sci-arc magazine no. 6 (spring 2013)

ARC

1 how things work [and don’t] Eric owen Moss

3 Public PrograMs

5 Faculty ProFilE: alExis rochas craig hodgetts

7 undErgraduatE thEsis 2013

11 sci-arc cElEbratEs 40

13 aluMni nEws and EvEnts

18 class notEs

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Eric

Ow

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oss

3 Public PrograMs

rEcEntSCI-Arc Gallery ExhibitionMarcElyn gow + ulrika karlssonAqueotropeJanuary 18–March 3

Lecture SeriesPiEr vittorio aurEliJanuary 23, 7pm

Lecture Seriesdavid ruyReturning to (Strange) ObjectsJanuary 30

Lecture SeriesandrEw ZagoAn Awkward PositionFebruary 6

Lecture SeriestoM gilMorEThe City ChairFebruary 13

Lecture SeriesbEn van bErkElArchitecture and its FutureFebruary 20

Lecture Series Eric owEn MossThe Man from the Country Where No One Else Lives2013 Raimund Abraham LectureMarch 6

Lecture Series kEllEr EastErlingExtrastatecraftMarch 13

Lecture Series tod MachovErMediated Music: Robotic Operas, Guitar Hero, Collaborative Symphonies and BeyondMarch 20

Lecture Series todd gannonPrelude to the ConfederacyMarch 27

SCI-Arc Gallery & Library Exhibitiona conFEdEracy oF hErEtics: thE architEcturE gallEry, vEnicE 1979March 29–July 7

Lecture Series ingEborg rockErApril 3, 7pm

SCI-Arc ExhibitionsEvEnth annual sPring showApril 20–May 12

Symposiuma conFEdEracy oF hErEticsJune 14–June 15Keynote: Thom Mayne and Coy Howard Moderators: Jeffrey Kipnis, Todd Gannon and Ewan Branda Featured Panelists: Original Architecture Gallery participants Eugene Kupper, Frederick Fisher, Frank Dimster, Peter de Bretteville, Thom Mayne, Craig Hodgetts, Eric Moss, and Coy Howard, as well as Barbara Bestor, Annie Chu, John Enright, Hisnming Fung, Paul Glodberger, Wes Jones, Mark Mack, and Andrew Zago.

about Public PrograMsLectures and discussions are webcast live at sciarc.edu/live.

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 [email protected].

Ben Van Berkel

Marcelyn Gow and Ulrika Karlsson, Aqueotrope, SCI-Arc Gallery

4

uPcoMingSCI-Arc Gallery ExhibitionandrEw atwood And PedestalsJuly 26–September 8

SCI-Arc Gallery ExhibitionsElEctEd thEsis ExhibitionSeptember 16-27

Lecture Series grahaM harMonSeptember 18 SCI-Arc Gallery ExhibitionlEbbEus woodsLebbeus Woods is an ArchetypeJune 1–December 1June 28, 7pm: Earthwave Opening Reception, Traction Triangle at Bloom Square in the Arts District. Designed by Lebbeus Woods and Christoph a. Kumpusch. October 11, 7pm: Exhibition Opening Reception & SymposiumWith Hernan Diaz Alonso, Christoph a. Kumpusch, Dwayne Oyler and Alexis Rochas.

Lecture Series guy nordEnsonOctober 2

Lecture Series cynthia davidsonOctober 16

Lecture Series sarah whitingNovember 6

Lebbeus Woods and Christoph a. Kumpusch, Earthwave, Traction Trianngle

Lecture Series MichaEl MaltZanNovember 13

Lecture Series kEnnEth FraMPtonDecember 4

DebatekEnnEth FraMPton + Eric owEn MossDialectical LyricDecember 6, 1pm, SCI-Arc Library

outsidE sci-arcExhibitionPaciFic standard tiME PrEsEnts: ModErn architEcturE in l.a.April–JulyDesigned to continue the momentum of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. provides a wide-ranging look at the region’s modern architectural heritage, as well as the significant contributions of L.A. architects to national and global developments in architecture. Comprising nine exhibitions and accompanying programs and events in and around Los Angeles, including the Getty, LACMA, MOCA, Hammer Museum, A+D Architecture and Design Museum, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and SCI-Arc.

SCI-Arc Magazine Issue 006

Editor-in-ChiefHsinming Fung

Contributing WritersGeorgiana CeausuCraig HodgettsDawn MoriEric Owen MossAimee RicherJustine Smith

SCI-Arc Publications

Project ManagerJustine Smith

Online Media and Public RelationsGeorgiana Ceausu

Graphic DesignerKate Merritt

Photography GeneralStephanie AtlanBennie Chan (B.Arch ’91)Maria Jose HerreroElena ManferdiniKate MerrittYuan MuFlorencia PitaAlexis RochasJoshua White

A Confederacy of Heretics, SCI-Arc Gallery

5 nodE MastEr: alExis rochasFaculty ProFilE

Craig Hodgetts

Surrounded by a crust of abstract foamcore models, with their authors from his Making + Meaning studio at SCI-Arc looking on, Alexis Rochas sits cross-legged on the floor as he comments on the model he holds aloft. His enthusiasm for this sort of interaction is clear as he relates the shape perhaps to the nucleus of an atom or perhaps the hip of a mastodon. As he favors each with observations both profound and profane, the students “get” it. They are watch-ing the mind of a designer at work, in real time, for the first time.

A member of the SCI-Arc design faculty since 2003, Rochas has headed several projects through the Community Design Pro-gram, including the FAB Arts Market Temporal Gallery, LINC Housing community grounds prototyping, and the LAMP com-munity’s sun shelter pavilion. His ingenuity and hands-on style have combined to create many of the novel structures which now dot our campus, and numerous temporary structures which served as a kind of experimental laboratory. Each seems to embody his appetite for transposing the use of novel materials, such as a supple plastic sheet used for sub-surface reinforcement, to highly visible and functional roles as an architectural surface. Theoretically, by mining previously de-valued systems of construction for their aes-thetic contribution, he is following in the footsteps of Gehry’s use of chain link fencing, but practically, Rochas simply favors utility over thesis. He searches for solutions, not demonstrations.

The unique thing about Rochas is that, if he can imagine it, he will make it. Unlike many of his peers—and the profession in general—he seems always poised to go beyond drawings and models to test a full-scale incarnation of his ideas. This process—for it is a process—is often iterative, as was the case with his proof-of-concept installation in the SCI-Arc gallery in 2010. For some time, Rochas had been developing a unique nodal structural system which, unlike existing types, was capable of conforming to near-infinite geometries, thus capable of adapting easily to para-metric forms as well as more conventional, platonic shapes, thus

alexis rochas is the founder of STEREO.BOT, a Los Angeles based practice focusing on the development of dynamic architectural methodolo-gies integrating design, technology and advanced fabrication techniques. Rochas has been a member of SCI-Arc’s design faculty since 2003, and has coordinated the Making + Meaning program, SCI-Arc’s summer foundation program in architecture, since 2006. He is the recipient of the 2004 City of Los Angeles Design Award, the 2002 New York Society of Architects M.W. Del Gaudio Award for Excellence in Total Design, and the 1996 Award for Excellence in Design from the Archi-tecture department of the University of Buenos Aires. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including Beyond Media, Florence, Italy (2009); SFWF (2008); MAK Applied Arts, Austria (2006); Wattis Institute (2006); A+D Museum NextGen (2006), Spot on Schools 2005, Florence, Italy; 2005 INDEX Awards, Copenhagen, Den-mark; MAK Center for Art and Archi-tecture (2005); and at the Bienal de Buenos Aires. His work has been published in a number of architectural journals including Monocle, I.D, Icon, 2G Dossier, Metropolis, Surface, Architectural Record, Domus and Frame magazine.

combining the inherent rigidity of Fuller’s triangles with the flex-ible, adaptive geometry of the two by four. The project took shape as Rochas began, project by project, to re-imagine the constraints of available, off-the-shelf connections, and to improvise, joint by joint, a new, systematic approach that would enable the construc-tion of the fluid, parametric forms he was imagining.

The opportunity to design a rapidly erected canopy for SCI-Arc’s 2010 graduation ceremonies provided the final impetus. Some 90 feet by 90 feet, and rising to a height of 35 feet, Rochas’ canopy successfully departed from the geodesic formula by means of a unique hub, assembled from Home Depot hardware, which accepted struts of any length and at any angle. This was revolutionary.

This is where the Internet truly comes into its own, because once the design Rochas had improvised from readily available components had matured, in his mind, to a universally adaptable construction methodology—had taken on a form which could be replicated en mass, tested, and made available for general use—it had become quite a refined, complex joint, aesthetically not un-like those employed by Japanese craftsmen, but radically different geometrically, and dependent on absolutely critical dimensions. A full-scale installation would require not a single hand-made example but the mass production of several hundred by a sophisti-cated multiple-cavity injection molding machine. Working alone, and over the Internet, Rochas identified a manufacturer, resolved issues, approved the fabrication of a custom injection mold, and gave the go-ahead for a limited production run. By documenting the faults, and successfully creating alternatives, the OCTOBOT structure was validated, and Rochas went on to win approval for a United States Patent.

Rochas also brings that concentrated ingenuity to larger scale projects which engage the community surrounding SCI-Arc. By turns self-initiated and in response to immediate needs, he has cre-

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1.Gateway Pavilion, Coachella, 2012

2.The Paths, SCI-Arc 40th Celebration, 2013

3.STILL ROBOT Node Detail, SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition, 2010

4..MOB Graduation Pavilion, SCI-Arc, 2009

5. STILL ROBOT, SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition, 2010

ated a series of works which animate rooftops and vacant lots with unique, useful, and purposeful structures. At LAMP, a street-front hybrid shelter offers seating and community space to the homeless individuals who seek it. Some, such as the SYNTHe combine func-tion, location, and materials in an unusual way to achieve unusual ends—in this case, to create a hydroponic vegetable garden for the Blue Velvet restaurant on a rooftop several stories above the street. Still others, such as an unrealized design for a pedestrian bridge over the Harbor Freeway that was to have featured a collage of decommissioned highway signs, lend new meaning to the concept of recycling. Projects such as these, which are deeply engaged with the community, are especially notable for the application of untried materials and methods, which in other hands, might be merely functional. In Rochas’ hands they become vehicles for architectural experimentation of the highest order.

It is also true that such projects, by their very nature, are far re-moved from the mainstream of critical architectural dialogue. They are idiosyncratic, born of a unique personal vision, and as such represent forays into an as yet undefined arena in which industrial design, architecture, and ecological concerns fuse. But being out-side of the so-called critical dialogue, and nurturing mostly per-sonal initiatives, has enabled Rochas to avoid being caught up in what fellow SCI-Arc architect Tom Wiscombe warns is an “extra-disciplinary” preoccupation with press, exhibitions, and lectures which put the younger generation of architects at risk of “exposing their work before it is fully cooked.”

As much of Rochas work is event-oriented, a certain ephemer-ality pervades even those projects which are designed as permanent structures. These projects, devoid of the burdens of durability and an expectation of longevity, can be seen as a pure translation of the tools and formal invention which pervades his work. It is as though a spontaneous gesture has been seized for the moment to serve as a gathering place, a showcase, or an icon which will evaporate the instant it is no longer needed. Like the early, unrealized proposals by Archigram, Rochas employs vibrant color, projections, and taut inflatable fabric skins to confer a festive, even celebratory charac-ter on what might have been merely functional. This is especially apparent in his 2012 entrance pavilion for the Coachella Music Festival, which employed the OCTABOT system, and featured internal LED lighting layered below 4D generative visuals, created

craig hodgetts worked for Sir James Stirling and formed StudioWorks before opening Hodgetts + Fung with his partner, Hsinming Fung, in 1984. Their work has been published exten-sively and has received numerous awards, including First Design Awards from Progressive Architecture, an AIA Library Buildings Award for UCLA Towell Library, the National Trust for Historic Preservation Honor Award for the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, and the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. Current projects include a cha-pel for the Jesuit Order, Port of Los Angeles Fire Boat Museum, and a mobile theater for Pink Floyd. In 2005 the Los Angeles Architectural Forum honored Hodgetts and his partner for career contributions to the architectur-al culture of Los Angeles and he is the recipient of the Los Angeles American Institute of Architecture teacher of the year award in recognition of his con-tinuing influence of his teaching upon students. Hodgetts is also the recipient in 2006 of the Los Angeles American Institute of Architecture Gold Medal Award and in 2008 received the AI-ACC Firm of the Year Award. A mono-graph of his firm’s work Hodgetts + Fung (United Asia Art and Design Corporation) was published in 2005.

