1 THAT’S SO 20 MINUTES AGO Eric Owen Moss

3 PUBLIC PROGRAMS

5 FACULTY PROFILE: PETER TESTA Amit Wolf

9 GRADUATE THESIS WEEKEND & GRADUATION

15 CLASS NOTES

ISSUE 007

THA

T’S

SO

20

MIN

UTE

S A

GO

Eric

Ow

en M

oss

“…an

d in

his

drea

m, C

oyot

itio

was

rea

ding

from

a b

ook

as la

rge

as a

ho

use,

with

lette

rs a

s big

as d

ogs,

and

the

wor

ds g

allo

ped

and

play

ed

on th

e bo

ok…

.” –

Ste

inbe

ck Th

ere

are

som

e w

ho a

rgue

that

the

act o

f im

agin

ing

new

arc

hite

ctur

e,

stud

ent b

y st

uden

t, is

an a

ntiq

ue c

once

ptio

n.Th

ey in

sist t

hat t

he a

spir

atio

n to

a p

erso

naliz

ed a

rchi

tect

ure,

on

e ar

chite

ct a

t a ti

me,

is o

ld n

ews.

Perh

aps a

dep

erso

naliz

ed n

ew is

in p

rosp

ect.

Wha

t’s d

eper

sona

lized

arc

hite

ctur

e?Bu

bble

gum

and

raz

or sc

oote

rs a

mus

t in

the

build

ing

phot

o? Pa

rado

xica

lly, t

hose

who

insis

t tha

t a h

istor

y of

per

petu

al in

vent

ion

in

arc

hite

ctur

e is

no lo

nger

per

petu

al a

re th

emse

lves

inve

ntor

s/ pr

opag

ator

s of a

new

not

ion.

They

cla

im a

n al

tern

ativ

e pa

radi

gm.

A n

ew p

arad

igm

as s

urro

gate

for

the

para

digm

of t

he n

ew.

And

the

inte

llect

ual f

utur

e of

the

“it’s

too

late

for

new

arc

hite

ctur

e”

advo

cate

s is c

ontin

gent

on

the

effic

acy

of th

eir

new

arg

umen

t.Fo

llow

ed b

y th

eir

unsu

rpri

sing

adm

oniti

on:

If y

ou’r

e no

t with

us,

you’

re o

ut o

f dat

e. Th

ose

who

rej

ect t

he in

divi

duat

ed n

ew a

re th

emse

lves

adv

ocat

es o

f th

eir

own

rend

ition

of w

hat’s

new

.Is

thei

r ca

se e

mpi

rica

lly d

emon

stra

ble?

The

anti-

new

s rel

y on

the

sam

e or

igin

ality

pre

mise

that

the

pro-

new

s re

ly o

n. In

the

end

ther

e’s t

acit

agre

emen

t on

the

dura

bilit

y of

the

new,

bu

t disa

gree

men

t on

the

new

’s co

nstit

uent

par

ts.

Wha

t’s g

enui

nely

new

, we’

re to

ld, i

s the

arc

hite

ct a

s the

ent

repr

eneu

r of

savv

y: c

hase

wha

t the

wor

ld c

hase

s; d

on’t

indu

lge

the

arch

itect

’s so

litar

y pu

rsui

ts.

The

acco

mm

odat

ion

with

“ho

w th

e w

orld

sees

it”

switc

hes t

he

arch

itect

as i

ntro

vert

to th

e ar

chite

ct a

s ext

rove

rt.

Res

istan

ce a

s pas

sé.

The

new

arc

hite

ct is

to b

e fo

rmed

by

the

colla

tera

lizat

ion

of v

ario

us

exte

rnal

con

stitu

enci

es.

Of c

ours

e, th

ose

exte

rnal

obl

igat

ions

are

not

hing

new

to a

rchi

tect

ure.

It’s t

he n

otio

n of

the

valu

e en

gine

erin

g of

thos

e ex

tern

al p

ress

ures

th

at’s

at st

ake.

A c

olle

ctiv

e m

atur

ing

of th

e pr

ofes

sion,

we’

re to

ld.

Tim

e fo

r im

plem

enta

tion,

we’

re to

ld, n

ot sp

ecul

atio

n.A

new

inst

itutio

nal a

llegi

ance

, [an

d an

old

one

]:Be

have

you

rsel

f. Le

t’s n

ot g

ener

aliz

e SC

I-A

rc.

The

SCI-

Arc

inst

itutio

nal m

odel

is o

nly

the

aggr

egat

e of

pro

duct

ive

priv

ate

mod

els.

SCI-

Arc

is n

ot a

n in

stitu

tion

with

a r

igid

per

imet

er a

rray

ed a

gain

st

othe

r in

stitu

tions

with

thei

r pe

rim

eter

s.If

SC

I-A

rc h

as a

per

imet

er, i

t’s p

erfo

rate

d. To

mak

e it

new

is a

n id

eal w

ith n

o gu

aran

tee

the

idea

l will

be

real

ized

.A

s lon

g as

arc

hite

ctur

e co

uld

be o

ther

than

it is

, the

idea

l is a

live.

W

hat w

e do

is to

art

icul

ate

the

idea

l, an

d en

gend

er a

con

text

whe

re

frui

tion

has a

n op

port

unity

.A

nd o

ppor

tuni

ty is

all

arch

itect

ure

requ

ires

.

“…an

d in

his

drea

m, C

oyot

itio

was

rea

ding

from

a b

ook

as la

rge

as a

ho

use,

with

lette

rs a

s big

as d

ogs,

and

the

wor

ds g

allo

ped

and

play

ed

on th

e bo

ok…

.” –

Ste

inbe

ck Th

ere

are

som

e w

ho a

rgue

that

the

act o

f im

agin

ing

new

arc

hite

ctur

e,

stud

ent b

y st

uden

t, is

an a

ntiq

ue c

once

ptio

n.Th

ey in

sist t

hat t

he a

spir

atio

n to

a p

erso

naliz

ed a

rchi

tect

ure,

on

e ar

chite

ct a

t a ti

me,

is o

ld n

ews.

Perh

aps a

dep

erso

naliz

ed n

ew is

in p

rosp

ect.

Wha

t’s d

eper

sona

lized

arc

hite

ctur

e?Bu

bble

gum

and

raz

or sc

oote

rs a

mus

t in

the

build

ing

phot

o? Pa

rado

xica

lly, t

hose

who

insis

t tha

t a h

istor

y of

per

petu

al in

vent

ion

in

arc

hite

ctur

e is

no lo

nger

per

petu

al a

re th

emse

lves

inve

ntor

s/ pr

opag

ator

s of a

new

not

ion.

They

cla

im a

n al

tern

ativ

e pa

radi

gm.

A n

ew p

arad

igm

as s

urro

gate

for

the

para

digm

of t

he n

ew.

And

the

inte

llect

ual f

utur

e of

the

“it’s

too

late

for

new

arc

hite

ctur

e”

advo

cate

s is c

ontin

gent

on

the

effic

acy

of th

eir

new

arg

umen

t.Fo

llow

ed b

y th

eir

unsu

rpri

sing

adm

oniti

on:

If y

ou’r

e no

t with

us,

you’

re o

ut o

f dat

e. Th

ose

who

rej

ect t

he in

divi

duat

ed n

ew a

re th

emse

lves

adv

ocat

es o

f th

eir

own

rend

ition

of w

hat’s

new

.Is

thei

r ca

se e

mpi

rica

lly d

emon

stra

ble?

The

anti-

new

s rel

y on

the

sam

e or

igin

ality

pre

mise

that

the

pro-

new

s re

ly o

n. In

the

end

ther

e’s t

acit

agre

emen

t on

the

dura

bilit

y of

the

new,

bu

t disa

gree

men

t on

the

new

’s co

nstit

uent

par

ts.

Wha

t’s g

enui

nely

new

, we’

re to

ld, i

s the

arc

hite

ct a

s the

ent

repr

eneu

r of

savv

y: c

hase

wha

t the

wor

ld c

hase

s; d

on’t

indu

lge

the

arch

itect

’s so

litar

y pu

rsui

ts.

The

acco

mm

odat

ion

with

“ho

w th

e w

orld

sees

it”

switc

hes t

he

arch

itect

as i

ntro

vert

to th

e ar

chite

ct a

s ext

rove

rt.

Res

istan

ce a

s pas

sé.

The

new

arc

hite

ct is

to b

e fo

rmed

by

the

colla

tera

lizat

ion

of v

ario

us

exte

rnal

con

stitu

enci

es.

Of c

ours

e, th

ose

exte

rnal

obl

igat

ions

are

not

hing

new

to a

rchi

tect

ure.

It’s t

he n

otio

n of

the

valu

e en

gine

erin

g of

thos

e ex

tern

al p

ress

ures

th

at’s

at st

ake.

A c

olle

ctiv

e m

atur

ing

of th

e pr

ofes

sion,

we’

re to

ld.

Tim

e fo

r im

plem

enta

tion,

we’

re to

ld, n

ot sp

ecul

atio

n.A

new

inst

itutio

nal a

llegi

ance

, [an

d an

old

one

]:Be

have

you

rsel

f. Le

t’s n

ot g

ener

aliz

e SC

I-A

rc.

The

SCI-

Arc

inst

itutio

nal m

odel

is o

nly

the

aggr

egat

e of

pro

duct

ive

priv

ate

mod

els.

SCI-

Arc

is n

ot a

n in

stitu

tion

with

a r

igid

per

imet

er a

rray

ed a

gain

st

othe

r in

stitu

tions

with

thei

r pe

rim

eter

s.If

SC

I-A

rc h

as a

per

imet

er, i

t’s p

erfo

rate

d. To

mak

e it

new

is a

n id

eal w

ith n

o gu

aran

tee

the

idea

l will

be

real

ized

.A

s lon

g as

arc

hite

ctur

e co

uld

be o

ther

than

it is

, the

idea

l is a

live.

W

hat w

e do

is to

art

icul

ate

the

idea

l, an

d en

gend

er a

con

text

whe

re

frui

tion

has a

n op

port

unity

.A

nd o

ppor

tuni

ty is

all

arch

itect

ure

requ

ires

.

2

3 PUBLIC PROGRAMS

RECENTLecture SeriesGRAFTIn Pursuit of HappinessSeptember 25

Lecture SeriesANTÓN GARCÍA-ABRILThe Big BangOctober 2

Lecture SeriesGUY NORDENSONClimate AdaptationOctober 7

Lecture SeriesALI RAHIMSophisticated Form October 9

Lecture SeriesCYNTHIA DAVIDSONImage and Word: A Critical ContextOctober 16

Lecture SeriesTOM WISCOMBEThe Status of SubdivisionsOctober 30

Lecture SeriesSARAH WHITINGEngaging AutonomyNovember 6

Lecture SeriesMICHAEL MALTZANElasticNovember 13

Lecture SeriesJOAN OCKMANBetween Ornament and Monument: Siegfried Kracauer and the Substance of the SurfaceNovember 20

Lecture SeriesKENNETH FRAMPTONTowards an Agonistic ArchitectureDecember 4

UPCOMINGSCI-Arc Gallery ExhibitionSTEPHEN TURK & JEFFREY KIPNISFigure Ground Game January 17–March 2, 2014January 17: Opening Reception + Discussion with Jeffrey Kipnis and Eric Owen Mos

Lecture SeriesLARS MÜLLER 2014: Avant-Garde is Analog January 31, 2014

Lecture SeriesALBERTO KALACH Alberto Kalach WorkshopJanuary 22, 2014

ABOUT PUBLIC PROGRAMSAll events begin at 7pm unless other-wise noted. Lectures take place in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall.

The Lecture Series is broadcast live at sciarc.edu/live. Lectures are also archived for future viewing, and can be found online in the SCI-Arc Media Archive at sma.sciarc.edu.

The SCI-Arc Gallery is open daily from 10am–6pm. The Library Gallery is open Monday–Friday from 10am–7pm and Saturday–Sunday from 12pm–6pm.

SCI-Arc exhibitions and public pro-grams are made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.

SCI-Arc is located at 960 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013. The building entrance and parking lot are located at 350 Merrick Street, between 4th Street and Traction Avenue.

SCI-Arc Public Programs are subject to change beyond our control. For the most current information, please visit sciarc.edu or call 213.613.2200.

To join SCI-Arc’s Public Programs email list, contact public_programs@sciarc.edu.

Graham HarmanStrange Objects Contra Parametricism Lecture Series, September 18

4

Lecture SeriesJEN STARK Art, Science & the Cosmos January 15, 2014

Lecture Series BARRY BERGDOLLOut of Site/In Plain View: On the Origins and Modernity of the Architecture Exhibition February 5, 2014

Lecture Series ANTONI VIVESBarcelona 5.0. The Polis is Back February 12, 2014

Lecture Series KEVIN RATNERHigh-Rise Modular February 19, 2014

Lecture Series WOLF D. PRIX On Raimund Abraham: “Visions in Exile or: Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted” Raimund Abraham LectureMarch 5, 2014

Lecture Series JOHNSTON MARKLEEToo Fast To Live Too Young To DieMarch 12, 2014

Lecture Series STAN ALLENLandscapes and BuildingsMarch 19, 2014

Lecture Series MARK Z. DANIELEWSKIParable #8: Z Is for Zoo (or Transgressing Barriers Against Creative Survival)March 26, 2014

SCI-Arc Gallery ExhibitionBAUMGARTNER + URIUApertures4 April 4–May 18, 2014April 4: Opening Reception + Discussion with Herwig Baumgartner and Eric Owen Moss

SCI-Arc ExhibitionSPRING SHOWApril 19–May 4, 2014The annual SCI-Arc Spring Show includes student work from all school programs, and will be installed throughout the school.April 19: Opening Reception

OUTSIDE SCI-ARCExhibitionA NEW SCULPTURALISM: CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE FROM SOUTHERN CALIFORNIAMuseum of Contemporary Art, Los AngelesJune 16–September 16 Part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., this exhibit examined the work of thirty-eight major and emerging practices in contemporary Los Angeles architecture of the past twenty-five years. Included three pavilions designed by Elena Manferdini, Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich (P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S), and Tom Wiscombe as well as projects from Eric Owen Moss, Coy Howard, Griffin Enright, Hodgetts+Fung, Brooks + Scarpa, and Barbara Bestor, amongst others.

Lebbeus Woods is an ArchetypeSCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition, October 11–December 1

5 THE EMPIRICAL FRAME: PETER TESTA FACULTY PROFILE

Amit Wolf

In their form and pedagogy, Peter Testa’s ESTm studios at SCIArc’s Robot House are empirical operations. An invitation to sit in on one of Testa’s reviews is a rare treat, inasmuch as it engages all the senses, which are given a first hand feel of each experiment’s empiric results. Of more interest than the physicality of these results, however, is their capacity to liberate the discus-sion from any tedious-mindedness in favor of a posteriori percepts that can cut through and make clear whatever is in the air that week, from objecthood to bio-printing to avant-garde art, all with the precision reserved for a six-axis robotic arm. To give a sense of this achievement, in one instance, a group of students side-stepped recent lengthy close readings of art-architecture relations to unearth surprising links between Conceptual art and Futurism, two currents that formally and ideologically could not be more distinct. Used as a precedent, the students began with Sol Lewitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes of 1974. Lewitt’s serial experiment, with its depiction of the varied forms with which to elude and deny the completion of a cube frame, was recreated as a choreography of robotized prisms. Further, when digitally filmed and spliced, the performance yielded unexpected in-between objects—circular sweeps that underlie Lewitt’s original index and that are akin to Umberto Boccioni’s and Giacomo Balla’s respective dynamisms, constructions capturing motion typical of 1914-1915 Italian Futurism.

Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and trained in the offices of Álvaro Siza in Porto between 1984 and 1986, Testa belongs to that small group of architects who man-aged to avoid Postmodern American architecture and the protract-ing 1980s, stretching well into the mid-90s, while also trading academia and discursive practice for the computational advances unique at the time to MIT. Indeed, returning to MIT as an associ-ate professor via Bernard Tschumi’s Columbia (two institutions in which architecture has never been deadlocked in the academic erudition of language and text, and in which technological experi-mentation was nearly indifferent to the self-imposed checks and boundaries of critical, ‘autonomous’ discourse), Testa understands computational innovation in all its forms as the sole remaining agent for the development of vigorous, novel architectures.

Testa first came into his own in a series of prototype compos-ite towers developed in 2000 with Devyn Weiser, co-principle of the Los Angeles based architecture firm Testa|Weiser. The deter-mining agent in these vertical structures, as in the firm’s later work, is computational vitalism that serves to re-imagine form in relation to structural and material computations and to create within such relays microcosms in which, as Testa affirmed, “materials are no longer fixed substances and morphogenesis supersedes form.” While not dissimilar to the ambitions of other digital proponents to come out of Tschumi’s tenure at Columbia (Greg Lynn and Hani Rashid, to name but a few), Testa has ben-efited from MIT’s disciplinary open-endedness and therefore from an empirical approach to both advanced materials and software that distinguishes him from his peers. The reiterative scripting templates developed with his MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG) would challenge a receding pallet of rotational and scalar formal operations as well as then parallel computational experiments in emergent form. These included the templates AgencyGP, GENR8, and Weaver™, all pivotal to Testa|Weiser’s later work. For an office building prototype for Herman Miller, by his account, Testa would produce nothing but “populations of design”—vital ontolo-gies of design permutations that were made possible by software agents, themselves refitted to the standard software package to effect the envelopes’ myriad curves. As a result, the scheme is far removed from the typical imagery of architectural computation circa 2000, evoking more than anything else Mies van der Rohe’s

Glasarchitekture of 1920-22: the ephemeras of the Friedrichstras-se competition entry and the Glass Skyscraper, still unburdened by the curtain wall. Notably, the latter 1922 scheme was a more or less programmatic demonstration of experiments in curved glass prisms, which were conducted by Mies to empirically determine the concave/convex curvature of the glass.

That Testa’s is an empirical exploration, a discovery as much as an architectural project, is clear from Testa|Weiser’s two tower schemes: The Carbon Tower, prototyped by 3D Systems Inc. in 2004; and The Strand Tower and Precursors commissioned by MOCA in 2006 and designed with Emily White. Owing much of their complex bundle-like configurations to the EDG Weaver™ script template, these vertical structures renounce the basic core-envelop logic common to American speculative buildings. The former enfolds a spiraling ramp and three elevator pods, forming a spiraling exoskeleton; the latter relinquishes the core-envelop dyad altogether to develop a technique combining robotic and human labors within a single structure. Regardless of such strong, compelling objectives, Testa seems to have experienced real diffi-culty in these two schemes, but also real advances, within the more routine aspects of the modern tower frame, bringing it to term with other pressing questions of contemporary machine pro-duction, namely robotics and the materiality of composites. The tower frame, underwritten with compressive/tensile moments and code provisions, can be briefly summarized here to illustrate this difficulty. Before William L.B. Jenney’s Fair Store, built in Chi-cago between 1890 and 1891, the great problem of the rentable multistory building was the proviso of a fireproofed steel frame that can absorb variedly directed load intensities. Jenney’s steel frame overcame this difficulty through an assembly of concrete and tile slabs. These slabs were laid over (concrete) and in-be-tween (hollowed tiles) beam and girder as to resist local stress, complementing the wind girts and providing fire insulation.

Jenney and the intimate corollary of Modern architecture’s assemblage logic to the Chicago frame have been widely dis-cussed by the likes of Sigfried Giedion and Colin Rowe; Kenneth Frampton disclosed the influence of the Chicago School on Adolf Loos, remarking on the Viennese architect’s Chicago period and its part in the conception of Le Corbusier’s Domino frame. Less discussed, perhaps, are the dynamics implicit to the erection of steel frames: the lifting, rigging, and detailing as well as the schedule and the standards entailed by specialized products and labor. The last fact, that of human labor, would find its most im-mediate, delicate expression with Louis Sullivan and a parallel

Peter Testa is Principal-in-Charge of Design at TESTA|WEISER and found-ing director of the MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG). His work is ex-hibited at leading museums and gal-leries worldwide, including recent shows in Los Angeles, New York London, Tokyo, and Beijing. He is the author of two books and more than 30 research papers on architecture, design, computation and robotics. His work is regularly published in interna-tional art, architecture, design, engi-neering, and scientific journals as well as major newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Times of London. Testa was Associate Professor of Architecture at MIT, and has also taught at Columbia University GSAPP, Harvard University GSD, and the University of California. Since 2004 he has been a member of the Design Faculty at SCI-Arc, teach-ing XLAB advanced design studios and seminars. Testa holds an S.M. Arch.S. from MIT. He is the recipient of the MIT Innovation Award, three Graham Foundation Awards, and the Design Arts Award of the National Endowment for the Arts.

W.B. Jenney, Fair Store

Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper

6

economy of decorative, filigreed terracotta structures (rendered legendary by omission in Giedion’s Space Time and Architecture depicting a stripped-down detail from Sullivan’s Schlesinger and Mayer department store, Chicago, 1899-1904). Far from decided, questions of the frame structure and its secondary expressions have persisted and expanded beyond Modernism (together with the respective budgets of material transfers, work scheduling, structural and standard reviews, as well as progressively more elaborate façade systems, all echoing Sullivan’s ornaments). Clos-er in kind to Jenney, Testa’s tower propositions pioneer a system of construction—a structure that is as responsive to technical developments in construction as it is cautious of erecting second-ary expressions of itself. Indeed, at their best, the Carbon Tower and The Strand Tower and Precursors propositions eliminate the spontaneous addition of secondary structures, leaving standing only bereft, if complex, frames: strand structures of carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) which are extruded, fused, and bond-ed (pultruded) rather than assembled.

That the question is as materialist as much as material (CFRP pultrusions) is given by the Carbon Tower’s complete control of means to ends: the primary structure is erected in-situ using ro-botic pultruders: spiders weaving a tower of taut strands, spider webs seeking form following the logic of the Weaver™ platform. This productivism, the architects’ control of means to an end, has been further refined since 2004 in Testa’s SCI-Arc studios, semi-nars, and theses. These efforts culminated in 2011 in the Robot House initiative—a platform of six Staübli robots inaugurated by Director Eric Moss and Academic Affairs Director Hsinming Fung, with the support of the Board of Directors. In its three years, the initiative has benefited from grants supporting teaching and research fellowships, with fellows carrying out advanced research with an emphasis on constructing a new digital/physical design platform.

