JACK_BURTON

M.Arch, Graduate Candidate, May 2025
Jack Burton is a passionate and experienced designer whose expertise lies at the intersection of a humanitarian lens of design and local building systems that intimately connect projects to their context. Jack came to his architecture studies with an already established foundation of drafting, managing BIM models, and seeing projects through construction administration. His background gave him the freedom to explore more conceptual and abstract skills during his time at the school of architecture while remaining grounded in established construction methodologies. Jack understands the balance in architecture between the client's wants and the community's needs and does not shy away from seeking one in the other.

A native of Ringwood in the United Kingdom, Jack moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, at the age of 18 to pursue a degree in Urban Ecology. After graduating in 2019, he worked for Woodbury Corporation as an Architectural Designer before returning to school in 2022 to complete a postgraduate degree in Architecture. Jack enjoys spending his free time improving skills he finds comfort in, such as baking loaves of sourdough and jogging through Utah scenery.



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01_REFRAMING_BRITISH_LAND_TENURE
FALL 2024 / SPRING 2025

Affordable Housing and Community Agricultural Center

20,000 Total Square Feet

Thatch and timber structural system, Steel and Glass Greenhouse



The eighteenth to nineteenth centuries were a crucial period for art and European aesthetics.  Aristocratic tastes for art shifted away from following a particular style and instead focused on its emotional effect. For example, instead of trying to follow the formula of Greco-Roman proportions in a neoclassical garden, the emphasis shifted to how the landscaping looked from one perspective in an attempt to compose asymmetry, texture, detail, and balance. The term picturesque developed as a loaded adjective that described the appreciation gained from looking out into the rural scenes of Britain.

Despite the arguments made by its philosophers, the picturesque artistic movement wasn’t as detached from its impact on the real world as it wanted to portray itself. Picturesque aesthetics transformed the delineation of land within England to the considerable benefit of the noble classes. Enclosure became the favored method for creating these landscapes, and this commonly involved stripping communal rights from vast swaths of agricultural land to preserve their natural rusticity. The once prevalent “common land” was affected the worst and, for the most part, was subsumed into manor estates.

The proposed center for common land improvement seeks to rejuvenate small-scale local subsistence farming by  providing the village community with an agricultural incubator. Plants, crops, and livestock initially  raised in this building can be relocated to the fractured pieces of common land throughout the local context, breathing life back into these communal parcels and challenging the countryside’s homogenous privatization.


The collage includes the artwork of William Gilpin, John Constable, Henry Moore, and other unknown artists.

Background: Cloud Study, John Constable, 1821

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