The School of Architecture affords collective living as embodied praxis. WASH Magazine distills the interests and insight into the architectural discipline that is formed through this experience. Produced, edited, and curated entirely by the student body, WASH identifies new threads and trajectories facing contemporary architecture. The act of selecting, organizing, and framing otherwise disparate voices is an attempt to cut through the noisy nature of modern discourse. WASH prints two magazines a year while making penultimate content available online.

Nelson Schleiff is a graduate student with a leadership role at WASH Magazine. Schleiff attended Berea College, where he received a bachelor’s degree before continuing to graduate school in architecture. Growing up in West Virginia, where he worked with a family business, he has remained interested in building while exploring design first in furniture and finally as a larger way of exploring architecture as a holistic way of life. He approaches the discipline of design armed with knowledge and experience ranging from design including graphic and spatial work as well as experimental construction and theoretical work.

Jessica Martin is a visual artist and designer. She is part of a design duo with Deon Rubi called Nun that focuses on architecture, objects, and furniture. Interested in interactions of form, her work explores the junction of separate parts through intersection, gravity, and interlocking. Martin’s work has been exhibited at Sight Unseen, the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Design Miami, CIFO, Locust Projects, Bas Fisher Invitational, Spinello Projects, Tile Blush, and Jonald Dudd.

Jan Sobotka is a graduate student at the School of Architecture at Taliesin. A Slovak/Canadian dual citizen, Sobotka completed his psychology and economics degree at McGill University in Montreal. After completing his degree, he worked in the financial industry as a market analyst while remodeling homes in the Pacific Northwest. Since then, he has led efforts to publish WASH Issue 00, 001, and 002. He has worked abroad at Ben van Berkel's UNStudio in the Strategic Innovations Department.

Michele Yeeles is the cofounder and chief executive officer of Bob’s Your Uncle, whose products have graced the shelves of design and museum stores since 2001. As both a designer and an entrepreneur, Michele completed her bachelor of arts in footwear design in the United Kingdom and her MBA at Babson College. During her career in footwear, Michele created collections for Clark’s Shoes, Ecco, and Rockport and was design director at Reebok. She is a graduate student at The School of Architecture at Taliesin.

Michael Simmons is a graduate student at the School of Architecture at Taliesin interested in the relationship between authenticity and objective beauty and how it impacts the built environment. A carpenter by trade and a runner by nature, Michael often does his research on foot at 8.7 miles per hour, lending to his particular understanding of context in architecture. His projects tend to be unrelenting in principle and are frequently subversive in nature, putting the end users of the architecture at the core of his design process. Hailing from Northeast Ohio, Simmons draws inspiration from the lofty goals of those around him—past and present, realized or otherwise—and seeks to create spaces that return the favor.

Aaron Betsky is President of the School of Architecture at Taliesin. A critic of art, architecture, and design, Betsky is the author of over a dozen books on those subjects, including a forthcoming survey of modernism in architecture and design. He writes a twice-weekly blog for architectmagazine.com, Beyond Buildings. Trained as an architect and in the humanities at Yale University, Betsky was previously director of the Cincinnati Art Museum (2006–14) and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2001–06), as well as Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995–2001). In 2008, he also directed the 11th Venice International Biennale of Architecture. Select books include, Making It Modern and Architecture Matters.

Ryan Scavnicky is the founder of Extra Office. He authors a column on Archinect called Extra Extra and serves as the Visiting Teaching Fellow for the School of Architecture at Taliesin. In addition, he has over six years of experience in international offices in Beijing, San Francisco, and Vienna. He received his master’s in design theory and pedagogy with distinction from SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. He studied at The University of Cincinnati College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning for his master’s of architecture. He previously held appointments at the University of Cincinnati, Kent State University, and SCI-Arc.

Building on Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs and thoughts, The School of Architecture is a graduate program in architecture that teaches and practices learning by doing, new ways of looking, an ability to honor and build with the landscape, and experimentation. We learn how to serve our diverse communities by making our environment more sustainable, open to all, and beautiful.