Daniel Hapton
Assistant Professor
Daniel Hapton is a teaching-focused Assistant Professor at SAPL and the founder of AITCH Design, a Calgary-based studio that specializes in creative renovations. His entrepreneurial spirit and love for expressive design are also reflected in his restoration of musical instruments and passion for improvisational music. Daniel’s innovative approach to design is guided by the values of humor, history, multiplicity, disciplinarity, and projectivity, which also shape his work as an educator. He is committed to refining pedagogy, strengthening curricula, and enhancing course coordination. Through collaboration, hands-on studio experience, and value-informed innovation, Daniel bridges the gap between architectural practice and education, inspiring students to rethink and transform the field of architecture.
Hapton brings his experience as a practitioner to his current role, though his primary focus is now on education. His value-informed approach to teaching is rooted in his training at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), an avant-garde school that emphasizes the relationship between practice and experimentation within an academic context. This foundation has profoundly shaped his approach to both architecture and teaching. After working in Los Angeles for several years, Hapton returned to Calgary just before the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of disruption that led him to reevaluate his career priorities. “There’s something important about it. It’s a rupture in normalcy.” This rupture opened opportunities to connect with the architectural faculty at SAPL, where he discovered a new calling in education. He realized the importance of having “an impact in education, rather than trying to be a hotshot designer.” His sessions as an instructor evolved into a full-time teaching position due to his natural aptitude and the fresh perspective he brought from SCI-Arc. Hapton’s teaching philosophy is deeply rooted in his diverse experiences and the contrasting approaches to architecture he has encountered. He strives to integrate theoretical knowledge with practical application, often blurring the lines between the two. His approach is structured around four core values: projection, history, multiplicity, and discipline, all tied together by a strong emphasis on humor.
Hapton understands projection and history in architecture as how it interacts with the past and future. He believes that architecture’s ability to project the future has traditionally been one of the field’s most valuable and effective contributions to society. “Something that I think we’ve been good at is being able to just paint an image of how the world could be different. It’s not necessarily what it’s going to be, but it’s a way to stimulate people to think about that.” He values projective architecture for how it fosters imagination and pushes forward progress. He sees the value of history as essential for supporting these endeavors. “Ideas that were generated before us, whether buildings or ideas or theories, are important to be aware of, because without them, we risk just repeating things or being naive about what we’re doing.”
Multiplicity and discipline, according to Hapton, are the values that balance engaging with new perspectives while building on a strong foundation of practical skills. He explains that multiplicity is “about acknowledging social position or subjectivity. The idea that there’s always a multiplicity to the world, multiple points of view, things could always be otherwise.” He encourages his students to compose projects outside their singular subjectivity, allowing for broader understandings and creative innovations. However, Hapton stresses that these outcomes rely on strong core skills, likening architecture to playing a musical instrument—where mastery comes from disciplined practice. “It is a discipline, like a fine art discipline,” which he believes has its own objective set of technical skills that enable students to effectively engage their creativity. “Like practising scales, it’s the same kind of thing. You need to know enough of them and have gone through enough variations and tried them enough times that eventually it finds its way into your intuition, and then you have some capacity to improvise with it or apply it.” Hapton has noticed a decline in the teaching of disciplinary architecture, and fights to emphasize its importance in his own teaching. “Ideally it needs to take the course of the whole curriculum to foster… I haven’t been able to really figure it out just because our curricular structure is relatively chaotic and inconsistent.” He calls for discussions to define the necessary skills of the field so they can set the basis of the curriculum. One of the foundational skills that he teaches is geometric precision, seen in the work of his foundation-year student, Bryce Meintzer. In this assignment, Hapton challenges students by using a specific set of geometries that cannot be easily made even with modern 3D modelling software. “When they work through that, they build a really strong foundational skill set in understanding geometric relationships.”
A key aspect of Hapton’s teaching methodology is the use of humor and creativity to foster a conducive learning environment. “It’s one of the only ways I find I can actually get students to really experiment in the context of a design studio, because if they’re taking it too seriously the whole time, they usually just do safe stuff.” He believes that humor can break down barriers, allowing students to experiment without fear of failure. “If we can laugh at it, we can talk about it.” He even teaches research studios that directly explore comedy as a method of critique, using it “to destabilise our points of view about architecture and open it up to what else might be possible.” In one of these studios, his student Vivian Ton proposed a national park for the new White House. “This is not a normal kind of a project… It has both humour and multiplicity.” Another example is from a short film by his student Dash Maxwell, who situated strange shapes in the classroom setting and animated them as though it was a class Hapton was teaching. “I just loved it because it seems to be simultaneously ridiculous and absurd. It also maybe draws attention to something about the structure of the teaching of this class that we wouldn’t normally pay attention to, just through its comedic absurdity.”
Hapton sees a need to destabilize both pedagogies and students themselves. “The digital generation has had this emergence of anyone can do anything. These students show up and maybe have that ethos.” He is inspired by his colleague Jason Johnson’s goal of “deprogramming” first-year students, making them more aware of their own subjectivity to open them up to learning. “Most people aren’t thinking about… their general condition of their subjectivity relative to the culture, relative to ideology.” He aims to help students understand the contexts they operate in, encouraging them to engage with difficulty and ambiguity, and develop strategies for working through it. “That we’re not just assuming that we know, I think is important.” Hapton evaluates students on how they work through problems rather than what they create, preparing them to be agile and well-prepared for the unknown. Unfortunately, he has received pushback to this approach from students and faculty with a narrow focus on legible connections to practice. “But just that is not really teaching the whole academic, traditional, historical discipline of what we do. There’s a lot more to it.”
Hapton believes the role of architecture has been constrained by the failures of postmodernism, which led to a general mistrust of architects. He saw this influence his own architectural education. “I was trained in a place that really didn’t, for the most part, teach or believe in the idea of the discipline of architecture engaging outside cultural issues.” However, the global urgency brought about by climate change and societal shifts has led to a renewed advocacy for an architectural education that is both technically proficient and culturally and environmentally aware. His experiences during the pandemic have reinforced his belief in the need for architects to engage with larger global issues, moving beyond traditional boundaries to influence positive change in society. “I think my approach to this is more situated in questioning of foundations or fundamentals of what architecture is and what we do. How do we teach that?” Looking ahead, Daniel envisions further exploration of student-directed learning and experimental studios. He is currently collaborating with Matthew Parker on a pilot project that grants students greater autonomy in their projects, aiming to study and potentially reshape the pedagogy within the architecture department. “We’re hoping to basically start to get students working on research projects that are focused on the way we teach courses and where this comes from.” He sees this initiative as a way to foster a more responsive and dynamic learning environment. “The hope would be that it enables us to respond to some of the things we’re talking about here.”
Hapton’s journey from a practitioner in Los Angeles to an influential educator at SAPL is a testament to his adaptability and commitment to architectural education. His innovative teaching methods, grounded in humor and rigorous skill development, prepare students to navigate the complexities of modern architecture. As he continues to explore new educational paradigms and engage with pressing global issues, Hapton is shaping a future where architecture is both a discipline and a transformative force for societal good.
Contact Info
Education
B.ENDS (University of British Columbia)
M.ARCH (Southern California Institute of Architecture, SCI-Arc)
Keywords
- Humour
- History
- Multiplicity
- Discipline
- Projection
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