killing, ansgar  

Arch 106 is a 2 unit class that was the equivalent of a 4 unit. Most of the students in the class are freshman, and want to learn about the materials of construction that he's there to teach us about. We all understood the main points, but were all shocked when we saw that he expected to know specific information about the materials on the first midterm. He wanted us to know serial codes for steel, random specific terms from 200 pages of readings in his book, and concepts he barely covered in class. He gave us a quiz at the end of every class, and told us at the end of the quarter that we were supposed to work by ourselves on them. This was followed by an email stating that if you suspected of cheating, your work could be submitted to review for cheating. This review could be avoided by admitting you cheated and creating a 2x2x2 inch cube out of whatever materials you like and writing a page paper about it. Ansgar expected this to be done over spring break. Overall, Ansgar's class kicked my ass, and I only got a B-; if you have to take this class, be ready for the most work you've ever done for 2 units.

This class contains a lot of worthy information. Killing is great at giving quality information in his lectures and his credibility and teaching style make him very well-liked. However, the material is presented very quickly and takes time outside of class to fully digest and remember.

Ansgar is super funny and easy to get along with. During his lectures, he does tend to pick and choose people to answer questions (not hard), but it makes his lectures pretty amusing. His midterm and final were online and you could do it with groups.

Ansgar killing is the absolute best. Ansgar is an instructor that gives his all to his students. He creates a wonderful studio atmosphere where he is not afraid to critic your work, however always provides help and encouraging words. Studio workloads can be extremely overwhelming but it is safe to say that Ansgar makes every stressful day worth it. Ansgar has taught me so much and motivates me to stick with this crazy major. I would 11/10 recommend him to any arch student.

Ansgar is the best professor I have ever had and you would be lucky to be his student. He cares for his students like they are his family, he is so smart and knows what he is talking about, and is always EXTREMELY helpful with studio (and even just life). Ansgar always understands how we are feeling and always makes us feel better when we are stressed or sad or upset!! I have learned more from him in just this one quarter of studio than I have in my entire time here at Cal Poly. He always comes in to studio to help his students outside of class hours, including the weekends. Seriously if you are debating taking him as your professor, stop debating and do it. Your life will be changed and you will be a much happier person (which helps a lot in this crazy major).

I will be forever grateful that I got to learn from Ansgar this quarter. Through his helpful feedback and insightful critiques, he completely transformed the way I see this major. I was very nervous about beginning second year, but Ansgar immediately made it clear that he genuinely cares about his students and their success. Ansgar is my favorite teacher I have ever had and I will take everything that I learned this quarter with me for the rest of my life. In this one quarter, I feel I learned more than my entire first year and for the first time I felt like I could really enjoy the work assigned. Ansgar goes above and beyond every single day for his students and has helped me grow as both a student and person. Before this quarter, I was always so nervous to present my work or share my ideas but Ansgar has truly helped me feel confident in recognizing both my strong and weak design decisions. If every professor was a little more like Ansgar, the architecture program at Cal Poly would not only be #1 in the nation, but #1 in the world.

This professor is not as dedicated to his students as professors I've had in the past. He doesn't show up to class on time, and doesn't provide enough one-on-one time with his students.

Ansgar is by far the laziest and least qualified of the second year studio professors. His projects lack any sort of process. While other professors have warm-up projects and ways to approach design (form first, site analysis, etc) Ansgar doesn't have any kind of process, lending to uninspired design. There are far more inspiring professors to take over Ansgar and I regret taking his studio.

THE BEST PROFESSOR! Ansgar is literally the best professor any architecture major can have. He teaches you the basic process of designing which will stay with you forever. It helps you organize your design process making it way more productive. He understands how much workload the other classes put in us and helps us constantly to balance everything out. His studio grows super close and we can literally go back to him for reviews any time after. He also makes class super enjoyable and fun. DEFINATELY take him if you can!!!!!!

Ansgar was honestly one of the best professors for the first quarter of year two where he gives you constructive feedback and guides you in the right direction. He supports your thoughts and ideas and also provides a clear route to follow in the design process. He intelligently combines Architectural Technology lessons into studio; this serves as site analysis. Essentially, killing two birds with one stone. He is very knowledgeable and his formal strategies improve your concept. I would one hundo recommend him!

Killing is a very funny and caring teacher. He makes an effort to understand student work loads and tries to assign only the necessary workload for a project. This means that you will have a easy quarter but you might not get your best work out of him as he doesn't push his students overly hard. However, if you push yourself and put in effort you will produce good work. You have to want it, as I don't think hes going to force it out of you - it's not his style. You will still have the opportunity and guidance from him in order to create a nice piece for your portfolio if you push yourself. He has a very goofy demeanor all the time as he is constantly cracking jokes, which makes the 5 hour class enjoyable. I never thought lost my passion to go to class because of this. He is also very approachable, if you open up to him he is more than willing to share with you and you can learn a lot from him if you just talk to him. Other reviews on here say his crits are vague or uninspired, but I would say that during the daily crits I got from him he got into my concepts and gave me advice according to the direction my project was going. I do think though that the more you can talk to him about your project and your thoughts the more you will get out of his crits, which is kind of true for most professors. If you give profs a half assed explanation of your concepts and then say ah idk, you're not giving them much to go on. Be confidant and stick up for yourself. Profs aren't going to judge you and even if they do, (which Killing, out of all people will be the LAST person to be rude or passive aggressive) who gives a fuck. I believe that if you are wishy-washy it can either result in "biased" crits where students think professors are taking charge of their direction (which to me kind of makes sense because you aren't showing that you have direction, of course they will fall back on a style with which they are familiar) or an equal response in vagueness crits. And if you don't have a direction yet, which is fine that is what crits are for, talk about the decisions and thoughts that are going on and getting in your way. Profs can't just tell you what to do. Overall, what I appreciated the most about taking Killing's class was his personality and the positivity in his class. I was happy in his class. If you don't like his teaching, you can at least admit that he is a class act. Extremely caring, willing to talk as well as listen, funny - just an all around good dude.