Initiated and designed by Testa|Weiser, the Robot House ef-fects the communication between the architect and the robot. To that end, the Robot House has set up the task of scripting a plug-in interface capable of addressing a uniquely collaborative, syn-chronic production model. Termed Esperant.0, and developed by SCI-Arc graduates Brandon Kruysman, Jonathan Proto, and Curime Batliner, the Maya plug-in underscores the reiterative process that extends between the robot and the software by orga-nizing new software templates. Aiming at a more exacting, fluent management of student-designed end tools (or rigs), these tem-plates intervene in the very logic of robotic manufacturing, for example, supplementing Maya’s kinematics solvers (the kinematic computations determining the specific position of the end tool). In turn, rather than determined, the tool’s position becomes relative and complex, excluding the rigid, axial end tool positioning of conventional kinematic computation. Judging by its outputs, this is one of the Robot House’s intrinsic strengths. By re-imagining kinematics, for example, amalgamating forward kinematics (end

joint kinematics concerned with the rig) with inverse kinematics (axial or joint kinematics), Testa has been able to expand the Ro-bot House’s initial formal range, and therefore its range of objects. These include ambiguous geometries that emerge from a polyure-thane sphere, caressed by cool heating guns, and tower schemes that grow out of a photo-induced resin substrate. Testa|Weiser’s influence is particularly evident in the latter case, effecting not only the material quality of the tower-object but also its parti.

Two themes recently carried over from the Robot House to Testa|Weiser with their latest project, Factor(e), a factory ideated for the Peugeot Citroën EV division. The first is the spherical arrangement of robotic production, owed to the end tools reach limits, a limit also at the base of the Robot House’s collaborative, synchronous model. In Factor(e) this paradigm sees the robots stacked within an enclosed spherical production cell. In contrast to traditional models where production robots operate externally to the body shell, Testa|Weiser re-imagine the inverted setting with smaller, more agile robots effecting the production from within. Per Testa|Weiser, the inversion entails the eclipsing of sheet metal related labor of conventional body shell production (pressing, welding, and paint processes) by rapid, continuous mod-ulation of fast curing composites. The second theme is intimately linked to the Robot House’s novel conception of production, i.e., the un-marrying of Peugeot Citroën EV from the linear, conveyer belt model of industrial manufacturing and, therefore, the rethink-ing of the production space itself. In Factor(e) such un-marrying affords a liberated single-story scheme with circular extensions occupying the remainder of the designated lot. Testa|Weiser’s design turns on Sol Lewitt’s black and white Loopy Doopy wall drawing series of 1974, not by chance a collaborative large scale work in which, eliminating any gesture or authority, the composi-tion (a drawing drafted by Lewitt) is executed by a team of work-ers rather than the artist himself. The dual character of the Factor(e)—hermetic production spheres punctuating an open loop of self-driving chassis—is given by the use of contrasting materi-als and morphologies: the shed building is a continuous carbon fiber column/beam structure supporting doubly laid domes; futur-istic micro shells that are imbedded in the fiber reinforced floor slab. If to consider again the Carbon Tower and the Strand Tower (the firm’s two projects recently acquired by the CCA) and their instantiation of iterative computational design, Factor(e) is as iterant. Still, Testa|Weiser’s attempt to knock down the walls be-tween research and production to rethink the way cars are assem-bled— not just in terms of structure and frame but back and forth in the context of what Peugeot Citroën and vehicular transporta-tion might become—is closer to an early stage of a new revolution rather than simply the rethinking of a building type, tower or shed. In this sense, like the empirical experiments on which it builds, Factor(e) is evidence of a new attitude in the conception and formation of our computational/physical world—per Testa, “a third industrial revolution ushering a fourth.”

Amit Wolf is an architect, writer and curator. His atelier is dedicated to developing varied commercial and residential projects in the Los Angeles area. He has curated several exhibi-tions and events collaboratively in Los Angeles and is currently working on the large-scale exhibition Beyond Environment for LACE, examining re-lationships between architecture and performance and land art. At SCI-Arc, Wolf teaches courses in architectural history and theory. He previously taught at Otis, Woodbury University, and UCLA. Wolf is the recipient of the 2007 Clinton Webb Award, the 2012 California Interdisciplinary Consortium of Italian Studies Award, and the 2013 Graham Foundation Award. Wolf’s publications have to date focused on the areas of Italian experimentalist practice as well as on theoretical issues in contemporary architecture. Fabrication Yes and No (2014), his forthcoming book, explores computa-tional advances in the field. Wolf received his M.Arch degree from the Politecnico di Milano and his Doctor of Philosophy in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art from UCLA.

Louis Sullivan, Schlesinger and Mayer department store

1. Carbon Tower, 2002

2. FACTORe, 2012

3. Strand Tower Precursors, 2006

4. Strand Tower, 2006

1

5 THE EMPIRICAL FRAME: PETER TESTA FACULTY PROFILE

Amit Wolf

In their form and pedagogy, Peter Testa’s ESTm studios at SCIArc’s Robot House are empirical operations. An invitation to sit in on one of Testa’s reviews is a rare treat, inasmuch as it engages all the senses, which are given a first hand feel of each experiment’s empiric results. Of more interest than the physicality of these results, however, is their capacity to liberate the discussion from any tedious-mindedness in favor of a posteriori percepts that can cut through and make clear whatever is in the air that week, from objecthood to bio-printing to avant-garde art, all with the precision reserved for a six-axis robotic arm. To give a sense of this achievement, in one instance, a group of students sidestepped recent lengthy close readings of art-architecture relations to unearth surprising links between Conceptual art and Futurism, two currents that formally and ideologically could not be more distinct. Used as a precedent, the students began with Sol Lewitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes of 1974. Lewitt’s serial experiment, with its depiction of the varied forms with which to elude and deny the completion of a cube frame, was recreated as a choreography of robotized prisms. Further, when digitally filmed and spliced, the performance yielded unexpected in-between objects—circular sweeps that underlie Lewitt’s original index and that are akin to Umberto Boccioni’s and Giacomo Balla’s respective dynamisms, constructions capturing motion typical of 1914-1915 Italian Futurism.

Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and trained in the offices of Álvaro Siza in Porto between 1984 and 1986, Testa belongs to that small group of architects who managed to avoid Postmodern American architecture and the protracting 1980s, stretching well into the mid-90s, while also trading academia and discursive practice for the computational advances unique at the time to MIT. Indeed, returning to MIT as an associate professor via Bernard Tschumi’s Columbia (two institutions in which architecture has never been deadlocked in the academic erudition of language and text, and in which technological experimentation was nearly indifferent to the self-imposed checks and boundaries of critical, ‘autonomous’ discourse), Testa understands computational innovation in all its forms as the sole remaining agent for the development of vigorous, novel architectures.

Testa first came into his own in a series of prototype composite towers developed in 2000 with Devyn Weiser, co-principle of the Los Angeles based architecture firm Testa|Weiser. The determining agent in these vertical structures, as in the firm’s later work, is computational vitalism that serves to re-imagine form in relation to structural and material computations and to create within such relays microcosms in which, as Testa affirmed, “materials are no longer fixed substances and morphogenesis supersedes form.” While not dissimilar to the ambitions of other digital proponents to come out of Tschumi’s tenure at Columbia (Greg Lynn and Hani Rashid, to name but a few), Testa has benefited from MIT’s disciplinary open-endedness and therefore from an empirical approach to both advanced materials and software that distinguishes him from his peers. The reiterative scripting templates developed with his MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG) would challenge a receding pallet of rotational and scalar formal operations as well as then parallel computational experiments in emergent form. These included the templates AgencyGP, GENR8, and Weaver™, all pivotal to Testa|Weiser’s later work. For an office building prototype for Herman Miller, by his account, Testa would produce nothing but “populations of design”—vital ontologies of design permutations that were made possible by software agents, themselves refitted to the standard software

package to effect the envelopes’ myriad curves. As a result, the scheme is far removed from the typical imagery of architectural computation circa 2000, evoking more than anything else Mies van der Rohe’s Glasarchitekture of 1920-22: the ephemeras of the Friedrichstrasse competition entry and the Glass Skyscraper, still unburdened by the curtain wall. Notably, the latter 1922 scheme was a more or less programmatic demonstration of experiments in curved glass prisms, which were conducted by Mies to empirically determine the concave/convex curvature of the glass.

That Testa’s is an empirical exploration, a discovery as much as an architectural project, is clear from Testa|Weiser’s two tower schemes: The Carbon Tower, prototyped by 3D Systems Inc. in 2004; and The Strand Tower and Precursors commissioned by MOCA in 2006 and designed with Emily White. Owing much of their complex bundle-like configurations to the EDG Weaver™ script template, these vertical structures renounce the basic core-envelop logic common to American speculative buildings. The former enfolds a spiraling ramp and three elevator pods, forming a spiraling exoskeleton; the latter relinquishes the core-envelop dyad altogether to develop a technique combining robotic and human labors within a single structure. Regardless of such strong, compelling objectives, Testa seems to have experienced real difficulty in these two schemes, but also real advances, within the more routine aspects of the modern tower frame, bringing it to term with other pressing questions of contemporary machine production, namely robotics and the materiality of composites. The tower frame, underwritten with compressive/tensile moments and code provisions, can be briefly summarized here to illustrate this difficulty. Before William L.B. Jenney’s Fair Store, built in Chicago between 1890 and 1891, the great problem of the rentable multistory building was the proviso of a fireproofed steel frame that can absorb variedly directed load intensities. Jenney’s steel frame overcame this difficulty through an assembly of concrete

and tile slabs. These slabs were laid over (concrete) and in-between (hollowed tiles) beam and girder as to resist local stress, complementing the wind girts and providing fire insulation.

Jenney and the intimate corollary of Modern architecture’s assemblage logic to the Chicago frame have been widely discussed by the likes of Sigfried Giedion and Colin Rowe; Kenneth Frampton disclosed the influence of the Chicago School on Adolf Loos, remarking on the Viennese architect’s Chicago period and its part in the conception of Le Corbusier’s Domino frame. Less discussed, perhaps, are the dynamics implicit to the erection of steel frames: the lifting, rigging, and detailing as well

Peter Testa is Principal-in-Charge of Design at TESTA|WEISER and founding director of the MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG). His work is exhibited at leading museums and galleries worldwide, including recent shows in Los Angeles, New York London, Tokyo, and Beijing. He is the author of two books and more than 30 research papers on architecture, design, computation and robotics. His work is regularly published in international art, architecture, design, engineering, and scientific journals as well as major newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Times of London. Testa was Associate Professor of Architecture at MIT, and has also taught at Columbia University GSAPP, Harvard University GSD, and the University of California. Since 2004 he has been a member of the Design Faculty at SCI-Arc, teaching XLAB advanced design studios and seminars. Testa holds an S.M. Arch.S. from MIT. He is the recipient of the MIT Innovation Award, three Graham Foundation Awards, and the Design Arts Award of the National Endowment for the Arts.

W.B. Jenney, Fair Store

Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper

4

6

as the schedule and the standards entailed by specialized products and labor. The last fact, that of human labor, would find its most immediate, delicate expression with Louis Sullivan and a parallel economy of decorative, filigreed terracotta structures (rendered legendary by omission in Giedion’s Space Time and Architecture depicting a stripped-down detail from Sullivan’s Schlesinger and Mayer department store, Chicago, 1899-1904). Far from decided, questions of the frame structure and its secondary expressions have persisted and expanded beyond Modernism (together with the respective budgets of material transfers, work scheduling, structural and standard reviews, as well as progressively more elaborate façade systems, all echoing Sullivan’s ornaments). Closer in kind to Jenney, Testa’s tower propositions pioneer a system of construction—a structure that is as responsive to technical developments in construction as it is cautious of erecting secondary expressions of itself. Indeed, at their best, the Carbon Tower and The Strand Tower and Precursors propositions eliminate the spontaneous addition of secondary structures,

leaving standing only bereft, if complex, frames: strand structures of carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) which are extruded, fused, and bonded (pultruded) rather than assembled.

That the question is as materialist as much as material (CFRP pultrusions) is given by the Carbon Tower’s complete control of means to ends: the primary structure is erected in-situ using robotic pultruders: spiders weaving a tower of taut strands, spider webs seeking form following the logic of the Weaver™ platform. This productivism, the architects’ control of means to an end, has been further refined since 2004 in Testa’s SCI-Arc studios, seminars, and theses. These efforts culminated in 2011 in the Robot House initiative—a platform of six Staübli robots inaugurated by Director Eric Moss and Academic Affairs Director Hsinming Fung, with the support of the Board of Directors. In its three years, the initiative has benefited from grants supporting teaching and research fellowships, with fellows carrying out advanced research with an emphasis on constructing a new digital/physical design platform.

Initiated and designed by Testa|Weiser, the Robot House effects the communication between the architect and the robot. To that end, the Robot House has set up the task of scripting a plug-in interface capable of addressing a uniquely collaborative, synchronic production model. Termed Esperant.0, and developed by SCI-Arc graduates Brandon Kruysman, Jonathan Proto, and Curime Batliner, the Maya plug-in underscores the reiterative process that extends between the robot and the software by organizing new software templates. Aiming at a more exacting, fluent management of student-designed end tools (or rigs), these templates intervene in the very logic of robotic manufacturing, for example, supplementing Maya’s kinematics solvers (the kinematic computations determining the specific position of the end tool). In turn, rather than determined, the tool’s position becomes relative and complex, excluding the rigid, axial end tool positioning of

conventional kinematic computation. Judging by its outputs, this is one of the Robot House’s intrinsic strengths. By re-imagining kinematics, for example, amalgamating forward kinematics (end joint kinematics concerned with the rig) with inverse kinematics (axial or joint kinematics), Testa has been able to expand the Robot House’s initial formal range, and therefore its range of objects. These include ambiguous geometries that emerge from a polyurethane sphere, caressed by cool heating guns, and tower schemes that grow out of a photo-induced resin substrate. Testa|Weiser’s influence is particularly evident in the latter case, effecting not only the material quality of the tower-object but also its parti.

Two themes recently carried over from the Robot House to Testa|Weiser with their latest project, Factor(e), a factory ideated for the Peugeot Citroën EV division. The first is the spherical arrangement of robotic production, owed to the end tools reach limits, a limit also at the base of the Robot House’s collaborative, synchronous model. In Factor(e) this paradigm sees the robots stacked within an enclosed spherical production cell. In contrast to traditional models where production robots operate externally to the body shell, Testa|Weiser re-imagine the inverted setting with smaller, more agile robots effecting the production from within. Per Testa|Weiser, the inversion entails the eclipsing of sheet metal related labor of conventional body shell production (pressing, welding, and paint processes) by rapid, continuous modulation of fast curing composites. The second theme is intimately linked to the Robot House’s novel conception of production, i.e., the un-marrying of Peugeot Citroën EV from the linear, conveyer belt model of industrial manufacturing and, therefore, the rethinking of the production space itself. In Factor(e) such un-marrying affords a liberated single-story scheme with circular extensions occupying the remainder of the designated lot. Testa|Weiser’s design turns on Sol Lewitt’s black and white Loopy Doopy wall drawing series of 1974, not by chance a collaborative large scale work in which, eliminating any gesture or authority, the composition (a drawing drafted by Lewitt) is executed by a team of workers rather than the artist himself. The dual character of the Factor(e)—hermetic production spheres punctuating an open loop of self-driving chassis—is given by the use of contrasting materials and morphologies: the shed building is a continuous carbon fiber column/beam structure supporting doubly laid domes; futuristic micro shells that are imbedded in the fiber reinforced floor slab. If to consider again the Carbon Tower and the Strand Tower (the firm’s two projects recently acquired by the CCA) and their instantiation of iterative computational design, Factor(e) is as iterant. Still, Testa|Weiser’s attempt to knock down the walls between research and production to rethink the way cars are assembled— not just in terms of structure and frame but back and forth in the context of what Peugeot Citroën and vehicular transportation might become—is closer to an early stage of a new revolution rather than simply the rethinking of a building type, tower or shed. In this sense, like the empirical experiments on which it builds, Factor(e) is evidence of a new attitude in the conception and formation of our computational/physical world—per Testa, “a third industrial revolution ushering a fourth.”

Amit Wolf is an architect, writer and curator. His atelier is dedicated to developing varied commercial and residential projects in the Los Angeles area. He has curated several exhibitions and events collaboratively in Los Angeles and is currently working on the large-scale exhibition Beyond Environment for LACE, examining relationships between architecture and performance and land art. At SCI-Arc, Wolf teaches courses in architectural history and theory. He previously taught at Otis, Woodbury University, and UCLA. Wolf is the recipient of the 2007 Clinton Webb Award, the 2012 California Interdisciplinary Consortium of Italian Studies Award, and the 2013 Graham Foundation Award. Wolf’s publications have to date focused on the areas of Italian experimentalist practice as well as on theoretical issues in contemporary architecture. Fabrication Yes and No (2014), his forthcoming book, explores computational advances in the field. Wolf received his M.Arch degree from the Politecnico di Milano and his Doctor of Philosophy in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art

Louis Sullivan, Schlesinger and Mayer department store

1. Carbon Tower, 2002

2. FACTORe, 2012

3. Strand Tower Precursors, 2006

4. Strand Tower, 2006

5 THE EMPIRICAL FRAME: PETER TESTA FACULTY PROFILE

Amit Wolf

In their form and pedagogy, Peter Testa’s ESTm studios at SCIArc’s Robot House are empirical operations. An invitation to sit in on one of Testa’s reviews is a rare treat, inasmuch as it engages all the senses, which are given a first hand feel of each experiment’s empiric results. Of more interest than the physicality of these results, however, is their capacity to liberate the discussion from any tedious-mindedness in favor of a posteriori percepts that can cut through and make clear whatever is in the air that week, from objecthood to bio-printing to avant-garde art, all with the precision reserved for a six-axis robotic arm. To give a sense of this achievement, in one instance, a group of students sidestepped recent lengthy close readings of art-architecture relations to unearth surprising links between Conceptual art and Futurism, two currents that formally and ideologically could not be more distinct. Used as a precedent, the students began with Sol Lewitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes of 1974. Lewitt’s serial experiment, with its depiction of the varied forms with which to elude and deny the completion of a cube frame, was recreated as a choreography of robotized prisms. Further, when digitally filmed and spliced, the performance yielded unexpected in-between objects—circular sweeps that underlie Lewitt’s original index and that are akin to Umberto Boccioni’s and Giacomo Balla’s respective dynamisms, constructions capturing motion typical of 1914-1915 Italian Futurism.

Educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and trained in the offices of Álvaro Siza in Porto between 1984 and 1986, Testa belongs to that small group of architects who managed to avoid Postmodern American architecture and the protracting 1980s, stretching well into the mid-90s, while also trading academia and discursive practice for the computational advances unique at the time to MIT. Indeed, returning to MIT as an associate professor via Bernard Tschumi’s Columbia (two institutions in which architecture has never been deadlocked in the academic erudition of language and text, and in which technological experimentation was nearly indifferent to the self-imposed checks and boundaries of critical, ‘autonomous’ discourse), Testa understands computational innovation in all its forms as the sole remaining agent for the development of vigorous, novel architectures.

Testa first came into his own in a series of prototype composite towers developed in 2000 with Devyn Weiser, co-principle of the Los Angeles based architecture firm Testa|Weiser. The determining agent in these vertical structures, as in the firm’s later work, is computational vitalism that serves to re-imagine form in relation to structural and material computations and to create within such relays microcosms in which, as Testa affirmed, “materials are no longer fixed substances and morphogenesis supersedes form.” While not dissimilar to the ambitions of other digital proponents to come out of Tschumi’s tenure at Columbia (Greg Lynn and Hani Rashid, to name but a few), Testa has benefited from MIT’s disciplinary open-endedness and therefore from an empirical approach to both advanced materials and software that distinguishes him from his peers. The reiterative scripting templates developed with his MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG) would challenge a receding pallet of rotational and scalar formal operations as well as then parallel computational experiments in emergent form. These included the templates AgencyGP, GENR8, and Weaver™, all pivotal to Testa|Weiser’s later work. For an office building prototype for Herman Miller, by his account, Testa would produce nothing but “populations of design”—vital ontologies of design permutations that were made possible by software agents, themselves refitted to the standard software

package to effect the envelopes’ myriad curves. As a result, the scheme is far removed from the typical imagery of architectural computation circa 2000, evoking more than anything else Mies van der Rohe’s Glasarchitekture of 1920-22: the ephemeras of the Friedrichstrasse competition entry and the Glass Skyscraper, still unburdened by the curtain wall. Notably, the latter 1922 scheme was a more or less programmatic demonstration of experiments in curved glass prisms, which were conducted by Mies to empirically determine the concave/convex curvature of the glass.

That Testa’s is an empirical exploration, a discovery as much as an architectural project, is clear from Testa|Weiser’s two tower schemes: The Carbon Tower, prototyped by 3D Systems Inc. in 2004; and The Strand Tower and Precursors commissioned by MOCA in 2006 and designed with Emily White. Owing much of their complex bundle-like configurations to the EDG Weaver™ script template, these vertical structures renounce the basic core-envelop logic common to American speculative buildings. The former enfolds a spiraling ramp and three elevator pods, forming a spiraling exoskeleton; the latter relinquishes the core-envelop dyad altogether to develop a technique combining robotic and human labors within a single structure. Regardless of such strong, compelling objectives, Testa seems to have experienced real difficulty in these two schemes, but also real advances, within the more routine aspects of the modern tower frame, bringing it to term with other pressing questions of contemporary machine production, namely robotics and the materiality of composites. The tower frame, underwritten with compressive/tensile moments and code provisions, can be briefly summarized here to illustrate this difficulty. Before William L.B. Jenney’s Fair Store, built in Chicago between 1890 and 1891, the great problem of the rentable multistory building was the proviso of a fireproofed steel frame that can absorb variedly directed load intensities. Jenney’s steel frame overcame this difficulty through an assembly of concrete

and tile slabs. These slabs were laid over (concrete) and in-between (hollowed tiles) beam and girder as to resist local stress, complementing the wind girts and providing fire insulation.

Jenney and the intimate corollary of Modern architecture’s assemblage logic to the Chicago frame have been widely discussed by the likes of Sigfried Giedion and Colin Rowe; Kenneth Frampton disclosed the influence of the Chicago School on Adolf Loos, remarking on the Viennese architect’s Chicago period and its part in the conception of Le Corbusier’s Domino frame. Less discussed, perhaps, are the dynamics implicit to the erection of steel frames: the lifting, rigging, and detailing as well

Peter Testa is Principal-in-Charge of Design at TESTA|WEISER and founding director of the MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG). His work is exhibited at leading museums and galleries worldwide, including recent shows in Los Angeles, New York London, Tokyo, and Beijing. He is the author of two books and more than 30 research papers on architecture, design, computation and robotics. His work is regularly published in international art, architecture, design, engineering, and scientific journals as well as major newspapers including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Times of London. Testa was Associate Professor of Architecture at MIT, and has also taught at Columbia University GSAPP, Harvard University GSD, and the University of California. Since 2004 he has been a member of the Design Faculty at SCI-Arc, teaching XLAB advanced design studios and seminars. Testa holds an S.M. Arch.S. from MIT. He is the recipient of the MIT Innovation Award, three Graham Foundation Awards, and the Design Arts Award of the National Endowment for the Arts.