…the Coachella Pavilion concept was “born out of a collaborative initiative seeking to fuse architecture, art and engineering into a unique and dynamic immersive experience.”

by Bryant Place of Sensory Sync.As this is a neglected corner of architectural speculation, Ro-

chas has not had the benefit of a body of focused critical inquiry, yet the work persists. Formally and technologically related to the better known structures of Peter Pearce, Yona Friedman, and Fuller, the steady evolution of the system continues to surprise, and to surpass the capabilities of its predecessors. For instance, while three-dimensional space-frame structures are constrained by the laws of geometry to certain formal limits, Rochas has been able to devise a system which is self-supporting yet capable of nearly lim-itless deformation. Pearce’s more traditional structures—and those of Pearce’s mentor Buckminster Fuller—even though composed of similar-appearing struts and nodes, are ultimately constrained by the fixed geometry of the node itself, and thus must adhere to a recursive, systematic pattern.

By contrast, Rochas has devised an “off-the-shelf” system that has the potential to liberate designers to freely imagine complex continuous forms, which can be economically assembled by un-skilled labor. The result, he believes, would change the game from the inside, enabling a universe of forms created by practitioners around the globe. In a recent interview he explains that the Coach-ella Pavilion concept was “born out of a collaborative initiative seeking to fuse architecture, art and engineering into a unique and dynamic immersive experience.”

That statement may well explain the extraordinary success of Rochas’ teaching methods. Rather than rely on analysis of exist-ing architectural models, or abstract formal theory, his studios are prime examples of a design methodology that favors practical innovation over speculative misadventure. In real-world terms, this attitude reflects an impatience with tired traditional methods, and a sometimes impetuous embrace of innovative ideas—be they born by looting non-architectural systems and materials, or cross-breeding stereotypes. Whatever the process, Roches’ students create works that might plausibly occupy a Los Angeles street one day even while they have the capacity to surprise and intrigue passersby.


Craig Hodgetts









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Craig Hodgetts









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The undergraduate program at SCI-Arc supports and values thesis as an opportunity for students to both synthesize their undergradu-ate work over the part five years, and to also aim beyond that base of knowledge towards new propositions. It serves as a conceptual jumping-off point for the students, as they prepare to graduate and engage in the field of architecture. This year, thesis presentations and reviews took place throughout the school on Friday, April 19th and Saturday, April 20th. For Simon F. Alvarez (B.Arch ’14) and Antonio C. Follo’s review (B.Arch ’14), the jury got into a par-ticularly lively discussion on the meaning of thesis itself. The jury included Stefano Casciani, Joe Day, John Enright, Hsinming Fung, Jeffrey Kipnis, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Monica Ponce de Leon, Wolf Prix, and Andrew Zago. An excerpt of the discussion follows:

Thom Mayne: There is no discussion of how this particular proj-ect has changed our notion of human behavior. Is there a threshold where student work has to demonstrate a minimal connection between technology, culture, political status, social status? Is there a thesis obligation to include a basic policy notion that makes the new city an ecological frontier? Is there a sense of sustainable architecture that connects the project to an idea of how we should exist in the world? Can you operate without those conversations? The thesis students are at the end of their academic careers. I’m about to hire one of you guys. There are fifteen constraints in front of you and, obviously, that’s what architecture is—dealing with constraints. If you can’t deal with those constraints, you can’t make the architecture work.

Jeff Kipnis: It took you 65 years to get there, and you want them to do it in five?

Thom Mayne: I’m asking for a conceptual threshold.

Eric Owen Moss: It’s not so much a question of whether I’m going to hire you. What we have to argue is, when we add up all the discussions of all the projects, we arrive at a thesis-in-the-aggregate that delivers the broadest conceptual knowledge content. The threshold is a multi-project, multi-student threshold. You won’t find it project by project, because individual project scope is defined more narrowly. We’re prepared to tolerate substantial deviations from the concept of a comprehensive building pro forma—sometimes there’s a conventional program, sometimes it’s utility, ecology, sociology, culture, sometimes not. Sometimes the means; sometimes the end. And we’re looking for an idiosyncratic student vantage point. Those requisite threshold ingredients come floating in piecemeal from all the projects; and, in the aggregate, we get that comprehensive coverage. But I would say a narrowness of conceptual content is tolerated, indeed encouraged. The tacit assumption is that too much breadth precludes depth.

Thom Mayne: They’re looking at you, the Aronoff House, and the question is: How is the student viewpoint now somehow different than your viewpoint twenty years ago? Right? Different interests? That would change the discussion. The students might be interested in gravity. They might be interested in utility, or a spatial strategy, and how it connects to some new pattern of human behavior. They might introduce the possibility of some new social organization. Something the students brought to the project beyond what you did is what I’m looking for. And they need to actually locate their project within a broader architectural context.

Eric Owen Moss: I think that gets to the quality of the student- architects, whether they accepted someone else’s premise and

essentially acquiesced or re-invented the concept. The pro forma should not remain what it was twenty-five years ago. What we’re looking for is an ability to re-imagine in a different context in a different world. How might the original project be transformed given very different social, technical, and ideological pressures? By the way, the Aronoff project belonged to a very particular site. If the wind came up, it would have rolled down the hill. This was Sisyphus. That was part of imagining it at the time. I would say the student project needs its own Sisyphus analogue.

Andrew Zago: Just a minor question. Is it accurate to say that thesis is not considered to be a comprehensive project? That it’s supposed to be narrowly defined?

John Enright: Absolutely. The projects are extremely specific by intention. We asked students to narrowly look at a topic, here, for instance the resultant study of an axonometric surface with pieces taken apart for reasons belonging to the making of an explanatory drawing, then reassembled for an entirely different set of organiza-tional reasons. That double disassembly/re-assembly focused the work. Students are developing their own ideas and their own iden-tities as architects. If we want to discuss the full curriculum, or the idea of thesis as a culmination of five years of all sorts of academic course work—technical, visual studies, et cetera—you won’t nec-essarily locate that discussion in the thesis project. However, we have emphasized a dense, internally coherent project, and a project composite in the sense of a basic set of explanatory drawings, models, and text that delivers on a premise.

Thom Mayne: Wouldn’t it be natural that they would bring with them the residue of the four previous years, which would automati-cally raise issues of gravity, materiality, and site? That would seem to be inherent.

Joe Day: Those issues certainly aren’t in the foreground, but I think they’re present here. And I think this is a profoundly con-temporary project in one critical respect that’s different from your work twenty-five years ago, Eric. I think this project suggests dif-ferent performance and functionality criteria. The students made tactical decisions about combining certain geometries to get them to perform functionally in certain ways, and to yield certain kinds of spaces. The geometry was never just a sphere. It was a sphere

1-4.Simon F. Alvarez, Anotnio C. FolloXOAdvisors: Dwayne Oyler, Devyn Weiser

8

in a combination with a pyramid, or cube. These guys are operat-ing in a more iterative context where a series of axonimetrically driven operations yield an almost infinite number of variations on the sphere that can functionally perform in a variety of ways. And the lion’s share of this project, I think, probably from the midterm, has been reading those programmatic possibilities strategically and taking advantage of them spatially. In that sense it’s more like try-ing to find a cure by making ten thousand combinations of genetic material than it is by making a single tactical decision about how to combine three things.

Monica Ponce de Leon: But they chose to make it into a neigh-borhood...So by making it a neighborhood, by choosing that as your site of operation, they demonstrate the consequences of the design process. I agree that working on certain pieces to narrow the topic as much possible is acceptable, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to use the narrowness of thesis as an excuse to excuse the questions that inevitably come about when you’re working on the problem. That’s why in the previous project, because it’s a tower, it was very good that the student chose the Copley Plaza Tower site. And she shouldn’t then have put blinders and said, “Okay, but I’m not going to discuss any of the consequences that the Plaza or the Trinity Church. I’ll just stick to the tower surface discussion.” When a primary issue of the consequences of that surface belongs to the context in which it’s seen. She avoided that subject entirely. In this project you guys chose to do a neighbor-hood, and that subject should be an essential part of the disassem-bly/re-assembly strategy.

Thom Mayne: There’s a certain rigor that comes out of that sort of neighborhood discussion that connects you to what we call archi-tecture. I’m just asking if that’s relevant here.

Devyn Weiser: I think this is a really fascinating discussion after seeing these projects today. Almost inevitably in every student project you’ll see some kind of technique driving that project, the iteration of that technique, and then the application of that to a building and site. And I think that’s what we’re looking at here—go and test the technique on a site where all of the pragmatic dif-ficulties and challenges are. I think it’s a fascinating discussion just from a pedagogical point of view about the way the students are just working.

Thom Mayne: That’s why I’m asking this. The work is amazingly disciplined. You’re somehow connected to the profession, and I’m just saying there’s a threshold, and I want you to be far enough along where you can actually make the leap to professional suc-cess, and there is some connection to the reality of the production of architecture.

Eric Owen Moss: I think the issue exists at the preliminary level of conceptual thinking and advising about the project. In other words, how is the student producing the project; why is the student doing the project; what are the constraints; what are the possibili-ties? When you look at the project in front of us, for instance, why should it appear as a ball in the end? Why is it what it is? Why don’t we end up with something entirely different? Were those questions asked at an early stage? I think one of the things that I would be looking for in terms of ‘you can work-you can’t’ is a level of student dexterity and a capacity for versatility in thinking. You don’t necessarily know all of the answers, but at least you have a sense of what you don’t know, and you can see problems, and that there are a lot of ways of coming after those issues. I’m less interested in an ideological perspective, or a belief system.

You don’t see too much of that around here. I would argue that architecture is not a religion; it’s not an allegiance. Unless you invent your own.

We’re looking for a dexterity capacity. Intellectual versatility. It’s not lock step predictable. I think there’s probably too much attribution: ‘it belongs to the origins of the project.” I don’t need a project to celebrate what I did. I would be interested in where else it might go and why. That’s why I was talking about the Japa-nese wood puzzles which potentially disembowel the object; not obligated to return to or reference the original shape at all, and, in the end, you don’t necessarily know, unless you’re an archaeolo-gist, the origins of the pieces that belong to some kind of inherited geometry. You don’t have to put the puzzle back together. Just use the pieces to make something else. You can you deal with a subject that is antithetical to the original premise. You introduce other issues—organizational issues, operational issues, things like that—to obviate the original premise. There’s an alternative argu-ment that’s also relevant that has to with either simple minded or single-minded conception depending on how you want to define it. In other words, the project only belongs to ‘this’, and then you have to exhaust ‘this,’ rather than broaden it to include ‘that.’

Thom Mayne: That’s going somewhere else.


The undergraduate program at SCI-Arc supports and values thesis as an opportunity for students to both synthesize their undergradu-ate work over the part five years, and to also aim beyond that base of knowledge towards new propositions. It serves as a conceptual jumping-off point for the students, as they prepare to graduate and engage in the field of architecture. This year, thesis presentations and reviews took place throughout the school on Friday, April 19th and Saturday, April 20th. For Simon F. Alvarez (B.Arch ’14) and Antonio C. Follo’s review (B.Arch ’14), the jury got into a par-ticularly lively discussion on the meaning of thesis itself. The jury included Stefano Casciani, Joe Day, John Enright, Hsinming Fung, Jeffrey Kipnis, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Monica Ponce de Leon, Wolf Prix, and Andrew Zago. An excerpt of the discussion follows:

Thom Mayne: There is no discussion of how this particular proj-ect has changed our notion of human behavior. Is there a threshold where student work has to demonstrate a minimal connection between technology, culture, political status, social status? Is there a thesis obligation to include a basic policy notion that makes the new city an ecological frontier? Is there a sense of sustainable architecture that connects the project to an idea of how we should exist in the world? Can you operate without those conversations? The thesis students are at the end of their academic careers. I’m about to hire one of you guys. There are fifteen constraints in front of you and, obviously, that’s what architecture is—dealing with constraints. If you can’t deal with those constraints, you can’t make the architecture work.

Jeff Kipnis: It took you 65 years to get there, and you want them to do it in five?

Thom Mayne: I’m asking for a conceptual threshold.

