printMission Statement
SCI-Arc Mission
Re-imagining the edge: Educating Architects to engage, speculate, innovate.
SCI-Arc Vision
SCI-Arc makes alliances with international communities, builds value into cities, and advances critical architecture, to engage a fluid world. SCI-Arc’s pedagogy is cross disciplinary, and focused on hybrid and flexible programming. New technological tools, used in experimental ways, prepare students to meet unprecedented global change.
SCI-Arc Core Values
SCI-Arc is a diversified institute that educates students to be experimental. SCI-Arc is committed to city building. SCI-Arc is committed to community outreach. SCI-Arc is committed to the ongoing integration of new technological tools into its curriculum.
SCI-Arc's Institutional Goals
For the five year period of 2007–2012:
1. SCI-Arc will complete the restructuring of the Board of Directors. A committed membership will focus on the long term planning of the institute, on fund development, and on the integrity of governance practices.
2. SCI-Arc will continue to redefine the edge in architectural pedagogy and practice through open inquiry, critical dialogue, community engagement, and the integration of state of the art technology into its curriculum.
3. SCI-Arc will continue to enhance the institute’s stature amongst the public, to engage its peers, nationally and internationally, and to provide alternative educational opportunities to those institutions.
4. SCI-Arc will create a broad advocacy within its community of alumni, faculty, staff, and board members, and amongst civic and business leaders to reinforce the institute’s fund raising capacity.
There is so much in architecture that has to do with the creation
of opinion as opposed to the creation of the thing, the making
the thing. Making the thing and commenting on the thing are
very much about developing a meaning of the thing that lasts.
I would like to create an environment at SCI-Arc that would
enable faculty, students, and everyone associated with the
school to have enough confidence in what they know and
in what they do to be able to distinguish the importance of
those things from all the noise and promotion. We need at
SCI-Arc a sense of critical durability that enables us to make
real contributions that resonate over a long period of time in
artistically, poetically, intellectually meaningful ways. And this
relates directly to what it means to be an architect. One of the
really charming things about SCI-Arc initially was that it had
no idea of itself as SCI-Arc. What mattered was not an image
of SCI-Arc; what mattered was the different ways of making
space and objects, ways of discussing, presenting and building
those objects. The discussion was intimate and about small
buildings and houses that were scattered all over LA. And the
discussion related to building. The building process involved
a precise connection between the conception, design and
implementation for one very simple reason: there was not a lot
of money. The success of SCI-Arc was related to this process
and to the success of some practitioners who were speculating
and delivering those small-scale projects. People started to
notice and get interested. SCI-Arc was not concerned with its
place in some kind of academic pantheon, and that gave it a
naive quality. It focused on what anybody who does anything
meaningful has to focus on: what goes on between the hand,
the eye and the table. The feeling was: 'Don't worry about who
thinks what. Over a period of time, what you do will work or it
won't. If it works it has durability; if it does not, you move on to
the next thing.' That, I think, is what today endures at SCI-Arc.
— Eric Owen Moss, Director