cts | Design

I attended Cornell University's College of Architecture Art & Planning. I didn't make it through in the usual five years, but I eventually snagged my Bachelors of Architecture.

After school I really wanted to design things, instead of slaving away on the drawings of someone else's design. So a classmate and I moved to near his hometown in Susquehanna, PA and started our own design-build firm. Two and a half years later I had built a house and a bunch of additions and renovations, a lot of them with my own two hands. I designed a lot of details and the facades and floor plans and sections, things that I could not do for a large firm. I moved to NYC to see if I now wanted to work for a big firm.

I didn't. I worked as a computer consultant for a while, at a big law firm in Newark. I poked around at a few projects. Eventually, my friend Penn Jillette asked me to design a house for him in Las Vegas. That is the last big project I have worked on.

So I have done everything I wanted in the field. A small house, a big house, houses all over the country, in different climates. I learned to lay roofing, put up siding, frame, deck, and put down hardwood floors. I hung sheet rock, painted, and pulled telephone line. I stuck in insulation, hung doors and installed windows. In the midst of it all, I did the things that Cornell taught me to do, drew facades, manipulated plans, worked out the space in sectional drawings and considered the importance of the context to the rest of the design.

I am extremely skeptical and critical of the current state of architecture education in this country. It would appear that a renegade picks up more and better information than the masses on the prescribed path. That is not as it should be. It is possible that basing our currently architecture education system on a defunct European system (that we bastardized to begin with) is not a good idea any longer.