SCI-Arc Alumni Magazine 011 - Fall 2015

Fall 2015

1

Director’s Letter

3

Public Programs

5

Faculty Profile: Liam Young

9

RIGHT NOW Symposium

11 SCI-Arc EDGE 15 Class Notes

positive, progressive, and imaginative agenda. As exciting as the contemporary

research and how our faculty and students engage the world.

As the world accelerates in ways that are beautiful and strange, this is an enormously timein forways architecture and an important moment toan claim a As the worldexciting accelerates that are beautiful and strange, this is positive, progressive, andfor imaginative agenda.

Asimportant exciting as the contemporary enormously exciting time architecture and an moment to claim a

Where others might choose to relax, we choose to accelerate.

SCI-Arc is ever expanding and permanently under construction. This has been true since weisembarked on ourand project in 1972 inunder Santaconstruction.

Monica. In the global SCI-Arc ever expanding permanently This has economy been true today, design matters like never before, and with the core strengths that we have since we embarked on our project in 1972 in Santa Monica. In the global economy carefully built,matters we continue to astonish it all thethat different ways today, design like never before,the andworld with by theshowing core strengths we have in which design can changetoit.astonish As we have done, we keep onways the carefully built, we continue the always world by showing it allour thefingers different pulse of the world but alwaysit.we a step ahead.

SCI-Arc is anour institute and in which design can change Asstay we have always done, we keep fingers onnot thea university. is one the many unique strengths SCI-Arc. Weinstitute are not and not a pulse of theThis world butof always we stay a step ahead. of SCI-Arc is an constrained by is stubborn bureaucracies, we are of notSCI-Arc. the preservationists university. This one of the many uniqueand strengths We are not of traditional forms of knowledge.

With thisand agility, we continue to rewrite the rules constrained by stubborn bureaucracies, we are not the preservationists of of research howofour faculty and students engage world.to rewrite the rules of traditionaland forms knowledge.

With this agility, we the continue

Alchemy is our craft—we turn things into gold.

It is a great time to be at SCI-Arc. In fact, it has never been a better time to be here.

As approaches half-century its history, willtime findto a SCI-Arc It isitarapidly great time to be at the SCI-Arc. In fact, itmark has in never been a you better be here. that has become a mature, vital, and innovative institution operating on an As it rapidly approaches the half-century mark in its history, you will find a SCI-Arc international stage.

As successful as innovative it has become however, we remain restless. that has become a mature, vital, and institution operating on an Where othersstage. mightAs choose to relax, choose to accelerate. international successful as we it has become however, we remain restless.

DIRECTOR’S LETTER SCI-Arc is where architects become mad scientists. It is where art, science, and industry and new futures At SCI-Arc, wewhere forecast migrations SCI-Arc isconverge where architects becomeunfold. mad scientists.

It is art, the science, and of culture. stare down complex technologies and command them the to do our bidding. industryWe converge and new futures unfold. At SCI-Arc, we forecast migrations of We are agile and street smart.

Where others drown in the complex flows of urban culture. We stare down complex technologies and command them to do our bidding. life, we thrive andstreet choreograph its movements.

We are prophets of flows beauty, We are agile and smart. Where others drown in the complex of urban broadcasters of ideas, and tellers of stories.

We are builders, leaders, and life, we thrive and choreograph its movements. We are prophets of beauty,dreamers.

Alchemy is ourofcraft—we turn things into gold. broadcasters ideas, and tellers of stories.

We are builders, leaders, and dreamers.

DIRECTOR’S LETTER

Hernan Diaz Alonso SCI-Arc Director/CEO

At SCI-Arc, we will continue to speculate and keep taking risks in order to remake the real. Nothing defines the real like architecture does. And because of this, architecture needs to have an understanding of its own uncertainty. It is in this uncertainty that architecture remains a supreme act of optimism and exuberance. In this spirit, I invite you to come help us to build the unbuildable and think the unthinkable. Come with us to ponder the possibilities of the impossible.

The century ahead will introduce many challenges that we cannot imagine today.

Yet as architects, we will always have to meet the challenges as soon as they arrive.

Because of this, SCI-Arc is a space of action. We’re not here to have polite conversations. At SCI-Arc, we intensely model our problems and prototype our responses. We engage the world in critical debate with the full force of our intellect and talent, demonstrating the persistent relevance and power of architecture.

