NEWS
In conjunction with the school’s 40th anniversary, the SCI-Arc Alumni Council sponsored a competition for the design, management, 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.
Eugene Kosgoron and Evelina Sausina in front of "Fractal Projections"
The winning entry, “Fractal Projection” by recent alums Evelina Sausina (B.Arch ’11) and Eugene Kosgoron (M.DesR ’12), was deemed by the council to be the most original, appropriate 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 spectators.
"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 Chairwoman 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.
Robot House faculty members Brandon Kruysman (ESTm ‘11) and Jonathan Proto (ESTm ‘11), traveled to San Francisco in October together with the lab’s Staubli TX60L 'baby robot' for a day-long workshop on 5-axis robotic fabrication held at the ACADIA 2012 Synthetic Digital Ecologies conference. Focused on technical and creative applications using robots, the workshop featured a demonstration of the custom robot control plugin for Maya developed by Kruysman and Proto at SCI-Arc.
On view during the 2012 ACADIA weekend was the Wild Cards exhibition at the California College of the Arts, which explored ideas of leveraging material and materiality as a 'wild card' in the design process. Contrary to many recent digital design processes where emergent complexity is internalized in a controlled model, in this exhibition materials and material properties act as wild cards: "objects of low probability, but high impact." Modes of control and precision were questioned through the unpredictability of materiality, recombined with digital techniques and precision. Approaches to craft and fabrication, previously focused on precision and control, were reconceived as techniques opened to play, fluctuation and erratic behavior. An intentionally vulnerable position, these projects relinquish design agency in order to embrace risk and material propensity.
Exhibiting SCI-Arc faculty and alumni included Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu of Oyler Wu Collaborative, Elena Manferdini of Atelier Manferdini, Brandon Kruysman (ESTm ‘11) and Jonathan Proto (ESTm ‘11) of Kruysman│Proto, and Benjamin Ball (B.Arch ‘03) and Gaston Nogues (B.Arch ‘94) of Ball-Nogues Studio.
SCI-Arc Graduate Programs Director Hernan Diaz Alonso will lecture in Helsinki, Finland on Thursday, September 27, at the 8th address of ADDTHOUGHT hosted by the Aalto University Digital Design Laboratory (ADDLAB) on the Aalto University Campus.
On Saturday, September 29, Diaz Alonso joins an all-star cast of renowned architects in the Never Again Resistance? Steinhaus Architecture Workshop and Symposium 2012, dedicated in Memoriam Günther Domenig. Taking place in Steindorf, Austria, the symposium features Hitoshi Abe, UCLA Architecture Chair; Marcos Cruz, Director of the Barlett School of Architecture; Hernan Diaz Alonso, SCI-Arc Graduate Programs Chair; Peter Ebner of UCLA Architecture; Kurt W. Foster of Yale School of Architecture; Mark Mack of UCLA Architecture; Thom Mayne of Morphosis; Peter Noever, Curator-at-large, Vienna; and Georg Wald of Haus der Architektur, Klagenfurt.
The event celebrates the act of architectural resistance in a time of so called austerity and developer-driven expectations. Is architectural innovation dead? What are the trends of architecture resistance? Can and should architects engage in sociocultural change or stick to aesthetic issues? What is anti-norm of today? International students, architectural educators and practicing professionals will discuss these issues and more during a workshop and symposium.
The architecture of Eric Owen Moss, SCI-Arc director and pricipal of Eric Owen Moss Architects, is embodied by his Culver City buildings, and will be the topic in the “Conjunctive Points” discussion with urbanists Frederick and Laurie Samitaur-Smith, hosted by the Society of Architectural Historians, Southern California Chapter (SAH/SCC).
Umbrella │ Eric Owen Moss Arhchitects │ Photo: John Berley
Held in Culver City’s Hayden Tract on Saturday, August 18, 10am-2pm, the event will feature a behind-the-scenes dialogue with visionary developers on inspiration, process and social change. Following the discussion, participants will embark on a self-guided walking tour of more than 20 sites in the historic Hayden Tract, followed by refreshments, Q&A and closing remarks at the iconic Samitaur Tower.
Admission is $29 for SAH/SCC members and $55 for non-members.
The SCI-Arc Art Supply Store is among the downtown LA participants and sponsors backing the fifth annual Arts District event, named for late shop owner and community activist Joel Bloom, set to take place Saturday, July 21.
Presented at 3rd Street and Traction Avenue in the Downtown Arts District, BloomfestLA will offer live indie music, local artisan wares, and good food amidst a rotating outdoor gallery of street art by renowned artists. More than 100 artists’ booths and a dozen food vendors will set up shop in the blocks around Third and Traction. New this year, the festival includes the KoolKidZone—featuring supplies provided by the SCI-Arc Supply Store—a fun area designated for families with children attending the event.
