What is your name, current location, and current occupation?
My name is Max Jarosz and I currently live in Miami, FL, where I work as the Director of Fabrication and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Miami.
I also recently started my own firm, Daft Buro Architecture.
What was your affiliation with MIT?
I graduated with a Master of Architecture degree from MIT in 2017.
What was your thesis title, if you completed one?
Toxic Urbanism: Heart | Heimatlosigkeit | Home
What are you doing today?
I recently completed a MBA from the University of Miami while working at the university full time.
I am hoping to incorporate that education into an architecture practice, specifically with rethinking how architects can be more involved with the finance and development side of practice to create opportunities for themselves, rather than relying on clients. In terms of projects, we are currently working on the first 3D printed concrete home in Miami and hope to complete that by the end of the year.
How did your time at MIT affect your career path?
I think my time at MIT really set up a more entrepreneurial mindset than I had expected as I completed the program. There are two main ways I think the school contributes to this, the philosophy and the people. While at MIT there is a constant drive to innovate and experiment which naturally leads alumni to question their careers and look for opportunities to innovate their professions. Secondly, being at MIT surrounds you with a diverse range of people at different stages of their life's all doing different things. Seeing other people that I knew from my classes go out and create start-ups, open businesses, and succeed has been very important in giving me the confidence to go out and try as well.
What are you excited about in your career field today?
The two things that I am most excited by in architecture today are the changing cultures and new innovations. First, I believe the emergence of more conversations in our profession on labor, wellbeing, and work life balance are starting to create better lives for people in the profession.
This can be seen by the unionization efforts in New York by SHoP but I think also at many other firms where new hires are willing to leave and go to firms with better cultures as there is a larger awareness and emphasis on this across the field and throughout our generation. Secondly, I think while we view the transformation from hand drawing to digital drawing as a significant transformation, architecture is still far behind in its digital transformation of the profession compared to others. I believe this is creating a lot of exciting change that is challenging some of our very monolithic views of how the profession should operate.
For me, we are just at the beginning of innovating mortgage and financing structures to make design more accessible, integrating cryptocurrencies in construction processes, and developing design to fabrication strategies that create a lot of exciting futures for the profession.
What is advice you would give to a new alum coming out of MIT?
Hop around and take risks. As we leave MIT I think there is a lot of pressure to go straight into your career, but we graduate with a lot of different skills that won't all be utilized at one job. Hoping around a few different early career positions will let you test out and really parse out which parts of the profession you are interested in (and which you aren't) and from there you can build your career.
How can fellow alums reach you if they want to speak further (email address, website, etc)?
Please feel free to reach out to me personally at maxwelljarosz@gmail.com