19
Alumni News and Events
RECENT ALUMNi SPAN THE GLOBE
Emmy Maruta (B.Arch ’12)
Alina Amiri (M.Arch ’10)
LannaSemel (M.Arch ’11) Sergio S. Ochoa (B.Arch ’11)
Like soccer, architecture is an international sport. Graduates of SCI-Arc can find opportunities for work all over the world. We checked in with five recent grads to see what they’re up to. Jeffrey Lam (B.Arch ’12) is an architectural assistant at eightsixthree, a boutique design studio based in Hong Kong. At this small and nimble operation, Lam enjoys the opportunity to see concepts through from design to construction. He is currently at work designing a façade for a shopping mall in Tianjin, China. At the other end of the globe, Emmy Maruta (B.Arch ’12) is designing and researching products for ADDLab (Aalto Digital Design Laboratory), an international design research laboratory in Finland. Maruta is putting her digital design training to good use in collaborative projects with material scientists and engineers. On the same continent, Alina Amiri (M.Arch ’10) recently landed a new job doing design and research for [Ay] Architects, an innovative global research laboratory based in Paris. She has lived
Jeffrey Lam (B.Arch ’12)
in Paris for two years following her graduation from SCI-Arc and is now fluent in French. She finds international living highly inspirational and recommends it to new graduates! Meanwhile, back in the US, Lanna Semel (M.Arch ’11) has joined the “Work-2 Studio” division of Gensler, a top-ranked New York design and architecture firm that she first interned with in 2010. Staying in touch with her mentors there while she completed her education at SCI-Arc paid off; after almost a year at the company, she is amazed by how much she is learning. And finally, Sergio S. Ochoa (B.Arch ’11) didn’t have to go far at all to find his dream job as junior architect for the Los Angeles office of Arquitectonica, an internationally recognized firm whose projects include luxury hotels, high-rise residential and mixed-use buildings, and sports complexes. Ochoa is currently focusing on residential projects in the Bay Area.
SCI-ARC ROBOT FEATURED IN SAN FRANCISCO ACADIA CONFERENCE 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 daylong 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 ’93) of Ball-Nogues Studio.