This document voices the story of siting and constructing a hidden, "squatted studio" space within a bridge superstructure over the White River in downtown Anderson, Indiana. It includes interpretations of this "build-design-build" project; a field study (CapAsia) in Sri Lanka with faculty and students from the University of Moratuwa; and the author's work alongside undergraduate design students and faculty colleagues at Anderson University, Anderson, Indiana. The project documents and extends occasions of experience that inform a pedagogy of total loss teaching. The `squatted studio' is presented as architectural form and practice congruent with a total loss approach to learning understood by these statements: there is nothing to gain by total loss teaching as there is no profit in it-waste nothing, and make useful everything at hand. The subversive transformation of materials and space by communities of learners illuminates the affects of total loss teaching.