W.B. Jenney, Fair Store

Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper

2

3

6

as the schedule and the standards entailed by specialized products and labor. The last fact, that of human labor, would find its most immediate, delicate expression with Louis Sullivan and a parallel economy of decorative, filigreed terracotta structures (rendered legendary by omission in Giedion’s Space Time and Architecture depicting a stripped-down detail from Sullivan’s Schlesinger and Mayer department store, Chicago, 1899-1904). Far from decided, questions of the frame structure and its secondary expressions have persisted and expanded beyond Modernism (together with the respective budgets of material transfers, work scheduling, structural and standard reviews, as well as progressively more elaborate façade systems, all echoing Sullivan’s ornaments). Closer in kind to Jenney, Testa’s tower propositions pioneer a system of construction—a structure that is as responsive to technical developments in construction as it is cautious of erecting secondary expressions of itself. Indeed, at their best, the Carbon Tower and The Strand Tower and Precursors propositions eliminate the spontaneous addition of secondary structures,

leaving standing only bereft, if complex, frames: strand structures of carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) which are extruded, fused, and bonded (pultruded) rather than assembled.

That the question is as materialist as much as material (CFRP pultrusions) is given by the Carbon Tower’s complete control of means to ends: the primary structure is erected in-situ using robotic pultruders: spiders weaving a tower of taut strands, spider webs seeking form following the logic of the Weaver™ platform. This productivism, the architects’ control of means to an end, has been further refined since 2004 in Testa’s SCI-Arc studios, seminars, and theses. These efforts culminated in 2011 in the Robot House initiative—a platform of six Staübli robots inaugurated by Director Eric Moss and Academic Affairs Director Hsinming Fung, with the support of the Board of Directors. In its three years, the initiative has benefited from grants supporting teaching and research fellowships, with fellows carrying out advanced research with an emphasis on constructing a new digital/physical design platform.

Initiated and designed by Testa|Weiser, the Robot House effects the communication between the architect and the robot. To that end, the Robot House has set up the task of scripting a plug-in interface capable of addressing a uniquely collaborative, synchronic production model. Termed Esperant.0, and developed by SCI-Arc graduates Brandon Kruysman, Jonathan Proto, and Curime Batliner, the Maya plug-in underscores the reiterative process that extends between the robot and the software by organizing new software templates. Aiming at a more exacting, fluent management of student-designed end tools (or rigs), these templates intervene in the very logic of robotic manufacturing, for example, supplementing Maya’s kinematics solvers (the kinematic computations determining the specific position of the end tool). In turn, rather than determined, the tool’s position becomes relative and complex, excluding the rigid, axial end tool positioning of

conventional kinematic computation. Judging by its outputs, this is one of the Robot House’s intrinsic strengths. By re-imagining kinematics, for example, amalgamating forward kinematics (end joint kinematics concerned with the rig) with inverse kinematics (axial or joint kinematics), Testa has been able to expand the Robot House’s initial formal range, and therefore its range of objects. These include ambiguous geometries that emerge from a polyurethane sphere, caressed by cool heating guns, and tower schemes that grow out of a photo-induced resin substrate. Testa|Weiser’s influence is particularly evident in the latter case, effecting not only the material quality of the tower-object but also its parti.

Two themes recently carried over from the Robot House to Testa|Weiser with their latest project, Factor(e), a factory ideated for the Peugeot Citroën EV division. The first is the spherical arrangement of robotic production, owed to the end tools reach limits, a limit also at the base of the Robot House’s collaborative, synchronous model. In Factor(e) this paradigm sees the robots stacked within an enclosed spherical production cell. In contrast to traditional models where production robots operate externally to the body shell, Testa|Weiser re-imagine the inverted setting with smaller, more agile robots effecting the production from within. Per Testa|Weiser, the inversion entails the eclipsing of sheet metal related labor of conventional body shell production (pressing, welding, and paint processes) by rapid, continuous modulation of fast curing composites. The second theme is intimately linked to the Robot House’s novel conception of production, i.e., the un-marrying of Peugeot Citroën EV from the linear, conveyer belt model of industrial manufacturing and, therefore, the rethinking of the production space itself. In Factor(e) such un-marrying affords a liberated single-story scheme with circular extensions occupying the remainder of the designated lot. Testa|Weiser’s design turns on Sol Lewitt’s black and white Loopy Doopy wall drawing series of 1974, not by chance a collaborative large scale work in which, eliminating any gesture or authority, the composition (a drawing drafted by Lewitt) is executed by a team of workers rather than the artist himself. The dual character of the Factor(e)—hermetic production spheres punctuating an open loop of self-driving chassis—is given by the use of contrasting materials and morphologies: the shed building is a continuous carbon fiber column/beam structure supporting doubly laid domes; futuristic micro shells that are imbedded in the fiber reinforced floor slab. If to consider again the Carbon Tower and the Strand Tower (the firm’s two projects recently acquired by the CCA) and their instantiation of iterative computational design, Factor(e) is as iterant. Still, Testa|Weiser’s attempt to knock down the walls between research and production to rethink the way cars are assembled— not just in terms of structure and frame but back and forth in the context of what Peugeot Citroën and vehicular transportation might become—is closer to an early stage of a new revolution rather than simply the rethinking of a building type, tower or shed. In this sense, like the empirical experiments on which it builds, Factor(e) is evidence of a new attitude in the conception and formation of our computational/physical world—per Testa, “a third industrial revolution ushering a fourth.”

Amit Wolf is an architect, writer and curator. His atelier is dedicated to developing varied commercial and residential projects in the Los Angeles area. He has curated several exhibitions and events collaboratively in Los Angeles and is currently working on the large-scale exhibition Beyond Environment for LACE, examining relationships between architecture and performance and land art. At SCI-Arc, Wolf teaches courses in architectural history and theory. He previously taught at Otis, Woodbury University, and UCLA. Wolf is the recipient of the 2007 Clinton Webb Award, the 2012 California Interdisciplinary Consortium of Italian Studies Award, and the 2013 Graham Foundation Award. Wolf’s publications have to date focused on the areas of Italian experimentalist practice as well as on theoretical issues in contemporary architecture. Fabrication Yes and No (2014), his forthcoming book, explores computational advances in the field. Wolf received his M.Arch degree from the Politecnico di Milano and his Doctor of Philosophy in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art

Louis Sullivan, Schlesinger and Mayer department store

1. Carbon Tower, 2002

2. FACTORe, 2012

3. Strand Tower Precursors, 2006

4. Strand Tower, 2006

7 NEWS

SCI-ARC WELCOMES RICHARD BAPTIE, TIM DISNEY AND ENRIQUE PEÑALOSA AS NEW TRUSTEES

This September, SCI-Arc elected three new trustees to its ranks: Richard Baptie, Tim Disney and Enrique Peñalosa (above, from left to right).

“SCI-Arc has extended the political reach and intellectual capacity of its Board of Trustees by adding Tim Disney, Richard Baptie, and Enrique Peñalosa to its board,” said Director Eric Owen Moss. “Disney brings a supportive interest in art and design along with expertise in housing pre-fabrication; Baptie is an alum-nus and long-time advocate for architecture education, and a builder with a unique reputation for constructing large and com-plex urban projects; and Peñalosa brings an international political pedigree and an expertise in Latin American urbanism to the SCI-Arc community. Welcome all.”

SCI-Arc’s board is chaired by land-use attorney Jerry Neu-man, and now includes 25 members, among them noted individu-als such as Rick Carter, William Fain, Frank Gehry, Tom Gilm-ore, Thom Mayne, Kevin Ratner, and Ted Tanner. “As one of the highest ranked architectural institutions in the country and among the foremost thought leaders in the world in the areas of planning, design and the built environment, we believe it is important to have a board that reflects that same stature,” stated Neuman. “Dick, Tim and Enrique more than fit that bill, they personify it and I am proud to have them join the school as Trustees.”

Richard Baptie is a Senior Vice President of Hathaway Din-widdie Construction Company and head of the Southern Califor-nia office. He is currently the Principal-in-Charge of the Emerson College construction project in Hollywood, designed by trustee Thom Mayne’s firm Morphosis, among other duties. He has been involved as a leader in many notable projects in Southern Califor-nia including The Getty Center, The Reagan Library Air Force

One Pavilion and the 2000 Avenue of the Stars project. Baptie joined Hathaway Dinwiddie in 1985, having studied Architecture at SCI-Arc. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Economics from California State University, Los Angeles. Involved in the commu-nity, Baptie is on the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Busi-ness Council, The Kidspace Museum, past President of the USC Architectural Guild and has served on the capital campaigns for the Music Center and the Downtown YMCA.

Tim Disney has written, directed or produced 15 feature films, documentaries, and television programs. From 1992–2000, he served as Chairman and CEO of Virtual World Entertainment, a leading developer and operator of 3D gaming and simulation technology. Disney was a founding investor and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Blu Homes Inc., the leading manu-facturer of green pre-fab housing. He also serves as President of The Rowena Group, a private investment firm, and as a Director of Shamrock Capital Advisors, a leading private equity investor in the fields of media, entertainment, and communications. A gradu-ate of Harvard University with a degree in Fine Arts, Disney serves as a Trustee of California Institute of the Arts. He co-founded the international aid organization World Connect, and serves on the Board of several other charitable organizations.

Enrique Peñalosa is an urban strategist whose vision and pro-posals have significantly influenced policies in numerous cities throughout the world. He currently is President of the Board of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy of New York. As Mayor of Colombia’s capital city of Bogotá from 1998–2001, Peñalosa profoundly transformed the city, turning it into an international example for improvements in quality of life, public spaces, mobility and equity. He implemented a model giving pri-ority to children and public spaces and restricting private car use, building schools and libraries in the poorest neighborhoods, as well as adding hundreds of miles of protected bicycle paths, sidewalks, pedestrian streets, bicycle highways, greenways, and parks. Peñalosa has lectured all over the world in governmental, academic and citizens’ forums, and his ideas have been featured in many of the world’s most important media.

REMEMBERING SCI-ARC TRUSTEE BILL GRUEN (1917-2013)

Noted architectural lighting engineer and long-time SCI-Arc trustee Bill Gruen passed away on Sunday, July 14 at his home in Northridge, California. He was 96 years old. Gruen was a lifelong fan of architecture and collaborated with a number of renown architects and interior designers to create customized fixtures and effects. He joined the SCI-Arc board of trustees in 2002, and in 2010, he established the Bill Gruen Endowed Fund.

Director Eric Owen Moss remembers Gruen’s profound pas-sion and commitment to the school. “SCI-Arc grew from Bill’s belief in our capacity to successfully re-invent our pro forma. We thank him for his enduring confidence in SCI-Arc when confi-dence was not to be taken for granted, his proffer of a fiscal hand, especially in the tough times when there weren’t many such of-fers, and for his undying enthusiasm for the on-going architecture adventure here at SCI-Arc. Bill Gruen—we miss you.”

Gruen spent his career working closely with architects and designers. After studying electrical engineering at New York

University, he got his start at General Lighting Company in New York, where he worked with designers including Louis Danziger and Ladislav Sutnar. His cousin Victor Gruen—widely recognized as the inventor of the modern shopping mall—inspired him to move west in 1941, with the plan to expand his practice and en-gage with the growing modern design community of Southern California. In 1946, he and his wife Elaine founded Gruen Light-ing, which soon became a trusted source in modern lighting.

For Gruen, the favorite thing about working with SCI-Arc was being able to help the students. “Establishing the Bill Gruen Endowment Fund was a given for me,” said Gruen when announc-ing his SCI-Arc pledge three years ago. “I knew I needed to do something to make sure students were able to enroll and stay en-rolled in SCI-Arc. They are our future and the future of the archi-tecture profession.” Gruen was preceded in death by his wife, Elaine Gruen.

8

BOOK BY JOE DAY SURVEYS NEW ARCHITECTURES FOR THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED

The United States holds over two million inmates in its prisons and jails, and hosts over two million daily visits to museums—in both, more than a ten-fold increase over the last fifty years. A new book by SCI-Arc trustee and alumnus Joe Day (M.Arch ’94), Corrections and Collections, Architectures for Art and Crime examines how architectures of exhibition and discipline now dominate the American landscape, the ways in which the two typologies complement one another, and why we’ve become a society of more and more extreme freedoms and constraints.

Day shows that the surging demand for both museums and prisons has spurred architects to gamble on new design possibili-ties and experiment with their scale and distribution through US cities. He charts cross-pollination between these building types, beginning with an unlikely convergence in Minimalism, and esca-lating through a wealth of diverse millennial holding spaces.

Joe Day is design principal of deegan-day design and teaches at SCI-Arc and Yale School of Architecture. In 2009, he contrib-uted a new foreword to Reyner Banham’s seminal study Los An-geles: Architecture of the Four Ecologies (UC Press). Published by Routledge Press, Corrections and Collections was completed with a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

A book discussion with Joe Day and Director Eric Owen Moss was hosted at SCI-Arc in October, and can be viewed at the SCI-Arc Media Archive (sma.sciarc.edu). Day’s book is available for purchase on Amazon.com and at the SCI-Arc Supply Store.

SCI-ARC WELCOMES PARENTS TO CAMPUS

The last week in August marked a successful beginning to SCI-Arc’s 41st year. Over 180 new students were welcomed to the school during the three-day event. Orientation week concluded with a welcome reception for parents followed by a whole-school reception. Parents joined the event from all regions of the globe, including Canada, Greece, Korea, Lebanon, India, Venezuela, and Spain—no surprise given the impressive international makeup of SCI-Arc’s student body. Directors were on hand at the event to welcome families to SCI-Arc and offer them the opportunity to learn more about the school.

MANFERDINI RECEIVES 2013 ACADIA AWARD FOR INNOVATIVE RESEARCH, AIA LA EDUCATOR AWARD

Design faculty Elena Manferdini received two coveted awards earlier this fall recognizing her contributions to architecture and design and her efforts to push the architectural profession forward.

The AIA/LA awarded Manferdini with their 2013 Educator Award at the institute’s annual gala held October 28th at the Broad Stage at Santa Monica College. Presidential honorees this year included Frank Gehry, Johnston Marklee, Michael Govan and Los Angeles City Mayor Eric Garcetti. Previous AIA Educa-tor Awards were conferred to Director Eric Owen Moss in 2006 and Graduate Programs Chair Hernan Diaz Alonso in 2012.

Also this fall, Manferdini received a 2013 Innovative Re-search Award from the Association of Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) for her research contributions to digi-tal design in architecture. She was honored at ACADIA’s 2013 Adaptive Architecture International Conference on October 24th, alongside prominent winners such as Brett Steele of the Archi-tectural Association, London, and Greg Lynn of FORM.

Manferdini, who is principal of Los Angeles-based Atelier Manferdini, lectures and exhibits around the world. Some of her recent exhibitions include Massive Projection, an installation at the 5th edition of the Gwangju Design Biennale in Korea, Asia’s first and most prestigious contemporary art biennale; the Tempera Pavilion exhibited in the MOCA’s A New Sculpturalism survey of Los Angeles contemporary architecture; and Smeared Projec-tions, exhibited in the DADA show at the 2013 Beijing Biennale.

Manferdini teaches visual studies, design and advanced verti-cal studios at SCI-Arc, and coordinates the school’s Graduate Thesis program.

GRADUATE THESIS WEEKEND & GRADUATION

9

On Sunday, September 8th, SCI-Arc hosted its commencement ceremony for the 2013 graduating class, welcoming more than 850 guests who came to celebrate the 160 graduates and undergradu-ates receiving their degrees. Constructed with the support of a prestigious ArtPlace America grant, the towering pavilion de-signed by Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of PATTERNS, with its intricate system of textiles wrapped around the steel frame, shielded the audience from the Southern California sun, becoming brightly saturated with color as the sun set behind it. After an introduction by Director Eric Owen Moss, the invited commencement speakers followed—here are excerpts of their speeches:

Jean-Louis Cohen

SCI-Arc is unquestionably a remarkable, unique, institution, the radiation of which far reaches beyond this side of the world. Its destiny has been defined in the past four decades since its creation in 1972 by its location at the intersection of two phenomena that interest me vividly. The first phenomenon is the culture of subver-sion and innovation in modern and contemporary architectural education, as it has developed in the past five decades; the second deals with the original architectural culture that has developed in Los Angeles, where SCI-Arc has dug its roots. In a certain way, I discovered both at the same time. In the summer of 1981, I was for the first time in Los Angeles—and the US—since, as a conspic-uous, engaged, leftist, I had been denied American visas until then. Among the encounters I vividly remember was a meeting I had one morning with Michael Rotondi, then the director of SCI-Arc, and a brief visit at the school.

After having been actively engaged in the destruction of one of the most formidable of them—the École des Beaux Arts in Paris—I found at SCI-Arc an echo of what had been happening since 1968 with the new schools in France and part of Europe, where new didactic protocols were implemented by young archi-tects hostile to the suffocating professional establishment. Euro-pean schools were still diffident in respect to design, which they misunderstood as being unavoidably corrupted by the profession’s expectations, and focused on social sciences or on scientific pur-suits, reducing studio work to timid explorations. In contrast, a new design culture was being shaped at SCI-Arc, with an experi-mental perspective. Experimental in its definition of space, in its understanding of construction, and in its exploration of new geom-etries. It is very clear that SCI-Arc has found for itself a unique place in the galaxy of architectural education, as it has morphed away from its initial character of an alternative regional school to become a point of intensity in the globalized network of schools. This network is characterized not only by the mobility of faculty and students, but also by the fluid circulation of ideas and forms between the peculiar entities that schools of architecture constitute.

The first architectural academies had been instituted in order to disseminate the canons of classicism, and the main schools that emerged in the 19th century were meant to educate the students in a spirit of reproduction and conformity. The new institutions that emerged after the First World War had a different perspective: training architects for modern industry and modern programs, at the Bauhaus; or training architects at the service of the revolution, at Moscow’s Vkhutemas. In both cases, the experience of the wood or metal workshops was considered as important as the knowledge of the fundamentals of design. SCI-Arc has inherited several features from these schools, in order to institutionalize subversion, most notably through its insistence on virtuoso craftmanship.

In concrete terms, the training of architects cannot be limited however to the realm of the schools, even the most daring ones, and the culture of young designers is not only shaped by their masters’ example and the experience of the studios. Three compo-nents are in fact intertwined in the making of young professionals. The first one is what I would call the explicit training provided by the schools’ courses and studios. The second component deals with the experience gained by students outside of the school in the firms where most of them work. Just think of prominent figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier, who received only, if at all, a brief and shallow academic educa-tion, and were taught by their bosses, respectively Louis Sullivan, Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens, and Auguste Perret.

The third component is more elusive. It is relative to what I would call the “cultural bath” in which students are floating, that is the urban context in which their life unfolds and in which their understanding of architecture and of society at large is shaped. It is precisely there that we encounter the second phenomenon I have mentioned—the significance of Los Angeles’s architecture culture today. Since early 20th century, Los Angeles has been a laboratory for architectural invention, thanks to the combined ambitions of adventurous patrons and radical architects. The labors of several generations of designers have created a multilayered network of imaginative building types and of remarkable houses, even if the overall landscape of the metropolis cannot be considered a harmo-nious one. Since Reyner Banham published his pioneering book in 1971, due tribute has been paid to the early modernists, and to postwar designers. Now the “heretic” forces that have shaped the current scene since the 1970s are acknowledged as having created a strong, non-standard, and pluralist culture.

Significant ideas and forms originating in Los Angeles now reach the wide world, from Europe to Asia, and Latin America. A similar, centrifugal, pattern can be discerned in architectural education. As the students’ work discussed today confirms it, SCI-Arc carries values of imagination and experimentation capable of reconfiguring thought and practice well beyond the 10, 101, and even the 110 freeways.

Eva Franch i Gilabert

If we look to the world we have outside of this fence, we might find ourselves in a society immersed in a ‘consumer culture’ where desires and citizens, perhaps called users, are being con-structed through marketing and fashion models where play does not equal anymore freedom, but numbness perhaps; and where politics and wars do not construct democracies, if they ever did; and economy is a global, ever-present game unable to be played by the 99% of the world. We are constantly exposed to a culture to consume, to a political system we hardly believe, and to an econo-my we cannot even understand and even less control. And the question is: Where is architecture within this all?

Before you entered this school, you all had an idea about what architecture was. And now, after all these readings, all these draw-ings, all these words, all these sleepless passionate nights with coffees, you all have another idea of what architecture is, and I want you to hold into it. I want you to grab it. I want you to write it down in your heads right now. So, what is architecture? Architec-ture is dealing with it all. Architecture is the discipline that has the duty but also the privilege to articulate the different desires and the different realities of society in a particular moment in time. Architecture has the ability to bring together the social, the politi-cal, the economical, all in the orchestration of a collective aspira-tion trying to understand who we are as citizens of a world that we constantly keep on constructing. But more importantly,

JEAN-LOUIS COHEN is the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at the Institute of the Fine Arts at New York University. Trained as an architect and historian in Paris, Cohen has taught in Europe and North America. From 1998 to 2003 he directed the Institut francais d’architecture and since 1999 the Musée des Monuments Francais. Cohen’s research activity has chiefly focused on twentieth-century archi-tecture and urban planning. In particu-lar, he has studied German and Soviet architectural cultures, colonial situa-tions in North Africa and interpreted extensively Le Corbusier’s work and Paris planning history He has been a curator for numerous exhibitions in Europe and North America. His re-search has focused on 20th century architecture and urban planning in France, Russia, Germany, and North Africa, resulting in numerous exhibi-tions and publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the author of a number of books on Le Corbusier in-cluding Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, as well as other books such as Casablanca, Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures and Above Paris.

Featured are the 2013 Gehry Prize winning thesis, and the nine graduate thesis projects recognized with a merit award.

1.Stefano Pessari (M.Arch 2), Office Building, 2013 Gehry Prize

2.Mackenzie Elaine Murphy (M.Arch 2)Architecture of Affair

3.Jonathan H. Schnure (M.Arch 1)Inline Profile

4.Laura Kwak (M.Arch 1)Stroke

5.Emily Chen Choi (M.Arch 1)Deep Façade

6.Elias Arkin (M.Arch 1) My Dinner with Object

10

architecture is the discipline that understands society as a whole, being able to be an advocate for those ones who are not able to sit down in the decision making table. Architecture sits there for all. It is the duty of the architect to be the spokesperson for those ones who do not have the power to decide the cities, the architectures, and the territories we actually live in.

You came to SCI-Arc to learn what architecture was, yet you have received the best education possible—an invitation to figure out what architecture could and should be. And tomorrow, when you all face your loans, your new moves, your licensing desires, your desires for other skills, do not forget what you have learned in here. The school has given you the time to construct who you are; and even if that picture is still a bit blurry, it will sharpen really fast. Having studied in Europe, I did not have the luxury and the privilege that you had. I received the education of what archi-tecture was.