Eric Owen Moss: It’s not so much a question of whether I’m going to hire you. What we have to argue is, when we add up all the discussions of all the projects, we arrive at a thesis-in-the-aggregate that delivers the broadest conceptual knowledge content. The threshold is a multi-project, multi-student threshold. You won’t find it project by project, because individual project scope is defined more narrowly. We’re prepared to tolerate substantial deviations from the concept of a comprehensive building pro forma—sometimes there’s a conventional program, sometimes it’s utility, ecology, sociology, culture, sometimes not. Sometimes the means; sometimes the end. And we’re looking for an idiosyncratic student vantage point. Those requisite threshold ingredients come floating in piecemeal from all the projects; and, in the aggregate, we get that comprehensive coverage. But I would say a narrowness of conceptual content is tolerated, indeed encouraged. The tacit assumption is that too much breadth precludes depth.

Thom Mayne: They’re looking at you, the Aronoff House, and the question is: How is the student viewpoint now somehow different than your viewpoint twenty years ago? Right? Different interests? That would change the discussion. The students might be interested in gravity. They might be interested in utility, or a spatial strategy, and how it connects to some new pattern of human behavior. They might introduce the possibility of some new social organization. Something the students brought to the project beyond what you did is what I’m looking for. And they need to actually locate their project within a broader architectural context.

Eric Owen Moss: I think that gets to the quality of the student- architects, whether they accepted someone else’s premise and

essentially acquiesced or re-invented the concept. The pro forma should not remain what it was twenty-five years ago. What we’re looking for is an ability to re-imagine in a different context in a different world. How might the original project be transformed given very different social, technical, and ideological pressures? By the way, the Aronoff project belonged to a very particular site. If the wind came up, it would have rolled down the hill. This was Sisyphus. That was part of imagining it at the time. I would say the student project needs its own Sisyphus analogue.

Andrew Zago: Just a minor question. Is it accurate to say that thesis is not considered to be a comprehensive project? That it’s supposed to be narrowly defined?

John Enright: Absolutely. The projects are extremely specific by intention. We asked students to narrowly look at a topic, here, for instance the resultant study of an axonometric surface with pieces taken apart for reasons belonging to the making of an explanatory drawing, then reassembled for an entirely different set of organiza-tional reasons. That double disassembly/re-assembly focused the work. Students are developing their own ideas and their own iden-tities as architects. If we want to discuss the full curriculum, or the idea of thesis as a culmination of five years of all sorts of academic course work—technical, visual studies, et cetera—you won’t nec-essarily locate that discussion in the thesis project. However, we have emphasized a dense, internally coherent project, and a project composite in the sense of a basic set of explanatory drawings, models, and text that delivers on a premise.

Thom Mayne: Wouldn’t it be natural that they would bring with them the residue of the four previous years, which would automati-cally raise issues of gravity, materiality, and site? That would seem to be inherent.

Joe Day: Those issues certainly aren’t in the foreground, but I think they’re present here. And I think this is a profoundly con-temporary project in one critical respect that’s different from your work twenty-five years ago, Eric. I think this project suggests dif-ferent performance and functionality criteria. The students made tactical decisions about combining certain geometries to get them to perform functionally in certain ways, and to yield certain kinds of spaces. The geometry was never just a sphere. It was a sphere


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in a combination with a pyramid, or cube. These guys are operat-ing in a more iterative context where a series of axonimetrically driven operations yield an almost infinite number of variations on the sphere that can functionally perform in a variety of ways. And the lion’s share of this project, I think, probably from the midterm, has been reading those programmatic possibilities strategically and taking advantage of them spatially. In that sense it’s more like try-ing to find a cure by making ten thousand combinations of genetic material than it is by making a single tactical decision about how to combine three things.

Monica Ponce de Leon: But they chose to make it into a neigh-borhood...So by making it a neighborhood, by choosing that as your site of operation, they demonstrate the consequences of the design process. I agree that working on certain pieces to narrow the topic as much possible is acceptable, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to use the narrowness of thesis as an excuse to excuse the questions that inevitably come about when you’re working on the problem. That’s why in the previous project, because it’s a tower, it was very good that the student chose the Copley Plaza Tower site. And she shouldn’t then have put blinders and said, “Okay, but I’m not going to discuss any of the consequences that the Plaza or the Trinity Church. I’ll just stick to the tower surface discussion.” When a primary issue of the consequences of that surface belongs to the context in which it’s seen. She avoided that subject entirely. In this project you guys chose to do a neighbor-hood, and that subject should be an essential part of the disassem-bly/re-assembly strategy.

Thom Mayne: There’s a certain rigor that comes out of that sort of neighborhood discussion that connects you to what we call archi-tecture. I’m just asking if that’s relevant here.

Devyn Weiser: I think this is a really fascinating discussion after seeing these projects today. Almost inevitably in every student project you’ll see some kind of technique driving that project, the iteration of that technique, and then the application of that to a building and site. And I think that’s what we’re looking at here—go and test the technique on a site where all of the pragmatic dif-ficulties and challenges are. I think it’s a fascinating discussion just from a pedagogical point of view about the way the students are just working.

Thom Mayne: That’s why I’m asking this. The work is amazingly disciplined. You’re somehow connected to the profession, and I’m just saying there’s a threshold, and I want you to be far enough along where you can actually make the leap to professional suc-cess, and there is some connection to the reality of the production of architecture.

Eric Owen Moss: I think the issue exists at the preliminary level of conceptual thinking and advising about the project. In other words, how is the student producing the project; why is the student doing the project; what are the constraints; what are the possibili-ties? When you look at the project in front of us, for instance, why should it appear as a ball in the end? Why is it what it is? Why don’t we end up with something entirely different? Were those questions asked at an early stage? I think one of the things that I would be looking for in terms of ‘you can work-you can’t’ is a level of student dexterity and a capacity for versatility in thinking. You don’t necessarily know all of the answers, but at least you have a sense of what you don’t know, and you can see problems, and that there are a lot of ways of coming after those issues. I’m less interested in an ideological perspective, or a belief system.

You don’t see too much of that around here. I would argue that architecture is not a religion; it’s not an allegiance. Unless you invent your own.

We’re looking for a dexterity capacity. Intellectual versatility. It’s not lock step predictable. I think there’s probably too much attribution: ‘it belongs to the origins of the project.” I don’t need a project to celebrate what I did. I would be interested in where else it might go and why. That’s why I was talking about the Japa-nese wood puzzles which potentially disembowel the object; not obligated to return to or reference the original shape at all, and, in the end, you don’t necessarily know, unless you’re an archaeolo-gist, the origins of the pieces that belong to some kind of inherited geometry. You don’t have to put the puzzle back together. Just use the pieces to make something else. You can you deal with a subject that is antithetical to the original premise. You introduce other issues—organizational issues, operational issues, things like that—to obviate the original premise. There’s an alternative argu-ment that’s also relevant that has to with either simple minded or single-minded conception depending on how you want to define it. In other words, the project only belongs to ‘this’, and then you have to exhaust ‘this,’ rather than broaden it to include ‘that.’

Thom Mayne: That’s going somewhere else.

nEws9

hsinMing Fung aPPointEd acsa 2013 PrEsidEnt-ElEct

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) elected Hsinming Fung, SCI-Arc’s Director of Academic Affairs, as the organization’s 2013 President-Elect. The appointment recog-nizes Fung’s leadership and forward-thinking vision in today’s rap-idly changing political and economic context, which has brought about profound changes in architecture education.

“It is time to re-tune the expectations of our programs,” says Fung. “As the practice of architecture transforms, and it will, it is the schools and their programs which must look ahead to exploit the opportunities of new, practical and effective roles for the pro-fession.”

Fung will serve on the ACSA Board for a three-year term, beginning on July 1, 2013, with the first year served as Vice Presi-dent, the second as President, and the third as Past President. Com-mitted to architectural education for nearly thirty years, Fung was appointed Director of Academic Affairs in 2010, after eight years of teaching and serving as SCI-Arc’s Director of Graduate Pro-grams. An AIA registered architect, Fung is principal and Director of Design for Los Angeles-based architecture firm Hodgetts+Fung (H+F).

Since founding H+F in 1984 with partner Craig Hodgetts, FAIA, she has overseen the design of distinguished projects such as the renovated Hollywood Bowl, the Menlo-Atherton Perform-ing Arts Center, the Wild Beast Pavilion at California Institute of the Arts, and a host of other influential designs. Current projects include renovation of the historic Robert Frost Auditorium in Cul-ver City, the Rosa Parks Metro station, a mixed-use development in West Hollywood, the Chapel of the North American Martyrs at Jesuit High School in Sacramento, and the Diamond Head Theatre in O’Ahu. They have also received numerous prestigious awards, including the Fellowship Architecture Award, the Gold Medal from the AIA/LA, the AIACC Firm of the Year Award, the GSA Design Excellence Award, and most recently, the R+D Award for their in-novative fiberglass roof design for LAUSD modular classrooms.

ManFErdini’s “EyE candy” dEbuts at thE PaciFic dEsign cEntEr

A site-specific installation designed by faculty member Elena Manferdini, Eye Candy, was included in an exhibition hosted in January at the Pacific Design Center. Commissioned by INDUS-TRY Los Angeles, Manferdini’s work represented a deliberate flir-tation with the contemporary attraction to the glossy, the playful, the fictional and the pop. The installation’s unique iconography put forth a clear statement that architectural material finishes have the communicative potential to enter into the imaginary realm of our “eye-candy” culture, exploiting our most superficial of obsessions including desire, age, gender, media, consumption and delight. Manferdini is principal of Atelier Manferdini, a Los Angeles based design office which she founded in 2004. Her practice is based on a multi-scale work methodology and embraces the philosophy that design can participate in a wide range of multidisciplinary devel-opments that define our culture.

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 representativeNerin Kadribegovic (M. Arch ’03)

student representative Paul Andrzejczak (B. Arch ’13)

board Members at largeRick CarterWilliam H. Fain, Jr.Anthony FergusonFrank O. Gehry Russell L. Goings IIIWilliam GruenScott Hughes (M. Arch ’97)Thom MayneMerry NorrisGreg OttoKevin RatnerAbigail Scheuer (M. Arch ’93)Nick Seierup (B. Arch ’79)Abby SherTed Tanner

honorary MembersElyse GrinsteinRay KappeIan RobertsonMichael Rotondi (B. Arch ’75)

architEcturE Follows naturE

Faculty member Ilaria Mazzoleni, in collaboration with Shauna Price, recently released Architecture Follows Nature: BIOMI-METIC PRINCIPLES FOR INNOVATIVE DESIGN (CRC Press, March 2013). Biology influences design projects in many ways; the related discipline is known as biomimetics or biomimicry. Us-ing the animal kingdom as a source of inspiration, Mazzoleni seeks to instill a shift in thinking about the application of biological principles to design and architecture. She focuses on the analysis of how organisms have adapted to different environments and translates the learned principles into the built environment. To illustrate the methodology, Mazzoleni draws inspiration from the diversity of animal coverings, referred to broadly as skin, and ap-plies them to the design of building envelopes through a series of twelve case studies. The resulting architectural designs illustrate an integrative methodology that allows architecture to follow nature. Mazzoleni is an architect and the founder of IM Studio Milano/Los Angeles. Price is an evolutionary biologist focusing on speciation in neotropical insects.

ar PublishEs Eric owEn Moss intErviEw on radical architEcturE

Architectural Review’s May 2013 issue features an interview led by director Eric Owen Moss with SCI-Arc Graduate Programs Chair Hernan Diaz Alonso and design faculty Marcelo Spina, in a conversation about the fluctuation relationship between radical architecture and the tools that give it shape. The discussion touches on digital tools: how the creation of a building when the tools don’t yet exist is different from designing and building the identical structure years later when the tool is known, as well as the notion that tools change the limitations, as well as the efficiency, of archi-tecture. “It’s interesting that the tool can be understood as a means to efficiency as well as invention,” says Moss. “To be fair, the new tool has an interesting neutrality which facilitates, in some hands, a cheapening of the work—even more austere, even more efficient, and even more penurious. You can go back today, for instance, and rebuild the Seagram Building using Revit.” A full version of the interview is also available online at www.architectural-review.com.

10

FlorEncia Pita wins grahaM Foundation grant For uMMa Exhibit

SCI-Arc design faculty Florencia Pita received a Graham Foun-dation grant to support a solo exhibition at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Art (UMMA) presenting a comprehensive survey of her work. Curated by Joseph Rosa, Florencia Pita/fpmod explored the provocations and intersections of digital technology, material experimentation, femininity, and ornament in her work.

