Welcome to the DUAL:workshop Blog!

So, I'm about to make a major life change and I've decided to document it via a blog. Right now, I'm sitting at T-minus 18 days before we pack up our stuff and move from St. Petersburg, FL to Philadelphia, PA. Then, I'll have about 2 weeks before school begins and I officially start working toward my PhD in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania (PennDesign). It has been a little more than 5 years since I graduated from Georgia Tech with my M.Arch. and I'm definitely looking forward to returning to the academic life. The semester starts on September 3rd and my schedule is currently shaping up to include the following classes:

Writing on Architecture (Prof. Witold Rybcynski)
Architectural Research (Prof. David Leatherbarrow)
Proseminar in Urban Studies (Prof. Michael Katz)
Concepts and Theories in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (Prof. Anita Berrizbeitia)

At this point, I'm pretty sure that this will be my final schedule, but it is still subject to change. It looks like in addition to pursuing the PhD, I will also be working towards the Graduate Certificate in Urban Studies. This program is geared toward PhD students that are doing urban research, so it is pretty much in line with what I'm planning on doing over the next few years.

Anyways, other than maybe this post, this blog is not really intended to be a record of my personal life. If anything, I would say that the mission of the blog is to help me think out loud and develop my ideas about architecture and the city. Of course, given how deeply intertwined my life is with my thoughts about and practice of architecture and urban design, there is bound to be some blurring of the lines every now and then.

I've never really done this sort of thing, so hopefully it will be both interesting and educational.

The couple of posts that are below this one are ones that I have migrated over from the Emerging Tampa Bay Architects blog, where I have been a contributing editor (for lack of a better term) for the past year or so. I thought that they were at least somewhat relevant to the topic of this blog and they gave me some content to help with editing the layout of things before going public.