In this path of discovery of what architecture has been to what it could be, only your own madness has and will drive you. To my students I always say, “I cannot teach you madness, I can only teach you rigor.” Yet, honestly, the only thing that interests me is the madness that each one of you carries inside. As the Director for Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, my job is actu-ally to help everyone bring our collective madness inside, out. At schools, it is always within thesis that one finds the highest exam-ples, the best evidences that demonstrate a school’s ability to bring the madness of its student body inside out. These last two days have been a spectacle of madness. There have been beautiful, sub-lime madnesses, one after the other; and you need to keep on pur-suing them and unveiling them and bringing yourself inside out.

You have heard many times: Follow your dreams, follow your passions. But you know what? Dreams are super hard to remem-ber. And passions, one cannot even follow them. They go faster than one does. One is always somehow behind them. But architec-ture, once you actually almost master it, is able to build dreams that everyone can remember. And different than passions, archi-tecture does not only move mountains, it makes mountains. So, forget the dreams and forget the passions; just focus on architec-ture. My advice is to let your madness act and do that what you cannot avoid doing. But let me give you a piece of warning. To-morrow can be a hard day. What architect you choose to be is in your hands to decide. I do believe that actually there are three growing models of architects. These three types are what I call the enabler, the iconographer, and the agitator.

And who are these three guys? Well, the enabler is the archi-tect that more or less with cynical, cool arguments limits his or her duty or creative task to accommodate the multiplicities of project-ed desires by society with no further questioning on the origin or

nature of the problem posed. With this position, the enabler is extremely similar to the dictator. It doesn’t question anything. It simply has, as clients, ideological constructs, and their intellectual game becomes simply a meta-discourse–an insider’s game–either technical, functional, geometrical, cultural, environmental, social, political, moral or, even in more general terms, and I don’t like to use that word, I would say ‘disciplinary.’

On the other hand, we have the second type of the architect. We have the iconographer. The iconographer is immersed in a drama of signification and communication, plays the frustrating game of difference and sameness. It is the guy who wants to do symbols and icons and easy metaphors for everyone to consume and to eat. And in this place and in this frustrating game of ‘dif-ference and sameness,’ in the search of a frozen firework, that while desiring to be in the realm of the sublime, most of the time just simply stays on the fringe of the banal without ever reaching even the realm of the revolutionary.

And then we have the third type that is the agitator. And who is the agitator? Well, he’s the avant-garde architect—the one who is disturbed, molested, against everything and all, right? He’s just simply playing the game of resistance. He wants to be the enfant terrible whose parents are most of the times in a complicated rela-tionship—the enabler and the iconographer—who need to be killed in an act of terrorism or war.

So with these three categories, users can fulfill their expecta-tions of service and spectacle, and architects can find their jobs. You will find your jobs being an enabler or an iconographer or an agitator. The enabler constructs spaces of habitation of discourse, the iconographer constructs images, and the agitator constructs events that are actually even memorable sometimes. And with these three types, we end up with a service industry; and instead of an architecture culture, we become architecture servants.

There is a fourth type, and for the sake of today, I would say that this type is the savior of this situation—I will call it for to-day’s ceremony the SCI-Arc type. The SCI-Arc type is the archi-tect that is able to be an agitator, an enabler, and an iconographer, all of them at the same time. And this SCI-Arc architect is able to question the wrongs of society; is able to facilitate, not only what society wants, but that what society didn’t know it wanted. It is able to produce a new aesthetic that is able to engulf us with beau-ty, with agency and thought.

The best piece of advice that I can give you is one that it took me a long time to realize, and this is usually what happens with the best things in life; that it just takes a while, and it will take you a while to realize what you really learned in here. When I was 14, I was in the chemistry class and when the professor was going through all the different elements, we arrived to potassium and suddenly she said, “You know, potassium with water is extremely explosive.” So, this brings me to my last piece. The glass is not half full or half empty, there is just simply water to play with, and the only thing that you need to make sure is that you have the right ingredient in your hands. Call it potassium; call it architecture. I know that all of you SCI-Arc students do have that potassium and do have that thing in your hands. Class of 2013, congratulations. All of the speeches from SCI-Arc’s 2013 graduation ceremony can be viewed at the SCI-Arc Media Archive (sma.sciarc.edu).

EVA FRANCH I GILABERT is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture. Franch is a licensed architect, re-searcher, curator, teacher, and found-er in 2003 of OOAA (office of archi-tectural affairs). Prior to joining SFAA, Franch was an artist in residence at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, and di-rected the Masters Thesis studio at Rice University while practicing and building in Catalonia. She studied at TU Delft and earned an M. Arch from ETSAB-UPC, and an M. Arch. II from Princeton University. She has lectured internationally on art, architecture and the importance of alternative practices in the construction and understanding of public life. At Storefront, her proj-ects include a new publication Series, exhibitions POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions and No Shame: Storefront for Sale, and the launching of the Storefront Inter-national Series. More recently, Franch has been selected by the State Department, jointly with a curatorial and design team, to represent the US at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale.

You came to SCI-Arc to learn what architecture was, yet you have received the best education possible—an invitation to figure out what architecture could and should be.

7.2013 Graduate Thesis review

8.Joseph Francis Ramiro (M.Arch 2)Cartooning Disbelief

9.Yong Ha Kim (M.Arch 2)Biological Growth

10.Eric Owen Moss speaking at the graduation ceremony

11.Yi-Chen Li (M.Arch 2)Rendering: Between Drawing and Form

12.Marie-Sophie Starlinger (M.Arch 2)Naked

1

GRADUATE THESIS WEEKEND & GRADUATION

9

On Sunday, September 8th, SCI-Arc hosted its commencement ceremony for the 2013 graduating class, welcoming more than 850 guests who came to celebrate the 160 graduates and undergraduates receiving their degrees. Constructed with the support of a prestigious ArtPlace America grant, the towering pavilion designed by Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of PATTERNS, with its intricate system of textiles wrapped around the steel frame, shielded the audience from the Southern California sun, becoming brightly saturated with color as the sun set behind it. After an introduction by Director Eric Owen Moss, the invited commencement speakers followed—here are excerpts of their speeches:

Jean-Louis Cohen

SCI-Arc is unquestionably a remarkable, unique, institution, the radiation of which far reaches beyond this side of the world. Its destiny has been defined in the past four decades since its creation in 1972 by its location at the intersection of two phenomena that interest me vividly. The first phenomenon is the culture of subversion and innovation in modern and contemporary architectural education, as it has developed in the past five decades; the second deals with the original architectural culture that has developed in Los Angeles, where SCI-Arc has dug its roots. In a certain way, I discovered both at the same time. In the summer of 1981, I was for the first time in Los Angeles—and the US—since, as a conspicuous, engaged, leftist, I had been denied American visas until then. Among the encounters I vividly remember was a meeting I had one morning with Michael Rotondi, then the director of SCI-Arc, and a brief visit at the school.

After having been actively engaged in the destruction of one of the most formidable of them—the École des Beaux Arts in Paris—I found at SCI-Arc an echo of what had been happening since 1968 with the new schools in France and part of Europe, where new didactic protocols were implemented by young architects hostile to the suffocating professional establishment. European schools were still diffident in respect to design, which they misunderstood as being unavoidably corrupted by the profession’s expectations, and focused on social sciences or on scientific pursuits, reducing studio work to timid explorations. In contrast, a new design culture was being shaped at SCI-Arc, with an experimental perspective. Experimental in its definition of space, in its understanding of construction, and in its exploration of new geometries. It is very clear that SCI-Arc has found for itself a unique place in the galaxy of architectural education, as it has morphed away from its initial character of an alternative regional school to become a point of intensity in the globalized network of schools. This network is characterized not only by the mobility of faculty and students, but also by the fluid circulation of ideas and forms between the peculiar entities that schools of architecture constitute.

The first architectural academies had been instituted in order to disseminate the canons of classicism, and the main schools that emerged in the 19th century were meant to educate the students in a spirit of reproduction and conformity. The new institutions that emerged after the First World War had a different perspective: training architects for modern industry and modern programs, at the Bauhaus; or training architects at the service of the revolution, at Moscow’s Vkhutemas. In both cases, the experience of the wood or metal workshops was considered as important as the knowledge of the fundamentals of design. SCI-Arc has inherited several features from these schools, in order to institutionalize subversion, most notably through its insistence on virtuoso

craftmanship. In concrete terms, the training of architects cannot be limited

however to the realm of the schools, even the most daring ones, and the culture of young designers is not only shaped by their masters’ example and the experience of the studios. Three components are in fact intertwined in the making of young professionals. The first one is what I would call the explicit training provided by the schools’ courses and studios. The second component deals with the experience gained by students outside of the school in the firms where most of them work. Just think of prominent figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier, who received only, if at all, a brief and shallow academic education, and were taught by their bosses, respectively Louis Sullivan, Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens, and Auguste Perret.

The third component is more elusive. It is relative to what I would call the “cultural bath” in which students are floating, that is the urban context in which their life unfolds and in which their understanding of architecture and of society at large is shaped. It is precisely there that we encounter the second phenomenon I have mentioned—the significance of Los Angeles’s architecture culture today. Since early 20th century, Los Angeles has been a laboratory for architectural invention, thanks to the combined ambitions of adventurous patrons and radical architects. The labors of several generations of designers have created a multilayered network of imaginative building types and of remarkable houses, even if the overall landscape of the metropolis cannot be considered a harmonious one. Since Reyner Banham published his pioneering book in 1971, due tribute has been paid to the early modernists, and to postwar designers. Now the “heretic” forces that have shaped the current scene since the 1970s are acknowledged as having created a strong, non-standard, and pluralist culture.

Significant ideas and forms originating in Los Angeles now reach the wide world, from Europe to Asia, and Latin America. A similar, centrifugal, pattern can be discerned in architectural education. As the students’ work discussed today confirms it, SCI-Arc carries values of imagination and experimentation capable of reconfiguring thought and practice well beyond the 10, 101, and even the 110 freeways.

Eva Franch i Gilabert

If we look to the world we have outside of this fence, we might find ourselves in a society immersed in a ‘consumer culture’ where desires and citizens, perhaps called users, are being constructed through marketing and fashion models where play does not equal anymore freedom, but numbness perhaps; and where politics and wars do not construct democracies, if they ever did; and economy is a global, ever-present game unable to be played by the 99% of the world. We are constantly exposed to a culture to consume, to a political system we hardly believe, and to an economy we cannot even understand and even less control. And the question is: Where is architecture within this all?

Before you entered this school, you all had an idea about what architecture was. And now, after all these readings, all these drawings, all these words, all these sleepless passionate nights with coffees, you all have another idea of what architecture is, and I want you to hold into it. I want you to grab it. I want you to write it down in your heads right now. So, what is architecture? Architecture is dealing with it all. Architecture is the discipline that has the duty but also the privilege to articulate the different desires and the different realities of society in a particular moment in time. Architecture has the ability to bring together the social, the political, the economical, all in the orchestration of a collective

JEAN-LOUIS COHEN is the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at the Institute of the Fine Arts at New York University. Trained as an architect and historian in Paris, Cohen has taught in Europe and North America. From 1998 to 2003 he directed the Institut francais d’architecture and since 1999 the Musée des Monuments Francais. Cohen’s research activity has chiefly focused on twentieth-century architecture and urban planning. In particular, he has studied German and Soviet architectural cultures, colonial situations in North Africa and interpreted extensively Le Corbusier’s work and Paris planning history He has been a curator for numerous exhibitions in Europe and North America. His research has focused on 20th century architecture and urban planning in France, Russia, Germany, and North Africa, resulting in numerous exhibitions and publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the author of a number of books on Le Corbusier including Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, as well as other books such as Casablanca, Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures and Above Paris.

Featured are the 2013 Gehry Prize winning thesis, and the nine graduate thesis projects recognized with a merit award.

1.Stefano Pessari (M.Arch 2), Office Building, 2013 Gehry Prize

2.Mackenzie Elaine Murphy (M.Arch 2)Architecture of Affair

3.Jonathan H. Schnure (M.Arch 1)Inline Profile

4.Laura Kwak (M.Arch 1)Stroke

5.Emily Chen Choi (M.Arch 1)Deep Façade

6.Elias Arkin (M.Arch 1) My Dinner with Object

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aspiration trying to understand who we are as citizens of a world that we constantly keep on constructing. But more importantly, architecture is the discipline that understands society as a whole, being able to be an advocate for those ones who are not able to sit down in the decision making table. Architecture sits there for all. It is the duty of the architect to be the spokesperson for those ones who do not have the power to decide the cities, the architectures, and the territories we actually live in.

You came to SCI-Arc to learn what architecture was, yet you have received the best education possible—an invitation to figure out what architecture could and should be. And tomorrow, when you all face your loans, your new moves, your licensing desires, your desires for other skills, do not forget what you have learned in here. The school has given you the time to construct who you are; and even if that picture is still a bit blurry, it will sharpen really fast. Having studied in Europe, I did not have the luxury and

the privilege that you had. I received the education of what architecture was.

In this path of discovery of what architecture has been to what it could be, only your own madness has and will drive you. To my students I always say, “I cannot teach you madness, I can only teach you rigor.” Yet, honestly, the only thing that interests me is the madness that each one of you carries inside. As the Director for Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, my job is actually to help everyone bring our collective madness inside, out. At schools, it is always within thesis that one finds the highest examples, the best evidences that demonstrate a school’s ability to bring the madness of its student body inside out. These last two days have been a spectacle of madness. There have been beautiful, sublime madnesses, one after the other; and you need to keep on pursuing them and unveiling them and bringing yourself inside out.

You have heard many times: Follow your dreams, follow your passions. But you know what? Dreams are super hard to remember. And passions, one cannot even follow them. They go faster than one does. One is always somehow behind them. But architecture, once you actually almost master it, is able to build dreams that everyone can remember. And different than passions, architecture does not only move mountains, it makes mountains. So, forget the dreams and forget the passions; just focus on architecture. My advice is to let your madness act and do that what you cannot avoid doing. But let me give you a piece of warning. Tomorrow can be a hard day. What architect you choose to be is in your hands to decide. I do believe that actually there are three growing models of architects. These three types are what I call the enabler, the iconographer, and the agitator.

And who are these three guys? Well, the enabler is the

architect that more or less with cynical, cool arguments limits his or her duty or creative task to accommodate the multiplicities of projected desires by society with no further questioning on the origin or nature of the problem posed. With this position, the enabler is extremely similar to the dictator. It doesn’t question anything. It simply has, as clients, ideological constructs, and their intellectual game becomes simply a meta-discourse–an insider’s game–either technical, functional, geometrical, cultural, environmental, social, political, moral or, even in more general terms, and I don’t like to use that word, I would say ‘disciplinary.’

On the other hand, we have the second type of the architect. We have the iconographer. The iconographer is immersed in a drama of signification and communication, plays the frustrating game of difference and sameness. It is the guy who wants to do symbols and icons and easy metaphors for everyone to consume and to eat. And in this place and in this frustrating game of ‘difference and sameness,’ in the search of a frozen firework, that while desiring to be in the realm of the sublime, most of the time just simply stays on the fringe of the banal without ever reaching even the realm of the revolutionary.

And then we have the third type that is the agitator. And who is the agitator? Well, he’s the avant-garde architect—the one who is disturbed, molested, against everything and all, right? He’s just simply playing the game of resistance. He wants to be the enfant terrible whose parents are most of the times in a complicated relationship—the enabler and the iconographer—who need to be killed in an act of terrorism or war.

So with these three categories, users can fulfill their expectations of service and spectacle, and architects can find their jobs. You will find your jobs being an enabler or an iconographer or an agitator. The enabler constructs spaces of habitation of discourse, the iconographer constructs images, and the agitator constructs events that are actually even memorable sometimes. And with these three types, we end up with a service industry; and instead of an architecture culture, we become architecture servants.

There is a fourth type, and for the sake of today, I would say that this type is the savior of this situation—I will call it for today’s ceremony the SCI-Arc type. The SCI-Arc type is the architect that is able to be an agitator, an enabler, and an iconographer, all of them at the same time. And this SCI-Arc architect is able to question the wrongs of society; is able to facilitate, not only what society wants, but that what society didn’t know it wanted. It is able to produce a new aesthetic that is able to engulf us with beauty, with agency and thought.

The best piece of advice that I can give you is one that it took me a long time to realize, and this is usually what happens with the best things in life; that it just takes a while, and it will take you a while to realize what you really learned in here. When I was 14, I was in the chemistry class and when the professor was going through all the different elements, we arrived to potassium and suddenly she said, “You know, potassium with water is extremely explosive.” So, this brings me to my last piece. The glass is not half full or half empty, there is just simply water to play with, and the only thing that you need to make sure is that you have the right ingredient in your hands. Call it potassium; call it architecture. I know that all of you SCI-Arc students do have that potassium and do have that thing in your hands. Class of 2013, congratulations. All of the speeches from SCI-Arc’s 2013 graduation ceremony can be viewed at the SCI-Arc Media Archive (sma.sciarc.edu).

EVA FRANCH I GILABERT is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture. Franch is a licensed architect, researcher, curator, teacher, and founder in 2003 of OOAA (office of architectural affairs). Prior to joining SFAA, Franch was an artist in residence at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, and directed the Masters Thesis studio at Rice University while practicing and building in Catalonia. She studied at TU Delft and earned an M. Arch from ETSAB-UPC, and an M. Arch. II from Princeton University. She has lectured internationally on art, architecture and the importance of alternative practices in the construction and understanding of public life. At Storefront, her projects include a new publication Series, exhibitions POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions and No Shame: Storefront for Sale, and the launching of the Storefront Inter-national Series. More recently, Franch has been selected by the State Department, jointly with a curatorial and design team, to represent the US at the 2014 Venice Architecture

You came to SCI-Arc to learn what architecture was, yet you have received the best education possible—an invitation to figure out what architecture could and should be.

7.2013 Graduate Thesis review

8.Joseph Francis Ramiro (M.Arch 2)Cartooning Disbelief

9.Yong Ha Kim (M.Arch 2)Biological Growth

10.Eric Owen Moss speaking at the graduation ceremony

11.Yi-Chen Li (M.Arch 2)Rendering: Between Drawing and Form

12.Marie-Sophie Starlinger (M.Arch 2)Naked

GRADUATE THESIS WEEKEND & GRADUATION

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On Sunday, September 8th, SCI-Arc hosted its commencement ceremony for the 2013 graduating class, welcoming more than 850 guests who came to celebrate the 160 graduates and undergraduates receiving their degrees. Constructed with the support of a prestigious ArtPlace America grant, the towering pavilion designed by Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of PATTERNS, with its intricate system of textiles wrapped around the steel frame, shielded the audience from the Southern California sun, becoming brightly saturated with color as the sun set behind it. After an introduction by Director Eric Owen Moss, the invited commencement speakers followed—here are excerpts of their speeches:

Jean-Louis Cohen

SCI-Arc is unquestionably a remarkable, unique, institution, the radiation of which far reaches beyond this side of the world. Its destiny has been defined in the past four decades since its creation in 1972 by its location at the intersection of two phenomena that interest me vividly. The first phenomenon is the culture of subversion and innovation in modern and contemporary architectural education, as it has developed in the past five decades; the second deals with the original architectural culture that has developed in Los Angeles, where SCI-Arc has dug its roots. In a certain way, I discovered both at the same time. In the summer of 1981, I was for the first time in Los Angeles—and the US—since, as a conspicuous, engaged, leftist, I had been denied American visas until then. Among the encounters I vividly remember was a meeting I had one morning with Michael Rotondi, then the director of SCI-Arc, and a brief visit at the school.

After having been actively engaged in the destruction of one of the most formidable of them—the École des Beaux Arts in Paris—I found at SCI-Arc an echo of what had been happening since 1968 with the new schools in France and part of Europe, where new didactic protocols were implemented by young architects hostile to the suffocating professional establishment. European schools were still diffident in respect to design, which they misunderstood as being unavoidably corrupted by the profession’s expectations, and focused on social sciences or on scientific pursuits, reducing studio work to timid explorations. In contrast, a new design culture was being shaped at SCI-Arc, with an experimental perspective. Experimental in its definition of space, in its understanding of construction, and in its exploration of new geometries. It is very clear that SCI-Arc has found for itself a unique place in the galaxy of architectural education, as it has morphed away from its initial character of an alternative regional school to become a point of intensity in the globalized network of schools. This network is characterized not only by the mobility of faculty and students, but also by the fluid circulation of ideas and forms between the peculiar entities that schools of architecture constitute.

The first architectural academies had been instituted in order to disseminate the canons of classicism, and the main schools that emerged in the 19th century were meant to educate the students in a spirit of reproduction and conformity. The new institutions that emerged after the First World War had a different perspective: training architects for modern industry and modern programs, at the Bauhaus; or training architects at the service of the revolution, at Moscow’s Vkhutemas. In both cases, the experience of the wood or metal workshops was considered as important as the knowledge of the fundamentals of design. SCI-Arc has inherited several features from these schools, in order to institutionalize subversion, most notably through its insistence on virtuoso

craftmanship. In concrete terms, the training of architects cannot be limited

however to the realm of the schools, even the most daring ones, and the culture of young designers is not only shaped by their masters’ example and the experience of the studios. Three components are in fact intertwined in the making of young professionals. The first one is what I would call the explicit training provided by the schools’ courses and studios. The second component deals with the experience gained by students outside of the school in the firms where most of them work. Just think of prominent figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier, who received only, if at all, a brief and shallow academic education, and were taught by their bosses, respectively Louis Sullivan, Bruno Paul and Peter Behrens, and Auguste Perret.

The third component is more elusive. It is relative to what I would call the “cultural bath” in which students are floating, that is the urban context in which their life unfolds and in which their understanding of architecture and of society at large is shaped. It is precisely there that we encounter the second phenomenon I have mentioned—the significance of Los Angeles’s architecture culture today. Since early 20th century, Los Angeles has been a laboratory for architectural invention, thanks to the combined ambitions of adventurous patrons and radical architects. The labors of several generations of designers have created a multilayered network of imaginative building types and of remarkable houses, even if the overall landscape of the metropolis cannot be considered a harmonious one. Since Reyner Banham published his pioneering book in 1971, due tribute has been paid to the early modernists, and to postwar designers. Now the “heretic” forces that have shaped the current scene since the 1970s are acknowledged as having created a strong, non-standard, and pluralist culture.

Significant ideas and forms originating in Los Angeles now reach the wide world, from Europe to Asia, and Latin America. A similar, centrifugal, pattern can be discerned in architectural education. As the students’ work discussed today confirms it, SCI-Arc carries values of imagination and experimentation capable of reconfiguring thought and practice well beyond the 10, 101, and even the 110 freeways.

