Bear Down Wildcats

Thought I would show you some of the stuff that I’ve been doing in the UAE for the last 11 years. This is the last project we completed. It was substantially completed before I moved back to the US in 2017, but I had to fly back last year to help finish the project. Now a year and a half later I’m going back to teach one semester per year. Mostly to pick up the fat paycheck.

When I got there in 2006, the architecture school didn’t even have a wood shop and there was no capacity for making in the student body (or even within the faculty, really). Within 5 years we had a well developed wood shop, metal fab facility and digital fabrication facility. We worked on building up capacity towards a full fledged design/build program where the students design and construct buildings (albeit small scale). I started by teaching a furniture design course every year and we built up from there. If you aren’t bored by this stuff I can show you some of the other work as well.

If your taste runs towards traditional, you may want to turn away at this point.

Finished product first, then some progress shots.

The project started as simply replacing a 1 meter by 1 meter existing guard booth. Of course in grand tradition of undisciplined architects and clients everywhere, we radically expanded the project brief and program. The students (with some prodding from me) decided they wanted to do something to help the underserved communities on campus (the security guards, janitors and landscape workers who labor outside in 100+F and 80% humidity). So they designed a guard booth that has a shaded front porch for the guards who are required to spend most of their time outside of the air conditioned booth. And they also created a “garden” space that is shaded and has chilled drinking water for the landscape workers and anybody else who wants or needs the reprieve.

Happy to answer any questions about process, function, stylistic expression, whatever. Or accept ridicule and dodge rotten fruit.

Original booth


View from the street


North side holds the security booth and shaded front porch


South side has the Garden space and drinking fountain






View from inside guard booth






Oculus window from outside




Views that show the phenomenological shift from transparency to opacity depending on viewing angle relative to the bar grate




A few process shots. Students learned how to weld, general metal working, carpentry and CNC digital fabrication










Me trying to exert some control over the chaos while showing off my ever-expanding gut. God I need to start exercising again.


Bar grate superstructure finished with test assembly


Such near disaster, much puckered asshole.


Moving on the wood booth fab process








And somehow completed with no major injuries or minds completely lost.

Looks great! Congratulations.

Is that saguaro your 'signature'?

Oh, yeah. The most important question... do the guards like it?

Wow BYJove!!!!

Such beautiful, innovative, and inspiring work, both with the guard booth and what is represents in leading your group of students.

So proud of you and your accomplishments

Thank you for sharing.

That's some legit cool stuff bjbj. I dream to be half as cool as that with my work someday.

Is having a mustache a requirement for being a guard?

Fantastic photos by the way too, along with the incredible work you did.

Merkin wrote:Is having a mustache a requirement for being a guard?

Fantastic photos by the way too, along with the incredible work you did.

Haha, maybe? Also seems to be a regional deal. Especially Pakistanis. The finished photos are by a colleague at the college who is a Spanish architect and also does architectural photography. He’s fantastic.

scumdevils86 wrote:That's some legit cool stuff bjbj. I dream to be half as cool as that with my work someday.

Thanks, man! I dream of being half as cool as my work someday,too. But it never happens.

CalStateTempe wrote:Wow BYJove!!!!



Such beautiful, innovative, and inspiring work, both with the guard booth and what is represents in leading your group of students.

So proud of you and your accomplishments

Thank you for sharing.

If this isn’t facetious sarcasm, I thank you for your warm thoughts. If you’re completely taking the piss, I congratulate you on your British sensibility!

RichardCranium wrote:Looks great! Congratulations.

Is that saguaro your 'signature'?

Oh, yeah. The most important question... do the guards like it?

Haha! We actually had some money left over in the budget so I decided to blow it on the only cactus I’ve seen in the country.

To be honest we just turned it over to them. My colleague said he didn’t see them using it, so he went and talked to them and ask why. The guard he talked to said he didn’t think they were allowed to use it. I laughed, I cried, I kissed 2 years goodbye. But this is the kind of thing we are working against. I’m sure eventually they are going to understand it was meant for them and they aren’t going to get in trouble for using it. It’s a process.