The SCI-Arc Supply Store, which serves both the student body and the downtown community, recently moved from its original Traction Ave. site to a new, double-in-size location at 955 East Third St., on the corner of Santa Fe and Third Streets.
Last year’s Bloomfest attracted 20,000 people, and this year, festival producers expect up to 25,000 people to descend on the Arts District for the free event that runs from 2-10pm.
Full schedule available HERE.
SCI-Arc’s Design Immersion Days (DID) summer program for high school students concludes with a graduation ceremony and reception scheduled Friday, July 20, 5-7pm.
Awarded by the American Architectural Foundation with a 2012 Merit Award, DID provides students with rare access to prominent designers and the opportunity to learn what the study of design and architecture entails.
Through a series of lectures given by Los Angeles-based designers and field trips exploring the city of Los Angeles, students are exposed to examples of design and modes of production at all scales.
The students' final projects, celebrating the end of their 4-week program at SCI-Arc, will be on view as part of the graduation reception.
Design Immersion Days is generously supported by The Ahmanson Foundation and the Bowling Family Foundations.
suckerPUNCH and the Land of Tomorrow Gallery have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a fall exhibition featuring some of the hottest work from architecture students around the U.S. Collected from the spring and fall terms of 2011, the work features cutting edge experimentations in technology, space and materials.
The show will feature twenty student projects including the work of young SCI-Arc grads Ivan Bernal (M.Arch 2 ‘11), Wilson Wu (M.Arch 1 ‘11), Nicholas Poulos (M.Arch 2 ‘11), Michael Gross (M.Arch 2 ‘11), Donovan Ballantyne (M.Arch 1 ‘11), Paul Mecomber (M.Arch 2 ‘11) and Robert Gilson (B.Arch ‘11), as well as work by current students Cheng Gong (M.Arch 2 ‘13) and Kiem Ho (M.Arch 2 ‘13).
Provided funding is successful, the exhibition will offer a unique way for the public to engage with contemporary student work from leading architecture schools.
A jury of architects, including SCI-Arc graduate programs chair Hernan Diaz Alonso, Aaron Betsky, Mark Gage, Greg Lynn, Michael Speaks, and Tom Wiscombe selected three of the projects to have prototypes fabricated by PR&vD. All twenty projects were selected earlier this year through online voting on suckerpunchdaily.com.
The exhibition will open at the Land of Tomorrow Gallery in Lexington, Kentucky in the fall, with plans for it to travel to other cities, including Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago.
The campaign will help with the mounting of the exhibition as well as publication of a catalogue that will collect writings and interviews from leading architecture educators and critics including a number of SCI-Arc faculty and alumni, such as Volkan Alkanoglu, Erick Cárcamo, Brian DeLuna (B.Arch '07), Hernan Diaz Alonso, Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Keith Krumwiede (M.Arch '94), Elena Manferdini, Dwayne Oyler, Florencia Pita, Jonah Rowen, Marcelo Spina, and Tom Wiscombe.
Read more information here.
SCI-Arc has been awarded a $400,000 grant from ArtPlace that will go toward the planning, design and construction of two arts venues on its campus in downtown Los Angeles, and planning with the community for a third venue in the community across from campus. This ArtPlace award represents the largest institutional grant received by SCI-Arc to date for its community initiatives.
"The transformative grant from Artplace gives SCI-Arc a unique opportunity to extend its conceptual design voice by building the 'Hispanic Steps' and the new Outdoor Pavilion for our students, faculty, and the surrounding community," says Director Eric Owen Moss. "If architecture, as SCI-Arc has always proclaimed, speaks by building, the Artplace contribution affords us two special construction moments to ratify what we preach."
The first venue to be designed and built by the school is an indoor amphitheater, dubbed the 'Hispanic Steps.' Located in the heart of the SCI-Arc building, the open space with rise-seating will be used for lectures, performances, symposia, film series and community meetings.
The second venue is a multi-purpose 750-seat outdoor pavilion which will become the Arts District’s largest public programming venue. It will provide a welcoming gathering place at the school’s entrance and a much-needed sun-shelter in an urban area lacking in green space.
The third component is helping plan with the community for the One Santa Fe arts center, a 99-seat theatre to be located inside a developer-funded, $160 million mixed-use transit oriented development project adjacent to SCI-Arc, designed by noted architect Michael Maltzan.
