NEWS
Student work that recasts emergency-shelter architecture as a deployable high-rise is featured by eVolo magazine and design weblog Inhabitat.
SCI-Arc students Adrian Ariosa and Doy Laufer created the Transient Response System (TRS-1) to provide immediate large-scale shelter to victims of natural disasters, such as earthquakes or floods in cities such as Jakarta.
Their proposal involves a seven-step strategy, in which a vehicle called The Mastodon, delivers an infrastructural base, on which a tower is quickly assembled as for residents. Following the city's recovery, the TRS-1 can become a permanent building in the city or be moved and redeployed.
SCI-Arc trustee and alumnus Michael Poris (M.Arch '90), principal of McIntosh Poris Associates, is among several Detroit-based architects and developers featured in a recent New York Times article about key people who are contributing to the thriving economic success of the city's Midtown neighborhood.
"Developers are refurbishing old buildings, using tax credits and public financing, as much as they are building from scratch," writes NY Times reporter Alison Gregor in her article, "A Detroit District Thrives by Building on the Past."
"For a long time, there was a big effort to tear things down in Detroit," said Poris in his interview with Gregor. "But if we have all these great historic buildings here, why not take the historic tax credits and reuse them? Plus it's a greener, more sustainable form of development."
Poris is currently working on restoring the 1912 Garden Theater, a former vaudeville house that will include a new three-story office building housing a new restaurant and medical offices, as well as a 302-space parking garage and 60 apartments. According to Poris, the development was financed with historic preservation tax credits, along with brownfield tax credits for re-using an obsolete building.
In recent years, Poris' firm helped save several 20th century Detroit landmarks including the Park Shelton tower—for which it did a residential conversion; the Eureka Building, which won his firm a Michigan Historical Preservation award for adaptive re-use of the mixed-use facility; and the Book Cadillac hotel.
Poris is principal of McIntosh Poris Associates. He has been serving on the board of trustees at SCI-Arc since 2001.
The homes of several Los Angeles-based SCI-Arc alumni are featured in the August 2010 issue of Angeleno Magazine.
In his article, “Power Grid,” architectural writer Sam Lubell highlights husband-and-wife design teams including Carlos Zubieta (B.Arch '94) of Bernstein-Zubieta Architects and Tatiana Barhar (M.Arch '96) of Verdego Design; Robert Thibodeau (M.Arch '93) and Yasi Vafaie (B.Arch '90) of DU Architects; and Jason Ruperto (M.Arch2 '01) and Emmylou Vy (B.Arch '00) of Emjae Design Shop.
"L.A.'s hottest architects turn a quiet quadrant of Venice streets into the insiders's residential 'hood' for top design talent,” writes Lubell.
All homes listed in the article are based in the city of Venice, located in a “non-descript, non-touristed pocket of tree-lined streets east of Abbot Kinney and north of Venice Boulevard…ground zero for the city’s highest concentration of A-list architects."
Other featured alumni include Angela Brooks (M.Arch '91) of Pugh+Scarpa, David Hertz (B.Arch '83) of Studio of Environmental Architecture, and Anthony Coscia of Coscia Day Architecture+Design. The article also mentions former faculty members Steven Ehrlich, Deborah Richmond, Lawrence Scarpa and Olivier Touraine.
SCI-Arc faculty member Margaret Griffin of Griffin Enright Architects, alumna Jennifer Siegal (M.Arch '94) of Office of Mobile Design, and Julie Smith-Clementi of Rios Clementi Hale Studios will appear as "Three Voices in Design" in the New Voices panel series hosted by the Architectural Foundation of Los Angeles.
The panel moderated by Alissa Walker will be hosted on Thursday, September 16, 7 to 8:30pm by the Ilan Dei Studio (2100 Zeno Place, Venice).
The Architect’s Newspaper highlights an AECOM project led by alumnus
Carlos Madrid III (M.Arch2 ’95) in its August 2010 Developers issue. The project, 207 Goode Street, is “a normal suburban office building but subverts the formula with simple moves that make it not only edgier design-wise but more effective in its urban context,” writes AN's Sam Lubell in his editorial, "Keep It Simple."
Surrounded by standard office buildings in downtown Glendale, 207 Goode Street is the clear nonconformist on the block. The building’s exterior, as described by Lubell, is “a cubed-shaped envelope with a flat profile and mullion-less mirrored glass curtain wall…but within this sheer envelope the firm carved holes into the typical scheme, both literally and figuratively.” Madrid and his team designed a “sleek port cochere and supported it with dramatic chevron-shaped columns that give the heavy structure a feeling of lightness and minimize the sense of an imposing block.”
“At night the building stands out even more thanks to its thin, dramatic bands of greenish LED lighting; the thin strips further demarcate the strategic cuts in the façade. As the back of the building touches the ground, a loggia connects it to a new paved courtyard and to the complex’s other buildings, helping create a new urban space where there was basically nothing.”