As we accelerate into the coming years, SCI-Arc will debate the ethics of architecture. It is not enough to just focus on what we can do to meet our challenges. We also need to consider what we should do. In the coming years, the ethical questions of architecture will be poignant for an institute so dedicated to innovation. But this will be the place where humanism and technology will collide and connect in a very new way.

situation is, the noise of the world can be deafening and disorienting. It can be difficult to see and understand where the true opportunities are. We’ll show you. In the constant chatter of cable channels and social media feeds, new heroes and villains are identified every minute of the day. We’ll show you how to cut through the chatter by taking strong positions as leaders in the field. We’ll show you the necessity of conjuring vivid images of what the world might become. We’ll show you how we choose our own heroes.

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PUBLIC PROGRAMS

ABOUT PUBLIC PROGRAMS All events begin at 7pm unless otherwise noted. Lectures take place in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall. The Lecture Series is broadcast live at sciarc.edu/ live. Lectures are also archived for future viewing, and can be found online in the SCI-Arc Media Archive at sma. sciarc.edu.

UPCOMING

During exhibitions, the SCI-Arc Gallery is open daily from 10am–6pm.

The Library Gallery is open Monday– Friday from 10am–7pm and Saturday– Sunday from 12pm–6pm.

Lecture Series

ROBERT SOMOL January 27

Duels and Duets

PATRIK SCHUMACHER + TOM WISCOMBE February 3

Lecture Series

SCI-Arc exhibitions and public programs are made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.

MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI

SCI-Arc is located at 960 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013. The building entrance and parking lot are located at 350 Merrick Street, between 4th Street and Traction Avenue.

BENJAMIN H. BRATTON

SCI-Arc Public Programs are subject to change beyond our control. For the most current information, please visit sciarc.edu or call 213.613.2200.

To join SCI-Arc’s Public Programs email list, contact public_programs@sciarc.edu.

February 10

Lecture Series February 17

Duels and Duets

PETER TESTA + GREG LYNN February 24

Duels and Duets

RAY KAPPE + HERNAN DIAZ ALONSO March 2

Michael Hansmeyer Out of Order

Lecture Series

GREGORY CREWSDON March 4

SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition

CLOSE-UP

March 11–May 29 March 11: Opening Reception March 25: Panel Discussion Lecture Series

ANTOINE PICON March 9

Lecture Series

TIM MORTON March 14

Lecture Series

MICHAEL FRIED March 16

SCI-Arc Library Gallery Exhibition

ELLIE ABRONS

Inside Things March 18–May 1 Collaboration with the University of Michigan Museum of Art March 18: Opening Reception

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Lecture Series

MA YANSONG March 23

Duels and Duets

BEN VAN BERKEL + HERNAN DIAZ ALONSO March 30

Lecture Series

JEFFREY KIPNIS April 6

All School Event

UNDERGRADUATE THESIS REVIEWS April 22–23

SCI-Arc Library Gallery Exhibition

JOE DAY

ARRAYS June 3–July 24 June 3: Opening Reception

Perry Hall Painting Far from Equilibrium

SCI-Arc Exhibition

SPRING SHOW

June 10–June 26 June 10: Opening Reception SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition

M. CASEY REHM Control June 24–July 24 June 24: Opening Reception

RECENT

Lecture Series

LIAM YOUNG

Tomorrows Thoughts Today & Unknown Fields Division October 28 Lecture Series

PERRY HALL

Painting Far from Equilibrium November 4

Lecture Series

Lecture Series

GRAHAM HARMAN

FABIAN MARCACCIO

Form and its Rivals October 5

Paintant Lab November 13

Lecture Series

Lecture Series

MICHAEL HANSMEYER

N. KATHERINE HAYLES

Out of Order October 7

Rethinking the Mind of Architecture November 23

SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition

Lecture Series

ZVI HECKER

Two Strips October 9–November 29 Lecture Series

HASHIM SARKIS Premises for Practice October 14

BRETT STEELE & HERNAN DIAZ ALONSO Directors Talk December 2

Lecture Series

BEATRICE GALILEE The Institute Effect December 7

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LIAM YOUNG is the founder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, speculative and imaginary urbanisms. He tells stories about the city using fiction, film and performance as imaginative tools to explore the implications and consequences of new technologies and ecological conditions. Building his design fictions from the realities of present Young also co runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels on location shoots and expeditions to the ends of the earth to document emerging trends and uncover the weak signals of possible futures. He has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, including the BBC, NBC, Wired, Guardian, Time magazine, and Dazed and Confused.