The exhibition, on view at UMMA from January 19 to June 16, and its related publication, trace the evolution of Pita’s design ideology through installation pieces, urban design, tableware, fur-niture, and architecture, as well as small adornments. Pita’s boldly colored works draw from literary, art, and biological sources; employ cutting-edge architectural fabrication techniques; and cross borders of visual art, architecture and design.

trustEE rick cartEr wins acadEMy award For Production dEsign

SCI-Arc trustee Rick Carter was awarded an Oscar at the 2013 Academy Awards ceremony in February for the production design of Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed film Lincoln. This marks the sec-ond academy award for Carter, who joined the SCI-Arc board in January 2012. He previously won an Oscar for his art direction on James Cameron’s Avatar.

“It’s very much an instinctive process,” Carter recently told The New York Times. The article also noted that Carter was in-spired by a trip to the White House in 2003, when he visited the Lincoln Bedroom—originally Lincoln’s office—and walked the hallways. “The space felt haunted,” said Carter, “not a dark or negative haunting, but the burden that was carried by Lincoln in his time.”

“From the very beginning we knew this would be a psycho-logical space,” Carter added.

naturE insPirEd architEcturE and dEsign in Focus at aia│la cotE PanEl

The complex interplay between the natural and artificial landscape of Los Angeles provides a platform to explore the lessons offered by the natural world. Enter biomimicry—the idea of emulating strategies nature has already perfected. The application of bio-inspired design, animal skins and building envelopes, was central to one of the discussions hosted in March by AIA Los Angeles as part of its COTE panel series. Moderated by Sam Lubell, West Coast editor of the Architect’s Newspaper, the conversation featured SCI-Arc faculty members Russell Fortmeyer, a sustain-ability consultant with the Los Angeles office of global engineering firm Arup, and design faculty Tom Wiscombe, principal of Tom Wiscombe Design. Co-chaired by Ilaria Mazzoleni, who also teaches at SCI-Arc, and Deborah Richmond, the AIA|LA COTE seeks to explore, discuss, compile and broadcast information about the impacts, both positive and negative, of the city’s urban geogra-phy. Mazzoleni said in a recent interview with architecture writer Nate Berg: “You don’t design a set of roads in isolation but in relation to buildings, to the sewer system below or to the cabling. There are a lot of invisible elements that go into it. And nature is really a master example of making different things work one to the other and eliminating things that don’t fit in the picture.”

sci-arc Part oF PaciFic standard tiME PrEsEnts: ModErn architEcturE in l.a.

From images of Moss’ Culver City Art Tower decking PSTP ban-ners around town, to the fabrication of three pavilions central to MOCA’s showcase of a new generation of emerging L.A. architects, the stellar contributions to the built environment by SCI-Arc faculty and alumni can be seen this summer in several exhibitions part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. The prominent display of work by faculty and alumni in these shows is a testament to the school’s ongoing influence in shaping some of architecture’s most influential players today.

SCI-Arc’s Confederacy of Heretics exhibition, curated by faculty members Todd Gannon and Andrew Zago, together with Ewan Branda, revisits an influential series of architectural events hosted by SCI-Arc founder and trustee Thom Mayne at his Venice, Calif. home in 1979.

The Getty Research Institute and the J.Paul Getty Museum collaborated to produce Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, the first major museum exhibition to survey Los Angeles’ built environment and rapid evolution, while at the MAK Center, the Everything Loose Will Land show curated by architectural historian and SCI-Arc guest critic Sylvia Lavin explores cross-pollination between architecture and art. The two shows feature work by Eric Owen Moss, Craig Hodgetts, Robert Mangurian, Thom Mayne, and Michael Rotondi, among many others.

MOCA’s grand survey of Los Angeles architecture, A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern Califor-nia showcases a wide array of work by both emerging and estab-lished Los Angeles architects, many of them closely affiliated to SCI-Arc. Among exhibitors are alumni Hitoshi Abe (M.Arch ’89), Benjamin Ball (B.Arch ’03), Barbara Bestor (M.Arch ’92), An-gela Brooks (M.Arch ’91), and Gaston Nogues (B.Arch ’94), as well as an impressive group of SCI-Arc faculty including Herwig Baumgartner, John Enright, Hsinming Fung, Margaret Grif-fin, Craig Hodgetts, Coy Howard, Wes Jones, Elena Manfer-dini, Robert Mangurian, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Marcelo Spina, Mary-Ann Ray, Michael Rotondi, Patrick Tighe, Scott Uriu and Tom Wiscombe.

sci-arc cElEbratEs 4011

On April 20, 2013, SCI-Arc celebrated its 40th anniversary with a party that was as unconventional as the school’s approach to architecture education. Alongside brightly color-coded polygonal tables and galleries of some of the year’s best student work, 330 alumni, trustees, faculty, and friends joined all four SCI-Arc direc-tors Ray Kappe, Michael Rotondi (B.Arch ’75), Neil Denari, and Eric Owen Moss, to raise nearly $400,000 in support of student scholarships.

The benefit dinner celebrated SCI-Arc’s forty years of innova-tion and architectural experimentation, and the school’s mission to find radically new responses to the needs and aspirations of today’s world.

“SCI-Arc is ageless,” said SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss, who served as one of the evening’s hosts along with emcees Tom Gilmore, a SCI-Arc trustee, and Frances Anderton of KCRW’s architecture and design program, DnA.

In a design that both recollected the school’s past and recog-nized its forward vision, SCI-Arc faculty member Alexis Rochas completely transformed the North Gallery. White studio walls were replaced with a sleek gray dinner space, punctuated with an array of custom-designed tabletops with hues arranged in a unique pat-tern of syncopated color.

A large-scale media installation showcasing a timeline of the school traveled across an entire studio wall over the course of the evening. The timeline alternated images from SCI-Arc’s historical collection, visuals of faculty, student, and alumni work, and snap-shots of campus life.

Beforehand, a casual cocktail hour allowed guests to view some of the best student projects from undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate design studios and seminars. The exhibition filled W. M. Keck Hall and the entirety of the South Gallery. The SCI-Arc Robot House showcased live demonstrations and the Fabrication Shop unveiled the design for the Magic Box, the school’s new digi-tal fabrication laboratory which will break ground later this year.

At the north end of the school, A Confederacy of Heretics: The Architecture Gallery, Venice, 1979, SCI-Arc’s contribution to the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., was open late in the SCI-Arc Gallery and Library Gallery.

After-Party in the Storm Cloud and The Paths Hundreds of SCI-Arc alumni, faculty and students joined dinner guests for an after-party held outdoors in the SCI-Arc parking lot. The Storm Cloud pavilion designed by faculty members Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu of Oyler Wu Collaborative hovered over the after-party. The installation made use of the existing structure of graduation pavilions from 2011/2012, and played off of the con-trast between the existing rectilinear structure and a new system of eccentrically curvilinear elements at the bottom of the columns.

Spandex fabric was stretched between the two contrasting frames, creating the dramatic illusion of a transformative and undulating canopy. Complementing Storm Cloud outdoors were The Paths, also designed by Alexis Rochas, a set of five self-sup-porting, semi-circular lightweight structures defined by bold color transitions that linked the dinner space and indoor exhibitions with the after-party.

In AttendanceThe celebration brought together hundreds of guests from the worlds of architecture, design, film, public service, and educa-tion. In attendance were the four event chairs and SCI-Arc direc-tors from the past four decades, Ray Kappe, Michael Rotondi (B.Arch ’75), Neil Denari, and Eric Owen Moss; board of trust-ees members Rick Carter, Joe Day (M.Arch ’94), William Fain, Anthony Ferguson, Tom Gilmore, Scott Hughes (M.Arch ’97), Thom Mayne, Merry Norris, Greg Otto, Kevin Ratner, Abigail Scheuer (M.Arch ’93), Nick Seierup (B.Arch ’79), Abby Sher, Dan Swartz, Ted Tanner, Andrew Zago, honorary trustee Ian Robertson, and Board Chairman Jerry Neuman; former council-woman Jan Perry, city planners Art Beccera, Tanner Blackman, Raymond Chan, Alfred Fraijo, Robert Hertzberg, Director of City Planning Michael LoGrande, and William Roschen; graphic designers April Greiman and Lorraine Wild, CalArts President Steven D. Levine, media and entertainment executives David Agnew and Tim Disney, Linda Dishman of the LA Conservancy, Con Howe of the Urban Land Institute, and international architects Stefano Casciani, Peter Cook and Wolf Prix, UCLA Architecture Chair Hitoshi Abe (M. Arch ’89), Anabelle Adler Avery (M.Arch ’95), Benjamin Ball (B.Arch ’03), Barbara Bestor (M.Arch ’92), Monique Birault (M.Arch ’92), SCI-Arc chair of graduate programs Hernan Diaz Alonso, SCI-Arc chair of undergraduate programs John Enright, Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78), SCI-Arc director of academic affairs Hsinming Fung, Elizabeth Gibb (M.Arch ’89), Steve Glenn, Marcelyn Gow, Jackie Greenberg (M.Arch ’95), Margaret Griffin, Peter Grueneisen (M.Arch ’90), David Hertz (B.Arch ’83), Craig Hodgetts, Beth Holden (B.Arch ’98), Darin Johnstone, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sylvia Lavin, Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96), Jeremy Levine (M.Arch ’93), Sheridan Lowrey (M.Arch ’93), Greg Lynn, Michael Maltzan, Elena Manferdini, Robert Mangurian, William McGregor, Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76), Margi Nothard (M.Arch ’92), Nick Pats-aouras, Monica Ponce de Leon, Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90), Aaron Sosnick,Michael Speaks, Marcelo Spina, Tim Sullivan, SCI-Arc chief advancement officer Sarah Sullivan, Ardie Tavan-garian (B. Arch ’80), Peter Testa, Russell Thomsen, Laurence Tighe (M.Arch ’91), Devyn Weiser, Tom Wiscombe, Stephanie Bowling-Zeigler (M.Arch ’95), and Peter Zellner.

The program included taped messages from all four SCI-Arc directors, and a special 40th anniversary film Recollecting Forward highlighting thoughts and recollections from SCI-Arc students, faculty and board members past and present including Hernan Diaz Alonso, Joe Day, Neil Denari, John Enright, Dora Epstein-Jones, Hsinming Fung, Tom Gilmore, Marcelyn Gow, Ray Kappe, Jeff Kipnis, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Jerry Neuman, Ian Rob-ertson, Alexis Rochas, Michael Rotondi, Nick Seierup, Marcelo Spina, Tom Wiscombe, and Andrew Zago. The film was included in a DVD package along with a timeline of SCI-Arc’s past 40 years that was given as a parting gift to guests. There were also com-ments from Board of Trustees chairman Jerry Neuman, Eric Owen Moss, and undergraduate student Deborah Garcia (B.Arch ’17).

1. Oyler Wu’s Storm Cloud pavilion

2.Debbie Garcia (B.Arch ’17)

3.Greg Lynn, Sylvia Lavin, Jeffrey Kipnis

4.John Enright, Andrew Zago, Todd Gannon

5.Merry Norris and Eric Owen Moss

6.Bonnie Solmssen, Paula Edwards Agnew, Jacqueline Greenberg (M.Arch ’95), Annabelle Adler Avery (M.Arch ’95)

7.Oyler Wu’s Storm Cloud pavilion

8.Greg Walsh, Steve Glenn, Dean Nota (B. Arch ’76), Ray Kappe, and Robin Donaldson (M. Arch ‘87)

9.David Hertz (B. Arch ’83) and Laura Doss

10.Alexis Rocha’s outdoor structures

11.Robert Mangurian, Sheridan Lowrey (M.Arch ’93), Mary-Ann Ray, Michael Maltzan

12.Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78) and Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76)

13.Michael Rotondi (B.Arch ’75), Marina Forstmann Day Livadary, Joe Day (M.Arch ’94)

14.Wyndham Chow (M.Arch ’91) and Terry Chow

15.Hsinming Fung and Eric Owen Moss

16.Monica Ponce de Leon, Florencia Pita, Jenny Wu

17/19.The dinner space for the event

18.Nick Seierup (B.Arch ’79) and Susanna Seierup

20.Michael Speaks, Neil Denari and Hitoshi Abe (M.Arch ’89)

12

1972-1973 SCI-Arc, aka The New School, begins its first year in October at 1800 Berkeley Street, Santa Monica, with Ray Kappe as director.