Read the entire story in Architect’s Newspaper >>More about AECOM >>
Sunday, September 12, 2010Ceremony 5:00-7:00pm
Reception 7:00-9:00pm
SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion
The ceremony will be broadcast
live online>>
Sir Peter Cook--founder of Archigram, Director of CRAB, Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London--will give a commencement speech entitled Let's fly - it's architecture.
Guest Reception:
The SCI-Arc Office of Development and Alumni Relations will host a special pre-ceremony priority seating reception for parents, family members, and guests to begin at 4pm in the Graduation Pavilion.
Pre-Ceremony Arrival:
Graduates should arrive no later than 4:30pm to check in with Peter Dung and Lisa Russo, who will assist with assigned seating and explain the procedure for walking to receive diplomas.
To guarantee that family secure priority seating, please RSVP to Aimee Richer at aimee_richer@sciarc.edu by Friday, September 3. Please include the names of your reception attendees.
A home designed by alumnus Robert Thibodeau (M.Arch ’93), was featured in the 2010 Dwell on Design Westside Home Tour. Scheduled on Saturday, June 26, the tour featured homes in the “Surf and Turf” beach cities of the Los Angeles area.
Our house, also known as Biddle/Reilly Residence, is a 3,000 square foot, single story home on a flat 11,000 square foot lot in Venice. It is designed in the tradition of California modernism, emphasizing indoor/outdoor living and an open plan. Floor to ceiling glass floods the interior with daylight while cantilevered eaves provide shade and reduce solar heat gain. The design includes passive solar and natural ventilation to accentuate the emphasis on green building. Solar panels on the roof provide power for hot water, heating, and electricity. Natural materials were selected to create warm living spaces.
Thibodeau’s clients utilized local resources to infuse the Our House project with a sense of community. The project was approached as a traditional barn-raising, where friends and neighbors join together to erect a structure. Because the property is located on a street made up of single-story homes, the clients chose to build a single-story home rather than a taller home in consideration of scale with their neighborhood.
With wife and fellow SCI-Arc graduate Yasi Vafai (B.Arch ’90), Thibodeau co-founded Design Universal, known as du Architects, in 1995. du has had projects throughout Southern California, mostly in the Venice and Santa Monica area where Thibodeau and Vafai live and work. The firm has been a primary contributor to the reshaping of Venice as a community that nurtures support of both art and new architecture.
Faculty member Juan Azulay of Matter Management, with the contribution of post-graduate student Shaocong Zhou, received 3rd place in a competition to design a 4-square-mile district in the 7,000-year-old city of Shaoxing in Southern China. Located in the urban district at Paojiang, the master plan called for an evolved water ecology culture.
Azulay traveled to China in early July to present the project to the Chinese authorities–alongside the other winning proposals.
A new exhibition by RailLA, LA Beyond Cars, introduces a multimedia experience showcasing concepts, ideas, and musings from around the world reflecting the future of Los Angeles—a future beyond just cars.
The exhibition opens Thursday, July 29,
at the Jewel Box, located in the Financial District of downtown Los Angeles.
The opening reception is scheduled
from 6 to 10pm.
Projects on view include work by Eric Owen Moss Architects, Zaha Hadid Architects, Morphosis, MVRDV, Topotek1, Fosters and Partners, Park 101 (AECOM), and The Piggy Back Yard—including Parsons Brinkerhoff, Michael Maltzan Architecture, Mia Lehrer + Associates, Chee Salette Architecture Office, and Perkins + Will.
The exhibition will remain on view through August 28, at the Jewel Box, located at 525 S. Flower Street.
Standard, the Los Angeles-based architecture and design practice of alum Jeffrey Allsbrook (M.Arch2 '95) and wife Silvia Kuhle, was recognized in June by the Los Angeles Business Council (LABC) as winner in the Single Family Housing category of the 40th Annual Los Angeles Architectural Awards.
Allsbrooks' winning project, Hidden House (shown here)—a modern single-family residence located in Glassell Park—was selected as a best-practices example of local architectural innovation. Its eco-friendly construction involved incorporating an existing two-bedroom cottage into a new, larger structure, and doubling the size of the residence from 1,580 to 3,500 sq. ft., without marring the natural context of the property's expansive and rare 7-acre site. The home's design offers its owners the experience of country living while situated in the center of an urban environment.
"It is an honor to be recognized by the LABC," said Allsbrook. "The project demonstrates how working within constraints and incorporating the extant can be key in creating an entirely new design."
Allsbrook's practice was among 31 architectural teams to win awards from the LABC for recent work. The winning projects cut across a wide range of building types, from commercial office spaces to affordable apartment complexes to sports arenas.
Upcoming projects for Standard include a new retail/restaurant space for Tommy Bahama in Laguna Beach scheduled to open November 2010, several residential projects in Beverly Hills and the Hollywood Hills, and a design studio for a Los Angeles-based clothing company.
