of the everyday and the world as we find it through the emphatic presence of its works.

I am working from a conviction that architecture is larger then the subject of architecture. I try to look at the world with a microscopic wide angle lens to generate ideas and actions from concrete experiences of the everyday ‚ between the ordinary and the extraordinary ‚ between oneís own personal history and the history of our discipline. Observations of micro and macro conditions - biological, geological, and cultural - form the basis of inspiration and deep possibilities for making. This is an inductive, bottom up process that allows us to amplify the small things that manifest the large things...

...In each project there is an attempt to use a combination of tactical operations to insure some measure of interplay between detail, form, and place. These tactics center on the presence of material choices at the point of project conception, details considered as a spatial proposition, local conditions that generate systems of articulation, expressive details that generate expressive form, and the configuring of local crafted assemblies with standardized products and assemblies to produce a hybrid tectonic. All of this is presented in the support of ëplace-specific architectural form (local form) and is set in opposition to the increasing and inexorable standardization, bland and ubiquitous, of most contemporary constructionÖand ideas.

Our work strives for a multiplicity of readings within direct experience. The desire here is to maintain individual identity, tectonic presence, and an ethic that values the land while bringing in to play forces that are active within any given cultural conditionÖin effect, to implace material tangibility into the everyday. I believe it is safe to say that most architecture is not very good. Most good architecture is good enough for most days, but some buildings, some architecture should rise above the everyday. This necessarily challenges us to return to the significance of the everyday, to enrich it and revalidate it through the totality of the things we build.