27.04.2026
Jonathan Foote spent his childhood forging ideas in his room and testing them in his father’s auto workshop. Thinking through making is a mantra that has always permeated his approach to architecture.
When Jonathan Foote had time off from school in the 1990s, he returned to the main street in Noblesville, Indiana, USA, where his father, Jim, ran the local auto repair shop.
Here he developed a sense for craftsmanship by tinkering with mechanics, while also gaining insight into—and an understanding of—the conditions of the working class when he spoke with the mechanics, who often lived very different lives than his own, for example with alcohol issues and broken homes. His mother studied psychology, and Jonathan Foote has created a professional life that resembles a synthesis of his parents’ interests: his research and teaching at the Aarhus School of Architecture are characterized by connections between the workshop and the library.
With a bachelor’s degree in history, he has always been interested in the roots of architecture—yet he also feels at home in the school’s workshops due to a strong interest in materials such as metal, wood, and in recent years also stone and marble.
“Our workshops and their staff are world-class, and I am very interested in the way they support fabrication both digitally, analogically, and manually.”
At the OPEN Architecture Festival in 2024, audiences could see him using a hammer and chisel to create a crack through a large marble block from Norway. And in 2018, he spent three weeks at an abandoned marble quarry in the remote Maarmorilik in Greenland, accompanied only by a faithful snow hare and colleague, associate professor Robert Trempe. Watch a short film about the trip.
In search of education
The nearly ten years as an associate professor at the Aarhus School of Architecture have given Jonathan a foothold in a career that began with some turbulence and has also been shaped by chance.
It was his grandfather who arranged interviews and visits to a number of educational institutions in Virginia in the mid-1990s, and the young man took the Greyhound bus to Blacksburg and fell in love with the workshops at Virginia Tech School of Architecture. Architecture was thus not on his radar until the practical dimension of the discipline became clear to him.
“I was lucky, because Virginia Tech’s approach was very much about thinking through making, in contrast to many other architecture schools. If I hadn’t visited that particular school, I would probably have chosen a completely different path.”
Into practice
After completing his master’s degree, he used his connections to get in touch with a small architecture firm in Washington, D.C., where over the next three years he learned everything about how architecture is made.
“We designed smaller, often public projects such as parks or office renovations. My tasks changed on a daily basis, and in that way I learned everything from how to communicate with the various stakeholders in the process to which drawings need to be produced and submitted.”
Into academia
But there came a time when Jonathan Foote became “antsy,” as he puts it—impatient for something new. Virginia Tech had a campus in Washington, D.C. with good workshops. One day Jonathan showed up at the workshop and asked if they needed volunteers. They did not, but they did need someone to teach design-build. That became his entry into teaching and his occupation for the following three years. After that, he completed a PhD focusing on full-scale architectural drawings in the 16th century, particularly Michelangelo’s drawings.
“At that time, you drew your project, for example a column, at full scale and gave the drawing to the craftsman who was to execute it. It was magical to me because of the close connection between design, material, and execution.”