Eva Franch i Gilabert

If we look to the world we have outside of this fence, we might find ourselves in a society immersed in a ‘consumer culture’ where desires and citizens, perhaps called users, are being constructed through marketing and fashion models where play does not equal anymore freedom, but numbness perhaps; and where politics and wars do not construct democracies, if they ever did; and economy is a global, ever-present game unable to be played by the 99% of the world. We are constantly exposed to a culture to consume, to a political system we hardly believe, and to an economy we cannot even understand and even less control. And the question is: Where is architecture within this all?

Before you entered this school, you all had an idea about what architecture was. And now, after all these readings, all these drawings, all these words, all these sleepless passionate nights with coffees, you all have another idea of what architecture is, and I want you to hold into it. I want you to grab it. I want you to write it down in your heads right now. So, what is architecture? Architecture is dealing with it all. Architecture is the discipline that has the duty but also the privilege to articulate the different desires and the different realities of society in a particular moment in time. Architecture has the ability to bring together the social, the political, the economical, all in the orchestration of a collective

JEAN-LOUIS COHEN is the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at the Institute of the Fine Arts at New York University. Trained as an architect and historian in Paris, Cohen has taught in Europe and North America. From 1998 to 2003 he directed the Institut francais d’architecture and since 1999 the Musée des Monuments Francais. Cohen’s research activity has chiefly focused on twentieth-century architecture and urban planning. In particular, he has studied German and Soviet architectural cultures, colonial situations in North Africa and interpreted extensively Le Corbusier’s work and Paris planning history He has been a curator for numerous exhibitions in Europe and North America. His research has focused on 20th century architecture and urban planning in France, Russia, Germany, and North Africa, resulting in numerous exhibitions and publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He is the author of a number of books on Le Corbusier including Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, as well as other books such as Casablanca, Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures and Above Paris.

Featured are the 2013 Gehry Prize winning thesis, and the nine graduate thesis projects recognized with a merit award.

1.Stefano Pessari (M.Arch 2), Office Building, 2013 Gehry Prize

2.Mackenzie Elaine Murphy (M.Arch 2)Architecture of Affair

3.Jonathan H. Schnure (M.Arch 1)Inline Profile

4.Laura Kwak (M.Arch 1)Stroke

5.Emily Chen Choi (M.Arch 1)Deep Façade

6.Elias Arkin (M.Arch 1) My Dinner with Object

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3

2

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aspiration trying to understand who we are as citizens of a world that we constantly keep on constructing. But more importantly, architecture is the discipline that understands society as a whole, being able to be an advocate for those ones who are not able to sit down in the decision making table. Architecture sits there for all. It is the duty of the architect to be the spokesperson for those ones who do not have the power to decide the cities, the architectures, and the territories we actually live in.

You came to SCI-Arc to learn what architecture was, yet you have received the best education possible—an invitation to figure out what architecture could and should be. And tomorrow, when you all face your loans, your new moves, your licensing desires, your desires for other skills, do not forget what you have learned in here. The school has given you the time to construct who you are; and even if that picture is still a bit blurry, it will sharpen really fast. Having studied in Europe, I did not have the luxury and the privilege that you had. I received the education of what architecture was.

In this path of discovery of what architecture has been to what it could be, only your own madness has and will drive you. To my students I always say, “I cannot teach you madness, I can only teach you rigor.” Yet, honestly, the only thing that interests me is the madness that each one of you carries inside. As the Director for Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, my job is actually to help everyone bring our collective madness inside, out. At schools, it is always within thesis that one finds the highest examples, the best evidences that demonstrate a school’s ability to bring the madness of its student body inside out. These last two days have been a spectacle of madness. There have been beautiful, sublime madnesses, one after the other; and you need to keep on pursuing them and unveiling them and bringing yourself inside out.

You have heard many times: Follow your dreams, follow your passions. But you know what? Dreams are super hard to remember. And passions, one cannot even follow them. They go faster than one does. One is always somehow behind them. But architecture, once you actually almost master it, is able to build dreams that everyone can remember. And different than passions, architecture does not only move mountains, it makes mountains. So, forget the dreams and forget the passions; just focus on architecture. My advice is to let your madness act and do that what you cannot avoid doing. But let me give you a piece of warning. Tomorrow can be a hard day. What architect you choose to be is in your hands to decide. I do believe that actually there are three growing models of architects. These three types are what I call the enabler, the iconographer, and the agitator.

And who are these three guys? Well, the enabler is the architect that more or less with cynical, cool arguments limits his or her duty or creative task to accommodate the multiplicities of projected desires by society with no further questioning on the origin or nature of the problem posed. With this position, the enabler is extremely similar to the dictator. It doesn’t question anything. It simply has, as clients, ideological constructs, and their intellectual game becomes simply a meta-discourse–an insider’s game–either technical, functional, geometrical, cultural, environmental, social, political, moral or, even in more general terms, and I don’t like to use that word, I would say ‘disciplinary.’

On the other hand, we have the second type of the architect. We have the iconographer. The iconographer is immersed in a drama of signification and communication, plays the frustrating game of difference and sameness. It is the guy who wants to do symbols and icons and easy metaphors for everyone to consume and to eat. And in this place and in this frustrating game of ‘difference and sameness,’ in the search of a frozen firework, that

while desiring to be in the realm of the sublime, most of the time just simply stays on the fringe of the banal without ever reaching even the realm of the revolutionary.

And then we have the third type that is the agitator. And who is the agitator? Well, he’s the avant-garde architect—the one who is disturbed, molested, against everything and all, right? He’s just simply playing the game of resistance. He wants to be the enfant terrible whose parents are most of the times in a complicated relationship—the enabler and the iconographer—who need to be killed in an act of terrorism or war.

So with these three categories, users can fulfill their expectations of service and spectacle, and architects can find their jobs. You will find your jobs being an enabler or an iconographer or an agitator. The enabler constructs spaces of habitation of discourse, the iconographer constructs images, and the agitator constructs events that are actually even memorable sometimes. And with these three types, we end up with a service industry; and instead of an architecture culture, we become architecture servants.

There is a fourth type, and for the sake of today, I would say that this type is the savior of this situation—I will call it for today’s ceremony the SCI-Arc type. The SCI-Arc type is the architect that is able to be an agitator, an enabler, and an iconographer, all of them at the same time. And this SCI-Arc architect is able to question the wrongs of society; is able to facilitate, not only what society wants, but that what society didn’t know it wanted. It is able to produce a new aesthetic that is able to engulf us with beauty, with agency and thought.

The best piece of advice that I can give you is one that it took me a long time to realize, and this is usually what happens with the best things in life; that it just takes a while, and it will take you a while to realize what you really learned in here. When I was 14, I was in the chemistry class and when the professor was going through all the different elements, we arrived to potassium and suddenly she said, “You know, potassium with water is extremely explosive.” So, this brings me to my last piece. The glass is not half full or half empty, there is just simply water to play with, and the only thing that you need to make sure is that you have the right ingredient in your hands. Call it potassium; call it architecture. I know that all of you SCI-Arc students do have that potassium and do have that thing in your hands. Class of 2013, congratulations. All of the speeches from SCI-Arc’s 2013 graduation ceremony can be viewed at the SCI-Arc Media Archive (sma.sciarc.edu).

EVA FRANCH I GILABERT is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture. Franch is a licensed architect, researcher, curator, teacher, and founder in 2003 of OOAA (office of architectural affairs). Prior to joining SFAA, Franch was an artist in residence at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, and directed the Masters Thesis studio at Rice University while practicing and building in Catalonia. She studied at TU Delft and earned an M. Arch from ETSAB-UPC, and an M. Arch. II from Princeton University. She has lectured internationally on art, architecture and the importance of alternative practices in the construction and understanding of public life. At Storefront, her projects include a new publication Series, exhibitions POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions and No Shame: Storefront for Sale, and the launching of the Storefront Inter-national Series. More recently, Franch has been selected by the State Department, jointly with a curatorial and design team, to represent the US at the 2014 Venice Architecture

You came to SCI-Arc to learn what architecture was, yet you have received the best education possible—an invitation to figure out what architecture could and should be.

7.2013 Graduate Thesis review

8.Joseph Francis Ramiro (M.Arch 2)Cartooning Disbelief

9.Yong Ha Kim (M.Arch 2)Biological Growth

10.Eric Owen Moss speaking at the graduation ceremony

11.Yi-Chen Li (M.Arch 2)Rendering: Between Drawing and Form

12.Marie-Sophie Starlinger (M.Arch 2)Naked

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NEWS11

ALUMNA, NEW THEME PRINCIPAL COMBINES WORK WITH PLAY

SCI-Arc alumna Beth Holden (B.Arch ’98), principal of Los Angeles-based NEW THEME, had a busy 2013. She recently completed the restoration of a Mid-Century John Lautner home in the San Gabriel area, and is currently at work on several proj-ects in downtown Los Angeles including the renovation and resto-ration of the Regent Theatre, and several restaurant designs. Her firm is also designing residential projects in Malibu and Los Feliz, and has completed the restoration of the old Madison res-taurant in Long Beach. On top of her current work, Holden’s widely-publicized redesign for the 6,200-square-feet Hollywood Hills residence of renowned photographer Jill Greenberg, which she completed in 2012, invited acclaim from several publications, gracing the cover of Angeleno Interiors.

In addition to her client-driven projects, Holden and her archi-tect husband Wolfgang Melian, acquired and remodeled their NEW THEME studio space, combining it with a storefront art gallery. The space showcases exhibitions from local artists and features the couple’s own custom-designed furniture built locally in their North Hollywood shop. Holden and Melian are actively expanding their calendar of exhibitions, and this past summer they hosted the gallery’s fifth show. Titled Diffraction, the exhibi-tion featured work by Los Angeles artists Nick Aguayo, Daniel Payavis and Zach Stadel, as well as some of Holden’s own work.

Despite her involvement in a wide array of ongoing projects, Holden has still found time to “play,” which in her case meant the design of a state-of-the-art playhouse affectionately named La Folie. Tucked away in the hills of Encino, Calif., the Hayvenhurst Folie was conceptualized after Holden completed a restoration of the main Hayvenhurst residence in 2010. She was brought back to develop a chic and inspirational concept for La Folie, which rede-fines the California vacation home and exhibits a modern look with an easy going environment.

JENNIFER SIEGAL FEATURED IN MICROTOPIA FILM

SCI-Arc alumna Jennifer Siegal (M.Arch ’94), principal of Of-fice of Mobile Design, is known for her work in creating the pre-fab home of the 21st century. Her philosophy for responsible, sustainable design is now depicted in a new documentary by inter-national Swedish filmmaker Jesper Wachtmeister released earlier this fall. A one-hour film about micro dwellings, downsizing and living off the grid, Microtopia examines modern alternative dwellings and mobile lifestyles. It profiles Siegal’s first prototype for prefab dwelling, the Joshua Tree PreFab House, a 900-square-feet fully functional mobile dwelling that embodies responsible, sustainable, and aesthetically beautiful design.

Wachtmeister’s Microtopia has already received international acclaim, drawing attention to current trends in dwellings and use of space, as well as looking to the future for the impact and influ-ence design will have on lifestyles and resources. Also featured in the film are several international architects that have become household names in sustainable design, including Dré Wapenaar, Ana Rewakowicz, John Wells, Stéphane Malka, Jay Shafer, Jon Sørvin, Aristide Antonas and Richart Sowa. Back in the US, Siegal continues to make her mark on sustainable architecture by constantly pushing the limits to find answers to our dreams of portability, flexibility and independence from the grid.

EMILY WHITE UNVEILS INSTALLATIONS IN LOS ANGELES, PORTLAND, MAINE A participatory installation by SCI-Arc design faculty and alumna Emily White (M.Arch ’06) invited visitors to the Getty Center in July to “help themselves” to an architectural model of the museum by removing pieces from it. For the one-day event hosted as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architec-ture in L.A., White built a model of what the Getty Center might look like in the distant future. She encouraged participants to remove pieces from the model and then return throughout the day to check how the site evolved. SCI-Arc graduate student Sierra Helvey (M.Arch ’15) helped with the project.

This past summer, White also unveiled a new installation at the SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine. For the site-specific show titled Horns, White used machine based production techniques to explore the relationship between machine-made and handmade. With Horns, White demonstrated the range of differences avail-able within a given system when machines and humans “collabo-rate.” Each Horn took its own shape, reflecting the variables possible when the human hand intersects with these larger than life and precisely executed paper cuts. White is a Los Angeles based designer and principal of the architecture office Layer.

SCI-ARC MAGAZINE ISSUE OO7

Editor-in-ChiefHsinming Fung

Contributing WritersGeorgiana CeausuEric Owen MossJustine SmithJohanna VandemoorteleAmit Wolf

Photography Lara Everly, 108 Pictures Zach LippElena ManferdiniKate MerrittCarolina MurciaYuan Mu Monica NouwensBenjamin Parks SPACE GalleryJoshua White SCI-Arc Publications

Project ManagerJustine Smith

Online Media and Public RelationsGeorgiana Ceausu

Graphic DesignersKate MerrittAlex Pines

Designed by SCI-Arc Publications

© 2013 SCI-Arc Publications

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SCI-ARC PUBLICATIONS

Another Fine Mess—ONRAMP no.4

A publication of selected work by SCI-Arc graduate and under-graduate students, the fourth edition of ONRAMP (September 2013) features projects from the 2011-2012 academic year. Anoth-er Fine Mess reflects the messy vitality of our contemporary cul-tural moment and sets the stage for considering the sometimes conflicting, never static, and often messy array of perspectives on the current state of our discipline, where consensus is hard to come by and the status of the architectural Project is a subject of debate. This edition is organized around three curated sections comprised of student projects with accompanying texts by SCI-Arc faculty. There will be a panel discussion and book launch for Another Fine Mess on February 7, 2014 at 7pm in the SCI-Arc Library.

Lebbeus Woods is an Archetype Exhibition Catalog

Lebbeus Woods (Lansing, Michigan, May 31, 1940–New York City, October 30, 2012) was an American architect and architec-tural theorist. Although Woods’s designs were rarely constructed, they were considered widely influential, and were exhibited in museums around the world. The SCI-Arc Gallery exhibition Leb-beus Woods is an Archetype displayed several original, rarely seen Lebbeus Woods drawings from private collections, and most notably, recently uncovered video footage from a 1998 interview recorded in Vico Morcote, Switzerland (available online at sma.sciarc.edu). The exhibition also included a public art installation in the Arts District’s Bloom Square. Complemented by the sym-posium and catalog, the exhibition aimed to demonstrate the fear-less nature with which the late visionary architect and draftsman created. The exhibition catalog (October 2013) includes essays from Eric Owen Moss, Aleksandra Wagner and members of the exhibition team Hernan Diaz Alonso, Christoph a. Kompusch, and Alexis Rochas, as well as color plates of all the drawings in the exhibition, and a transcript of the video interview.

A Confederacy of Heretics Exhibition Catalog

Edited by Todd Gannon and Ewan Banda, the exhibition catalog for A Confederacy of Heretics (SCI-Arc Press in association with Getty Publications, June 2013) examines the explosion of activity associated with “The Architecture Gallery,” Los Angeles’ first gallery exclusively dedicated to architecture. Instigated by Thom Mayne in the fall of 1979, the gallery staged ten exhibitions in as many weeks on both young and established Los Angeles practitio-ners, featuring the work of Eugene Kupper, Roland Coate Jr., Frederick Fisher, Frank Dimster, Frank Gehry, Peter de Brette-ville, Morphosis (Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi), Studio Works (Craig Hodgetts and Robert Mangurian), and Eric Owen Moss. Another architect, Coy Howard, opened the events with a lecture at SCI-Arc, which hosted talks by each exhibiting archi-tect. (Most of these talks as well as Howard’s lecture can be found in the SCI-Arc Media Archive.) The events were also chronicled in weekly reviews by Los Angeles Times architecture critic John Dreyfuss. Gathering an array of original drawings, models, photo-graphic documentation, and commentary alongside new assess-ments by current scholars, A Confederacy of Heretics re-examines the early work of some of Los Angeles’ most well-known archi-tects in a contemporary context. In addition to the catalog, the associated two-day symposium featuring many of the Architec-ture Gallery exhibitors is archived and available online at the SCI-Arc Media Archive (sma.sciarc.edu).

All SCI-Arc publications are available in the SCI-Arc Supply Store at 955 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles

SCI-ARC LEADERSHIP

DirectorEric Owen Moss

Director of Academic AffairsHsinming Fung

Graduate Programs ChairHernan Diaz Alonso

Undergraduate Program ChairJohn Enright

Chief Operating OfficerJamie Bennett

BOARD OF TRUSTEES

ChairmanJerold B. Neuman

Vice-ChairJoe Day (M. Arch ’94)

SCI-Arc DirectorEric Owen Moss

Secretary Tom Gilmore

TreasurerDaniel Swartz

Faculty RepresentativeAndrew Zago

Alumni RepresentativeDan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02)

Student Representative Bridgette Marso (B.Arch ’14)

Board Members at LargeRichard BaptieRick CarterTim DisneyWilliam H. Fain, Jr.Anthony FergusonFrank O. Gehry Russell L. Goings IIIScott Hughes (M. Arch ’97)Thom MayneMerry NorrisGreg Otto

Enrique PeñalosaKevin RatnerAbigail Scheuer (M. Arch ’93)Nick Seierup (B. Arch ’79)Abby SherTed Tanner

Honorary MembersElyse GrinsteinRay KappeIan Robertson

13

Next Fall, SCI-Arc plans to open a new Digital Fabrication Lab (dubbed ‘the Magic Box’) and complete its RAD Center (Robot House, Analog Shop, and Digital Fabrication Lab). The space will expand the school’s experimental approach to design and its em-phasis on learning through building and provoking critical discus-sions, and solidify its commitment to developing and growing its permanent Downtown Los Angeles location.

It is impossible to separate SCI-Arc from where it has always existed, California. Whether in an industrial building in Santa Monica or a historic train depot downtown, the ethos of SCI-Arc has always been fundamentally linked to where it was born, grew up, and now, where it is headed. With its almost mythical reputa-tion of a land where any idea can flourish as long as one ‘tries it,’ California has always been a place where architects and designers from around the world have found a culture that welcomes the new, experimental, and unknown. In turn, the technology required in order to test and create has also evolved to spur, or even keep up with, the innovative ideas embraced by the experimental and open culture. Throughout its history, SCI-Arc has shared this emphasis on experimentation and making. Architecture education here goes beyond the design of physical spaces—it is a series of intensive interactions that brings students and ideas together to focus on process, discussion, feedback, and iterations. Architec-tural writer and editor Sam Lubell, in a recent essay, underscored the notion that Los Angeles embodies a “culture of technology-fueled risk taking that draws architects from across the country and the world” and specifically highlights SCI-Arc’s “focus [on] the infinite, overwhelming possibilities of digital technology, from visualization to, more recently, robotics and fabrication.”

As digital fabrication technology develops and continues its rapid impact on the design field, demand for new tools has grown at SCI-Arc. Complementing its current Robot House and Analog Shop, the Magic Box is anticipated to become an industry-leading facility for the visualization and fabrication of architectural proj-ects. The space will dramatically increase the number of high-speed laser cutters, CNC milling machines, and 3D scanners and ABS plastic printers. With a flexible layout, the lab will also have the room to grow and adapt to further developments in technology and software. Together, these three fabrication components—ro-botic, analog, and digital—will make up the new RAD Center, a multi-dimensional facility providing access to several different methods of fabrication and assembly.

While undoubtedly a space for fabrication, the RAD Center is importantly also envisioned as a platform for design and experi-mentation for SCI-Arc’s faculty and students. Housing multiple means of production, cutting-edge research within the Robot House can be bridged with important explorations occurring through other digital means and with hands-on projects in the adjacent wood and metal shops, which will also be undergoing a floor-to-ceiling renovation. Just as a cross-disciplinary approach

to learning expands understanding, allowing a platform for SCI-Arc’s academic community to move freely between different realms of fabrication and design will further enhance their capac-ity for innovation, creativity, and experimentation.

Architect and SCI-Arc alum Barbara Bestor, who graduated in the early 1990’s, recalls why she chose to move here for her graduate studies: “I had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and while studying at the AA in London, people kept telling me that people were building in L.A., they were doing some very experimental things, and I knew I had to go there. SCI-Arc was a place where we could test ideas and try new things, and the school embraced that.” Alumni like Bestor are continuing to test the grounds of architecture, and SCI-Arc’s faculty and students remain committed to these notions as well, working with new technologies to push the boundaries of what they can do. As Peter Testa, who with Devyn Weiser initiated SCI-Arc’s Robot House in 2011 says, “I am interested in developing new models of prac-tice, and at SCI-Arc the digital and physical are converging in a way that is not simply about fabrication, but rather focused on design innovation.”

Faculty like Marcelo Spina, coordinator of the Emerging Sys-tems, Technologies & Media (ESTm) postgraduate program, are devoted to empowering students to expand their imaginations and use acquired technological skills and materials research to further explore the limits of architecture. Such cross-fabrication and de-sign is very much a part of how they envision the potential for student development. In Tom Wiscombe’s studio last semester, a group of students combined analog painting techniques in digital sculpting software with robotic control. One of these students, Brian Harms, recently explained why he chose SCI-Arc: “For me SCI-Arc is a very serious playground in which one can canvass a variety of ideas and techniques in a relatively short amount of time. SCI-Arc encourages students to discover what genuinely interests them, and provides a platform for the rigorous pursuit and development of those ideas.”

Experimentation and making at SCI-Arc will continue to evolve once the RAD Center’s expansion and renovation is com-plete. SCI-Arc’s unique faculty and students recognize that they must not only use available and cutting-edge technology for its identified purposes, but that through bridging robotic capabilities with other digital and analog means, they will continue to be at the forefront of fabrication, experimentation, and architectural design. The addition of the Digital Fabrication Lab to campus will also help realize SCI-Arc’s full potential as an anchor institution in the community and by offering such cutting-edge facilities, the school remains committed to design and fabrication as core com-ponents of its students’ academic development.

RAD CENTER: THE FUTURE OF FABRICATION AT SCI-ARC

Robot House, Analog Shop, and Digital Fabrication Lab

SUPPORT THE MAGIC BOX!SCI-Arc invites you to join in the effort to build a new state-of-the-art Digital Fabrication Lab, the ‘Magic Box’, by making a gift today. We have already received lead gifts from two trustees and are now seeking support from the broader community—alumni, parents, and friends. Naming opportunities will be available for key spaces throughout the addition and a permanent Donor Wall will recognize all donors to the project. The collective giving of the SCI-Arc community plays a vital role in supporting innovation and experi-mentation at the school and we hope you will consider being a part of this exciting project. For more information on the RAD Center or about how to make a gift, please visit www.sciarc.edu/magicbox.html or contact Sarah Sullivan, SCI-Arc’s Chief Advancement Officer, at 213-356-5319 or Sarah_Sullivan@sciarc.edu.