Liam manages his time between exploring distant landscapes and visualizing the fictional worlds he extrapolates from them.

FACULTY PROFILE: LIAM YOUNG

Liam Young is a speculative architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. Trained as an architect in Australia, Young has worked for a number of the world’s leading practices including Zaha Hadid Architects and LAB Architecture Studio. As technology increasingly became the fundamental driver of urban change, he became frustrated with the slow pace of architecture and escaped the star architect system to set up his own urban futures think tank, Tomorrows Thoughts Today. Young recently joined the design faculty at SCI-Arc and in 2016, will be taking on the role of coordinator for one of the new postgraduate programs within SCI-Arc Edge, Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture. SCI-Arc’s Director Hernan Diaz Alonso sat down with Young to discuss his practice and design philosophies.

Hernan: You choose to operate in redefining and transforming the edges of what the practice of an architect is. In many ways, I consider your work still 100% architecture, but it deals with architecture in a much more contemporary way. Can you tell me a little bit of how you arrived at this?

Liam: I started out in a very traditional sense, at a very traditional architecture school. We learned what buildings were, how to make them, the real pragmatics about shaping, creating, defining, enclosing space. I worked in fairly ordinary offices, and became increasingly frustrated with the extraordinary slow pace at which architecture, in a traditional sense, actually starts to operate. I saw it becoming increasingly marginalized as a discipline that can meaningfully engage with a contemporary city in its traditional form. The traditional being the architect as the maker and shaper of building the singular objects in space.

So the work that I do has slowly been moving further and further away from that definition of what the architect is, into something which is much more about the architect as storyteller or the architect as speculator, the architect as strategist, which I do still think is very much a critical part of the discipline. But it’s trying to reevaluate what we do as a profession, which includes things beyond the making and shaping of physical buildings. For the most part, I think that an architect’s skills and education is wasted just on making buildings. We try and think about ways that architects can operate in the world with much more urgency and much more relevance. That’s about co-opting various mediums from popular culture, to try and create work that talks to people and a public that may exist outside of our small, insulated, little genre.

We now work very much outside the traditional service model of an architect. We don’t have clients. We self-initiate projects. We make films. We tell stories. We do installations. We do performances that are all talking about architectural ideas or ideas about the city, but that take alternative forms, from national building or renderings, illustrations, plans, sections of those buildings. It’s just been a constant journey, looking at ways that the architect can stay relevant in the context of a city where the forces that now shape it exist beyond the physical spectrum, where the building as an object no longer plays the role that it once did, but the city is now about the movements of technologies. It’s now about mass media, social media. It’s now about the network, and we make work that engages in that version of the city, as opposed to the traditional one.

Hernan: There is a high level of acceptance of the circumstances of the cultural context in which you choose to operate. One could argue that a speculative architecture, which in the past we could call avant-garde or resistant or whatever it is, is not the case anymore. What, from your point of view, are the mechanisms in which, you, like many others, are operating, in kind of a postcritical way?

Liam: Architecture’s always had a relationship with speculation and fiction. It’s just that, at certain times, it makes more sense than others. So there was a big interest in the speculative project in the ’60s. There was with German expressionism. It’s a trait that kind of reappears, and then at various moments, depending on where the global economy is, it’s kind of crushed by an interest in making. Interest in façades or materiality by Herzog & de Meuron in the ‘90s kind of killed the paper architecture of the ’80s; the financial crash, when you saw the birth of Libeskind and Chamber Works and Zaha’s paintings, all that sort of stuff. So speculative projects have always kind of ebbed and flowed, in terms of developments to architecture.

I think we’re now in a moment where the speculative project, the future as a project, is really relevant and urgent again. Look at the tradition of science fiction across the last few years. William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the ’80s, and it was a future fiction that was about 30 or 40 years as a projection ahead. Now his books have become increasingly set closer and closer to the present, to the point where his latest books are set right now. He talks about how you used to have a period of relative certainty of 20 or 30 years where you could say that the world wasn’t going to be too different from what it was.

But now, with so many different balls in play—rapid climate change, financial collapse, ubiquitous technology—you have no period of certainty. In the next five years, there could be a radical destructive technology that would totally change the way that we operate, the way that the city works, the way that you and I communicate. So for the science fiction author, the length of the now that they can operate in is so extraordinarily short, that things are set in the present.

