Teaching, Scholarship and Activism:

Following a year at the Harvard Graduate School of Design as a Loeb Fellow (1990-91), I returned to Maine for a transitional year of winding down my practice and tuning up my scholarship.

Teaching and studying at Texas A&M for four years (1993 – 97) gave me the opportunity to read deeply, make sense of my two decades of practice and consider an alternative future. In that work I had the support of three architects (Kenneth Frampton, Frances Downing and Malcolm Quantrill); a philosopher (Paul Thompson); a geographer (Jonathan Smith); and a social scientist (Kathryn Henderson). The scholarship I began in Texas was highly interdisciplinary and it has only become more so. At the time I imagined I would produce both books and buildings in the future, but the more I wrote, the more I discovered how words are but a different sort of nail.

In 1997, the University of Texas at Austin posted a faculty position that seemed to have my name embossed on the announcement. Although I never expected to stay in Texas, I spent the next 20 years at UT (1997-2017), becoming the Director of the Graduate Program in Sustainable Design (link) and founder of the UT Center for Sustainable Development (link). Both the research and teaching took my students and me back into the world of solving messy problems through activist work at the Austin Community Design and Development Center. ACDDC was founded by former students (Michael Gatto and Barbara Brown Wilson) and myself--fifteen years later that organization metamorphosed as the Community Powered Workshop (link).

Link to my (updated) CV