Can you encapsulate for us the world-view of your students in UAE before, during and after your teaching? Mine is a broad, unregulated question I am happy to let you run with. When teachers inculcate youthful native intelligence with possibilities and systems of thought wondrous things occur. I would love to hear your personal diary as a teacher in a foreign land. Please.

Completely earnest in my comments. I’ve visited the uae for a few days and loved it, I can only imagine what it was like to work, teach, and build a life there.

What dove said. Inquiring minds want to know.

Nice work man.

dovecanyoncat wrote:Can you encapsulate for us the world-view of your students in UAE before, during and after your teaching? Mine is a broad, unregulated question I am happy to let you run with. When teachers inculcate youthful native intelligence with possibilities and systems of thought wondrous things occur. I would love to hear your personal diary as a teacher in a foreign land. Please.

Yes, that’s an all-day sucker! A lot of different angles on this. I’ll drop thoughts in here as they occur to me.

azgreg wrote:Nice work man.

Thanks! A lot of people involved in the effort, but I guess I can accept the lionshare of credit/blame. Somebody has to drive the bus, even if off the cliff.

Honestly, Jove, one of my earliest memories is of my parents inviting an African student to our house in the South in the middle 60s. I was probably six or seven and I will never forget it. At Thanksgiving table Moses embodied the absolute best America could have hoped for in an immigrant student or a native son. His adulate devotion to American virtue was something separate from his own personal brilliance, and out of the memory of that confluence I ask you as a teacher who has surely experienced that striking thing: what is like to awaken the beyond in others?

If it isn't clear to you by now, I think you are a rock star! Tell us! Tell Us!

Amazing! I know what you mean about getting carried away in relation to usual expectations of a guard house (and what you replaced), but the restraint is actually remarkable. And the curvatures within the prismatic volume evoke bodies, nature, and fluidity. I'm glad it's a guards' house because it re-frames what a guard is, and invites everyone.

I hope your next project will be to take on the problem of the campus building stairway access. Why do they have to be such spartan, ugly, foul-smelling spaces? They should be the best part of the building, where you want to sit on the steps and hang out.

Longhorned wrote:Amazing! I know what you mean about getting carried away in relation to usual expectations of a guard house (and what you replaced), but the restraint is actually remarkable. And the curvatures within the prismatic volume evoke bodies, nature, and fluidity. I'm glad it's a guards' house because it re-frames what a guard is, and invites everyone.

I hope your next project will be to take on the problem of the campus building stairway access. Why do they have to be such spartan, ugly, foul-smelling spaces? They should be the best part of the building, where you want to sit on the steps and hang out.

Thanks! Yes, one of the early discussion points was how to deal with the duality and contradiction associated with any security apparatus: safety versus control, watching versus being watched, seeing versus being seen. The Oculus window was one attempt to address that—rather than the security guard being a hidden watcher, the window inverts the relationship of seeing and being seen much like the steps at Trevi Fountain does. At Trevi, the the amphitheater-like steps leading down to the fountain turn the normative watchers into the watched for the people sitting on the fountain pool’s wall looking back up towards the steps. The audience is on display. In the case of the security booth, the Oculus provides a view out but also a view back in. One of the photos above really shows this with security guard outlined inside.

As far as UofA, I guess this isn’t too unusual. Budgets and lack of inventiveness subvert any possibility of more thoughtful public spaces. Morphosis did (or attempted to do) what you are suggesting at Cooper Union in New York.

Wow incredible work. Now I wonder what your garage will look like

Jefe wrote:Wow incredible work. Now I wonder what your garage will look like

Thanks, Jefe. I’m not sure how extravagant I’ll be with the garage, since I want to do a 2nd floor addition to the house, too. But I have 4 months to work on a design, so maybe I can figure out a way to do something nice without breaking the bank.

dovecanyoncat wrote:Honestly, Jove, one of my earliest memories is of my parents inviting an African student to our house in the South in the middle 60s. I was probably six or seven and I will never forget it. At Thanksgiving table Moses embodied the absolute best America could have hoped for in an immigrant student or a native son. His adulate devotion to American virtue was something separate from his own personal brilliance, and out of the memory of that confluence I ask you as a teacher who has surely experienced that striking thing: what is like to awaken the beyond in others?