That’s why I think the speculative project is interesting again, because there’s so much uncertainty about our present condition, that all you can do is speculate on what could happen, and that seems to be the most relevant way of operating, and it seems to be the way that an architect can find traction and relevance again.

If we speculate on what the roles those technologies may play in the city or within our culture, we can prototype them, imagine new possibilities, and we can test out ideas in that speculative space. Hopefully that means that we can actually start to be much more active agents in shaping the futures that we want to have, as opposed to them just being dictated to us in whatever the latest tech keynote is.

Hernan: Let’s stay with this, the word “technology,” which I like to think, in many ways, we have gotten to the point that it has been demystified. Right? How do you think you set the parameters of what I call partnerships between the creativity of the author and the technology? Your work is about finding ways of human individuality within this technology. I think we are in a territory in which there is a partnership between what each of us do with the technology. How do you define your relation within that?

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Liam: You can’t separate technology from culture. Architects have, for a long time, been at the wrong end of the technology transfer chain. If something develops in military, it then, to a certain extent, gets democratized. Eventually, at some point, architects pick it up and start running with it. I’m interested in a relationship to technology that, through speculation, puts us much further along that process, where we can see things that are just emerging, and we can imagine and speculate on what the cultural consequences or the overall architectural consequences of those technologies might be, before they become practically implementable within the building industry.

So we’re really interested in the way that these technologies define new cultural relationships. The phone isn’t just an object that makes our lives easier. It changes the way that communities are formed. It changes the nature of what the city is. It changes the nature of what a building is. I think it’s our responsibility, as designers and architects, to look not just at technology as a tool that we can deploy, but to look at all of the systems that it sets in motion, to look at, broadly, to look at cultures that are embedded within it and the cultures that give rise to it.

Take something like drone technology, for instance. You have a genre of architects that are really interested in what it means to stick a drone with a suction cup, and it builds a wall out of bricks, or tie a string to it, and it knits a new bridge or something.

I’m much more interested in how drone technology will totally rewrite how we think of infrastructure in the city. Infrastructure that we thought of as being fixed, large-scale, big systems will now become totally nomadic. What are the subcultures that emerge around drone technologies? What does a goth/punk drone look like? What does a harajuku drone look like? How do people co-opt these things in the world in the same way that we’ve made phones our own bespoke objects, with our own apps, our own profiles, our own wallpapers, our own cases? Looking at the cultural implications of technology, I think, is far more interesting than just exploring it as one more tool that we have as architects in our arson.

Hernan: You’re moving your whole operation to Los Angeles and SCI-Arc. What makes it appealing for you? Why did you think that this is the right move in this moment in your career?

Liam: I would say I’m interested in the different forms of architect. I would put myself in a condition of the architect as storyteller. I think if you’re going to tell stories, this is the city to do it in. We’ve been making films. We’ve been working with TV stations over in Europe. We’ve been doing performative pieces, and operate at a certain scale in the European context. I think part of coming out to LA is looking at ways that we can embed those sorts of projects within the machine of the entertainment industry out here. How we can find larger audiences for these types of works. At the moment, we make a short film. It gets put up on Vimeo, it gets shown in a number of galleries—it’s within a particular audience that consumes culture like that.

I think the promise of coming out to LA is that you can create critical work that has really important ideas embedded within it, but you can co-opt—like a Trojan horse or a parasite—these bigger systems of the entertainment industry, and launch the same types of projects, but to audiences that are infinitely larger. I think 1

that’s what architects should be doing, looking at ways that we can disseminate our work and ideas which are really important and critical in thinking about the future of cities, and how we operate within them, to audiences that aren’t just other architects.

LA is a city where we can use these forms of pop media to actually broadcast our discussions much more widely. I think right now, the west coast is the place to do that. I think the east coast, as a center of cultural production, is slowly declining, and everyone’s migrating out west. I think, at least for the next five or 10 years, LA and the west coast is going to be really where everything interesting is happening. Part of that is the entertainment industry.

Part of that is also the growth of the tech sector and the movement further south from San Francisco; Google setting up offices here in LA and other big tech firms doing the same thing. So I think it’s a really interesting moment, and SCI-Arc, as a school, is in an extraordinary position to take advantage of that ground swell and that cultural shift.