1974 Graduate program begins.

1976 Undergraduate and graduate programs receive initial NAAB accreditation.

1978 European studies program begins in Nimes, France.

1984 European studies program begins in Vico Marcote, Switzerland.

1986 First Japanese exchange with the Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo.

1987 Alumnus Michael Rotondi becomes director. Robert Mangurian becomes Graduate Program director. Making and Meaning: The Foundation Program in Architecture begins in summer.

1988 SCI-Arc receives NEH grant to develop a humanities curriculum appropriate to architectural education.

1991 SCI-Arc and Yale represent U.S. in Venice Biennale.

1992 School moves to industrial building at 5454 Beethoven Street.

1994 Kappe Library dedication.

1995 Undergraduate and graduate programs receive initial WASC accreditation.

1997 Neil M. Denari becomes director.

1998 Michael Speaks becomes Graduate Program director and Gary Paige Undergraduate Program director.

2000 Move to temporary buildings at Freight Yard, downtown Los Angeles.

2001 Renovation of permanent home at Freight Depot completed and first classes held there.

2002 Eric Owen Moss appointed director. Hsinming Fung becomes Graduate Programs director and Chris Genik Undergraduate Program director. SCI-Arc Gallery opens.

2003 W.M. Keck Lecture Hall established. SCI-Arc Store on Traction Avenue opens.

2005 Graduate Thesis and Graduation shift from late spring to early fall to open the school year. SCI-Arc Press prints first two publications. SCIFI post-graduate program launches in summer.

2006 Temporary graduation pavilion program initiated.

2007 Robert A. Day Foundation gifts $1 million, dedicated to state-of-the-art technology and facilities. MediaSCAPES post-graduate program launches.

2008 SCI-Arc Press releases the first issue of Onramp, a collection of student work. Milan study abroad summer program “Design is One” begins.

2009 A New Infrastructure: Transit Solutions for Los Angeles, SCIFI open ideas competition and publication.

2010 Hsinming Fung appointed Director of Academic Affairs. Hernan Diaz Alonso becomes Graduate Programs Chair, and John Enright Undergraduate Program Chair. First issue of SCI-Arc bi-yearly magazine published.

2011 SCI-Arc announces purchase of Santa Fe Freight Depot building and land. ESTm post-graduate program launches. Robot House opens. Design Immersion Days (DID), summer program for high-school students, begins.

2012 SCI-Arc Media Archive launches with grants from the Getty Foundation and NEA. Grant from Art Place funds new Graduation Pavilion and Hispanic Steps. Frank and Berta Gehry endow the Gehry Prize, awarded annually to the best graduate thesis at SCI-Arc.

2013 Trustee Tom Gilmore endows the Gilmore City Chair with $1 million planned gift. SCI-Arc ranks #1 in Western U.S. in America’s Best Architecture Schools survey by Design Intelligence.

sci-arc at Forty: thE original “altErnativE” architEcturE schoolKCRW Design & Architecture blog, August 17, 2012 by Maura Lucking

Maybe, moving into its next forty years, SCI-Arc is better off shedding the mantle of the “alternative,” “countercultural,” or “experimental.” Still something of an oddity in American archi-tectural education with its artistically and technically sophisticated installations—a far cry from that early warehouse scaffolding—the program nonetheless has a steep task ahead of itself to remain in-volved and relevant in higher education, avant-garde architectural practice, and global and local community engagement. An effort to keep SCI-Arc “weird,” as those nostalgic for its past might wish for, would only create the very ideological allegiance that the school has sought to avoid and stifle the creative freedom and flexibility it has fought so hard to maintain. We can only hope…that when the center reaches the periphery, the periphery is already running for the border.

our diary oF thE gEtty’s l.a. architEcturE ProjEct: sci-arc’s gala and a concErt at jackiE trEEhorn’s housELA Weekly, May 30, 2013, by Alissa Walker

Who would have guessed that with just the right amount of booze, architects can be so much fun? On a warm April night I headed to SCI-Arc for its 40th anniversary gala, which also provided a peek at the PSTP show “A Confederacy of Heretics: The Architecture Gallery, Venice 1979.” The exhibition traces a series of shows held in architect Thom Mayne’s Venice home in 1979 featuring a dozen architects who would come to put L.A. on the map. One could mill about the show then step into the other room and see those grin-ning heretics wearing the same smiles 30-odd years later (and in a few cases, I think, wearing the same clothes).

The colorful architectural models in the show seemed to influ-ence gala designer Alexis Rochas, who included custom-printed, unique-pattered tablecloths that looked more like beach umbrellas than your typical Over the Hill decor. Most of the architects wore black on black, of course, but there were a few highlights, like SCI-Arc director of academic affairs Ming Fung and husband and partner Craig Hodgetts, who looked like spring chickens, both in bright yellow.

Out in the parking lot, architects Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu repurposed their knitted Netscape pavilion into the frilly, spandex-clad Stormcloud for the after party. With the addition of students, electronica and beer (which ran out quickly), it made for a little slice of Coachella in downtown L.A.

socal’s rEbEl dEsign school grows uPLos Angeles Magazine, April 22, 2013, by Jenny Lower

Complete the sentence: You know you’re officially establishment when… You buy your first home? You hit 40? You earn kudos from “the man”? In SCI-Arc’s case, it’s all three. Two years after the progressive Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc in the vernacular) purchased the narrow, quarter-mile-long strip of building it had been renting for a decade, the city’s anti-establish-ment design school celebrated its big 4-0. The anniversary follows news that the 2013 America’s Best Architecture Schools survey from trade publication DesignIntelligence now ranks SCI-Arc the 6th best program for graduate architecture studies in the nation, right behind MIT and a smattering of Ivies. For undergraduate cur-riculum, it comes it’s the 2nd best, beaten only by Cornell.

In his welcome note on the school’s website, Moss writes, “SCI-Arc is the institute of the provisional paradigm. And when the provisional paradigm threatens to become a permanent al-legiance—and it inevitably does—we begin again.” We all gotta grow up sometime, but leave it to SCI-Arc to do it with style.

21.Thom Mayne and Annie Chu (B.Arch ’83)

22.Shelly Kappe, Peter Cook, Florencia Pita

23.Abigail Scheuer (M.Arch ’93), Jerry Neuman, Ian Robertson

24/30.The tabletops designed by Alexis Rochas

25.Jennifer Gilman (M.Arch 2007), Coy Howard, Alexis Rochas

26.Barbara Bestor (M.Arch ’92) and Peter Zellner

27.Craig Hodgetts and Bill Fain

28.Frances Anderton, Tom Gilmore, Abigail Scheuer (M.Arch ’93), Hsinming Fung

29.Chris Genik, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Eric Owen Moss (fourth from left) with guests

31.Jerry Neuman speaks at the event

1





In a design that both recollected the school’s past and recog-nized its forward vision, SCI-Arc faculty member Alexis Rochas completely transformed the North Gallery. White studio walls were replaced with a sleek gray dinner space, punctuated with an array of custom-designed tabletops with hues arranged in a unique pat-tern of syncopated color.





Spandex fabric was stretched between the two contrasting frames, creating the dramatic illusion of a transformative and undulating canopy. Complementing Storm Cloud outdoors were The Paths, also designed by Alexis Rochas, a set of five self-sup-porting, semi-circular lightweight structures defined by bold color transitions that linked the dinner space and indoor exhibitions with the after-party.






















31

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1986 First Japanese exchange with the Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo.











2002 Eric Owen Moss appointed director. Hsinming Fung becomes Graduate Programs director and Chris Genik Undergraduate Program director. SCI-Arc Gallery opens.










2013 Trustee Tom Gilmore endows the Gilmore City Chair with $1 million planned gift. SCI-Arc ranks #1 in Western U.S. in America’s Best Architecture Schools survey by Design Intelligence.


Maybe, moving into its next forty years, SCI-Arc is better off shedding the mantle of the “alternative,” “countercultural,” or “experimental.” Still something of an oddity in American archi-tectural education with its artistically and technically sophisticated installations—a far cry from that early warehouse scaffolding—the program nonetheless has a steep task ahead of itself to remain in-volved and relevant in higher education, avant-garde architectural practice, and global and local community engagement. An effort to keep SCI-Arc “weird,” as those nostalgic for its past might wish for, would only create the very ideological allegiance that the school has sought to avoid and stifle the creative freedom and flexibility it has fought so hard to maintain. We can only hope…that when the center reaches the periphery, the periphery is already running for the border.






















In a design that both recollected the school’s past and recog-nized its forward vision, SCI-Arc faculty member Alexis Rochas completely transformed the North Gallery. White studio walls were replaced with a sleek gray dinner space, punctuated with an array

of custom-designed tabletops with hues arranged in a unique pat-tern of syncopated color.





Spandex fabric was stretched between the two contrasting frames, creating the dramatic illusion of a transformative and undulating canopy. Complementing Storm Cloud outdoors were The Paths, also designed by Alexis Rochas, a set of five self-sup-porting, semi-circular lightweight structures defined by bold color

transitions that linked the dinner space and indoor exhibitions with the after-party.






















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1986 First Japanese exchange with the

Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo.











2002 Eric Owen Moss appointed director. Hsinming Fung becomes Graduate Programs director and Chris

Genik Undergraduate Program director. SCI-Arc Gallery opens.










2013 Trustee Tom Gilmore endows the Gilmore City Chair with $1 million planned gift. SCI-Arc ranks #1 in Western U.S. in America’s Best Architecture Schools survey by Design


Maybe, moving into its next forty years, SCI-Arc is better off shedding the mantle of the “alternative,” “countercultural,” or

“experimental.” Still something of an oddity in American archi-tectural education with its artistically and technically sophisticated installations—a far cry from that early warehouse scaffolding—the program nonetheless has a steep task ahead of itself to remain in-volved and relevant in higher education, avant-garde architectural practice, and global and local community engagement. An effort to keep SCI-Arc “weird,” as those nostalgic for its past might wish for, would only create the very ideological allegiance that the school has sought to avoid and stifle the creative freedom and flexibility it has fought so hard to maintain. We can only hope…


















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“Alumni are lifelong members of the SCI-Arc community and an essential component of SCI-Arc as an institution. Over the last two years, thanks to the strong working relationship between the Alumni Council and the school, several achievements have been realized, including: creation of an alumni portal to promote alumni work; an alumni competition and exhibition to showcase alumni projects during downtown LA’s monthly artwalk; revised shop policy to accommodate alumni use; and the recovery of missing contact information for hundreds of alumni—an essential exercise that ensured the entire SCI-Arc alumni body could be invited to the 40th Celebration. I hope more alumni will become engaged at SCI-Arc and that we’ll see new faces at the next Alumni Council meeting.” nerin kadribegovic, aiaPrincipal, Lehrer Architects LASCI-Arc Board of Trustees, Alumni RepresentativeSCI-Arc Alumni Council

aluMni nEws and EvEnts

MEssagE FroM thE aluMni council

Dear Fellow Alumni,

Happy 40th Anniversary, SCI-Arc! I am sure that I speak on behalf of many of you when I say how proud I am to be a graduate of such an exceptional school. The recent 40th Celebration on campus during the weekend of April 19th and 20th reinforced just how impressive our alma mater is. The academic work on view was exemplary, as were the installations by faculty members, Alexis Rochas, Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu. The gallery exhibition, A Confederacy of Heretics, confirms our community as a fundamental part of the history of design in LA and beyond, and positions SCI-Arc not only as a school of architecture, but as an icon of design evolution that continues to grow and strengthen. As alumni, the successes of the school over four decades are ours to celebrate.

And celebrate, we did! The energy on campus as people reconnected with the school and each other was electric, and the fact that nearly $400,000 was raised for student scholarships is unparalleled. Never in the history of SCI-Arc have alumni and friends come together to support the school at that scale. It is heartening and encouraging knowing that collectively, we are a valuable force and resource in ensuring the continued prosperity of the school.

The challenge for us now is to keep the momentum of the 40th going. I hope you will use your renewed enthusiasm for the school to stay involved, or better yet–get more involved. Recruitment for the 2013/2014 Alumni Council is underway, so please make your interest known to a current member or to Aimee Richer, Associate Director of Annual Giving and Alumni Affairs at [email protected] or 213-356-5388.

I look forward to seeing more of you in SCI-Arc’s 41st year!

