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My architectural education was innovative, a multi-disciplinary curriculum fusing aesthetics, social and cultural concerns. I almost look at it as a general education that integrates the arts, sciences, and the humanities through analytical thinking, creativity, craftsmanship, and social interaction. I am interested in the extreme social and environmental conditions in which to debate the nature of architecture,the future of cities, and the changing role of the architect.

The site of a building is more than a mere ingredient in its conception. It is its physical and metaphysical foundation. Building transcends physical and functional requirements by fusing with a place, by gathering the meaning of a situation. Architecture does not so much intrude on a landscape as it serves to explain it.

Architecture and sites should have an experiential connection, a metaphysical link, and a poetic link. The transparency of a membrane, the chalky dullness of a wall, the glossy reflection of opaque glass, and a beam of sunlight intermesh in reciprocal relationships that form the particular experience of a place. Materials interlocking with the perceivers’ senses provide the detail that moves us beyond acute site to tactility. Space remains in oblivion without light. Light’s shadow and shade, it’s different sources, its opacity, transparency, and conditions of reflection and refraction intertwine to define or redefine space. Light subjects space to uncertainty, forming a kind of tentative bridge through fields of experience. Light the giver of all presence.

As a student of architecture, the question of design and making arises, I am searching for an alternative mode of production as a journey propelled by the desire to detour from this world of simulacrum and compulsion not to return to the hyperreality of nostalgia.

-Rouben