Rick Miller, MArch, PhD

Rick’s pedagogical belief is in an expansive classroom, where learning entwines lived experience with conceptual models. In his courses, Rick introduces frameworks for understanding how people that students will meet throughout the program continue to be impacted by global economic and structural forces. He believes in furthering student learning through field-training in ethnographic and visual methods, generating primary research. Rick’s own fieldwork began with urbanization processes in Mongolia where former pastoral nomads—often climate refugees driven into Ulaanbaatar from the countryside—have auto-constructed significant portions of the material city while remaking its social structures. More recently he has focused on decentralized resource knowledges of farmer-operated water infrastructure in south Arabia while on faculty at the American University of Sharjah. In collaborative courses teaming students from the social sciences and architecture, he has led research teams investigating urban informality and hydraulic citizenship across the Emirates.

Education

• PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
• MArch, Southern California Institute of Architecture
• BA, Asian Studies, Connecticut College