The school is open to the public daily from 10am - 6pm.

An Open Ideas Competition

Sponsored by SCIFI at SCI-Arc and The Architect’s Newspaper

Entries Due Friday March 13, 2009; Winners Announced March 21,2009.

Awards, Jury Discussion and Exhibition Schedule

Saturday, March 21, 2009, 2–6pm
Public announcement of winners and jury discussion, 2 pm
Exhibition opening reception, 4 pm

Exhibition of selected entries will remain on view at SCI-Arc from March 21 to March 28, 2009. SCI-Arc is open daily, 10am-6pm.

Image: Benny Chan/ Fotoworks 2009

Corporate Sponsors:

AECOM
ARUP
Sussman/Prejza and Company

Media Partner: Archinect

Institutional Sponsors:

American Institute of Architects - Los Angeles Chapter
The American Planning Association - Los Angeles Section
Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design

This project is funded in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs

Los Angeles, CA (January 15, 2009) – The passage in November 2008 of Measure R, a half cent sales tax in Los Angeles County, will provide as much as $40 billion for transit-related projects across the City of Los Angeles over the next 30 years. Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama has pledged to make the largest investment since the 1950s to rebuild our nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

In response to this historic opportunity, the SCIFI (Southern California Institute for Future Initiatives) program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and The Architect’s Newspaper are sponsoring an open ideas competition for architects, engineers, urban planners and students to propose new ideas for LA County’s transit infrastructure.

The competition will encourage entrants to develop solutions that dramatically rethink the relationship between transit systems, public space and urban redevelopment. Competitors will be encouraged to work within the parameters of LA County Ballot Measure R. Their entries will focus on specific rail extension projects and also take a look at larger-scale, inter-related transit planning challenges.

The competition jury will include Thom Mayne, Principal and Founder of Morphosis Architects;Professor, UCLA, Aspet Davidian, Director, Project Engineering Facilities, Metro, Neil Denari, Professor, UCLA; Principal, Neil M. Denari Architects, Gail Goldberg, Director of Planning, City of Los Angeles, Roland Genick, Urban Designer, Exposition Line, Cecilia V. Estolano, CEO CRA/LA- Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, Eric Owen Moss, Director, SCI-Arc; Principal and Founder of Eric Owen Moss Architects and Geoff Wardle, Director, Advanced Mobility Research, Art Center College of Design.

About SCIFI (Southern California Institute for Future Iniatives) at SCI-Arc Led by Peter Zellner and David Bergman, SCIFI is a post-graduate program under the direction of Hsin Ming Fung and focused on promoting innovation within design, policy, and planning responses to the economic, social and environmental futures of global cities and regions. SCIFI is dedicated to supporting investigations into the impacts of urban and planning policy, transnational financial markets, real estate speculation, and socio-economic globalization on the evolution of local urban fabrics.

About The Architect’s Newspaper
Combining timeliness with authority, The Architect's Newspaper is the most comprehensive source of information on the latest projects and commissions, unfolding politics and debate, current events and cultural developments related to architecture, with two editions focusing on the East and West Coasts. Up-front news is rounded out by a mix of topical essays, opinionated columns, project analyses, profiles, interviews, reviews of exhibitions and books, plus a complete calendar of important events and competitions.
www.archpaper.com

About Archinect
Launched in 1997, Archinect.com has become a leading online architecture publication and community platform. As the web has become the primary source for information seekers, Archinect has maintained its position a premier online destination for architects, designers, educators and students. The site's robust editorial content, coupled with its community-driven flavor, makes it a must-read for 2 million monthly visitors.
www.archinect.com

Invited Speakers

Benjamin Bratton
Jean Michel Crettaz
Manuel DeLanda
Ed Keller
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin
Eric Owen Moss
Marcos Novak


WHAT: For the Spring 2009 MediaSCAPES symposium, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) addresses the shifting boundaries between the virtual and the physical worlds in the practice of architecture with experts Benjamin Bratton, Jean Michel Crettaz, Manuel DeLanda, Ed Keller, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, Eric Owen Moss and Marcos Novak in conversation at SCI-Arc on Saturday, March 28 from 2 to 5pm.

Today, we are witness to an important moment of changing cultural paradigms, which are directly altering the manner in which technologies are being utilized in many, if not all, applications. In this discussion, SCI-Arc hosts seven distinguished architects and theorists that work at the intersection of physical and virtual worlds. These professionals will present their work and ideas and discuss the practice of immersive and virtual architecture, which spans animation and 3D technologies, digital environments, and questions of materiality ranging from theory to contemporary practices. The discussion will explore the convergence of the material and the virtual within contemporary architecture, while also questioning the future of these shifting definitions and asking how these classifications will define our understanding of the relationships between tangible and intangible worlds.

Participants include invited guests and SCI-Arc faculty: Benjamin Bratton, Principal, The Culture Industry and Associate Professor, UCSD; Jean Michel Crettaz, SCI-Arc Faculty, Director slap!; Manuel DeLanda, Philosopher and Professor, Columbia University; Ed Keller, SCI-Arc Faculty; JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, Professor, and Founder of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE), UCSB; Eric Owen Moss, Principal, Eric Owen Moss Architects and Director of SCI-Arc; and Marcos Novak, Professor and Director, transLAB, UCSB.

