And so began my path toward becoming an architect, urbanist, and city planner. I found myself back in LA attending architecture school at USC, living downtown and enthralled with the city and its nontraditional forms. Does a city require a downtown with tall buildings to be a place? In fact, most places are about everything but their downtown. LA, for instance — the hills, the flats, the beaches — the ecology of the city is more dynamic and alluring than the skyline. The real city lives in its terrain.

Eight years later, I moved to Boston to attend graduate school, and was again immersed in a whole new environment and urban structure. Boston was a city already deep in its own transformation — from industrial heartland to knowledge economy — and yet its bones remained legible. The earliest town structure in American history, walkable and dense, paths following the least resistance along rivers and valleys, a town structure that had emerged from the landscape rather than being laid on top of it. Here was what Springfield might have been pointing toward all along: a city whose form was a direct expression of its terrain, whose streets remembered the routes of horses and water before they remembered the routes of cars.

Graduate school gave shape to the obsession. I discovered critical regionalism — a framework developed in response to the twin failures of modernism and postmodernism. Modernism had flattened the world into universal solutions, erasing local culture and terrain in the name of progress. Postmodernism pushed back, but too often retreated into nostalgia and pastiche, borrowing historical forms without their living roots. Critical regionalism offered a third path: architecture and urbanism that is fully of its time — technically sophisticated, forward-looking — yet deeply grounded in the specific history, climate, culture, and landscape of where it stands. As humans we are always moving forward; the question is whether we carry the depth of where we come from. That idea reoriented everything. My thesis, The Transformation of the Ideal Wilderness: A Case Study of Springfield, Missouri and Opportunities for Urbanism in the Mid-Size American City, took Springfield as its subject: an attempt to decode the place where I had grown up, to understand its potential by first understanding its layers.

The methodology that emerged was to read the city the way a geologist reads rock — not as a surface, but as a record. Physical structure and cultural systems in historical sequence, from prehistoric terrain through each era of growth, each era carrying its own set of ideals and values about the land, about wilderness, about what a good life looked like. Form and ideal, inseparable. It was rigorous, revelatory work — and it was still entirely in the third person. I was reading the values embedded in the landscape analytically, with great care, but from the outside. The idea that the same methodology might turn inward — that I might need to read my own layers with the same honesty I brought to Springfield’s — hadn’t arrived yet. What I didn’t yet know was that the transformation of the ideal wilderness is not only a story about cities. It is a story about the self.

After graduate school, I moved to Denver in 2012 and joined Tryba Architects to lead the urban design studio — learning what it actually takes to build a city. The civic enterprise of urbanism moves through many hands: vision and planning, urban design and public realm, entitlement and community engagement, ultimately resulting in civic architecture and inhabited place. Through that work, a design methodology crystallized. It has three movements.

Enter the Field. Before analysis, before drawing, before vision — be present in the place. Walk it. Feel its terrain, its textures, its rhythms of use and neglect. This is not preliminary work; it is the work. The body knows things the map cannot show.

Read the Record. Decode the deep structure: the prehistoric geology, the sequence of eras, the cultural values and ideals embedded in each layer of growth. Form and ideal are inseparable — to understand why a place looks the way it does, you must understand what its builders believed. Pattern, history, and aspiration are all legible to those who learn to look. Drawing by hand is the essential tool of this reading. To draw a place is to encounter it the way you encounter a book — but the book is written in space, in section and plan, in the sequence of moving through a street or a room. The hand traces what the eye perceives, and in the tracing, understanding deepens in ways no photograph or model can replicate. Field observation and hand drawing together are where all of my design thinking begins.

Project the Future. Honor what is. Improve what can be. Structure the future not by erasing the past but by extending its deepest logic forward — identifying the practical processes, tools, funding mechanisms, and partnerships that allow a vision to take on a life of its own, to be adopted and carried by many. The best project begins with what appears to be a blank piece of paper. There is no such thing. Every site already holds its story, its strata, its forward momentum. The work is to find it, and set it free.

Ideal Wilderness Studio is the distillation of that journey — twenty years of education and practice brought into a single, focused instrument. The work is about reintegrating cities and landscape, reconnecting people to the land, revealing the sustaining depth of place that is already present, waiting to be read. But the deeper I go, the more I understand that the transformation of the ideal wilderness is not only something we do to cities. It is something we undergo ourselves.