Sincerely,Cara Lee (M. Arch ’96) Chair, 2012-13 Alumni Council Lee+mundwiler architects


14

“Fractal ProjEctions” showcasEs aluMni work at dtla artwalk

In conjunction with the school’s 40th anniversary, the SCI-Arc Alumni Council sponsored a competition for the design, manage-ment, and construction of “40/40”—an installation of alumni work from 40 graduating classes, aspiring to honor over 4,000 alumni that have attended the school.

The winning entry, “Fractal Projections” by recent alumni Evelina Sausina (B.Arch ’11) and Eugene Kosgoron (M.DesR ’12), was deemed by the council to be the most original, appropri-ate and responsive to the site. “The design was meant to re-connect the past and the present,” says Kosgoron. “The past is imitated by a cube which represents the general assumption in the industry that expects us to build boxes, while the projected images, combined with the lighting effect, represent current trends at SCI-Arc.”

Engagement with the audience was a key intention of the exhibition’s design. On view in the Farmers and Merchants Bank building on Main Street during April’s Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk, the interactive installation drew hundreds of viewers.

“The installation engages the audience through its reflective surfaces,” says Sausina. “The walk-through sliver in the cube shows the audience refracted illusions of themselves, creating a heavily animated environment that is tangible and yet evokes the ethereal.”

Alumni Council Chair Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96) regarded the competition and exhibition as extremely successful in introducing SCI-Arc and alumni work to the Los Angeles community. “This was a unique opportunity for SCI-Arc alumni across generations to collaborate on a project that showcases SCI-Arc and the talent of its alumni. Hopefully this will be the first of many opportunities,” added Lee.

raMiro diaZ-granados awardEd 2013 cola FEllowshiP

SCI-Arc design faculty and alumnus Ramiro Diaz-Granados (B.Arch ’96) has been appointed a 2013 COLA Fellow and was awarded an Artist Grant by the Los Angeles Department of Cul-tural Affairs. His work is part of a group exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), on view May 19-July 7, 2013. Diaz-Granados is principal of Amorphis, a Los Angeles architecture practice that pursues an overt interest in materiality, visuality, and sensuality towards the production of the contempo-rary sublime. Previously, he has worked as a project designer for the award-winning firm Gnuform and has participated in collabora-tions with distinguished practitioners that have yielded winning competition entries such as the 21st Century Park competition, or-ganized by the Graham Foundation in Chicago, and a Board Room & Conference Table for SCI-Arc. His work has been published in Architectural Record, I.D. Magazine, Icon-Eye, Futures Arquitec-tura, Mobility: A Room with a View, and 100 of the World’s Best Houses. Diaz-Granados holds degrees from SCI-Arc and UCLA, and is currently on faculty at SCI-Arc as a Design, Visual Studies, and Applied Studies instructor. He is also Undergraduate & Gradu-ate Portfolio Coordinator.

graduatE studEnts Exhibit in wuho Quick & dirty show

SCI-Arc graduate students Nan Yen Chen (M.Arch ’14), Danny Karas (M.Arch ’14), Austin Samson (M.Arch ’14) and Xiaotian Wu (M.Arch ’14) exhibited their studio work as part of a com-prehensive group exhibition of architectural drawings hosted at the WUHO Gallery from May 4—12. Titled 2D3D-4: Quick and Dirty, the exhibition included work by students from six estab-lished Southern California architecture and design schools, includ-ing SCI-Arc, UCLA and Cal Poly Pomona.

Drawing in architecture plays a multivalent role, alternatively representing, visualizing, reconfiguring, slicing, measuring, fabri-cating, patterning, envisioning, designing, discovering, question-ing, positioning, or some combination thereof. Presented at WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles—a city that’s the epicenter of innovative drawing technologies from aerospace to automotive to animation—2D3D-4: Quick and Dirty examined the status of architectural drawing in the post-digital age.

SCI-Arc Alumni Council 2013-14Tima Bell (M.Arch ’99)Lilliana Castro (B.Arch ’09)Eric Cheong (M.Arch ’05) Joshua Coggeshall (M.Arch ’97) Samson Chua (M.Arch ’02)Michael Cook (M.Arch ’95) Beth Gibb (M.Arch ’89) Julee Herdt (M.Arch ’88) Nerin Kadribegovic (M.Arch ’03) Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96)Santino Medina (M.Arch ’06) Mirai Morita (M.Arch ’06) Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ’04) Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76) Johnny Ramirios (B.Arch ’05) Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09)Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo (M.Arch ’07)Pia Schneider (M.Arch ’86) Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90) Steven Morales Suarez (B.Arch ’04) Joe Tarr (M.Arch ’08)Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02)Kevin Wronske (B.Arch ’02) Office of Development and Alumni Affairs

Chief Advancement OfficerSarah Sullivan

Associate Director of Corporate, Foundation and Government RelationsDawn Mori

Associate Director of Annual Giving and Alumni AffairsAimee Richer

Development and Alumni Affairs AssociateRebecca Silva

Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations AssociateFrances MuenzeraluMni lEd ra-da wins 2013

national aia honors award For intErior architEcturE

The Los Angeles firms of SCI-Arc alumna Rania Alomar (M.Arch ’97), RA-DA has won the 2013 National AIA Institute Honors Award for Interior Architecture. Alomar, together with fellow alumni Sofia Ames (M.Arch ’97) and Jesse Madrid (B.Arch ’08), received the AIA award for their design of Doc Magic—the of-fices of a Torrance, Calif. based technology company. The project features strategic use of light in the interior corridors of the build-ing to epitomize the blur between the physical and virtual world. “We approach each of our projects with a goal of exploring and implementing something new. It often takes us a while to reach the solution that we settle upon,” says Alomar. “For Doc Magic, we wanted to convey the company’s virtual presence in a physical reality—we envisioned it as a “fuzzy space.”

2

1

13

“Alumni are lifelong members of the SCI-Arc community and an essential component of SCI-Arc as an institution. Over the last two years, thanks to the strong working relationship between the Alumni Council and the school, several achievements have been realized, including: creation of an alumni portal to promote alumni work; an alumni competition and exhibition to showcase alumni projects during downtown LA’s monthly artwalk; revised shop policy to accommodate alumni use; and the recovery of missing contact information for hundreds of alumni—an essential exercise that ensured the entire SCI-Arc alumni body could be invited to the 40th Celebration. I hope more alumni will become engaged at SCI-Arc and that we’ll see new faces at the next Alumni Council meeting.” nerin kadribegovic, aiaPrincipal, Lehrer Architects LASCI-Arc Board of Trustees, Alumni RepresentativeSCI-Arc Alumni Council


MEssagE FroM thE aluMni council

Dear Fellow Alumni,

Happy 40th Anniversary, SCI-Arc! I am sure that I speak on behalf of many of you when I say how proud I am to be a graduate of such an exceptional school. The recent 40th Celebration on campus during the weekend of April 19th and 20th reinforced just how impressive our alma mater is. The academic work on view was exemplary, as were the installations by faculty members, Alexis Rochas, Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu. The gallery exhibition, A Confederacy of Heretics, confirms our community as a fundamental

part of the history of design in LA and beyond, and positions SCI-Arc not only as a school of architecture, but as an icon of design evolution that continues to grow and strengthen. As alumni, the successes of the school over four decades are ours to celebrate.

And celebrate, we did! The energy on campus as people reconnected with the school and each other was electric, and the fact that nearly $400,000 was raised for student scholarships is unparalleled. Never in the history of SCI-Arc have alumni and friends come together to support the school at that scale. It is heartening and encouraging knowing that collectively, we are a valuable force and resource in ensuring the continued prosperity of the school.

The challenge for us now is to keep the momentum of the 40th going. I hope you will use your renewed enthusiasm for the school to stay involved, or better yet–get more involved. Recruitment for the 2013/2014 Alumni Council is underway, so please make your interest known to a current member or to Aimee Richer, Associate Director of Annual Giving and Alumni Affairs at [email protected] or 213-356-5388.

I look forward to seeing more of you in SCI-Arc’s 41st year!

Sincerely,Cara Lee (M. Arch ’96)


3

4

14

“Fractal ProjEctions” showcasEs aluMni work at dtla artwalk

In conjunction with the school’s 40th anniversary, the SCI-Arc Alumni Council sponsored a competition for the design, manage-ment, and construction of “40/40”—an installation of alumni work from 40 graduating classes, aspiring to honor over 4,000 alumni that have attended the school.

The winning entry, “Fractal Projections” by recent alumni Evelina Sausina (B.Arch ’11) and Eugene Kosgoron (M.DesR ’12), was deemed by the council to be the most original, appropri-ate and responsive to the site. “The design was meant to re-connect the past and the present,” says Kosgoron. “The past is imitated by a cube which represents the general assumption in the industry that expects us to build boxes, while the projected images, combined with the lighting effect, represent current trends at SCI-Arc.”

Engagement with the audience was a key intention of the exhibition’s design. On view in the Farmers and Merchants Bank building on Main Street during April’s Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk, the interactive installation drew hundreds of viewers.

“The installation engages the audience through its reflective surfaces,” says Sausina. “The walk-through sliver in the cube shows the audience refracted illusions of themselves, creating a heavily animated environment that is tangible and yet evokes the ethereal.”

Alumni Council Chair Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96) regarded the competition and exhibition as extremely successful in introducing SCI-Arc and alumni work to the Los Angeles community. “This was a unique opportunity for SCI-Arc alumni across generations to collaborate on a project that showcases SCI-Arc and the talent of its alumni. Hopefully this will be the first of many opportunities,” added Lee.

raMiro diaZ-granados awardEd 2013 cola FEllowshiP

SCI-Arc design faculty and alumnus Ramiro Diaz-Granados (B.Arch ’96) has been appointed a 2013 COLA Fellow and was awarded an Artist Grant by the Los Angeles Department of Cul-tural Affairs. His work is part of a group exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), on view May 19-July 7, 2013. Diaz-Granados is principal of Amorphis, a Los Angeles architecture practice that pursues an overt interest in materiality, visuality, and sensuality towards the production of the contempo-rary sublime. Previously, he has worked as a project designer for the award-winning firm Gnuform and has participated in collabora-tions with distinguished practitioners that have yielded winning competition entries such as the 21st Century Park competition, or-ganized by the Graham Foundation in Chicago, and a Board Room & Conference Table for SCI-Arc. His work has been published in Architectural Record, I.D. Magazine, Icon-Eye, Futures Arquitec-tura, Mobility: A Room with a View, and 100 of the World’s Best Houses. Diaz-Granados holds degrees from SCI-Arc and UCLA, and is currently on faculty at SCI-Arc as a Design, Visual Studies, and Applied Studies instructor. He is also Undergraduate & Gradu-ate Portfolio Coordinator.

graduatE studEnts Exhibit in wuho Quick & dirty show

SCI-Arc graduate students Nan Yen Chen (M.Arch ’14), Danny Karas (M.Arch ’14), Austin Samson (M.Arch ’14) and Xiaotian Wu (M.Arch ’14) exhibited their studio work as part of a com-prehensive group exhibition of architectural drawings hosted at the WUHO Gallery from May 4—12. Titled 2D3D-4: Quick and Dirty, the exhibition included work by students from six estab-lished Southern California architecture and design schools, includ-ing SCI-Arc, UCLA and Cal Poly Pomona.

Drawing in architecture plays a multivalent role, alternatively representing, visualizing, reconfiguring, slicing, measuring, fabri-cating, patterning, envisioning, designing, discovering, question-ing, positioning, or some combination thereof. Presented at WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles—a city that’s the epicenter of innovative drawing technologies from aerospace to automotive to animation—2D3D-4: Quick and Dirty examined the status of architectural drawing in the post-digital age.