If it isn't clear to you by now, I think you are a rock star! Tell us! Tell Us!

The problem is that it’s hard to have a 30,000 foot level view of what impact you have when you’re laboring in the trenches. Making sense of the culturally specific impacts is also complicated by the fact that architectural education as taught American style is so radical relative to almost all other disciplines. In other words, it transforms whoever goes through it. All education does, but there is something specific about studio based architectural studies that has an outsized impact. John Dewey was one of the great educational theorists in America and he championed “hands on” educational approaches—and at the undergraduate level, architecture is the closest to the model he advocated. In 1996 the AIA and other professionally allied organizations commissioned an independent report on the state of architectural education—it became known as the Boyer Report. It was very in depth, but in addition to identifying opportunities for improvement, it basically concluded that the studio based system was so remarkably successful in educating young architects that all other disciplines (particularly non-design majors) should find a way to learn from it and implement selected methodologies.

All of that is long way of asking, how do I know which impacts on student development are a function of introduction to American systems and principles and, frankly, people . . . and which impacts are simply a function of being inculcated in the critical thinking necessary to be a good designer? There is no question that you can see students develop the ability think more critically as they progress. And there is no doubt that you can see them beginning to apply those critical thinking skills to the world at large and not just to the project on their desk in studio.

Just as an anecdotal example, I have occasionally taught 2nd year studio—which is the first architectural studio. Their first year is called Foundations, where they learn non-disciplinary specific design principles. It’s common to give small scale residential or an artist retreat as a studio project in their first studio. But what I was seeing in these studios was that students couldn’t yet disconnect themselves and think critically about the environments they grew up in . . . and so they would bring these horrible, gaudy, tasteless, badly designed spaces to the table as they worked on a project in studio. So to counteract this propensity, I gave a project I called the Anthropomorphic Zoo. The idea was that they would design a zoo enclosure for an animal, but an anthropomorphized version of the animal. Think Winnie the Poo or Yogi Bear (though I never mentioned the cartoon angle). The point was to get them to think critically about how different the requirements might be for a giraffe than for tiger . . . and how those differences would impact the design of a space. What I didn’t say was, hey, you’re actually designing a house, not an animal enclosure—it just happens to be a house for a very eccentric character. And by doing this, it helped the students disassociate from their preconceptions about what a kitchen or bedroom really should look like or function like.

I do think this exercise may have been more necessary for well-off, entitled students from the Middle East. But I also think American students suffer from similar issues and could benefit from a similar project early in their education.

I’ll tell you about a very interesting phenomenon in another post some other time: 85% of the architecture students in the program are female. Needless to say . . . that ain’t normal in the US.

"it basically concluded that the studio based system was so remarkably successful in educating young architects that all other disciplines (particularly non-design majors) should find a way to learn from it and implement selected methodologies."

I ask because I ponder the different basis and benefit between well guided research and teaching, and model that best teaches students how to think. In Greek thinking education consists of the dialectic of questions and answers. The question a person poses reveals what he knows and the fact that he's asking reveals that he doesn't know. The challenge to the teacher is to grasp the real question being asked, for the student will not understand an answer that is not in the same form as his question. The teacher re-forms the question in order to answer. Once teacher and student become student and teacher to each other the best of research can begin. Or some such...

What would be the modern studio-based model for, say, philosophy or theoIogy? Also, I'm keen to hear any of your experiences teaching outside of what is "normal" to the US model, students, method, whatever. Glad for your every contribution here.