Pervasive computing will make inanimate objects see, hear and comment on our interactions with them. This experience will, in many cases, be indistinguishable from a psychotic break, or from the rituals of classical Animism.
Benjamin Bratton

Convergence, divergence, transvergence: in the face of exponential change, transvergence is proposed as a tactic of corrective derailment of simple extrapolations into elsewhere, the territory of the allo~. Allo~, root of words such as else, alternative, alien, signifies the other of another kind.
Therefore, at any given moment in history, and given any set of materially and culturally productive theories and practices, transvergence is an algorithm and discipline for producing the salient alien.
Marcos Novak

Pythagoras, the 6th Century mathematician and Greek philosopher is quoted as saying ‘a rock is frozen music in time.’ As we enter the 21st Century, witnessing the intersection of the virtual and material, one must think of Pythagoras and the continuum between solid objects as condensed vibration and the vibratory forces that can free these structures into new forms. The virtual offers a path to liberation of the material, an avenue that will eventually lead to buildings that will change their shape over time according to their function.”
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin

Agent-based simulations have become an important research tool in fields from ecology to archeology. And their usefulness in every field increases if in addition to some form of artificial intelligence (neural nets) and reproductive capacity (genetic algorithms) simulated agents are also embodied and situated in space. Embodiment implies at a minimum that they must satisfy some metabolic requirements to survive, while being situated means that they interact more often with those agents that are nearby and have greater knowledge about their immediate surroundings.
Manuel Delanda

About MediaSCAPES at SCI-Arc
SCI-Arc MediaSCAPES post-graduate program is an academic cross disciplinary platform for the creative engagement and the development of critical responses to shifting technological and cultural paradigms. The program offers an unparalleled opportunity for working at the frontiers of architecture, media, art and technology where new ideas and practices are born and new expressive and immersive media invented. A cutting edge faculty team – with critics, lecturers, workshop leaders and guests drawn from academia and professional practice worldwide – provides students with training and a vital global network in both academic and professional contexts.

Participant Biographies
Benjamin Bratton
Principal, The Culture Industry and Associate Professor, UCSD
Benjamin H. Bratton is the principal of The Culture Industry, a Los Angeles-based consultancy that focuses on connecting investments in brand, market and design research, digital technologies and architectural planning. The Culture Industry has developed original scenario planning and design research initiatives for corporations and public institutions that includes Motorola, Microsoft, General Motors, Ogilvy & Mather, Razorfish, JetBlue, the US Conference of Mayors.

Jean Michel Crettaz
SCI-Arc Faculty, Coordinator Visual Studies, Director slap!
Jean-Michel Crettaz is a Media Architect. Whether he is documenting civilizing environments or parodying the sordid facts of western life form, his work projects experimental strategies and speculative visions and addresses new design cultures and critiques thereof.

Manuel DeLanda
Philosopher and Professor, Columbia University
Manuel DeLanda is the author of four philosophy books, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy and A New Philosophy of Society, as well as of many philosophical essays published in various journals and collections.

Ed Keller
SCI-Arc Faculty
Ed Keller is a designer, professor, writer, and musician/multimedia artist. He is a member of the Design and Cultural Studies faculty at SCI-Arc, and has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning (GSAPP), FIU Miami (Paul L. Cejas Eminent Scholars Endowed Chair), the University of Pennsylvania, Pratt, RPI, Bennington, and Parsons Schools of Design. In 2000-01, he was acting director of Columbia University GSAPP’s Advanced Architectural Design program.

JoAnn Kuchera-Morin
Professor of Composition and Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music in 1984. Director, Allosphere Research Laboratory California Nanosystems Institute, Professor, Media Arts and Technology and Music

Eric Owen Moss
Principal, Eric Owen Moss Architects and Director of SCI-Arc
Eric Owen Moss Architects was founded in 1973. The firm has garnered over 60 design awards from Progressive Architecture magazine and the American Institute of Architects. The Moss firm has been featured regularly at the Venice Biennale. In 2006, the Moss office won the City of the Future competition sponsored by the History Channel. Eric Moss first taught at SCI-Arc in 1974, and was appointed director in 2002. He received the 2007 Arnold Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for "a significant contribution to architecture as an art."

Marcos Novak
Professor and Director, transLAB, UCSB
Marcos Novak is a global nomad, and an artist, theorist, and transarchitect. Drawing upon architecture, music, and computation, and introducing numerous additional influences from art, science, and technology, his work intentionally defies categorization. He is universally recognized as the pioneer of architecture in cyberspace, of the critical consideration of virtual space as architectural and urban place, and of the use of generative computational composition in architecture and design. His seminal essay "Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace," already translated into the world's major languages, is now included in several anthologies of critical documents of the digital era. His current research involves nano~ and bio~ technologies, and explores the hypothesis that we are in a cultural phase characterized by "the production of the alien," paralleling the Renaissance "production of man."