SCI-Arc’s projects foster the momentum created by the school’s purchase last year of its historic 1907 building, and engage with the community in planning to attract creative residents and businesses.
ArtPlace received almost 2200 letters of inquiry from organizations seeking a portion of the $15.4 million available for grants in this cycle. Inquiries came from 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Islands. The 47 projects selected nationally—out of which four are located in Los Angeles—each take a unique and locally-focused approach to creative placemaking, from the creation of a Jazz and Heritage Center in New Orleans’ historic Tremés neighborhood to generate vibrancy and economic growth for the local community to ARTSIPELAGO, a comprehensive revitalization strategy that combines a number of unconnected arts and cultural initiatives in Eastport, Maine for greater effect.
"These projects all exemplify the best in creative placemaking," explained ArtPlace’s Carol Coletta. "They demonstrate a deep understanding of how smart investments in art, design and culture as part of a larger portfolio of revitalization strategies can change the trajectory of communities and increase economic opportunities for people."
The full list of 2012 ArtPlace grant recipients can be found at www.artplaceamerica.org.
About SCI-Arc
The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is dedicated to educating architects who will imagine and shape the future. It is an independent, accredited degree-granting institution offering undergraduate and graduate programs in architecture. Located in a quarter-mile-long former freight depot in the Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles, the school is distinguished by its vibrant studio culture and emphasis on process. SCI-Arc’s approximately 500 students and 80 faculty members—most of whom are practicing architects—work together to re-examine assumptions, create, explore and test the limits of architecture. SCI-Arc faculty and leadership have garnered more than 500 national and international design awards and recognitions, including Progressive Architecture awards, American Institute of Architects (AIA) awards, AIA Gold Medal awards, the Brunner award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Academy Award in Architecture, and the prestigious Jencks and Pritzker architecture prizes. SCI-Arc is ranked second in design and computer applications in the 2012 America’s Best Architecture Schools survey from DesignIntelligence, and #1 graduate and #2 undergraduate architecture school in Western U.S. SCI-Arc is located at 960 E. 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
www.sciarc.edu
About ArtPlace
ArtPlace is a collaboration of twelve of the nation’s leading foundations, eight federal agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts, and six financial institutions, to accelerate creative placemaking across the U.S. Participating foundations include Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Ford Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, Rasmuson Foundation, The William Penn Foundation, The Robina Foundation and an anonymous donor. Funds committed to ArtPlace are overseen by Nonprofit Finance Fund who serves as investment and grant manager for the collaboration.
Several SCI-Arc faculty and alumni participate in the Artists X Architects exhibition opening Tuesday, June 5m 6-8pm at Joe’s Restaurant in Venice.
Curated by Tibby Rothman, the show pairs 11 artists with 11 architects, both emerging and established, having them select one piece of each others work to be exhibited side-by-side.
Rather than "finished pieces," a completed painting and a photograph of a finished structure, Rothman asked for glimpses of an individual’s process: a sketch, a study, a small piece, a rendering, a material study or a similar piece. Stripped of art and architecture’s divergent vocabulary, the connections or complements between the pair are revealed.
Faculty members Patrick Tighe, Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, former SCI-Arc Director and visiting critic Neil Denari, and alumnus David Hertz (B.Arch ‘83), hijacked studio visits into lunches, dinners or meetings held over a series of weeks.
The exhibition is sponsored by The Architect’s Newspaper, Joe’s and V-SCAPE.
SCI-Arc faculty member Erick Carcamo and partner Nefeli Chatzimina of X│A Atelier are hosting two intensive workshops of advanced architectural design this summer in Athens, Greece.
Part of an ongoing academic research which introduces participants into contemporary discussions of formal exploration in Architecture and Art, the workshops explore innovative, potential architectural expressions of the current discourse around form through computational tools such as Autodesk MAYA.
The workshops focus on technique elaboration, material intelligence, formal logic efficiencies and precision assemblies as an ultimate condition of design. They introduce a discourse based in the use of multi-layered techniques and production processes allowing for control over intelligent geometries, calibration of parts, and behavioral taxonomies, normalizing an innovative held of predictability.
Within this context, each student will operate within an expertise towards intuition by means of software and advancement of the discipline through a precise contemporary understanding of architecture’s reliance on surface performance, unspecified systems, scale within scale, mechanical parts and absurd precisions to expand its discourse.
Dubbed Omni(progra)chromatic, the two workshops are organized under the auspices of the Benaki Museum, the Helenic Institute of Architecture and the Athens School of Fine Arts.
Workshop sessions are scheduled July 2-16 and July 17-31st and will be hosted at the Benaki Museum in Athens.
Click HERE for more information and to register.
