Taiji Miyasaka, Professor and Associate Director of the School of Design and Construction at Washington State University, entered academia after professional experience at architecture firms in New York and the Netherlands. Winner of an ACSA Design-Build Award and an ACSA Faculty Design Award, Miyasaka's teaching is informed by research in the areas of materiality, design process/communication, and design pedagogy. His book, Seeing and Making in Architecture: Design Exercises, investigates the practices of rigorous observation and material experimentation for manifesting ingenuity in the design process. Miyasaka’s creative work seeks to design and build architectural interventions that explore the role of materiality and context in discovering design potentials. His project "Light Hole Shed," built using reclaimed timber from grain elevators in eastern Washington, won a design award in the AIA Seattle 2012 Honor Awards. "Night Blooming," a 13-foot-high catenary dome made collaboratively with David Drake, was originally installed at Bellevue Arts Museum and is now permanently on view at the Bellevue Botanical Garden. The project received an Honorable Mention for the AIA Seattle Honor Awards in 2015. “Circum·ambience” is an installation of three spherical sculptures, including a 13-foot inhabitable structure made of clay and wood using traditional Japanese plaster construction methods. It was exhibited at MadArt Studio, Seattle from January to March, 2019. Miyasaka’s research also includes the invention and development of a building block material made of drywall waste in collaboration with David Drake. The project has resulted in an Architect Magazine R+D Award, two U.S. patents, and the Azure Award winning DWT Tiny House. It has been funded by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust Grant, an AIA Upjohn Research Grant, an Amazon Catalyst Grant, and the WSU Commercialization Gap Fund.