Born in the mid seventies and a child of the eighties, my formative years coincided with the height of the indoor shopping mall’s influence on American culture. From a young age, I was always attracted to those large, overbearing structures. I was awed by their sheer enormity and all of the exciting wares they held inside those unassuming brick walls.
My love of retail design is just one significant part of my love of architecture in general. Since the age of ten, I’ve been designing everything from suburban high schools, to airports, to entire skylines. Having received recognition for some of my work, I was accepted to the University of Hawai’i School of Architecture on scholarship.
I decided after a while that Architecture was not the way that I wanted to go and I ended up studying Technical Communications at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Other interests of mine include commercial aviation, the paranormal (I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts and I’m not so much into the serious research, but I really love the more anecdotal, scary ghost story side.) I’m also into writing satirical comedy (a fake Facebook page that I designed for North Korea won a contest by Cracked.com and was published on their site), short stories, and articles covering subjects on which I feel passionately. I've also been known to dabble in graphic design and webmastering. Entertainment wise, I listen to everything from System of the Down to Rufus Wainwright. My favorite movies are apocalyptic films, zombie movies in particular, and I am a huge Doctor Who fan.
I am an avid hiker and mountain climber. I hope one day to get to the top of Mount Rainier and to hike the Appalachian Trail. I love to travel and take every opportunity that I can to set foot in a new place. I have been to all but ten or so of the US States, thanks to having worked for the airlines for a few years. My favorite cities have been the ones with plenty of grit and grime like Saint Louis, Richmond and Pittsburgh.
I lived in the United States for the first 33 years of my life before moving to the Philippines in 2008. In 2012, I returned to the US, this time to Seattle which, in my opinion, is the best damn city on the planet. It is also home to one of the nation’s first shopping malls, Northgate. Despite my moving to the Pacific Northwest, I will always consider Huntsville, Alabama to be my home.
That should about cover it, but if there’s anything else you want to know, feel free to get in touch.
Chris