SCI-Arc Alumni Council 2013-14Tima Bell (M.Arch ’99)Lilliana Castro (B.Arch ’09)Eric Cheong (M.Arch ’05) Joshua Coggeshall (M.Arch ’97) Samson Chua (M.Arch ’02)Michael Cook (M.Arch ’95) Beth Gibb (M.Arch ’89) Julee Herdt (M.Arch ’88) Nerin Kadribegovic (M.Arch ’03) Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96)Santino Medina (M.Arch ’06) Mirai Morita (M.Arch ’06) Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ’04) Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76) Johnny Ramirios (B.Arch ’05) Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09)Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo (M.Arch ’07)Pia Schneider (M.Arch ’86) Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90) Steven Morales Suarez (B.Arch ’04) Joe Tarr (M.Arch ’08)Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02)Kevin Wronske (B.Arch ’02) Office of Development and Alumni Affairs

Chief Advancement OfficerSarah Sullivan

Associate Director of Corporate, Foundation and Government RelationsDawn Mori

Associate Director of Annual Giving and Alumni AffairsAimee Richer

Development and Alumni Affairs AssociateRebecca Silva

Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations AssociateFrances MuenzeraluMni lEd ra-da wins 2013

national aia honors award For intErior architEcturE

The Los Angeles firms of SCI-Arc alumna Rania Alomar (M.Arch ’97), RA-DA has won the 2013 National AIA Institute Honors Award for Interior Architecture. Alomar, together with fellow alumni Sofia Ames (M.Arch ’97) and Jesse Madrid (B.Arch ’08), received the AIA award for their design of Doc Magic—the of-fices of a Torrance, Calif. based technology company. The project features strategic use of light in the interior corridors of the build-ing to epitomize the blur between the physical and virtual world. “We approach each of our projects with a goal of exploring and implementing something new. It often takes us a while to reach the solution that we settle upon,” says Alomar. “For Doc Magic, we wanted to convey the company’s virtual presence in a physical reality—we envisioned it as a “fuzzy space.”

15

nEw El sEgundo art laboratory EstablishEd by sci-arc aluMna

Alumna Eva Sweeney (M.Arch ’98) and her husband Brian, of Manhattan Beach, are proud founders of the latest nonprofit art space to debut in the Los Angeles area, the ESMoA, which opened to the public in late January. The exhibitions on view in the 3,500-square-foot building consists primarily of work from the couple’s private art collection, featuring 19th century artists like Corot and Gustave Courbet along with more recent work by Christo, Andreas Gursky and emerging German artists. The archi-tecturally intriguing design is rooted in Eva’s professional experi-ence as architect and co-founder of the Los Angeles architecture practice Bau10. She designed the burnished concrete block and stainless steel building with an emphasis on both sustainability and beauty, bringing on board fellow SCI-Arc alumni John Milander, AIA (M.Arch ’02) and Chantal Aquin (M.Arch ’99) to help with the ambitious project. The plan for the nonprofit space is to offer students an art education experience during the week, and to keep public hours Friday through Sunday. Also constructed in ESMoA is an artist-in-residence work/live studio where artists can visit up to three months at a time.


aluMni lEad studEnt rEcruitMEnt during oPEn sEason

Open Season, SCI-Arc’s annual career event held in March, was the most successful student-recruiting event to date. Now in its third year, more than thirty professional design firms were repre-sented at the exhibition and networking event in pursuit of gradu-ates and interns for their firms.

Undergraduate student, Rachel Bagan, who is working for alumnus Joe Day (M.Arch ’93) this summer, was contacted for a paid summer internship by three different firms following the Open Season event. Rachel thinks the student exhibition-style career fair is as useful as it is effective: “Pinning up work gives the op-portunity to practice your presentation skills and makes you think about how you will represent yourself professionally. With aca-demic reviews, you have set criteria to follow and need to provide everything. For Open Season, you have to be selective—choosing images and work samples that best reflect your skills.”

New graduate, Maria Setaro (B. Arch ’13) has also found Open Season to be worthwhile. Setaro successfully completed a

oPEn sEason

Open Season facilitates introductions between current students and SCI-Arc alumni in the professional design world, encouraging alumni and profes-sional partners to observe, and poten-tially recruit, students presenting their studio and thesis work. Guests and attendees at the Spring Open Season career event included the following alumni: Edgar Bove (B.Arch ’11), DLR GroupKristen George (M.Arch ’10), Gensler Los AngelesKevin Wronske (B.Arch ’02), Heyday PartnershipBrian Knight (B Arch ’05), Johnson FainSteven Purvis (M.Arch ’06), JP:ADan Wienreber (M.Arch ’02), KGM Architectural LightingKeith McCloskey (M.Arch ’02), KTGY GroupCara Lee (M.Arch ’96), Lee+Mundwiler Architects, Inc.Nerin Kadribegovic, AIA (M.Arch ’03), Lehrer ArchitectsMatthew Rosenberg(M.Arch ’09), M-RadPeter Grueneisen (M.Arch ’90) (pictured with student top right), nonzero architectureMichael Liu (B.Arch ’00), PMDC

And additional representatives from the following companies:

AECOM - Los AngelesARYA GroupFrancis Krahe & Associates IncGehry PartnersGehry Technologies, IncHDR Architecture, Inc.Huayi Design ConsultantsJCE Structural Engineering GroupKelly Lamb DesignLiving HomesNBBJNELH Construction Integration Solu-tionsRubenstein ArchitectsSamsung Architectural Design TeamShimoda Design GroupSkidmore, Owings & Merrill LLPStandardVision LLCStudio of Architecture Ltd.Virgin GalacticWalt Disney Imagineering Research & Development Inc.Windrich GroupWolf ArchitectureXTEN Architecture

summer internship at Lehrer Architects after being recruited by alumnus Nerin Kadribegovic (M. Arch ’03) at last year’s event, and has been offered a position by alumnus Keith McClosky (M. Arch ’02) for Santa Monica-based firm, KTGY this year. “Open Season is a great experience, “says Setaro, “It is more comfortable talking to people about your work because they are already inter-ested. The challenge is making sure your project draws their atten-tion and makes an impression.”

In addition to the many alumni-represented firms that attended, companies like Disney Imagineering, Virgin Galactic, and Sam-sung also visited the exhibition to scout for talent.

Undergraduate Program Director, John Enright, reasons SCI-Arc graduates are equipped for a range of professional path-ways, making SCI-Arc a prime source for design talent across disciplines: “We are an architecture school, producing some of the best young professionals in the field, but it just so happens that our definition of what architecture is includes certain skills, concepts, and methodologies that other design fields are attracted to.”

The range of opportunities represented at Open Season also included firms recruiting for China and Hong Kong. The next Open Season event will be held in September.

16

nEa art works grant awardEd to suMMEr high school PrograM, dEsign iMMErsion days at sci-arc

SCI-Arc has received a $50,000 grant from the National Endow-ment for the Arts to support Design Immersion Days (DID), a summer program for high school students designed to educate the next generation of architects and designers, and to encourage students to pursue higher education. This year, SCI-Arc adds 3D printing to the DID curriculum, giving students access to one of the latest breakthroughs in technology. A rigorous, full-day, four week non-residential program for high school students, Design Immer-sion Days guides sophomores and juniors through a process of discovery, cultivating a lifelong appreciation for architecture and design. Students are exposed to design in all corners of their lives, while developing their skills in an immersive studio environment.

Design Immersion Days’ third edition will run from June 24 to July 19, 2013. Led by SCI-Arc design faculty Darin John-stone, it features an artistic and energizing mix of visual design coursework, hand drawing, computer design, college readiness workshops, guest speakers and field trips. The program culminates in a final review and exhibition for family, friends, teachers, and the community.

Scholarship support is available for students whose family income qualifies them to receive financial aid. “One of the objec-tives of SCI-Arc’s DID summer program is to reach a constituency that would be otherwise unable to afford such an educational expe-rience,” said SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss. “This NEA grant ensures that SCI-Arc can provide financial support to DID students from underserved communities.”

SCI-Arc launched Design Immersion Days in 2011 with seed funding from The Ahmanson Foundation. In 2012, following two successful editions, the program was awarded a Citation of Merit by the American Architectural Foundation. This year, SCI-Arc is one of 122 organizations in California to receive an NEA Art Works grant. It is the sixth NEA grant for SCI-Arc. Most recently, in 2011 the school received a Design category grant to create the SCI-Arc Media Archive, a comprehensive digital platform featur-ing more than 1,000 hours of lecture videos and 3,000 architecture and design related topics.

Additional support for DID is provided by The Green Foun-dation, ACE Mentor Program Los Angeles, The Bowling Fam-ily Foundation, and David Hertz, FAIA (B.Arch ’83). For more information on Design Immersion Days, please visit our website at sciarc.edu.

studEnt nEws

undErgrads takE on labc dEsign coMPEtition

A group of three undergraduate students in their fourth year at SCI-Arc, Clifford Ho (B.Arch ’14), Jessica Hong (B.Arch ’14) and Manori Sumanasinghe (B.Arch ’14), were selected to participate in a design charrette hosted in February at the Los Angeles offices of Gensler. The three-day event invited student teams from seven architecture schools in the Los Angeles area to compete in devel-oping a design concept for a continuing care facility for the elderly.

Following the announcement of the competition site—an area next to the Martin Luther King Jr. Complex in Los Angeles—stu-dents had only three days to develop a large-scale, mixed-use design proposal including site plans, site sections, renderings and drawings. Team SCI-Arc’s proposal includes a 200-unit assisted living facility and an independent living facility with 120 units, to-taling 320,000-sq.ft, in a scheme that promotes social engagement, healthy living and active lifestyle among seniors.

studEnts win honorablE MEntion in Evolo 2013 skyscraPEr coMPEtition

The Skinscape submission by graduate students Jaegeun Lim (M.Arch 2 ’14), Woongyeun Park (M.Arch 1 ’14), Haejun Jung (ESTm ’13) and Karam Kim (M.Arch 1 ’15) received an Honor-able Mention in the 2013 skyscraper competition hosted by eVolo magazine. Their project was inspired from the idea that the natural environment modifies architecture as time passes by, and in some instances, nature even reclaims it. Similar to the Banyan trees cov-ering the 12th century Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia—which today’s experts have decided not to remove due to their effect on the building’s structural system—the students’ design explores the possibility of creating a building tissue between skyscrapers. This tissue would not only add to the buildings but also modify them to allow for new programs. The idea is that buildings need to evolve with time because their initial design intentions and programs morph with time. Vacant spaces become active and a new hybrid emerges from the integration of two distinct buildings.

Established in 2006, eVolo’s skyscraper competition each year invites an international panel of renowned architects, engineers and designers to jury entries from participants from around the world, including professional architects and designers, as well as students and artists. Jurors this year included, among others, SCI-Arc graduate programs chair Hernan Diaz Alonso, design faculty Tom Wiscombe, alumnus Julien De Smedt, as well as several competi-tion winners from previous editions

sci-arc and caltEch dEsignEd nEt ZEro hoME sPlits in two For solar dEcathlon 2013

A team of architecture students from SCI-Arc and engineering students from Caltech are currently building a one-of-its-kind, solar-powered net-zero home that will enable residents to change the configuration of their living environment based on prefer-ence, presenting homeowners with a house uniquely suited for their needs. Currently being built on the SCI-Arc campus, DALE, which stands for Dynamic Augmented Living Environment, proposes a completely new approach to sustainability and includes many other engineering and design breakthroughs that ensure its energy usage is optimized.

At 600 square feet, DALE is a micro house with an unprec-edented flexible interior allowing it to transform into a home three times its size, demonstrating not only size variability, but also breakthrough advances in programmatic flexibility. Its two inde-pendent modules sit on a rail system that provides the option to expand and contract the home in order to react to climate changes, as well as take into account lifestyle needs. When the modules are spaced apart, a mid-yard is created that expands the living space and allows occupants to take advantage of California’s sublime climate. DALE’s sliding overhangs allow for additional configu-rations providing shading and privacy where needed. When an

expansive living space is not needed, or when the night climate becomes cold, DALE’s modules come together, seal and require minimal energy to power the home, maximizing efficiency with a small footprint. The home also produces more energy than it con-sumes, so that it can exist off the grid.

By moving along its rail system and opening up to nature, DALE expands into the environment, being at the same time small and spacious, and efficient and expansive. Its range of motion for the competition prototype is 54 feet, meaning the home’s square footage can grow from 600 to nearly 1,800 feet. In the real world, beyond the decathlon competition, the home can exist either on a standard suburban lot, or on a large expanse of land where the sys-tem can, in theory, be added to, resulting in much more variation.

Students are also implementing upgraded energy monitoring and tracking features that will make it intuitive for a homeowner to manage their energy and water usage. Due to DALE’s transforma-tive ability, great attention was dedicated to the remarkable safety system, giving the homeowner peace of mind when the modules are moving.