I only enrolled in this studio because there were none other available. Come on, a German guy with 'Killing' for a last name? Yeah, no. BUT I learned not to base decisions around polyratings too much or judge people before even meeting them because hands down this was the best quarter I've had at Cal Poly (altho to be fair, I'm only a 2nd year) Ansgar made me cry. Coming into second year, I was really struggling with whether Architecture is right for me, but after learning from him in and outside of class, I felt confident in my decision to continue. If you're one of those snobby conceited arch kids who thinks the amount of all-nighters is a competition, maybe don't take Ansgar. You probably won't be producing the best looking posters that wow strangers during reviews/shows. You probably won't be actively learning new skills in Rhino or whatever else 2nd year architecture is about. But what you'll take away from Ansgar's studio is a lot deeper than that. Even though he is "very chill" he will still challenge you to take your project in a direction you'll learn the most from. He also allows a lot of creative freedom and understands you have life outside of studio. It's good mental break from the demanding architecture curriculum, and will help you self-reflect on what you want your career to be like. Maybe not the "best" professor in the traditional sense, but this man is an all-around-good guy and I hope he realizes the positive impact he's making on these confused beginning-design students.

Would not recommend. Ansgar didn’t provide any proper guidance the whole quarter. The project was especially confusing and Ansgar would get personally offended if you asked why there were never any lesson plans. I felt like all my friends in other studios learned more and had much better guidance than me. In the end he played favorites and gave grades based on who he liked and not the quality or effort of work. I’ve only gotten A’s in college and this was my first B. He’s a pretty phony guy.

Would not recommend this professor if you want to increase you’re digital skills. Ansgar is not very knowledgeable on any digital practices and is not very adventurous when it comes to current representation methods. He wastes a lot of class time trying to tell jokes. Not worth your tuition. He also doesn’t allow you to have any kind of positive feedback which he would know is detrimental to student mental health if he ever read anything more current than outdated research papers written in the 80’s.

Ansgar Killing is one of the best professors I have ever had. He's very approachable and really makes an effort to listen to his students. He likes to have small, informal, and almost daily presentations or table critiques. As someone who does not enjoy presenting, I still enjoyed being in his studio despite my daily anxiety over these small presentations, which is a testament to what a great professor he is. He makes an effort to spend time, one-on-one with each student in his studio. He is encouraging but is also not afraid to poke fun at you if he doesn't believe you're doing your best. As architecture students, it's common for our personal health to suffer throughout the quarter due to lack of sleep and irregular diets, etc. Ansgar cares deeply for his students' well-being and structures his studio in such a way that rarely demands you to sacrifice your health for a project, as long as you work diligently. I also appreciated the fact that he would check-in with us on how we felt about certain aspects of the studio, such as presenting for critique, and made adjustments according to what we, as a studio, deemed the most helpful mode of feedback. Overall, he's a great and supportive professor and I would recommend him to anyone considering him.

-His work load was way too light and caused an extra stressful last week for his students where they had to produce a full quarter of work in a few days without much guidance. -He flakey with his scheduling and often didn’t show up when he promised or was late and would leave early too often. -His class curriculum seemed entirely unplanned and every day it seemed he spent the first hour of class trying to figure it out, cutting into work time. -His one on one time with students was limited to 10 minutes at max, less than than all other professors who will schedule 30min-1 hour crits to fully understand and give proper feedback. His often seemed rushed and uninterested during his desk crits. His advise was surface level —and to his specific taste, lending each project to look boring and similar. -He was able to give important advice that was beneficial, but it was much too late (day before the final) to actually implement. -He was not remotely fluent with the softwares we were using, (adobe suite, rhino) and therefore was not able to understand the effort needed to produce work. Not knowing these softwares also hindered his ability to help his students. -His grading was biased, and his attendance policy was used on some students but not on all. He lowered my grade for missing part of one class period, not even a whole day. His grading policy is 3 full days missed and he will lower your grade, but he lowered mine for not even one full day. When I brought this fact up he blew it off. I wouldn't take this professor if you want to grow. He is a good professor to take if you want to do nothing and learn nothing. If you want to learn take: Humberto Bracco Emily White Robert Arens Claire Olsen Carmen Trudell

His sense of humor is worse than his teaching skills.

He is nice on the outside but plays favorites and grades harshly.

Ansgar is not the best. Most of his work at the end of the year looked like first year work. He's afraid of using digital tools which sets his students back. I also noticed his studio never knew what was going on with respect to the other second year studios. There were several shows we were not made aware about because of Ansgars lack of communication with other staff.

Ansgar is really polarizing because he plays clear favorites. If you laugh at his bad jokes he will give you an A, and if you don't, he takes it personally offensive and will find some reason to dock your grade. Favorites or not, he's not a good professor so even if your in his favorites you will still receive a lesser of a studio education. I also think he favors women, and gives most of the females in his studio A's just for playing along with his clown act.

ansgar is a great teacher. he actually teaches, which helps! :) he also has real world experience doing design in germany. you should definitely take him for studio whatEVER year he is teaching. you'll learn a lot. shalom.

I learned that if I were to take up hunting, I should shoot deer, not bears, because a bear will hunt me back if I successfully wound it. Fascinating! I didnt know that the key to production and operations management was so brutally simple!