Prior to joining the faculty at Berkeley he was the co-director of Clemson University’s Charles E. Daniel Center for Building Research and Urban Studies in Genova, Italy, and coordinator of Clemson’s Core Digital Foundation Architecture Studios. He has been a member of the Design Faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona, and a Senior Instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He earned his Master of Architecture degree at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he was the recipient of the William Kinne Memorial Fellowship. He is the author of Earth Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press 2008)—a history of building with earth in the modern era to exemplify new, creative uses of the oldest building material on the planet.