Robin Dripps

Robin Dripps teaches within the studio design sequence, lectures on architectural theory, and directs a seminar on the relationship between design intent and detail manifestation. The ACSA honored her teaching with its Distinguished Professorship Award in 1992. Educated at Princeton (BA in architecture) and the University of Pennsylvania (M. Arch), she has been writing and lecturing on the structure of myth as a fundamental basis for architectural form. This work was published as The First House: Myth, Paradigm, and the Task of Architecture, where it received a Phi Beta Kappa book award in 1999. Professor Dripps recent research, writing, and teaching deals with the pragmatic and poetic opportunities of a shift in interest from the figure to the intellectual and physical grounds, fields, and other networks that give order to human action. Her essay,” Groundwork" was published by Routledge in Site Matters, an anthology on recent re-thinking about sites edited by Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn. “Notes on an Ethical Context for Fragmentation, Continuous and Multiple Grounds, and other Open Fields of Action, in The Hand and the Soul: Aesthetics and Ethics in Architecture and Art. Current research and teaching explores how parametric and generative software can extend how we work with complex field structures and how structures and surfaces can respond to external inputs. The design work of Professor Dripps, with Lucia Phinney, deals with the unobserved edge shared between architecture and landscape architecture, or between construction and ecology. Working with large scale earth works, water works, and agriculture, as well as scaffolding systems, operable shade cloth, and other lightweight materials, they have produced a body of work revealing different ways that the interior life of architecture can engage its political and natural context. This work has been published and exhibited in America, Europe, and Asia. Robin is also the designer and driver of a car that established two world land speed records. B.A., Princeton University; M.Arch., University of Pennsylvania