I’ve taught in an architecture school and seen the worst of it: midterm and final reviews, ego-driven teaching (and sometimes profiting off student labor), and a culture of the most capricious grading you could ever dream up. Not a lot of education going on. The Design Intelligence rankings plummeted. I spoke up, at first in very polite and subtle ways. And then the wrath, the vengeance. A dean had to step in and install an English Lit faculty member to take over as director. The experience left me feeling like I will never again try to work in a school of architecture.

Longhorned wrote:I’ve taught in an architecture school and seen the worst of it: midterm and final reviews, ego-driven teaching (and sometimes profiting off student labor), and a culture of the most capricious grading you could ever dream up. Not a lot of education going on. The Design Intelligence rankings plummeted. I spoke up, at first in very polite and subtle ways. And then the wrath, the vengeance. A dean had to step in and install an English Lit faculty member to take over as director. The experience left me feeling like I will never again try to work in a school of architecture.

That sounds awful. And really having an English Lit professor given the reigns is the nuclear option of a solution, so I assume it was just a complete disaster. I mean that would be about as effective as having the head football coach take over the basketball team. I’m sure they can manage the logistical aspects of administration, but on what basis could they provide a legitimate end-of-year FAR evaluation? Or distribute teaching assignments? Or, or, or? Yikes.

I’ve never seen it go south that thoroughly, but I can see how it might. An architecture school functions more in the Gemeinschaft mode—smaller faculty, intensely insular student body, etc. So I guess like any small community things can get very personal very quickly. As opposed to the impersonal mugging one gets in a big city (or presumably big department). From what I can tell, UofA doesn’t seem to be disfunctional. I’m sure there are the usual rivalries and frictions but they all seem to be rowing in more or less the same direction.

But that is the other side of the coin to the Boyer Report. There is plenty of opportunity for various kinds of abuses against or exploitation of students if there are bad faculty members and if there isn’t a strong hand preventing it. In other departments where teachers don’t even know the names of their students there are fewer opportunities for those kinds of problems.

dovecanyoncat wrote:"it basically concluded that the studio based system was so remarkably successful in educating young architects that all other disciplines (particularly non-design majors) should find a way to learn from it and implement selected methodologies."

I ask because I ponder the different basis and benefit between well guided research and teaching, and model that best teaches students how to think. In Greek thinking education consists of the dialectic of questions and answers. The question a person poses reveals what he knows and the fact that he's asking reveals that he doesn't know. The challenge to the teacher is to grasp the real question being asked, for the student will not understand an answer that is not in the same form as his question. The teacher re-forms the question in order to answer. Once teacher and student become student and teacher to each other the best of research can begin. Or some such...

What would be the modern studio-based model for, say, philosophy or theoIogy? Also, I'm keen to hear any of your experiences teaching outside of what is "normal" to the US model, students, method, whatever. Glad for your every contribution here.

Yeah, I think that’s the question—how could you implement a studio-like methodology in other disciplines? I guess it would require a close study and major reworking of approaches, which is highly unlikely. It’s also the case that architecture schools are expensive to run and don’t bring back a lot of money into the university the way that other research based disciplines do in the way of grants or business schools in the form of alumni donations. So I don’t see any rush to make changes.

Here are some generalizations about MENA (Middle East North Africa) students versus American students:

—MENA students are more respectful. My American students use my first name (as I did with my architecture professors). MENA students wouldn’t dream of calling you anything except Professor. At least to your face.
—MENA students are more grade obsessed. After grades go out, I’m guaranteed to have a line of students outside my office to discuss why they got a B+ instead of an A. I haven’t had an american student complain about a grade yet.
—American students tend to be more independent and show more initiative. MENA students tend to depend more on your advice and counsel and are less likely to chart their own path.
—American students have far more demands on their time. They have jobs and sometimes families to support. MENA students have one job—be a good student. Being an Architecture student is a full time job. I don’t know how American students are coping with working 20+ hours per week. They shouldn’t have time to do that.
—Religion is more a part of the MENA students’ daily lives, but not universally so. Also, talking to colleagues who have taught in the Bible Belt, it’s not too dissimilar there.

But the truth is, there are far more similarities than differences.