As part of the Bēhance Portfolio Review Workshop series at the University of Utah’s College of Architecture + Planning, I was invited to give a design workshop to architecture students on the value of competitions, publications, and research. I titled the workshop “Out of Obscurity: Bringing your Architecture into the Limelight – Competitions, Publications, Research.”

I taught students in the workshop to consider the invitation given to aspiring architects more than two millenia ago by Marcus Vitruvius. In his treatise The Ten Books of Architecture, Vitruvius advocated that design professionals strike a balance between theory and practice. Consequently, the design student should aim at understanding the theories and scholarship of the profession as well as developing the technical skills of day-to-day practice to be truly successful. Demonstrating this balance in their own work and porfolio would be one step towards that goal. Only in doing these things could they bring their own creative work out of obscurity and into the limelight.