Devin Jernigan

Teaching

Devin Jernigan teaches architectural history and theory, design, and digital methods. He starts from where each student is, listens for what they are trying to do, and gives the advice that particular project needs, whether that is a source, a technique, or a harder question. His studio briefs open with a question rather than a program: whether a bath house in the Montana backcountry can run on its own hot spring, age gracefully for a hundred years, and keep its mystery; or how a paradox from logic, set against a social data set, might shape a column. In his Montana State studios, students moved between cast porcelain, CNC-milled site models, photogrammetry, and rendering, switching whenever one of them stalled. At Yale he leads discussion sections in Introduction to Urban Design and in Eeva‑Liisa Pelkonen’s Architecture and Modernity: Sites and Spaces, where students read the large forces of modernity through single cases, from Mexico City in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma to a 1984 Swiss manual for building civil-defense shelters. His Penn seminar follows the traveling circus while each student traces a mobile practice of their own: livestock driven to market, traveling televangelists, the rise of séance culture in Victorian England. The cases change from one course to the next; the question each student pursues stays their own.