Hernan: Teaching is a big part of what you do. You’re the latest addition to a very long tradition of SCI-Arc, in which the people move seamlessly between their own body of work and what they teach. To me, it’s one of the many unique qualities of this place— it’s demanded and encouraged in the faculty. So when you work with the students, what are the goals? How do you help them? And how do you define when a project works or doesn’t work?

Liam: I think if we’re interested in expanding the remit of the architect and finding new medium in which the architect can operate, then it’s also our duty, as educators, to talk to students about developing projects that allow them to build a career in those different allied and associated disciplines. So I would say that when I teach a studio in a masters program or a postprofessional program, that I’m trying to work with the students to develop not their last, most substantial project within the institution, but the first project of their new career. How can they actually start to shape a body of work that is going to equip them to go out into the world and not just apply for an internship in the best architectural office they can find, but to actually set up their own practices that will really explore the different territories that an architect can operate within?

In the context of SCI-Arc, it’s to equip students with the knowledge and skills that they can then develop a project that can launch them into a career in the entertainment industry, where they can start to act as world builder or a consultant for the studio networks, where they can start to become set designers and filmmakers and animators, where they can start to tell architectural and urban stories through these media. I think that’s a really urgent thing that we should be doing, because the traditional paths an architecture student might once have taken are no longer there, or they’re increasingly boutique and marginalized.

So a successful student is one that starts to define their own direction and sets up their project work in such a way that they’re developing their own unique voice, and they start to develop the skills and the language through which to move out into a really interesting type of practice. In the context of that, that means connecting to this extraordinary infrastructure that’s around us in the entertainment industry.

HERNAN DIAZ ALONSO is principal of the Los Angeles-based architecture office Xefirotarch. In 2005, Diaz Alonso was the winner of MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program (YAP) competition, and in 2012 he received the “Educator of the Year” Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Most recently, he won the 2013 AR+D Award for Emerging Architecture and a 2013 Progressive Architecture Award for his design of the Thyssen Bornamiza Pavilion/Museum in Patagonia, Argentina. Diaz Alonso’s architectural designs have been featured in both architecture and art exhibitions worlwide. The work has also been widely published in magazines, periodicals and books.

1.

LOOP>>60Hz: Transmissions from The Drone Orchestra, a work by John Cale and Liam Young, commissioned by the Barbican and The Space as part of Digital Revolution. 2014 2.

Specimens of Unnatural History: the Bioluminescent Billboard, the Roving Forests and an Augmented Ferret.

2010 3.

New City: The City in the Sea. Multiple channel video installation.

2014 4.

New City: Keeping Up Appearances.

Multiple channel video installation.

2014

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FACULTY PROFILE: LIAM YOUNG

LIAM YOUNG is the founder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, speculative and imaginary urbanisms. He tells stories about the city using fiction, film and performance as imaginative tools to explore the implications and consequences of new technologies and ecological conditions. Building his design fictions from the realities of present Young also co runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels on location shoots and expeditions to the ends of the earth to document emerging trends and uncover the weak signals of possible futures. He has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, including the BBC, NBC, Wired, Guardian, Time magazine, and Dazed and Confused.

Liam manages his time between exploring distant landscapes and visualizing the fictional worlds he extrapolates from them.

2

Liam Young is a speculative architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. Trained as an architect in Australia, Young has worked for a number of the world’s leading practices including Zaha Hadid Architects and LAB Architecture Studio. As technology increasingly became the fundamental driver of urban change, he became frustrated with the slow pace of architecture and escaped the star architect system to set up his own urban futures think tank, Tomorrows Thoughts Today. Young recently joined the design faculty at SCI-Arc and in 2016, will be taking on the role of coordinator for one of the new postgraduate programs within SCI-Arc Edge, Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture. SCI-Arc’s Director Hernan Diaz Alonso sat down with Young to discuss his practice and design philosophies.

Hernan: You choose to operate in redefining and transforming the edges of what the practice of an architect is. In many ways, I consider your work still 100% architecture, but it deals with architecture in a much more contemporary way. Can you tell me a little bit of how you arrived at this?

Liam: I started out in a very traditional sense, at a very traditional architecture school. We learned what buildings were, how to make them, the real pragmatics about shaping, creating, defining, enclosing space. I worked in fairly ordinary offices, and became increasingly frustrated with the extraordinary slow pace at which architecture, in a traditional sense, actually starts to operate. I saw it becoming increasingly marginalized as a discipline that can meaningfully engage with a contemporary city in its traditional form. The traditional being the architect as the maker and shaper of building the singular objects in space.