This unique home is being developed for the Solar Decathlon 2013, an international competition sponsored by the United States Department of Energy. The competition will for the first time take place in California, at the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, where the decathlon will culminate in a Solar Village that will be open to the public from October 3-13. During the 2012-2013 school year, team members have been researching the climate con-ditions at the Irvine Great Park and have designed DALE’s system to meet the demands of the Solar Decathlon’s five measured con-tests. The team is also applying the lessons learned from SCI-Arc and Caltech’s previous participation in the 2011 edition of the decathlon, when the CHIP (Compact Hyper-Insulated Prototype) solar house designed by a joint team from the two schools placed 6th overall in the contest with top 3 finishes in five of the ten per-formance categories.

studEnt nEws

Edited by Todd Gannon and Ewan BandaPublished by SCI-Arc Press in association with Getty Publications (June 2013)A Confederacy of Heretics 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 Architecture Gallery staged ten exhibitions in as many weeks, featuring the work of Eugene Kupper, Roland Coate Jr., Frederick Fisher, Frank Dimster, Frank Gehry, Peter de Bretteville, Morphosis (Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi), Studio Works (Craig Hodgetts and Robert Mangurian), and Eric Owen Moss. Coy Howard opened the events with a lecture at SCI-Arc, which hosted talks by each exhibiting architect. In an unprecedented move by the popular press, the events were chronicled in weekly reviews by Los Ange-les Times architecture critic John Dreyfuss. Gathering an array of original drawings, models, photographic documentation, and commentary alongside new assessments by current scholars, A Confederacy of Heretics re-examines the early work of some of Los Angeles’ most well-known architects in a contemporary context, charts the development of their most potent design tech-niques, and documents a crucial turning point in Los Angeles architecture, a time when Angeleno architecture culture shifted from producing local variations on imported themes to exporting highly original disciplinary innovations to a global audience.

About the Solar Decathlon The Solar Decathlon competition is a biennial event sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy in which univer-sity teams put forward proposals for the design of net-zero-energy solar powered homes. Twenty teams from around the world are selected to take part and are tasked with designing and building a green home. The competi-tion culminates in the Solar Village, which will be on the runways of the Orange County Great Park in October 2013, with public tours and a number of tasks that simulate the energy and water usage of a family living in the homes. The Solar Decathlon challeng-es teams to design, build and operate solar-powered houses that are cost- effective, energy-efficient and attrac-tive. The winner of the competition is the team that best blends affordability, consumer appeal and design excel-lence with optimal energy production and maximum efficiency. Open to the public and free of charge, the Solar De-cathlon enables visitors to tour the houses, gather ideas to use in their own homes, and learn how energy-sav-ing features can help them save money today.

The Solar Decathlon depends on the generosity of sponsors to ensure the success of its event and teams. For sponsorship opportunities, please contact:Sarah SullivanSCI-Arc Chief Advancement [email protected]

sci-arc Publications 2013Another Fine Mess—Onramp no.4A Confederacy of Heretics Exhibition Catalog

Editor-in-Chief: Hsinming Fung Co-Editors: Marcelyn Gow and Florencia PitaPublished by SCI-Arc Press (August 2013)ONRAMP is a catalog of diverse, compelling and unorthodox work being done by SCI-Arc students. This issue of ONRAMP reflects the messy vitality of our contemporary cultural 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 sta-tus of the architectural Project is a subject of debate. Another Fine Mess is the rubric through which the plurality of voices, opinions, attitudes, and design work that makes up SCI-Arc presents itself publicly. The issue acts as a projects review by considering not only “what did we do?” but more importantly “how did we do?” The issue is organized around three curated sections that are com-prised of student projects from the 2011-2012 academic year, with accompanying texts by SCI-Arc faculty.

class notEs

1970stom oswalt (B.Arch ’79) is celebrat-ing 30 years in practice with his Thou-sand Oaks based architecture firm. His office has completed hundreds of residential and commercial projects throughout Ventura County and the greater Los Angeles area.

1980sstephen wagner’s (M.Arch ’84) project, with KMD Architects, for the San Diego County Women’s Detention Center, received a 2013 AIA Justice Facilities Review Citation and a 2013 DBIA Western Pacific Region Merit Award. Unusual among jails, the 45-acre, 24-building campus for 1,200 female inmates in Santee, Calif. is designed like a college campus, with a focus on life skills programs and reha-bilitation. stephen w. yundt (M.Arch ’84), principal of CO Architects in Los Angeles, was elevated to Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in the practice category. Yundt—who has more than 30 years of expertise, includ-ing two decades at CO Architects—is renowned for pioneering new efforts to advance the development of institution-al buildings and healthcare facilities. Morgan connolly (M.Arch ‘85) of Morgan Connolly Architects is in the final phase of completing a winery and hospitality complex in Napa Valley, Calif. Edmund M. Einy, FAIA’s (B.Arch ’85) design for the Blair IB Middle School was selected as one of Architectural Record’s “Schools of the 21st Centu-ry.” As the Pasadena Unified School District’s first local bond project, the 34,930-square-foot two-story middle school was developed as part of a new master plan for the Blair International Baccalaureate School campus.

1990sPam kinzie (M.Arch ’90) completed a residential renovation project that was one of eight projects featured in a book published this year: Atomic Ranch Midcentury Interiors, by Michelle Gring-eri-Brown and Jim Brown. Kinzie’s practice mostly provides Owner’s Rep project management services, but occasionally does an architectural project. bob schatz’s (B.Arch ’90) Kim resi-dence in Portland was featured in Oregon Home Magazine’s April 2013 issue. Schatz’s practice, Allusa Archi-tecture, designed the 3-bedroom, 2,500-square-feet home from the ground up, on a sloping site with views of Mt. Hood. The home features a rainwater harvest system and a record-ing studio. angela brooks (M.Arch ’91) and partner Larry Scarpa of Brooks + Scarpa in Los Angeles have published their proposal submitted in the Design

Excellence competition for a new Los Angeles courthouse. The approximately 550,000 sq. ft. high-rise building located at 1st and Hill Street is de-signed to accommodate a future 175,000 sq. ft. federal office building. The proposed 320 foot tall structure will be certified LEED Platinum and will save nearly 2 million gallons of water per year. jason shirriff (B.Arch ’92), currently serving as president of the American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI), will host the organization’s 28th annual conference coming up October 2013 in San Francisco. Highlights include an exhibition of illustrations by winners in the “Architecture in Perspec-tive” student competition held by earlier this year, educational seminars and city tours. ate atema (M.Arch ‘93) is working with storm water control system, Street Creeks, an organization tasked with cleaning up NYC’s waterways and providing the amenity of small gardens on every block. Street Creeks diverts storm water from the city’s combined sewer system to prevent to overloading of sewage treatment plants, and clean-ing waterways to meet federal Clean Water Act standards.

gulla jonsdottir (B.Arch ’94) of G+ Plus Design recently launched her luxury bespoke furniture line in Malibu. Jonsdottir is also working on a range of high-end residential projects. karen M’closkey (B.Arch ’94) and Keith VanDerSys, principals of PEG Office of Landscape + Architecture and faculty at University of Pennsylva-nia, won a 2013 PEW Fellowship in the Arts. M’Closkey’s recently published her book, Unearthed: The Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates.

Erick ragni (M.Arch ’94) and partner Kelie Mayfield of Houston-based MaRS made Interior Design’s top 100 big ideas list with their celebrated design of the VIP space at the 2012 Texas Con-temporary Art Fair. Their playful lounge featured shipping pallets, red umbrellas and seats made from exercise balls. The two have also been commissioned to design the space for this year’s edition of the fair, forthcoming October 2013. jennifer siegal’s (M.Arch ’94) archi-tecture thesis students installed their Prefab House on the USC campus in early February. This past spring, Siegal was the Keynote Speaker for the AT-MOSPHERE 5 Ecology and Design Conference at the University of Manito-ba, and participated in the Prefab Architecture symposium at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. jeffrey allsbrook (M.Arch ’95) and Silvia Kuhle of Standard designed the new Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery located on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. This central gallery, with its coffered ceiling and lensed skylights, is

the central feature of the design. The gallery also features a permanent James Turrell ‘Skyspace’ with a retract-able roof, and Turrell programmed LED lighting built into the skylight design. The gallery opening is scheduled for May and the inaugural show is James Turrell’s work, coinciding with his LACMA retrospective.

david nosanchuk (M.Arch ’96) was featured as one of ten influential de-signers in the video “Modernism Rei-magined: Design as a Journey,” pro-duced by Dwell and the Lincoln Motor Company. adam woltag (M.Arch ’96), partner and Design Director of WRNS Studio, has recently opened the firms’ new office in Honolulu, Hawaii. Woltag joined WRNS Studio in 2005, serving as lead designer on a number of educa-tion, civic, and health care projects. He was made a partner in 2008. His de-signs include the 2010 AIA COTE Top Ten Green Project for the City of Wat-sonville Water Resources Center and the Ryan Ranch Outpatient Hospital in Monterey, awarded by the AIA San Francisco with an Excellence in Archi-tecture Award. beth holden (B.Arch ’98), Principal of NEW THEME was a presenter for AltBuild 2013 in May, speaking to her green design methodology using the award-winning Greenberg House as a case study. Her current projects in-clude renovation and restoration of the Regent Theatre in Downtown Los Angeles, as well as the old Madison restaurant in Long Beach. Holden is also working on residential projects in Laurel Canyon, Malibu, and Los Feliz. In addition to her architectural work, the NEW THEME Gallery on Melrose hosted its fourth show in May. julien de smedt (’99) and JDS Archi-tecture have won the 2013 MIPIM Residential Development Award for their Iceberg Project, a development that provides a great opportunity for Arhus, Denmark’s second largest city, to develop in a socially sustainable way by renovating its old, out-of-use con-tainer terminal. De Smedt has also teamed up with Diana Balmori for an invited competition to rethink Down-town Lexington, Kentucky.

2000salan loomis (M.Arch ’00) contributed the essay “Streetscapes” to online exhibit “Form and Landscape: Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Basin, 1940-1990” (http://pstp-edison.com/) the Huntington’s contribution the Pacific Standard Time Presents pro-gramming. jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01) and her Los Angeles practice Platform for Architecture + Research (PAR) re-ceived an AIA New York Merit Award for their zero carbon proposal for the Helsinki Library. The M House, one of Marmon’s current projects situated in a

canyon near the Hollywood Sign and Griffith Observatory, is scheduled to top out this summer. kai cole (M. Arch ’02) was featured in the LA Times in May for the design of her private residence in Santa Monica. Cole’s house was used as the set for a contemporary adaptation of Shake-speare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, a film she produced in partnership with Joss Whedon. The film opened in select theatres in June. benjamin ball (B.Arch ’03) and gaston nogues (B. Arch ‘93) of Ball-Nogues Studio recently completed the commissioned public art installation “Euphony” for Music City Center in Nashville. The center officially opens to the public in June. Also opening in June, is Ball-Nogues’ creative interpretation of the Transamerica Building commis-sioned for the exhibition Modernist Maverick The Architecture of William L. Pereira at the Nevada Museum of Art. Other projects include the completion of two outdoor installations in the City of West Hollywood, a piece at the new Bradley West Terminal at LAX, and two pieces at the VA Aquatic Center in Palo Alto. Ball-Nogues was also recently awarded new commissions with the City of El Paso, the Regional Transpor-tation District of Denver, and Cedars-Sinai in Beverly Hills. jeremy j. Quinn (M.Arch ‘03) exhib-ited his video and sculpture installation Mountain II in the three person show Di-vergent Geometries at the José Drudis-Biada Art Gallery, at Mount St. Marys College. Mountain II consists of a twelve-foot long faceted mountain range, skinned with multiple landscape video projections. The work points both to mankind’s hubris in reshaping the face of the earth, and awe in nature’s own slow sculpting of landscape. dimitri damiel kim (M.Arch ’09) curated the exhibition Revenant: the Undeath of Ideas in Architecture, held in Honolulu, HI. The exhibition was an architectural exhibition of ambitious, unbuilt projects by young architects from across the globe, from New York to London, Barcelona, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Honolulu. The exhibition opened in April. Matthew rosenberg (M.Arch ’09) of M-Rad was named among Interior Design magazine’s Ones to Watch. M-Rad is currently at work on their first commission in Saskatoon, Canada.

2010srobbie Eleazer (M.Arch ’10) con-ducted a computational workshop at the Alvar Aalto University’s ADD Lab in Helsinki, Finland. He has also assisted fellow alum and classmate Matthew Rosenberg with a proposal to convert New York’s Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island into a gigantic park. Eleazer has been a designer with Asymptote Archi-tecture since 2011, working on projects including an office building in Gent,

Belgium.

southErn caliFornia institutE oF architEcturE960 EAST 3RD ST.LOS ANGELES, CA 90013

Photograph by Alicia Patel

sci-arc magazine no. 6 (spring 2013)

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