Jackson Brooks

I am a third-year architecture student at California Baptist University, where I am developing a practice around craft, tradition, and sacred geometry. My work asks how space can carry meaning that has been earned over centuries, and how a building can embody intention without explaining itself.

My Christian faith has shaped me since childhood, and it remains the center from which everything else in my life and work radiates. Growing up in the church gave me an early sense that the physical world is not neutral, and instead that it can be ordered toward something higher, and that beauty, order, and craft are not incidental to worship but part of it. That conviction has never really left me.

I am drawn to architecture as civic and sacred art, to buildings that emerge from their communities rather than being imposed on them. American historical styles are where I am focused right now, though I keep returning to African and Middle Eastern vernacular as a kind of wellspring: buildings shaped by climate, material, and collective memory rather than individual signature. I work slowly, through physical models and a lot of observational drawing.

Outside of studio I read, sketch, backpack, hunt, and spend as much time outdoors as I can manage. I take notes on buildings that feel rooted in something older than their architects. And I find myself increasingly preoccupied with how communities are actually built and sustained, with the overlap between rewilding, regenerative agriculture, and the kind of close-knit village life that most of the modern world has quietly forgotten how to make.