Jermaine Washington
| Position | Lecturer |
|---|---|
| Phone | 805.756.2833 |
| jewashin@calpoly.edu | |
| Office | 34-220G |
Areas of Expertise
Beginning Foundation Design
Beginning Building Technology
Urban Design – Community Planning
5th Year Thesis Design
Adaptive reuse
Adaptive reuse
Profile
In his undergraduate studies, Jermaine was part of Auburn University’s Design Build program the Rural Studio in both his second year of design and fifth year thesis design project. After undergraduate work, he spent two years on Auburn’s home campus earning a Master’s in Community Planning - Urban Design.
Jermaine then relocated to Barcelona, España and worked for a local Catalan design oPice (Battle l Roig Arquitectes) and later in an interior’s fabrication shop (Casadevall Export SA) where he spent time traveling and learning the importance of design to global cultures.
After three years in Spain, Jermaine moved to Sydney, Australia, where for the next two years he would work as a project manager in an oPice focusing on residential and commercial design (Mark Hurcum Design Practice) where he learned design in practice.
After two years, along with a fellow colleague, he opened his own design firm, named Regarding Architecture, which specialized in adaptive reuse projects in the marginalized City of North Birmingham, Alabama.
Jermaine is now a part of instructing the beginning design core curriculum in first and second foundational years, as well as, the 5th year design thesis teaching cohort, as well as upper division electives on mapping, race, and empathy at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
Teaching Philosophy + Activities
There are two very distinctive but similar facets of teaching. One component is instructing, but the other component is the learning. It is learning that I feel is at the heart of teaching. I iterate to students the importance of learning as an act in perpetuity. Learning is a lifelong affair, and it is self- evident that students become familiar with a variety of processes used in applying that learning to nature and the built environment.
I identify my own teaching philosophy by stressing reflections of concepts and an understanding of how process informs projects that link to people, place, things. ‘It is the getting there’ that I am searching for and the knowledge gleaned from those actions and activities as the fruits of success.
Understanding how ideas change our environment within any process is a valuable part of the education that we offer as instructors. This aligns with the manner in which students need to recognize and appreciate the growth and development of themselves and of their own ideas through the varying media typologies, design concepts, methodologies, and gestures.
For those involved in academia, learning involves skills developed over time through repetition and practice. Trying and failing, sometimes dividing and conquering, but always repeating is the only path between where you are now and where you would like to be in the future.
My career, my teaching directions has focus on two divergent modules of race and the built environment in order to shed light on these obscurities. I implore physical modeling and drawing exercises that allow for exploration, discovery and risk taking, along with the expectation and/or rejection of numerous ideas and opportunities. I also use singular, more inclusive studio design problems to assist a focus on skill sets transferable to life outside academics. With minds on your hands, and through varying sets of apparatus, across different media types and different mindsets, learning environments rife with possibility.
By exploring ideas and possibilities for design tools, we share the breadth of knowledge that possess various forms of experience to our cohort of students. Design tools are always a provocation of difference in our environments and therefore should always be explored in affordability, functionality, tectonics, etc. Always striving to redesign, always improving upon and ALWAYS learning something new, no matter what the topic.
Fortunately, there is always an underlying complexity existent in academia that education or learning put forth will always yield profound results. We have ideas and we have tools which to deploy those ideas, but it is less about WHAT we make with those and more about HOW, WHO we make those items for. The possibilities and therefore the complexities are infinite.
My philosophy stands as being the creative facilitator within a creative learning environment and of all the nuances and complexities that arise from this engagement of the ecosystem of education. I believe it is within this framework that students can then shape their own experiences through their own eyes and ultimately teach themselves how to provide positivity within our environments and on our planet. This cyclical process of learning and fostering growth and knowledge for us all who have a stake in both the constructed and natural climate of our environs.
Experience
Educational Credentials:
Master of Panning-Urban Design, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama
Bachelor of Interior Architecture, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama
Bachelor of Architecture, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama
Teaching Experience:
Full-Time Lecturer
Beginning Design and Drawing Studio Sequence, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, California Building Technology Course, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, California
5th Year Design Thesis and Seminar
4th Year Mapping Social Justice Electives
Professional Experience:
Board Secretary/Member At-Large, Pacific Wildlife Care Center, Morro Bay, California Project Production, Greg Wynn Architects, San Luis Obispo, California
Project Manager/Founder, Regarding Architecture, Birmingham, Alabama
Intern Architect, Mark Hurcum Design Practice, Sydney, Australia
Product/Exhibitor Designer, Casadevall Export SA, Barcelona, Spain
Project Designer, BattlelRoig Arquitectes, Barcelona, Spain
Scholarship
Selected Publications and Recent Research:
- Extended Education Campus Partner Grant Funds – Mapping for Social Justice: Using Architecture and Urban Design as Agents for Change
- 2022 Design Communication Association (DCA) International Conference – Water Drawings
- Community Development Work Study Fellowship January 2005. Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
- Oppenheimer Dean, Andrea and Hursley, Timothy and Barthel, Elena and Freear Andrew. “Rural Studio at twenty: Designing and Building in Hale County, Alabama.”
- New York: Princeton Architectural Press, Essay ‘An Eye-Opening Classroom’ was featured in section of book entitled “Voices”.
- Oppenheimer Dean, Andrea and Hursley, Timothy. Proceed and Be Bold: Rural Studio after Samuel Mockbee. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005. Highlighted the Newbern Little League Field.
- Ivy, Robert. “Samuel Mockbee: A Life’s Work, AIA Gold Medal Winner.” Architecture Record. June 2004: pages 185-198. Featured the Newbern Little League Project as well as a timeline of other student works.
- Davey, Peter. “ Field of Dreams.” Architectural Review. June 2004: pages 40-41.
Highlighted the Newbern Little League Field in Design Review section. - Corrugated Bale Construction Reader, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies of Fine Arts, Oct 2004. Co-published a design manual on the conventions of constructing with corrugated cardboard bales, which normally fare found in landfills because of their impregnation with a non-recyclable wax product.
- Moos, David and Treschsel, Gail. Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio: Community Architecture Alabama: Birmingham Museum of Art, 2003. Featured the Newbern Little League Field amongst other student projects and the work of the late Samuel Mockbee.
- Oppenheimer Dean, Andrea and Hursley, Timothy. Rural Studio: Samuel Mockbee and an Architecture of Decency. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. Featured the Sanders’ Dudley House.
Selected Activities:
- Pacific Wildlife Care Center, Board Secretary and member at large – serving new facility design team and headquarter relocation. 2015 - present
- Santa Barbara High School Architectural Design Competition March 2014. Guest critique event sponsored by the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara County.
- Design Studio Critic Mississippi State University March 2013. Critiqued an architectural design studio III-B schematic design presentation and subsequent final presentation
- Borderline Rural Southwestern Sydney Institute of TAFE June 2009. Invited to lecture about the student experience of the Rural Studio to a design class in Australia’s largest vocational education and training provider.
- Construmat Exhibition Barcelona, Spain June 2007. Universitat Poletecnica de Cataluña. Collaborated with a student ephemeral or temporary studio from the Fundacio
- UPC, Universitat Poletecnica de Cataluña for the design and construction of an exhibition displaying local glass artist.
- Self Help Continued: the Rural Studio Barcelona, Spain June 2003. Colegio de Arquitectes de Cataluña (COAC). Helped to design and construct an exhibition displaying student work from the Auburn University design/build program. This exhibition was done in collaboration with local design students from Barcelona.
Updated 10.17.24