the architect’s tour: notes for the design traveler

Ben Jacks, a designer, architect, writer, and teacher, holds degrees from the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine. When not looking at buildings and making photographs, he teaches at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, including courses in beginning design, human behavior, design detailing, and understanding architecture through drawing. In 1991 Ben walked the Appalachian Trail, 2000 miles from Georgia to his home in Maine. This half-year experience of walking and living outdoors inspired and continues to inform his thinking and writing about architecture, aesthetics, landscape, and place, which has been published in Journal of Architectural Education, Places, and Landscape Journal. As a designer, Ben focuses on detail and craft, seeking to develop the potentially rich and intimate relationship between landscape, building, dwelling, and interior. He traces his love of good craft to his maternal grandfather, Hugo Swanson, a carpenter, schoolteacher, and labor union organizer, who immigrated to Wisconsin from Eskilstuna, Sweden, much in the manner described in Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants. Good craft and a job well done perhaps allowed Hugo to feel some control in a new world. Choosing a hopeful path, and responding to his children’s anxiety about the state of our deteriorating environment, Ben is currently at work designing and building a family home meant to last: a flexible-family-structure, aging-in-place, aspiring LEED Platinum, net-zero, Passive House in Cincinnati, Ohio.