Magic Box

Brian Harms, Haejun Jung, Vince Huang, Yuying Chen, Suspended Depositions

1.SCI-Arc Trustee Thom Mayne with Tom Wiscombe and Michael Rotondi

2.Jerry Gonzales, SCI-Arc Trustee Merry Norris and Francois Nion

3.Glen Irani, Anthony Coscia and Jonathan Day

4.John Enright and recent alumni Andrew Hammer (B.Arch ’13), Paul Andrzejc-zak (B.Arch ’13) , Vanessa DeLaHoz, and Ryan Wynn (B.Arch ’13)

5.MOCA galleries featuring A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Archi-tecture from Southern California

6.Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of PATTERNS with their pavilion

7.Dick Doyle, President and CEO of the Vinyl Institute, with Solar Decathlon students Sheila Lo (Caltech), Paige Chambers (M.Arch ’13) and Nicole Violani (M.Arch ’13)

8.George Petersen of Apollo Opening Roof Systems and Kevin Mulvaney of the Vinyl Institute

9.Aaron Ryan (M.Arch ’13) and Reed Finlay (M.Arch ’10)

10.Kiyokazu Arai (M.Arch ’83)

11.John Bohn and Yusuke Obuchi (B.Arch ’97)

14

Dear Fellow Alumni,

I’m writing to you as the newly elected Alumni Representative to the SCI-Arc Board of Trustees, a position that I am honored to hold. SCI-Arc’s Board of Trustees is charged with the governance, accountability, and sustainability of the school. The Board also works to ensure SCI-Arc upholds the mission it set out to accomplish forty years ago, testing the limits of architecture in order to transform existing conditions into the designs of the future. The next couple of years promise to be an exciting time for the school and I look forward to serving the entire alumni community during my two-year term.

The Alumni Representative to the Board is elected every two years by the Alumni Council, which exists to connect alumni to each other, the school, and the students. We are a dynamic group of alumni from all decades and programs who volunteer to encourage alumni participation at SCI-Arc. As we plan this year’s roster of events and programs, we are interested in hearing your suggestions. Please feel free to reach out to me, or any member of the Alumni Council with ideas or feedback.

The SCI-Arc magazine is an important vehicle for staying connected. Included in this issue are articles about exciting developments on campus as well as several pages of Alumni News and Class Notes, where you can catch up with recent accomplishments of other alumni. Please consider letting SCI-Arc know if you have professional news to share with the community—drop a line to alumninews@sciarc.edu.

And finally, this year we are pleased to welcome several new members to the Alumni Council: Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78), Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01), Luis Herrera (B.Arch ’01), Poonam Sharma (M.Arch ’01), Scott Sullivan (M.Arch ’99), Vlado Valkof (M.DesR ’04), and Naia Waters (’99). I hope more alumni will consider joining us—please feel free to reach out to any member of the Alumni Council or to SCI-Arc’s Chief Advancement Officer, Sarah Sullivan (sarah_sullivan@sciarc.edu or 213.356.5319) for more information. You can nominate yourself or any other alumni to the Council, and a new Council is seated annually each summer for the following academic year.

I hope to see you on campus, at alumni events or somewhere in my travels in the near future!

Sincerely, Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02)Alumni Representative, SCI-Arc Board of TrusteesPartner, Kaplan Gehring McCarroll Architectural Lighting

SCI-ARC ALUMNI COUNCIL 2013-2014

Tima Bell (M.Arch ’99) Eric Cheong (M.Arch ’05)Joori Chun (B.Arch ’03)Joshua Coggeshall (M.Arch ’97)Michael Cook (M.Arch ’95)Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78)Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo (M.Arch ’07)Elizabeth Gibb (M.Arch ’89) Julee Herdt (M.Arch ‘88)Luis Herrera (M.Arch ‘93)Chikara Inamura (B.Arch ’06)Nerin Kadribegovic (M.Arch ’03)Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96)Kaiming Lin (B.Arch ’12)Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01)Santino Medina (M.Arch ’06)Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ’04)Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76)Johnny Ramirios (B.Arch ’05) Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09)Abigail Scheuer (M.Arch ’93)Pia Schneider (M.Arch ’86)Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90)Poonam Sharma (M.Arch ’01)Steven Morales Suarez (B.Arch ’04)Scott Sullivan (M.Arch ’99) Joe Tarr (M.Arch ’08)Vlado Valkof (M.DesR ’04)Naia Waters (’99)Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02)Kevin Wronske (B.Arch ’02)

MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI COUNCIL

12.Tomohisa Miyauchi (B.Arch ’00), Hiro Kashiwagi (M.Arch ’02), Hsinming Fung, Chikara Inamura (B.Arch ’06) and Takeshi Miura (M.Arch ’03)

13.Michael Poris (M.Arch ’90), Rick Gooding (B.Arch ’84) and Chad Overway (B.Arch ’77)

14.Luis Menendez (B.Arch ’83) and Nasrin Nourian Menendez (B.Arch ’85)

15.Reed Stilwill (M.Arch ’98)and J. Michael Atkinson (M.Arch ’00)

16.SCI-Arc faculty Andrew Zago and guests

17.Thom Mayne addressing guests at the MOCA event

18.Darius Sabbaghzadeh and Beth Holden (B.Arch ’98)

19.Austin Baker (M.Arch ’10), Edward Gonzalez (M.Arch ’10) and Melissa Diracles (M.Arch ’10)

20.Joseph Adam Dunn (M.Arch ’12) and Ben Warwas (M.Arch 10)

21.DJ for the evening, Jesse Madrid (B.Arch ’08)

1

3

4

5 6

2

13

Next Fall, SCI-Arc plans to open a new Digital Fabrication Lab (dubbed ‘the Magic Box’) and complete its RAD Center (Robot House, Analog Shop, and Digital Fabrication Lab). The space will expand the school’s experimental approach to design and its emphasis on learning through building and provoking critical discussions, and solidify its commitment to developing and growing its permanent Downtown Los Angeles location.

It is impossible to separate SCI-Arc from where it has always existed, California. Whether in an industrial building in Santa Monica or a historic train depot downtown, the ethos of SCI-Arc has always been fundamentally linked to where it was born, grew up, and now, where it is headed. With its almost mythical reputation of a land where any idea can flourish as long as one ‘tries it,’ California has always been a place where architects and designers from around the world have found a culture that welcomes the new, experimental, and unknown. In turn, the technology required in order to test and create has also evolved to spur, or even keep up with, the innovative ideas embraced by the experimental and open culture. Throughout its history, SCI-Arc has shared this emphasis on experimentation and making. Architecture education here goes beyond the design of physical spaces—it is a series of intensive interactions that brings students and ideas together to focus on process, discussion, feedback, and iterations. Architectural writer and editor Sam Lubell, in a recent essay, underscored the notion that Los Angeles embodies a “culture of technology-fueled risk taking that draws architects from across the country and the world” and specifically highlights SCI-Arc’s “focus [on] the infinite, overwhelming possibilities of digital technology, from visualization to, more recently, robotics and fabrication.”

As digital fabrication technology develops and continues its rapid impact on the design field, demand for new tools has grown at SCI-Arc. Complementing its current Robot House and Analog Shop, the Magic Box is anticipated to become an industry-leading facility for the visualization and fabrication of architectural projects. The space will dramatically increase the number of high-speed laser cutters, CNC milling machines, and 3D scanners and ABS plastic printers. With a flexible layout, the lab will also have the room to grow and adapt to further developments in technology and software. Together, these three fabrication components—robotic, analog, and digital—will make up the new RAD Center, a multi-dimensional facility providing access to several different methods of fabrication and assembly.

While undoubtedly a space for fabrication, the RAD Center is importantly also envisioned as a platform for design and experimentation for SCI-Arc’s faculty and students. Housing multiple means of production, cutting-edge research within the Robot House can be bridged with important explorations occurring through other digital means and with hands-on projects in the adjacent wood and metal shops, which will also be

undergoing a floor-to-ceiling renovation. Just as a cross-disciplinary approach to learning expands understanding, allowing a platform for SCI-Arc’s academic community to move freely between different realms of fabrication and design will further enhance their capacity for innovation, creativity, and experimentation.

Architect and SCI-Arc alum Barbara Bestor, who graduated in the early 1990’s, recalls why she chose to move here for her graduate studies: “I had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and while studying at the AA in London, people kept telling me that people were building in L.A., they were doing some very experimental things, and I knew I had to go there. SCI-Arc was a place where we could test ideas and try new things, and the school embraced that.” Alumni like Bestor are continuing to test the grounds of architecture, and SCI-Arc’s faculty and students remain committed to these notions as well, working with new technologies to push the boundaries of what they can do. As Peter Testa, who with Devyn Weiser initiated SCI-Arc’s Robot House in 2011 says, “I am interested in developing new models of practice, and at SCI-Arc the digital and physical are converging in a way that is not simply about fabrication, but rather focused on design innovation.”

Faculty like Marcelo Spina, coordinator of the Emerging Systems, Technologies & Media (ESTm) postgraduate program, are devoted to empowering students to expand their imaginations and use acquired technological skills and materials research to further explore the limits of architecture. Such cross-fabrication and design is very much a part of how they envision the potential for student development. In Tom Wiscombe’s studio last semester, a group of students combined analog painting techniques in digital sculpting software with robotic control. One of these students, Brian Harms, recently explained why he chose SCI-Arc: “For me SCI-Arc is a very serious playground in which one can canvass a variety of ideas and techniques in a relatively short amount of time. SCI-Arc encourages students to discover what genuinely interests them, and provides a platform for the rigorous pursuit and development of those ideas.”

Experimentation and making at SCI-Arc will continue to evolve once the RAD Center’s expansion and renovation is complete. SCI-Arc’s unique faculty and students recognize that they must not only use available and cutting-edge technology for its identified purposes, but that through bridging robotic capabilities with other digital and analog means, they will continue to be at the forefront of fabrication, experimentation, and architectural design. The addition of the Digital Fabrication Lab to campus will also help realize SCI-Arc’s full potential as an anchor institution in the community and by offering such

RAD CENTER: THE FUTURE OF FABRICATION AT SCI-ARC

Robot House, Analog Shop, and Digital Fabrication Lab

SUPPORT THE MAGIC BOX!SCI-Arc invites you to join in the effort to build a new state-of-the-art Digital Fabrication Lab, the ‘Magic Box’, by making a gift today. We have already received lead gifts from two trustees and are now seeking support from the broader community—alumni, parents, and friends. Naming opportunities will be available for key spaces throughout the addition and a permanent Donor Wall will recognize all donors to the project. The collective giving of the SCI-Arc community plays a vital role in supporting innovation and experimentation at the school and we hope you will consider being a part of this exciting project. For more information on the RAD Center or about how to make a gift, please visit www.sciarc.edu/magicbox.html or contact Sarah Sullivan, SCI-Arc’s Chief Advancement Officer, at 213-356-5319 or Sarah_Sullivan@sciarc.edu.

Magic Box

Brian Harms, Haejun Jung, Vince Huang, Yuying Chen, Suspended Depositions

1.SCI-Arc Trustee Thom Mayne with Tom Wiscombe and Michael Rotondi

2.Jerry Gonzales, SCI-Arc Trustee Merry Norris and Francois Nion

3.Glen Irani, Anthony Coscia and Jonathan Day

4.John Enright and recent alumni Andrew Hammer (B.Arch ’13), Paul Andrzejczak (B.Arch ’13) , Vanessa DeLaHoz, and Ryan Wynn (B.Arch ’13)

5.MOCA galleries featuring A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California

6.Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of PATTERNS with their pavilion

7.Dick Doyle, President and CEO of the Vinyl Institute, with Solar Decathlon students Sheila Lo (Caltech), Paige Chambers (M.Arch ’13) and Nicole Violani (M.Arch ’13)

8.George Petersen of Apollo Opening Roof Systems and Kevin Mulvaney of the Vinyl Institute

9.Aaron Ryan (M.Arch ’13) and Reed Finlay (M.Arch ’10)

10.Kiyokazu Arai (M.Arch ’83)

11.John Bohn and Yusuke Obuchi (B.Arch ’97)

17

18

21

20

19

14

Dear Fellow Alumni,

I’m writing to you as the newly elected Alumni Representative to the SCI-Arc Board of Trustees, a position that I am honored to hold. SCI-Arc’s Board of Trustees is charged with the governance, accountability, and sustainability of the school. The Board also works to ensure SCI-Arc upholds the mission it set out to accomplish forty years ago, testing the limits of architecture in order to transform existing conditions into the designs of the future. The next couple of years promise to be an exciting time for the school and I look forward to serving the entire alumni community during my two-year term.

The Alumni Representative to the Board is elected every two years by the Alumni Council, which exists to connect alumni to each other, the school, and the students. We are a dynamic group of alumni from all decades and programs who volunteer to encourage alumni participation at SCI-Arc. As we plan this year’s roster of events and programs, we are interested in hearing your suggestions. Please feel free to reach out to me, or any member of the Alumni Council with ideas or feedback.

The SCI-Arc magazine is an important vehicle for staying connected. Included in this issue are articles about exciting developments on campus as well as several pages of Alumni News and Class Notes, where you can catch up with recent accomplishments of other alumni. Please consider letting SCI-Arc know if you have professional news to share with the community—drop a line to alumninews@sciarc.edu.

And finally, this year we are pleased to welcome several new members to the Alumni Council: Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78), Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01), Luis Herrera (B.Arch ’01), Poonam Sharma (M.Arch ’01), Scott Sullivan (M.Arch ’99), Vlado Valkof (M.DesR ’04), and Naia Waters (’99). I hope more alumni will consider joining us—please feel free to reach out to any member of the Alumni Council or to SCI-Arc’s Chief Advancement Officer, Sarah Sullivan (sarah_sullivan@sciarc.edu or 213.356.5319) for more information. You can nominate yourself or any other alumni to the Council, and a new Council is seated annually each summer for the following academic year.

I hope to see you on campus, at alumni events or somewhere in my travels in the near future!

Sincerely, Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02)Alumni Representative, SCI-Arc Board of TrusteesPartner, Kaplan Gehring McCarroll Architectural Lighting

SCI-ARC ALUMNI COUNCIL 2013-2014

Tima Bell (M.Arch ’99) Eric Cheong (M.Arch ’05)Joori Chun (B.Arch ’03)Joshua Coggeshall (M.Arch ’97)Michael Cook (M.Arch ’95)Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78)Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo (M.Arch ’07)Elizabeth Gibb (M.Arch ’89) Julee Herdt (M.Arch ‘88)Luis Herrera (M.Arch ‘93)Chikara Inamura (B.Arch ’06)Nerin Kadribegovic (M.Arch ’03)Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96)Kaiming Lin (B.Arch ’12)Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01)Santino Medina (M.Arch ’06)Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ’04)Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76)Johnny Ramirios (B.Arch ’05) Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09)Abigail Scheuer (M.Arch ’93)Pia Schneider (M.Arch ’86)Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90)Poonam Sharma (M.Arch ’01)Steven Morales Suarez (B.Arch ’04)Scott Sullivan (M.Arch ’99) Joe Tarr (M.Arch ’08)Vlado Valkof (M.DesR ’04)Naia Waters (’99)Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02)Kevin Wronske (B.Arch ’02)

MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI COUNCIL

12.Tomohisa Miyauchi (B.Arch ’00), Hiro Kashiwagi (M.Arch ’02), Hsinming Fung, Chikara Inamura (B.Arch ’06) and Takeshi Miura (M.Arch ’03)

13.Michael Poris (M.Arch ’90), Rick Gooding (B.Arch ’84) and Chad Overway (B.Arch ’77)

14.Luis Menendez (B.Arch ’83) and Nasrin Nourian Menendez (B.Arch ’85)

15.Reed Stilwill (M.Arch ’98)and J. Michael Atkinson (M.Arch ’00)

16.SCI-Arc faculty Andrew Zago and guests

17.Thom Mayne addressing guests at the MOCA event

18.Darius Sabbaghzadeh and Beth Holden (B.Arch ’98)

19.Austin Baker (M.Arch ’10), Edward Gonzalez (M.Arch ’10) and Melissa Diracles (M.Arch ’10)

20.Joseph Adam Dunn (M.Arch ’12) and Ben Warwas (M.Arch 10)

21.DJ for the evening, Jesse Madrid (B.Arch ’08)

13

Next Fall, SCI-Arc plans to open a new Digital Fabrication Lab (dubbed ‘the Magic Box’) and complete its RAD Center (Robot House, Analog Shop, and Digital Fabrication Lab). The space will expand the school’s experimental approach to design and its emphasis on learning through building and provoking critical discussions, and solidify its commitment to developing and growing its permanent Downtown Los Angeles location.

It is impossible to separate SCI-Arc from where it has always existed, California. Whether in an industrial building in Santa Monica or a historic train depot downtown, the ethos of SCI-Arc has always been fundamentally linked to where it was born, grew up, and now, where it is headed. With its almost mythical reputation of a land where any idea can flourish as long as one ‘tries it,’ California has always been a place where architects and designers from around the world have found a culture that welcomes the new, experimental, and unknown. In turn, the technology required in order to test and create has also evolved to spur, or even keep up with, the innovative ideas embraced by the experimental and open culture. Throughout its history, SCI-Arc has shared this emphasis on experimentation and making. Architecture education here goes beyond the design of physical spaces—it is a series of intensive interactions that brings students and ideas together to focus on process, discussion, feedback, and iterations. Architectural writer and editor Sam Lubell, in a recent essay, underscored the notion that Los Angeles embodies a “culture of technology-fueled risk taking that draws architects from across the country and the world” and specifically highlights SCI-Arc’s “focus [on] the infinite, overwhelming possibilities of digital technology, from visualization to, more recently, robotics and fabrication.”

As digital fabrication technology develops and continues its rapid impact on the design field, demand for new tools has grown at SCI-Arc. Complementing its current Robot House and Analog Shop, the Magic Box is anticipated to become an industry-leading facility for the visualization and fabrication of architectural projects. The space will dramatically increase the number of high-speed laser cutters, CNC milling machines, and 3D scanners and ABS plastic printers. With a flexible layout, the lab will also have the room to grow and adapt to further developments in technology and software. Together, these three fabrication components—robotic, analog, and digital—will make up the new RAD Center, a multi-dimensional facility providing access to several different methods of fabrication and assembly.

While undoubtedly a space for fabrication, the RAD Center is importantly also envisioned as a platform for design and experimentation for SCI-Arc’s faculty and students. Housing multiple means of production, cutting-edge research within the Robot House can be bridged with important explorations occurring through other digital means and with hands-on projects in the adjacent wood and metal shops, which will also be

undergoing a floor-to-ceiling renovation. Just as a cross-disciplinary approach to learning expands understanding, allowing a platform for SCI-Arc’s academic community to move freely between different realms of fabrication and design will further enhance their capacity for innovation, creativity, and experimentation.

Architect and SCI-Arc alum Barbara Bestor, who graduated in the early 1990’s, recalls why she chose to move here for her graduate studies: “I had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and while studying at the AA in London, people kept telling me that people were building in L.A., they were doing some very experimental things, and I knew I had to go there. SCI-Arc was a place where we could test ideas and try new things, and the school embraced that.” Alumni like Bestor are continuing to test the grounds of architecture, and SCI-Arc’s faculty and students remain committed to these notions as well, working with new technologies to push the boundaries of what they can do. As Peter Testa, who with Devyn Weiser initiated SCI-Arc’s Robot House in 2011 says, “I am interested in developing new models of practice, and at SCI-Arc the digital and physical are converging in a way that is not simply about fabrication, but rather focused on design innovation.”

Faculty like Marcelo Spina, coordinator of the Emerging Systems, Technologies & Media (ESTm) postgraduate program, are devoted to empowering students to expand their imaginations and use acquired technological skills and materials research to further explore the limits of architecture. Such cross-fabrication and design is very much a part of how they envision the potential for student development. In Tom Wiscombe’s studio last semester, a group of students combined analog painting techniques in digital sculpting software with robotic control. One of these students, Brian Harms, recently explained why he chose SCI-Arc: “For me SCI-Arc is a very serious playground in which one can canvass a variety of ideas and techniques in a relatively short amount of time. SCI-Arc encourages students to discover what genuinely interests them, and provides a platform for the rigorous pursuit and development of those ideas.”

Experimentation and making at SCI-Arc will continue to evolve once the RAD Center’s expansion and renovation is complete. SCI-Arc’s unique faculty and students recognize that they must not only use available and cutting-edge technology for its identified purposes, but that through bridging robotic capabilities with other digital and analog means, they will continue to be at the forefront of fabrication, experimentation, and architectural design. The addition of the Digital Fabrication Lab to campus will also help realize SCI-Arc’s full potential as an anchor institution in the community and by offering such

RAD CENTER: THE FUTURE OF FABRICATION AT SCI-ARC

Robot House, Analog Shop, and Digital Fabrication Lab

SUPPORT THE MAGIC BOX!SCI-Arc invites you to join in the effort to build a new state-of-the-art Digital Fabrication Lab, the ‘Magic Box’, by making a gift today. We have already received lead gifts from two trustees and are now seeking support from the broader community—alumni, parents, and friends. Naming opportunities will be available for key spaces throughout the addition and a permanent Donor Wall will recognize all donors to the project. The collective giving of the SCI-Arc community plays a vital role in supporting innovation and experimentation at the school and we hope you will consider being a part of this exciting project. For more information on the RAD Center or about how to make a gift, please visit www.sciarc.edu/magicbox.html or contact Sarah Sullivan, SCI-Arc’s Chief Advancement Officer, at 213-356-5319 or Sarah_Sullivan@sciarc.edu.

Magic Box

Brian Harms, Haejun Jung, Vince Huang, Yuying Chen, Suspended Depositions

1.SCI-Arc Trustee Thom Mayne with Tom Wiscombe and Michael Rotondi

2.Jerry Gonzales, SCI-Arc Trustee Merry Norris and Francois Nion

3.Glen Irani, Anthony Coscia and Jonathan Day

4.John Enright and recent alumni Andrew Hammer (B.Arch ’13), Paul Andrzejczak (B.Arch ’13) , Vanessa DeLaHoz, and Ryan Wynn (B.Arch ’13)

5.MOCA galleries featuring A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California

6.Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of PATTERNS with their pavilion

7.Dick Doyle, President and CEO of the Vinyl Institute, with Solar Decathlon students Sheila Lo (Caltech), Paige Chambers (M.Arch ’13) and Nicole Violani (M.Arch ’13)

8.George Petersen of Apollo Opening Roof Systems and Kevin Mulvaney of the Vinyl Institute

9.Aaron Ryan (M.Arch ’13) and Reed Finlay (M.Arch ’10)

10.Kiyokazu Arai (M.Arch ’83)

11.John Bohn and Yusuke Obuchi (B.Arch ’97)

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Dear Fellow Alumni,

I’m writing to you as the newly elected Alumni Representative to the SCI-Arc Board of Trustees, a position that I am honored to hold. SCI-Arc’s Board of Trustees is charged with the governance, accountability, and sustainability of the school. The Board also works to ensure SCI-Arc upholds the mission it set out to accomplish forty years ago, testing the limits of architecture in order to transform existing conditions into the designs of the future. The next couple of years promise to be an exciting time for the school and I look forward to serving the entire alumni community during my two-year term.