So the work that I do has slowly been moving further and further away from that definition of what the architect is, into something which is much more about the architect as storyteller or the architect as speculator, the architect as strategist, which I do still think is very much a critical part of the discipline. But it’s trying to reevaluate what we do as a profession, which includes things beyond the making and shaping of physical buildings. For the most part, I think that an architect’s skills and education is wasted just on making buildings. We try and think about ways that architects can operate in the world with much more urgency and much more relevance. That’s about co-opting various mediums from popular culture, to try and create work that talks to people and a public that may exist outside of our small, insulated, little genre.

We now work very much outside the traditional service model of an architect. We don’t have clients. We self-initiate projects. We make films. We tell stories. We do installations. We do performances that are all talking about architectural ideas or ideas about the city, but that take alternative forms, from national building or renderings, illustrations, plans, sections of those buildings. It’s just been a constant journey, looking at ways that the architect can stay relevant in the context of a city where the forces that now shape it exist beyond the physical spectrum, where the building as an object no longer plays the role that it once did, but the city is now about the movements of technologies. It’s now about mass media, social media. It’s now about the network, and we make work that engages in that version of the city, as opposed to the traditional one.

Hernan: There is a high level of acceptance of the circumstances of the cultural context in which you choose to operate. One could argue that a speculative architecture, which in the past we could call avant-garde or resistant or whatever it is, is not the case anymore. What, from your point of view, are the mechanisms in which, you, like many others, are operating, in kind of a postcritical way?

Liam: Architecture’s always had a relationship with speculation and fiction. It’s just that, at certain times, it makes more sense than others. So there was a big interest in the speculative project in the ’60s. There was with German expressionism. It’s a trait that kind of reappears, and then at various moments, depending on where the global economy is, it’s kind of crushed by an interest in making. Interest in façades or materiality by Herzog & de Meuron in the ‘90s kind of killed the paper architecture of the ’80s; the financial crash, when you saw the birth of Libeskind and Chamber Works and Zaha’s paintings, all that sort of stuff. So speculative projects have always kind of ebbed and flowed, in terms of developments to architecture.

I think we’re now in a moment where the speculative project, the future as a project, is really relevant and urgent again. Look at the tradition of science fiction across the last few years. William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the ’80s, and it was a future fiction that was about 30 or 40 years as a projection ahead. Now his books have become increasingly set closer and closer to the present, to the point where his latest books are set right now. He talks about how you used to have a period of relative certainty of 20 or 30 years where you could say that the world wasn’t going to be too different from what it was.

But now, with so many different balls in play—rapid climate change, financial collapse, ubiquitous technology—you have no period of certainty. In the next five years, there could be a radical destructive technology that would totally change the way that we operate, the way that the city works, the way that you and I communicate. So for the science fiction author, the length of the now that they can operate in is so extraordinarily short, that things are set in the present.

That’s why I think the speculative project is interesting again, because there’s so much uncertainty about our present condition, that all you can do is speculate on what could happen, and that seems to be the most relevant way of operating, and it seems to be the way that an architect can find traction and relevance again.

If we speculate on what the roles those technologies may play in the city or within our culture, we can prototype them, imagine new possibilities, and we can test out ideas in that speculative space. Hopefully that means that we can actually start to be much more active agents in shaping the futures that we want to have, as opposed to them just being dictated to us in whatever the latest tech keynote is.

Hernan: Let’s stay with this, the word “technology,” which I like to think, in many ways, we have gotten to the point that it has been demystified. Right? How do you think you set the parameters of what I call partnerships between the creativity of the author and the technology? Your work is about finding ways of human individuality within this technology. I think we are in a territory in which there is a partnership between what each of us do with the technology. How do you define your relation within that?

6

Liam: You can’t separate technology from culture. Architects have, for a long time, been at the wrong end of the technology transfer chain. If something develops in military, it then, to a certain extent, gets democratized. Eventually, at some point, architects pick it up and start running with it. I’m interested in a relationship to technology that, through speculation, puts us much further along that process, where we can see things that are just emerging, and we can imagine and speculate on what the cultural consequences or the overall architectural consequences of those technologies might be, before they become practically implementable within the building industry.

