Roesling, Ralph  

Ralph was my favorite teacher second year. He knows so much and is more than willing to help you pick your own brain to come up with a design. He came in on the weekends to help us a few times too before a project was due, which is so appreciated. He's also open to many different ideas; he doesn't insist that you do something His way, so long as you can justify your own. He's not anywhere near as longwinded as some of the professors are,but he has just as much to say. You will be in lab the entire time, but there's no time wasted at all. Great person, awesome teacher. Take him if at all possible.

I had the opportunity of taking Professor Ralph Roesling as my ARCH 451 (fourth year design studio) Instructor. Looking back on the class, I truly think that his class was one of the top design studios that I experienced while studying at Cal Poly. If you are looking for an “easy” design studio, Ralph will not be the ideal instructor for you. Ralph has many years of experience in the profession of Architecture and his expertise comes across in his teaching style. As a Principal at RNT Architects, Ralph brought to our class a sense of what it would be like working in a real professional studio environment. Like all good design instructors at Cal Poly, he set high expectations for himself and everyone in his studio. He also demanded that we met aggressive deadlines, work collaboratively and produce high quality work. During that quarter our studio competed in the international eVolo Skyscraper design completion. I found the daily studio environment to be both challenging and inspiring. Ralphs desk crits and open class crits fostered creativity and innovation. As a result, each of our design teams produced impressive entries to submit to the competition. Two of the entries from that quarter received international recognition by the eVolo website and articles were written that described the complexity and innovation found in each of those submittals. Ralph also took us on a field trip during that quarter and went out of his way to make sure that all us found the means to go on the trip. We not only had the opportunity to visit the site that we selected for our design competition that quarter, but we also had the opportunity to visit impressive buildings and architecture offices in San Diego California. Yes, at times Ralph can be a bit reserved, but if you take the time to get to know him he will open up and share with you the wealth of knowledge that he has gained throughout his career. He is also just a great guy. I would highly recommend taking Ralph as a design studio professor.

Professor Roesling is hands down the worst professor I have ever had at Cal Poly. I strongly advise against taking him as a professor if you have the choice. I was a 4th year student coming back from studying abroad and signed up for his studio unintentionally, as it was labeled "staff". He spends about half the class talking at you about how to draw a diagram and how basic sun shading works. This is stuff we ALL already knew and did not need to have our time wasted talking about it over and over and over again. It seemed like he gave he same powerpoint presentation about seven times during the quarter. He gives grades very arbitrarily, lashes out at students when they try and bring problems to him that they need help with as he says, "I don't deal well with problems, I only like solutions." Well guess what, when you are constantly adding work to projects at the last minute and letting students know THE DAY BEFORE that they have a graded review the next day when it had never been mentioned before, you are bound to have some problems. My favorite part of this quarter was when we all got an email the night before our final review (which was during finals, which left people no time to actually study for their finals) telling us that we had a 1600 WORD ESSAY due that week on two readings that we had read weeks ago and were told we would have a class discussion on. We never had the class discussion, but were out of the blue assigned a very long essay on extremely short notice DURING FINALS WEEK!!! Needless to say, this man is a terrible professor and should never be hired to work at Cal Poly EVER AGAIN.

Ralph is a very very VERY Lackluster professor. He spends the overwhelming majority of the time telling us about all these little tidbits of designs that have NOTHING to do with the project (as in 2-3 hours every class) and never gives us any time to work, thus making us stay most nights and weekends. He is never helpful if you ask for help, choosing to critique you on something else on your project instead of what you ask for. His work load is also very unfair. Not in terms of the amount of work though, but rather the assigning something extra for project that's DUE THE NEXT TODAY. He's also rather dull in my opinion. I'd compare him to John Lange from a personality standpoint. Ralph's project are also tedious. It's honestly the first time that I genuinely did not like working on an Architecture project. Definitely do NOT recommend. You won't be a better architect at the end of the quarter from it.

When I took this class it was a mixed class of 4th year Architecture and Architectural Engineering students, teams were broken down into 2-3 ARCH plus 2-3 ARCE and asked to design a comprehensive project. To be honest the group of students in my class this quarter weren't particularly the strongest bunch of my year and this was mostly due to the fact that 4th year most students go abroad or do co-ops throughout the country, leaving only a small batch of students still at school. I've had my fair share of difficult group projects and teammates but none quite so difficult as the ones that I worked with this quarter. At first I think I focused my frustration on Ralph because I just wanted out of my group, I wanted a new one because I felt that my entire project was going to suffer from the negative tension. But guess what, in the real world you don't get to abandon your team just because you don't get along, in the real wold you have to suck it up and make it work regardless of personal issues or conflicts and for that I appreciate Ralph for encouraging me to stick with it and push the design through. Looking back this was probably the worst group project of my entire school career but one of my absolute favorite projects and studios. Ralph structures his studios so that they function like real projects, so that you get a more realistic experience of what architecture is like in the field. Most studios at Cal Poly are only a shadow of the actual profession, but with Ralph you work on real projects (projects that actually are being considered being built), working alongside with engineering (students) so that you begin to understand what it's like to design with others in mind because let me tell you, engineering students aren't big fans of 60 ft spanning cantilevers and amorphic blob buildings with no apparent structural reasoning that are commonplace designs in school (but not in real life). I would disagree with the other comments that he assigns things last minute and throws them at you to do, there are many studio teachers at Cal Poly that do this (I will not name them) but Ralph is not one of them. This goes back to the fact that I pointed out at the beginning that this wasn't a great bunch of students in my studio, and many of them were highly unorganized, didn't always pay attention and in some cases didn't even show up for studio. If you showed up to studio regularly, wrote down due dates when told of them, did the assignments on time (which were very much tolerable and reasonable in my opinion) then you will do fine in Ralph's studio. And yes, you will most likely need to work some hours outside of class time but honestly what architectural studio at Cal Poly doesn't entail that? If you aren't ok with working in studio outside of class time then you probably shouldn't be studying architecture, and especially not at Cal Poly because in every studio you will need to work most days on your project. Overall Ralph is a very good professor, completely reasonable, with a lot of practical knowledge and real world experiences that he is more than willing to share with you if you only ask and I would absolutely recommend taking him.