The Alumni Representative to the Board is elected every two years by the Alumni Council, which exists to connect alumni to each other, the school, and the students. We are a dynamic group of alumni from all decades and programs who volunteer to encourage alumni participation at SCI-Arc. As we plan this year’s roster of events and programs, we are interested in hearing your suggestions. Please feel free to reach out to me, or any member of the Alumni Council with ideas or feedback.

The SCI-Arc magazine is an important vehicle for staying connected. Included in this issue are articles about exciting developments on campus as well as several pages of Alumni News and Class Notes, where you can catch up with recent accomplishments of other alumni. Please consider letting SCI-Arc know if you have professional news to share with the community—drop a line to alumninews@sciarc.edu.

And finally, this year we are pleased to welcome several new members to the Alumni Council: Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78), Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01), Luis Herrera (B.Arch ’01), Poonam Sharma (M.Arch ’01), Scott Sullivan (M.Arch ’99), Vlado Valkof (M.DesR ’04), and Naia Waters (’99). I hope more alumni will consider joining us—please feel free to reach out to any member of the Alumni Council or to SCI-Arc’s Chief Advancement Officer, Sarah Sullivan (sarah_sullivan@sciarc.edu or 213.356.5319) for more information. You can nominate yourself or any other alumni to the Council, and a new Council is seated annually each summer for the following academic year.

I hope to see you on campus, at alumni events or somewhere in my travels in the near future!

Sincerely, Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02)Alumni Representative, SCI-Arc Board of TrusteesPartner, Kaplan Gehring McCarroll Architectural Lighting

SCI-ARC ALUMNI COUNCIL 2013-2014

Tima Bell (M.Arch ’99) Eric Cheong (M.Arch ’05)Joori Chun (B.Arch ’03)Joshua Coggeshall (M.Arch ’97)Michael Cook (M.Arch ’95)Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78)Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo (M.Arch ’07)Elizabeth Gibb (M.Arch ’89) Julee Herdt (M.Arch ‘88)Luis Herrera (M.Arch ‘93)Chikara Inamura (B.Arch ’06)Nerin Kadribegovic (M.Arch ’03)Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96)Kaiming Lin (B.Arch ’12)Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01)Santino Medina (M.Arch ’06)Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ’04)Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76)Johnny Ramirios (B.Arch ’05) Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09)Abigail Scheuer (M.Arch ’93)Pia Schneider (M.Arch ’86)Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90)Poonam Sharma (M.Arch ’01)Steven Morales Suarez (B.Arch ’04)Scott Sullivan (M.Arch ’99) Joe Tarr (M.Arch ’08)Vlado Valkof (M.DesR ’04)Naia Waters (’99)Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02)Kevin Wronske (B.Arch ’02)

MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI COUNCIL

12.Tomohisa Miyauchi (B.Arch ’00), Hiro Kashiwagi (M.Arch ’02), Hsinming Fung, Chikara Inamura (B.Arch ’06) and Takeshi Miura (M.Arch ’03)

13.Michael Poris (M.Arch ’90), Rick Gooding (B.Arch ’84) and Chad Overway (B.Arch ’77)

14.Luis Menendez (B.Arch ’83) and Nasrin Nourian Menendez (B.Arch ’85)

15.Reed Stilwill (M.Arch ’98)and J. Michael Atkinson (M.Arch ’00)

16.SCI-Arc faculty Andrew Zago and guests

17.Thom Mayne addressing guests at the MOCA event

18.Darius Sabbaghzadeh and Beth Holden (B.Arch ’98)

19.Austin Baker (M.Arch ’10), Edward Gonzalez (M.Arch ’10) and Melissa Diracles (M.Arch ’10)

20.Joseph Adam Dunn (M.Arch ’12) and Ben Warwas (M.Arch 10)

21.DJ for the evening, Jesse Madrid (B.Arch ’08)

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15 CLASS NOTES

1970sDean Nota (B.Arch ’76) received two design awards from the AIA Long Beach-South Bay Chapter in their 2013 Biennial Awards Program. The Marsh Residence, designed for artist Peggy Marsh, and completed in Hermosa Beach in 1988, was recognized with the Institute’s 25 Year Award, while the Olivares Residence, completed in Manhattan Beach in 2011, was recognized with a Merit Award.

Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78) has received 11 design awards for his first health care project, the UCLA Outpatient Surgery and Medical Building in Santa Monica, which is also the first project to ever win the National AIA/Academy of Architecture for Health Design Award in both built (2013) and unbuilt (2011) categories. The project was also awarded by the Southern California Development Forum, AIA/LA, Westside Urban Forum, AIA/CC, LA Business Council and Modern Healthcare. The medical building has been featured in 80 articles and posts.

Richard Levy (B.Arch ’78) of Architectural Photography & Design in Los Angeles was recently elected as the Architectural Photographer member of the Board of Directors of American Photographic Artists (APA).

Nick Seierup (B.Arch ’79), Design Director and Principal with Perkins+Will, recently received four AIA design awards. The Modesto College Student Center won Honor awards in the Sierra Valley and Pasadena Foothill Chapters, as well as a Savings by Design Award for its environmental program that culminated in LEED Silver certification. Seierup’s competition entry for a new 32-courtroom, 510,000-square-feet Superior Court facility for the Long Beach Courthouse won a Merit Award from the Long Beach-South Bay Chapter of the AIA.

1980sDenis LaRoche (B.Arch ’80) founded Bad Ass Sports in Tustin, Calif., an apparel company with a mission to support athletes with special needs, and generate meaningful employment for workers with physical and cognitive disabilities. Inspired by his daughter, who has epilepsy and left hemiplegia, LaRoche has so far partnered with the Special Olympics and Big Idea, and hopes his new company will serve as an instrument for helping others with special needs.

Alison Wright (B.Arch ’81) spoke at a recent TEDx Manhattan Beach event about her work as an artist, architect and educator. She has designed studios and residences throughout Los Angeles, and has produced artwork straddling the line between art and architecture. A long-time Manhattan Beach resident, Wright also served as the city’s Cultural Arts Commissioner.

James Lynn (B.Arch ’82) is project director with Jacobs Project Management Company for the new VA Denver Replacement Medical Center, a new 2-million square feet facility including a full service hospital and ambulatory care center. With a budget of approximately $1.5 billion, the project

is scheduled to be completed by end of 2016.

David Hertz (B.Arch ’83) and S.E.A. Studio of Environmental Architecture are at work on a new 92-room hotel in Venice, Calif., which will incorporate three restaurants and retail spaces. Hertz’s 747 Wing House was recently featured on CBS This Morning with Charlie Rose. Airbnb hired S.E.A. to design a prefab eco-pod with a living wall for their local hospitality project, Hello LA. The pod, with interiors co-designed by actress Angelica Houston, will travel to San Francisco and then New York. Hertz married photographer Laura Doss on August 31, their wedding being covered by a full-page article in The New York Times.

Brendan MacFarlane (B.Arch ’84) of Paris-based Jakob+MacFarlane recently completed the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France. The project involved the restoration and renovation of three 18th and 19th-century structures, plus demolition of a fourth wing to open up a sloping poured-in-place concrete courtyard from which a silvery aluminum-clad, parametric form springs like a sci-fi creature. The project is featured on the cover of Architectural Record’s October 2013 issue.

Bill Gregory’s (B.Arch ’84) Niemiec/Majchrzak Residence was featured in the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy-White Point Home Tour in September. Gregory is principal of Arcelab, a practice he founded in 2008 after having spent 22 years working on campus planning and master development for UCLA.

Polly Osborne (M.Arch ’87) was elevated to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects.

Ned Engs (M.Arch ’89) and his firm E4 Architects Studio’s $1 million face-lift of the mid-century modern Sechler House in Pasadena was featured by the Wall Street Journal. Engs bought the home in 2010 and spent two years renovating it, adding a second floor and expanding the residence by roughly 1,000 square feet. It was recently bought by Evie DiCiaccio, the development director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and John Dicaccio, a partner at Snowden Capital Advisors.

Steven Suchman (M.Arch ’89) runs Motivated Media, a production company providing a complete pipeline for immersive branding experiences to serve fashion, luxury and lifestyle brands. Most recently, Suchman collaborated with fashion designer Jonny Cota for the “art-inspired” SKINGRAFT line, directing the 3D film Dark Light Cycles, which depicts a motorcycle fashion show.

1990sPeter Grueneisen’s (M.Arch ’90) Crestwood Hills Residence was selected for publication in the forthcoming book by the national AIA/CRAN knowledge community. Titled Houses for All Regions—CRAN Residential Collection, the book features select residencies featuring design solutions that respond to the individual circumstances of place and program. Grueneisen is principal of nonzero\architecture in Santa Monica.

Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim (M.Arch ’90) presented her professorial inaugural lecture at the University Putra Malaysia, where she currently serves as Dean of the School of Design and Architecture. In her new role, she welcomes industry-academia joint collaborations with interested alumni. Previously, Ibrahim was named one of the 2012 Top Research Scientists by the Academy of Sciences Malaysia (ASM).

Elissa Scrafano’s (M.Arch ’90) Mendel Residence was featured this summer in Dwell on Design’s Canyon & Valley Home Tour 2013 in Los Angeles. An Echo Park residence designed by Scrafano in 2008, and subsequently bought by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, was featured by Dwell and The New York Times.

Christopher Mercier, AIA (M.Arch ’91), principal of (fer) studio, has had several projects featured in major publications such as Wall Street Journal, California Home & Design, as well as in Dwell’s home tours this past summer. (fer) studio’s latest restaurant project, Connie & Ted’s, opened its doors in West Hollywood in June and has since received rave reviews, being described as a “driveby showstopper” by Guy Horton (M.Arch ’96) on KCRW’s DnA blog.

Andreas Angelidakis (B.Arch ’92) designed the space for a hybrid art and design exhibition, The System of Objects, on view at the Deste Foundation in Athens, Greece. His designs were also on display at the Frieze Art Fair in London, and he was recently profiled by Architectural Record in the magazine’s Newsmaker column.

Jeremy Levine (M.Arch ’93) was elected Board Chair of Side Street Projects. His firm is developing and funding an Architecture for Kids pilot-program for next Spring in the LA School District. Two of his latest projects are featured in the new book, Passive Houses from Braun Publishing.

Miggi Hood (M.Arch ’93) created and co-produced the documentary series Time of Death, which premiered November 1 on Showtime. Having spent the earlier part of her career designing Hollywood sets, Hood conceived the idea for the 6-episode series after experiencing a series of deaths in her family and close circle of friends. The show has received rave reviews for its unflinchingly honest look at people facing their own mortality.

Joe Day (M.Arch ’94) published a new book, Corrections and Collections, Architectures for Art and Crime (Routledge Press, 2013) examining how architectures of exhibition and discipline now dominate the American landscape.

Todd Erlandson (M.Arch ’94) of Los Angeles based M)Arch. Studio collaborated this summer on the design of the Windshield Perspective exhibition at the A+D Museum. The show was part of the overarching Getty-funded Pacific Standard Times Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A initiative. Erlandson’s design was praised in an exhibition review by Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Hawthorne.

Elmar Kleiner (M.Arch ’94), founder and director of Thailand-based Office for Interior & Architecture (OIA), received a Gold certification from the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) for his Haefele Design Center in Phuket, being the first project to be certified by DGNB in South East Asia.

Karen M’Closkey (B.Arch ’94), principal of PEG office of landscape + architecture, and co-founder Keith VanDerSys, received a 2013 PEW fellowship in the arts. PEG is the first landscape architecture office to be awarded the fellowship since its inception in 1991. PEG was also named one of Metropolis’ Select Ten, which identifies the next generation of thought leaders in the field of design.

Jason Payne (B.Arch ’94) of Hirsuta contributed to the second edition of Project, a journal investigating the idea of a project in architecture—the pursuit of an intellectual problem or critical agenda that transcends an architect’s individual works. Alumni Joe Day (M.Arch ’94) and Albert Pope (B.Arch ’78) also contributed essays.

Iris Anna Regn (M.Arch ’94) is a Los Angeles based designer whose professional collaborations include Tim Durfee & Iris Anna Regn, Durfee Regn Sandhaus, and BROODWORK. She is currently working on a public artwork for the Northeast Los Angeles Police Station and is producing a collection of multipurpose textile wraps. With BROODWORK—a social practice examining the interweaving of creative practice and family life—Regn participated in the 2013 Trajector Art Fair in conjunction with Brussels Art Days.

Jeffrey Allsbrook (M.Arch ’95) and Silvia Kuhle of Standard received an AIA Los Angeles Merit Award for the new Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles. They are currently working on the permanent installation of a 1957 Jean Prouvé “Structure Nomade” pre-fab at Maxfield in West Hollywood and a concept store for Hourglass cosmetics. Recent projects include the environmental identity and the first eight stores for Pressed Juicery, and competition entries for housing in the Far Rockaways and a pedestrian bridge in Salford, England.

Gordon Kipping’s (M.Arch ’95) work is included in the MoMA exhibition Cut ‘n’ Paste: From Architectural Assemblage to Collage City, on view through January 5, 2014. Kipping, who heads New York-based GTECTS, interviewed about the MoMA show with Wall Street Journal.

Jörg Rügemer (M.Arch ’95) of AJR Atelier successfully led his team in winning the international urban design competition Sixty-Nine Seventy—The Spaces Between in Salt Lake City. He is currently at work on strategies to implement the proposal into the city’s downtown core and beyond. Rügemer also finished a 2-year post-occupancy monitoring phase of his 125 Haus, which became Utah’s most energy-efficient and cost effective house, being awarded several AIA and local Utah awards for its architectural and spatial qualities.

Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96) and Stephan Mundwiler (M.Arch ’95) of lee+mundwiler won a 2013 AIA California Chapter merit award for the Geology Museum and Research Center in Shenzhen, China, which was completed earlier this year. They also received an AIA│LA honor award for their residential project “L House” in Culver City, Los Angeles.

David Nosanchuk (M.Arch ’96) has been invited to contribute ideas to Flavor Paper, a Brooklyn producer of avant-garde wallcoverings. Seven of his designs of collaged bits of buildings such as the Pantheon and Bernini’s Colonnade at St. Peter’s Basilica are available to order from Flavor Paper.

Hadley Arnold (M.Arch ’97) and Peter Arnold (M.Arch ’94) received a 2013 AIA│LA Presidential Award for Community Contribution. The two founded the Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University to research innovative responses to climate change and water scarcity. Their Dry Studio involves wild and bumpy road trips across the arid west, where the entire class camps out, designing and erecting temporary drought-responsive structures.

Mimi Zeiger (M.Arch ’98) recently spoke at the Harvard GSD on the frontiers of design criticism. She also taught Reread Remix, a cross-platform criticism workshop for GSD students, exploring the act of critical writing as it translates from the page to the screen to performance. Her essay, Toward a Collective Criticism was published in Volume #36: Ways to Be Critical, and she contributed a chapter to Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo (Ashgate Publishers, 2013).

Paola Zellner (M.Arch ’98), assistant professor at the School of Architecture and Design, Virginia Tech, has completed the installation Between the Pyramid and the Labyrinth in the Cube at the Center for the Performing Arts. The project, an interactive and responsive environment developed in collaboration with Tom Martin and students from her class, Textile Space, was sponsored by the Institute of Creativity, Arts and Technology.

Beth Holden (B.Arch ’98) of New Theme presented a new exhibition at her NEW THEME Gallery on Melrose. Dubbed Diffraction, the show included art works by Holden and artist Zach Stadel.

Eric Vogel (M.Arch ’98) recently published a book about Frederick Layton—an American businessman turned pioneering art collector and philanthropist—who founded the Milwaukee Art Museum. Titled Layton’s Legacy: A Historic American Collection, 1888-2013, Vogel’s book co-authored with John Eastberg was reviewed by OnMilwaukee.com and is available on Amazon.com.

Tima Bell (M.Arch ’99) and Scott Sullivan (M.Arch ’99) have teamed up again to create Relativity Architects, an architecture firm focusing on low income housing, as well as hospitality, commercial and high end residential work.

Vicken Derderian (B.Arch ’99) debuted his designs as part of the Academy of Art University’s Spring 2014 collection for the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York. Derderian recently graduated with an M.F.A. in Fashion Design from the San Francisco-based school.

2000sDemetrios Avraamides (M.Arch ’00) has finished the design of a public primary school in a low income neighborhood in the town of Paphos, Cyprus. The new building will replace an existing school that was originally built as a prison. Groundbreaking took place in December.

Nico Marques (M.Arch ’00) of Photekt was featured in Archinect’s In Focus series profiling architectural photographers. Based in Los Angeles, Marques has recently photographed for Steven Ehrlich, Predock Frane, Kanner Architects, and Trulinea among others. His work was recently on view in the Never Built Los Angeles show at the A+D Museum.

Rebecca Rudolph (M.Arch ’00) and Catherine Johnson (M.Arch ’04), co-founders of Los Angeles design collaborative Design, Bitches, received an AIA/LA Restaurant Design Award for their work on Superba Snack Bar in Venice, Calif. They recently completed a second retail location for Coolhaus in Pasadena, and will be part of the Almost Anything Goes exhibition opening January 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Monica. The two alumnae were also recently profiled by the Architectural Record in their Newsmaker column. Johnson is featured in the documentary film Coast Modern, released earlier this year.

Coomy Bilimoria Kadribegovic (MRD ’01) was promoted to Senior Associate at AECOM, where she is currently working on the LACCD’s $6 billion building program. Nerin Kadribegovic (M.Arch ’03) and Coomy, who met while at SCI-Arc, recently welcomed the arrival of their second child.

Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02), Partner at Kaplan Gehring McCarroll Architectural Lighting, was invited to speak at the Asia Lighting Arts Symposium in Guangzhou in June. He presented the lighting design for the 60-story Zhengzhou Greenland Plaza Tower, a collaboration with Skidmore Owings and Merrill. Weinreber is currently designing projects in New York, New Jersey, Boston, Chicago, Shanghai and Los Angeles.

Kevin Wronske’s (B.Arch ’02) firm, Heyday Partnership, recently completed construction on a six-home small lot subdivision rated LEED Gold, located in the Glassell Park neighborhood of northeast Los Angeles. The project looks to create a denser, greener, healthier spec home in a neighborhood typically confined to banal stucco boxes.

Kai Cole (M.Arch ’02) was mentioned in several stories about the contemporary adaptation of Much Ado about Nothing. The film was shot entirely at Cole’s Santa Monica home which she designed.

Benjamin Ball (B.Arch ’03) and Gaston Nogues (B. Arch ’93) of Ball-Nogues Studio completed the permanent public art installation Air Garden for the new Bradley West International Terminal at LAX. They were commissioned to design three projects in Texas—Confluence Park in San Antonio, a public artwork in Houston, and a public artwork in El Paso. The October 2013 issue of Metropolis includes Ball-Nogues among the editors’ “Select Ten” emerging talents.

Bryan Flaig (M.Arch ’04) of Los Angeles-based Undisclosable recently completed the Bocato restaurant in Culver City’s historic Helms Bakery. Flaig’s design team included alumni Nicholas Poulos (M.Arch ’11) and Rob de Cosmo (M.Arch ’04), and undergraduate student Omar Preciado (B.Arch ’16).

Nerin Kadribegovic, AIA (M.Arch ’03), Principal with Lehrer Architects and member of the SCI-Arc Alumni Council, recently completed work on five affordable housing projects based on three prototypes designed by the firm. The projects are located throughout several challenging South Los Angeles neighborhoods. Kadribegovic is currently working on projects for the new Learning Center for Tree People, and a new headquarters for fashion designer Trina Turk.

Sang Dae Lee (M.Arch ’04), founder of Los Angeles and Seoul-based UnitedLAB, received a 2013 International Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum for his project, Magok Waterfront: Intercity. The work was shown alongside other wining projects in a group exhibition at the 14th International Biennial of Architecture in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Wagen Teh (M.Arch ’04) and his architecture practice, PROW Architects, were shortlisted for a World Architecture Festival 2013 award in the house category for his Arena House project. The design is a synthesis of an arena and a house typology in response to the client’s unique lifestyle in Singapore.

Steve Boyer (M.Arch ’05) was selected to participate in this year’s Glow festival in Santa Monica. His work involved the deployment of thousands of smart devices to splash a 60x60 space with color and sound. Boyer invited festival goers to download a smartphone app and participate in the work by becoming a “smart pixel” and contributing their device’s screen to the crowd-sourced fields of color.

Laurel Consuelo Broughton (M.Arch ’06) of Welcome Projects participated in an exhibition for the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Titled Wall Works: Black Holes, the show featured a milky way of black holes as interpreted through drawings inside TetraPak milk cartons by more than 500 kindergarten through 12th grade students in the Santa Monica-Malibu and Los Angeles Unified School Districts.

Guy Horton (M.Arch ’06) was recently picked by KCRW to be one of its new design reporters for DnA: Design & Architecture, produced and hosted by Frances Anderton. Horton will be contributing writing and on-air

segments to the show and podcast. His first aired interview was with Denise Scott Brown.

Benjamin Luddy (M.Arch ’06) and Makoto Mizutani (M.Arch ’05) of Scout Regalia recently launched their new product collections featuring handmade wall hooks, utility pouches and bicycle saddlebags designed in collaboration with Winter Session of Denver, Colo. The two were recently featured in Archinect’s Working out of the Box series presenting architects who have applied their architecture backgrounds to alternative career paths.

Mirai Morita (M.Arch ’06) was appointed lecturer at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. Previously, she worked at Atelier Bow-Wow, OMA, Asymptote and Michael Sorkin Studio.

Gabie Strong (M.Arch ’06) completed the site-specific public art installation It Calls from the Creek with collaborators Matthew Hebert and Jared Stanley. Together as Unmanned Minerals, the design+art+poetry group were commissioned by the Art on Site/Sierra Fund to design and build a semi-permanent outdoor installation along the Deer Creek Tribute Trail in Nevada City, Calif.

Joshua Taron (M.Arch ’06) was awarded tenure as Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary, Canada, where he also co-directs the Laboratory for Integrative Design (LID). Taron founded his office, Synthetiques, in 2008, focusing on the hybrid ecologies afforded through the interface of virtual and physical economies across multiple scales.

Moses Hacmon (B.Arch ’07) hosted an exhibition of his photographs at HUB LA in Downtown Los Angeles. Part art, part science, and part spiritual awakening, his show included a unique collection of images of water. Hacmon spent ten years studying water and developing a photographic technique that captures the hidden life of this element, portraying its pure form in motion.

Jong Hwa (Duly) Lee (M.Arch ’07) founded and has been directing a social experimental project called Festival Abierto in Panama. A first-of-its-kind in Panama, the event provides a platform for both private and public sectors to connect with cultural citizens through education, music, art and science. Its most recent edition welcomed more than 25,000 attendees, as well as a special collaboration with the Smithsonian Institute and the UN Development Program.

Ninaki Priddy (B.Arch ’07) joined the accessories team for Lucky Brand earlier this year. In her role as Jewelry Designer for the company, she will impart her creative expertise in design development and creative direction to the brand aesthetic. Priddy will continue to work on her eponymous line, and will be launching a new collection in 2014.

2010sAlfonso Medina (SCIFI ’10), founder of New York based T38 Studio, was highlighted by CurbedNY in a story about promising up-and-coming talent in the fields of architecture, interior

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design and urban development.

Jonathan Wimmel (B.Arch ’10) received a Master of Architecture from Columbia University. While in New York, he collaborated with Serendipity’s Thierry Morali on completing the full delivery of schematic design for a 12,000-square-feet home on Dubai’s Palm Island. Wimmel now resides in Houston, Texas, where he is Design Principal and Project Manager at Prozign Architects. He recently completed a 90,000-square-feet interior renovation with a construction budget of $14 million, for a space that will house a joint program between the University of Texas and the Houston Community College.

Seth Weiner (M.Arch ’10) developed a score for his conceptual project Choir Corridor, a site and space-specific performance in the Main Hall of the MAK Vienna. In collaboration with a professional choir, the work examines the interplay of human interaction and space in regard to group dynamics, mechanisms of crowd control, protest movements and the potential for voice to approximate a barrier. In Spring 2014, he will be joining the Department of Media Communications at Webster University in Vienna as an Adjunct Professor.

Alique Pempejian (B.Arch ’11) and Lusine Miribyan (B.Arch ’10), designers at Gin Wong Associates, have recently performed at the 5th annual Unfrozen Music concert, a collaboration of architects and designers who happen to also play music. Alique on the violin and Lusine on the piano performed their own rendition of Time from the movie Inception, in collaboration with photographs of Faces of Water provided by alumnus Moses Hacmon (B.Arch ’06).

Adriana Argyropoulos (M.Arch ’12) exhibited her SCI-Arc thesis project, Slow Space, in the 2013 edition of Currents, an internationally renowned new media festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Liz von Hasseln (M.Arch ’12) and Kyle von Hasseln (M.Arch ’12) co-founded The Sugar Lab, a micro design firm for custom 3D printed sugar in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Their work has recently been featured in Al Jazeera America, The Guardian, TechCrunch, Fast Company, Wired, and Los Angeles Magazine. In September, 3D Systems acquired the startup, which the partners will continue to manage as creative directors. In November, the couple presented their work at TEDx in Manhattan Beach.

Ralph S. Steenblik (M.Arch ’12) will have work published in “Educating 21st Century Architects” by Neil Spiller. His Sonata Panel piece was selected by a jury to be included in the Design Lab exhibit at Site Santa Fe. Steenblik recently completed a 3000 sq. ft. vacation residence project on Yuba Lake.

SCI-ARC DONORS

Academic Year 2012-13SCI-Arc gratefully acknowledges the following individuals and organizations whose support allows the school to educate the architects and designers who will imagine and shape our future.

$300,000 and Above ArtPlaceTom Gilmore

$100,000-$299,999The Getty FoundationThe Vinyl InstituteU.S. Department of Energy

$50,000-$99,999Anonymous (2)National Endowment for the ArtsThe Ahmanson Foundation

$10,000-$49,999Anschutz Entertainment GroupArya GroupRichard BaptieJamie and Carolyn BennettBlu HomesBoschBuro HappoldCity of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural AffairsJoe Day (M.Arch ’94) and Nina HachigianTim and Neda DisneyWilliam FainForest City WestGensler Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine ArtsHathaway Dinwiddie Construction CompanyScott Hughes (M.Arch ’97)Hughesumbanhowar architectsJohnson FainRay and Shelly KappeChristopher (M. Arch ’99) and Hildegard KennedyJeffrey KipnisEric Owen Moss and Emily KovnerLa Vida Feliz FoundationLegendary Investors GroupThom and Blythe MayneGreg OttoJerold B. NeumanKevin RatnerAbigail Scheuer (M.Arch ’93)SCI-Arc Student UnionAbby SherSouthern California IBEW-NECATed TannerArdie Tavangarian (B.Arch ’80)The Eisner FoundationThe Green FoundationU.S. BankW.M. Keck FoundationWilliam Lyon HomesStephanie Bowling Zeigler (M.Arch ’95)

$5,000-$9,999Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis LLPBDO USA LLPBernards BrothersAnthony FergusonFurthermore: A program of the J.M. Kaplan FundJacobs Matt ConstructionKenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris FoundationMerry NorrisPasadena Art AlliancePerkins + Will Los AngelesNick Seierup (B.Arch ’79)

Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLPWeyerhaeuserWurstküche

$1,000-$4,999Anthony Anderson (M.Arch ’04)Christopher BanksBarbara Bestor (M.Arch ’92)Monique Birault (M.Arch ’92)Jacklin BloomJohn Boccardo (M.Arch ’84)Mark BormanMark BradfordCalifornia Community FoundationRick CarterKai Cole (M.Arch ’02)C.W. Driver Hernan Diaz Alonso and Florencia PitaRobin Donaldson (M.Arch ’87)John Enright and Margaret GriffinSue FirestoneFrederick Fisher and PartnersHsinming Fung and Craig HodgettsJohn and Jean GeresiElizabeth Gibb (M.Arch ’89)Steve GlennJacqueline Greenberg (M.Arch ’95)Peter (M. Arch ’90) and Kimberly Grueneisen David Hertz (B. Arch ’83)Beth Holden (B. Arch ’98) and Wolfgang MelianSteven HollKathleen Hurley (M.Arch ’96)Darin JohnstoneAlice KimmCara Lee (M.Arch ’96) and Stephan Mundwiler (M.Arch ’95)Jeremy Levine (M. Arch ’93)Linear City DevelopmentMacPherson’sMenn, Van Kuik & Walker, Inc.Kurt Meyer and Pamela DeuelShigeru and Kiyoko MoritaMargi Glavovic Nothard (M.Arch ’92)Lorcan O’HerlihyPacon CorporationMichael PalladinoPasadena Community FoundationMichael Poris (M.Arch ’90)RB ElectricRoscoe and Swanson Accountancy Corp.Lisa RussoElissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90) and Tim SullivanShubin + Donaldson ArchitectsCherry Lietz Snelling (M.Arch ’97)Aaron SosnickSarah SullivanDan SwartzLee Tabler (B.Arch ’76)Michael and Gina ThaxtonThe McGregor CompanyLaurence Tighe (M.Arch ’91)Patrick TigheXefirotarch

$500-$999Herwig BaumgartnerMarty CaverlyCO ArchitectsDora Epstein-JonesMichael Folonis (B.Arch ’78)Pavel Getov (M.Arch ’93)Russell L. Goings IIIMarcelyn GowHammel, Green and Abrahamson, Inc.Alec (M.Arch ’90) and Sandra KobayashiJanet Simon (M.Arch ’94) and Ron McCoyMarcelo SpinaRussell Thomsen

Tom Wiscombe

Up to $500Bamshad AkhbariDaniel Alajajian (B.Arch ’12)Maya Alam (M.Arch ’12)Jean (B.Arch ’86) and William (B.Arch ’86) Amador Jinsoo An (B.Arch ’16)Keith Anderson (M.Arch ’87)Pawel C. Andrzejczak (B.Arch ’13)Anonymous (M.Arch ’89)Anonymous (M.Arch ’95)Anonymous (M.Arch ’96)Anonymous (B.Arch ’98)Anonymous (B.Arch ’99)Anonymous (M.DesR ’03)William Andrew AtwoodChristopher Aykanian (M.Arch ’89)Diane Bald (B.Arch ’83)Natasa Bajc (M.Arch ’99)Robert Bangham (M.Arch ’90)Francisco BanogonYasaman Barmaki (M.Arch ’07)Jeffrey Beck (B.Arch ’86)David Becker (B.Arch ’86)Tima Alexander Bell (M.Arch ’99)Alexander Jay BelsonDaniel Bernstein (M.Arch ’86)Erin (M.Arch ’12) and Ian BeslerLaura BirchMarilyn Bishop (M.Arch ’88)Megan Elisabeth Blaine (M.Arch ’07)Erik V. Blanchard (B.Arch ’09)John BohnJeff Bolen (B.Arch ’88)Chris Bonura (B.Arch ’88)Valerie BornPeter Borrego (B.Arch ’90)Cecilia Brock (M.Arch ’07)Isabel Brones (M.Arch ’83)Angie Brooks (M.Arch ’91)Joseph Brown (M.Arch ’13)Jessica Brush (M.Arch ’11)Cory BucknerStephen BurtonJay Bush (M.Arch ’99)Catherine Lee Caldwell (B.Arch ’11)Amaranta Campos (B.Arch ’08)Joao Canecas (B.Arch ’92)Dana Cantelmo (M.Arch ’89)Jonathan Cantwell (M.Arch ’00)Breanna Carlson (M.Arch ’03)Cynthia Carlson (M.Arch ’90)Lilliana Carolina Castro (B.Arch ’09)Cowan Chang (B.Arch ’90)Patrice Jin Jin Chang (B.Arch ’16)Eric Cheong (M.Arch ’04)Annie Chu (B.Arch ‘83) and Rick Gooding (B.Arch ’84)Alexander Reed Clark (M.Arch ’09)Isaac Gregory Clewans (M.Arch ’06)Benjamin Cole (B.Arch ’90)Christine Lee Coleman (M.Arch ’09)Morgan Connolly (M.Arch ’85)Ernest Convento (M.Arch ’05)Cook ArchitectureDanielle CornwellCameron Crockett (B.Arch ’09)Erin G. Crowell (M.Arch ’12)Valerie Dahan (M.Arch ’85)Kimberly DavisAdaPia d’ErricoTri Quang Do (M.Arch ’08)Henry Dominguez (M.Arch ’12)DU ArchitectsEdmund Einy (B.Arch ’83)Berit Eisenmann (M.Arch ’01)Elizabeth Dinkel Design Associates, Inc.Edward Engs (M.Arch ’89)Juan Carlos EsquivelJonathan Evans (M.Arch ’88)Jeffrey Eyster (M.Arch ’98)Scotty Field

Heather Flood (M.Arch ’04)Craig Fraulino (B.Arch ’80)Deborah Fuentes (B.Arch ’08)Stephen Gabor (M.Arch ’00)Anna Galanis (M.Arch ’88)Nat GaleSusan GarrardStephen GarrettCatherine Garrison (M.Arch ’02)William GaumerMark Gee (M.Arch ’99)Pavel Pan Getov (M.Arch ’93)Matthew GillisDina GiordanoFrance Girard and Alain LauriaultJared GlatterCarlos Gomez (B.Arch ’97)Thomas GrabnerDavid GrayGreenscreenAdam Nathaniel Grove (M.Arch ’10)John Sutton Gunning (B.Arch ’89)Sofia GutierrezAmir Teimour HabibabadiMeldia Nora Hacobian (M.Arch ’15)Christina HalsteadShannon Eve Han (M.Arch ’06)Nina Leah Handelman (M.Arch ’11)Birgit Hansen (B.Arch ’99)Carol Schlanger HelveyGraciela D. Hodgson (M.Arch ’07)Paul HollidayTimothy Hosbein (M.Arch ’01)Elena Howell (M.Arch ’06)Caroline Hur (M.Arch ’03)Farifteh Imani-RadYasushi Ishida (M.Arch ’04)Vic Jabrassian Robert Rea Jackson (M.Arch ’87)Christof Jantzen (M.Arch ’94)Melody J. Javaherian (B.Arch ’16)Christopher John Philip Jennings (M.Arch’ 95)Alec Johnson (B.Arch ’95)Coomy (M.DesR ’01) and Nerin (M.Arch ’03) Kadribegovic Geoffrey Kahn (M.Arch ’90)Steven M. Kanter, M.D.Kaplan Gehring McCarroll Architect-ural LightingFinn Kappe (B.Arch ’82)Daniel Jens Karas (M.Arch ’14)Katayoun Karimifard (M.Arch ’09)Shohreh Kashifian (B.Arch ’87)Molly KeeganElizabeth Keslacy (M.Arch ’04)Armen Khatchaturian (B.Arch ’94)Mahtash Khatib-Rahbar (B.Arch ’93)Pouria Khodaeiani (M.Arch ’13)Hyun-Jung Kim (M.Arch ’94)Steven Seong Wook Kim (B.Arch ’98)Jeffrey KingLaura Foster Kissack (M.Arch ’99)Ronald KolodziejKen KoslowHunter Knight (M.Arch ’06)Charlie Kramer (M.Arch ’80)Kreysler & AssociatesBrandon A. Kruysman (M.DesR ’11)Samantha Britt Labrie (M.Arch ’14)Guillermina Chiu Lam (B.Arch ’08)Miriam Ginsberg Larson (M.Arch ’02)Michelle and Oren (B.Arch ’79) LaveeHuy Duc Le (B.Arch ’11)Michael Lee (M.Arch ’89)Mina LeeYoram LePair (M.Arch ’04)Ben Levin (B.Arch ’80)Ottilie Levin (B.Arch ’97)Keming LiHeather Libonati Raleigh Lieban (M.Arch ’86)Selena Linkous (M.Arch ’03)Robert Lisauskas (M.DesR ’10)John Lodge (M.Arch ’94)

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OFFICE OF DEVELOPMENT AND ALUMNI AFFAIRS

Chief Advancement OfficerSarah Sullivan

Associate Director of Corporate, Foundation and Government RelationsAllison Holton

Assistant Director of Advancement ServicesAndrea Marshall

Research AssociateJohanna Vandermoortele

LETTERS TO THE DIRECTOR

I’d like to thank you for inviting me to the SCI-Arc Final Thesis Review. It is a privilege that I appreciate very much...the school is fantastic, the energy even more and you have around you plenty of excellent teachers and architects...I liked also your confrontation with Hernan which testifies in fact of the “sanity” of the school, of the vigor of its engagements in the field! I wish that we could have that in Columbus! It may be coming back here slowly as schools of architecture are like football teams, they are a configuration of great players, which are welded together for a moment, and you have such a great moment, you might be pleased! Merci encore, et amicalement, José Oubrerie

Congratulations on the 40th. I graduated with my Masters in the summer of 1985. Went that autumn to New Haven to work with Allan Greenberg. Now practice in San Francisco. Rotondi was my first teacher, then Ray, and then Thom Mayne. Ernie Salk was in there too. Good fellow. Those were the days of T.G. Smith. Good man as well. Your introduction (in Mag #6) got me thinking. SCI-Arc needs a class in the Classical Orders. “How Things Work [And Don’t]” posed two good questions: 1) Does the human condition continue to improve? 2) Is an alternative postulate possible? My answer. Study and build Classical buildings. Yes, so contradictory isn’t it? Moving into the 21 century and building brand new, classically ornamented buildings. “When we discover something new we simultaneously concede something old.” I guess sometimes an “...alternative premise is plausible.” Stanford White back from the dead. Again, congratulations and good job with the school. Morgan Conolly (M.Arch ’85)

I just finished reading your comments about “How Things Work [And Don’t]” in the front of the SCI-Arc magazine. I have nothing more to say [other] than I liked your thoughts and am poignantly reminded of the point of view about architecture and thinking that was so much a part of my experience at SCI-Arc…holding important questions, as opposed to sitting on answers, is much more enlarging...talmudic, I suppose. After having worked with Daniel Herren for 4 years, I found myself settled in Indianapolis so I am at a great distance both physically and psychologically from L.A. and SCI-Arc and it’s of value to me to become reminded of the spirit there. I have with pride, over the years, proclaimed SCI-Arc as a place that imparts a powerful influence upon those it touches and as a promoter of original thinking. Being embroiled in the task of maintaining a healthy business through recent trying times, and stretching within the context of a midwestern mindset as much as possible...it is very nice for me to be reminded of matters and considerations of consequence beyond that. So, I suppose this is just a short note of thanks and acknowledgement. Bruce Loewenthal (M.Arch ’81)

Some times we are blessed with synchronistic experiences that should not be ignored. Last night I read your piece, “How Things Work [And Don’t].” This morning I continued my reading of the introduction to the Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library by Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie and David Fideler. From an architectural point of view Pythagoras laid the foundations for the Greek temples and the Chartres Cathedral, this I believe bestows on him significant architectural credibility. I think Pythagoras speaks eloquently to your dilemma. Jock de Swart

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Deidre LoftusLos Angeles Downtown Arts District SpaceJonathan LouieMaggie LunskyLauren MacColl (M.Arch ’90)Briggs MacDonald (B.Arch ’80)Andrea Lenardin Madden (M.Arch ’98)Lida A. Mahabadi (M.Arch ’11)Hassan Majdfaghihi (B.Arch ’90)Sarah Rose Mark (M.Arch ’15)Elizabeth Martin (M.Arch ’92)John MartinZachary Martin-Schoch (M.Arch ’12)Peter MaurerIlaria MazzoleniTalbot McLanahan (M.Arch ’95)Santino Medina (M.Arch ’06)Matthew MelnykLuis (B. Arch ’83) and Nasrin (B.Arch ’85) Menendez Martin Roy Mervel (M.Arch ’81)Thomas Michael (M.Arch ’97)Matthew Momberger (B.Arch ’15)Dawn MoriParas Nanavati (M.Arch ’95)Navid/Oster Design Miriam Negri (B.Arch ’86)Fredrik Nilsson (B.Arch ’01)Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76)Walter O’BrienTom Oswalt (B.Arch ’78)Jennifer PanPAR Inc.Sarah Parker (B.Arch ’78)Aida and Malcolm PeckJohn C. Peck (M.Arch ’08)Alex Pettas (M.Arch ’06)Thuy P. Pham (M.Arch ’11)Jenny PhiKailey Anastasia PicoJacqueline Pimentel (M.Arch’ 89)Scott D. Plante (M.DesR ’10)Christian Aaron PraschNinaki Roberta Priddy (B.Arch ’09)Jonathan Proto (M.DesR ’11)Bruce ProvisorMatthew E. PughSteven Purvis (M.Arch ’06)Lorenz Quinley (M.Arch ’02)Pooja RajaramSomayyeh Ramezani (M.DesR ’12)Johnny Ramirios (B.Arch ’05)Glenn Rappaport Andrea Rawlings (B.Arch ’82)Molly Reid (M.Arch ’94)Brian Reiff (M.Arch ’91)Eve Carole Reynolds (M.Arch ’90)Steven H. Reynolds Felipe I. Rodriguez (M.DesR ’10)Jonah RowenJun and Donna RoxasLaurajean Jefferis Roxas (B.Arch ’14)Rafael Ruiz (M.Arch ’14)Raymond RyanJanet SagerRobyn Salathe (M.Arch ’89)Mary Salazar John Paul Salcido (B.Arch ’16)Bane Saleh (M.DesR ’04)Safura Salek (B.Arch ’97)Nancy SamovarSolmaaz SarrafzadehThomas Scarin (M.Arch ’83)Karolin SchmidbaurLanna B. Semel (M.Arch ’11)Elita Seow (B.Arch ’03)Boogie Shafer (M+M ’05)Will Sharp (M.Arch ’87)Neal Shelat (M.Arch ’86)David Shoucair (B.Arch ’79)Carolyn and Jonathan (B.Arch ’80) SiegalAlan Sieroty Domenic Silvestri (B.Arch ‘85)

Vicky and Bill SimonianGlen SmallBenjamin James Smith (M.Arch ’07)Yutaka and Hiromi SoneHadley Soutter (M.Arch ’97)Cathryn Hidley Spanbock (M.Arch ’98)Randy Spiwak (B.Arch ’79)Jordan M. SquiresShane StaffordArnold Stalk (B.Arch ’77)Renee and Brian (B.Arch ’92) StatonJohn Perry Stone (B.Arch ’10)Dale E. Strong (M.Arch ’10)Satoru SugiharaWendy Alkire SuhrSanjay W. Sukie (B.Arch ’09)Gerald Sullivan (B.Arch ’90)Scott Sullivan (M.Arch ’99)Stephen Sun (B.Arch ’11)Bo Sundius (M.Arch ’02)Mrinal Bipin Suri (M.Arch ’08)Roberto SzemzoJustin Tan (B.Arch ’16)Robert J. Tarr (M.Arch ’08)Julie TaylorMark Teale (B.Arch ’88)Tryggvi Thorsteinsson (B.Arch ’95)Tima Winter Inc.Alan T. Tomasi (B.Arch ’87)Zen TungAnthony Unruh (B.Arch ’81)Urban OperationsYasi Vafai (B.Arch ’90) and Robert Thibodeau (M.Arch ’93)David Valdes (M.Arch ’99)Flora Vara (B.Arch ’94)Daniel Vasini (M.Arch ’06)Peter Andras Vikar (M.DesR ’12)Kipling and William (B.Arch ’03) WagnerEsmerelda Jane Ward (M.Arch ’04)Ben P. Warwas (M.Arch ’10)Tami Wedekind (M.Arch ’91)Kainoa Westermark (M.Arch ’11)Emily White (M.Arch ’06)Jeff WilburnAllyne WindermanJohn Sharp Winston (M.Arch ’04)Amit WolfMark WorthingtonKevin Wronske (B.Arch ’02)Wilson Lee Wu (M.Arch ’11)Judith Wyle (M.Arch ’88)Michael James Wysochansk (M.Arch ’09)Tina WynnYi-Hsiu Yeh (M.Arch ’99)Andrew ZagoBrad Zeigel (M.Arch ’87)Mimi Zeiger (M.Arch ’98)Thomas Ziv (B.Arch ’80)Carlos Zubieta (B.Arch ’94)

And we thank the following for their in-kind support:American Lighting AmrampAngel City BreweryApollo Opening Roof SystemAramarkArcadia Doors and WindowsBAS EngineeringBechtel Project Planning and Development GroupBoise CascadeCSI ElectricalDavis LangdonDPR ConstructionDunn-EdwardsEmsealFisher & PaykelFormica CorporationGardengatesDiane GhirardoGrainger

KCRWKohlerLevi Strauss & Co.LiebherrMission WinesModern BiteOldcastleResource FurnitureRoxulSanifloSchneider ElectricSimpson Strong-TieSouthland Sod FarmsStock Building SupplySwinerton BuildersThe Honest Co.The ReclaimerUCLA Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special CollectionsWalters & WolfWhole Foods MarketWolverine

(Gifts and commitments from 9/1/12 through 8/31/13)

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTURE960 EAST 3RD ST.LOS ANGELES, CA 90013

Photograph by Monica Nouwens