So we’re really interested in the way that these technologies define new cultural relationships. The phone isn’t just an object that makes our lives easier. It changes the way that communities are formed. It changes the nature of what the city is. It changes the nature of what a building is. I think it’s our responsibility, as designers and architects, to look not just at technology as a tool that we can deploy, but to look at all of the systems that it sets in motion, to look at, broadly, to look at cultures that are embedded within it and the cultures that give rise to it.

Take something like drone technology, for instance. You have a genre of architects that are really interested in what it means to stick a drone with a suction cup, and it builds a wall out of bricks, or tie a string to it, and it knits a new bridge or something.

I’m much more interested in how drone technology will totally rewrite how we think of infrastructure in the city. Infrastructure that we thought of as being fixed, large-scale, big systems will now become totally nomadic. What are the subcultures that emerge around drone technologies? What does a goth/punk drone look like? What does a harajuku drone look like? How do people co-opt these things in the world in the same way that we’ve made phones our own bespoke objects, with our own apps, our own profiles, our own wallpapers, our own cases? Looking at the cultural implications of technology, I think, is far more interesting than just exploring it as one more tool that we have as architects in our arson.

Hernan: You’re moving your whole operation to Los Angeles and SCI-Arc. What makes it appealing for you? Why did you think that this is the right move in this moment in your career?

Liam: I would say I’m interested in the different forms of architect. I would put myself in a condition of the architect as storyteller. I think if you’re going to tell stories, this is the city to do it in. We’ve been making films. We’ve been working with TV stations over in Europe. We’ve been doing performative pieces, and operate at a certain scale in the European context. I think part of coming out to LA is looking at ways that we can embed those sorts of projects within the machine of the entertainment industry out here. How we can find larger audiences for these types of works. At the moment, we make a short film. It gets put up on Vimeo, it gets shown in a number of galleries—it’s within a particular audience that consumes culture like that.

I think the promise of coming out to LA is that you can create critical work that has really important ideas embedded within it, but you can co-opt—like a Trojan horse or a parasite—these bigger systems of the entertainment industry, and launch the same types of projects, but to audiences that are infinitely larger. I think

that’s what architects should be doing, looking at ways that we can disseminate our work and ideas which are really important and critical in thinking about the future of cities, and how we operate within them, to audiences that aren’t just other architects.

LA is a city where we can use these forms of pop media to actually broadcast our discussions much more widely. I think right now, the west coast is the place to do that. I think the east coast, as a center of cultural production, is slowly declining, and everyone’s migrating out west. I think, at least for the next five or 10 years, LA and the west coast is going to be really where everything interesting is happening. Part of that is the entertainment industry.

Part of that is also the growth of the tech sector and the movement further south from San Francisco; Google setting up offices here in LA and other big tech firms doing the same thing. So I think it’s a really interesting moment, and SCI-Arc, as a school, is in an extraordinary position to take advantage of that ground swell and that cultural shift.

Hernan: Teaching is a big part of what you do. You’re the latest addition to a very long tradition of SCI-Arc, in which the people move seamlessly between their own body of work and what they teach. To me, it’s one of the many unique qualities of this place— it’s demanded and encouraged in the faculty. So when you work with the students, what are the goals? How do you help them? And how do you define when a project works or doesn’t work?

Liam: I think if we’re interested in expanding the remit of the architect and finding new medium in which the architect can operate, then it’s also our duty, as educators, to talk to students about developing projects that allow them to build a career in those different allied and associated disciplines. So I would say that when I teach a studio in a masters program or a postprofessional program, that I’m trying to work with the students to develop not their last, most substantial project within the institution, but the first project of their new career. How can they actually start to shape a body of work that is going to equip them to go out into the world and not just apply for an internship in the best architectural office they can find, but to actually set up their own practices that will really explore the different territories that an architect can operate within?

In the context of SCI-Arc, it’s to equip students with the knowledge and skills that they can then develop a project that can launch them into a career in the entertainment industry, where they can start to act as world builder or a consultant for the studio networks, where they can start to become set designers and filmmakers and animators, where they can start to tell architectural and urban stories through these media. I think that’s a really urgent thing that we should be doing, because the traditional paths an architecture student might once have taken are no longer there, or they’re increasingly boutique and marginalized.

So a successful student is one that starts to define their own direction and sets up their project work in such a way that they’re developing their own unique voice, and they start to develop the skills and the language through which to move out into a really interesting type of practice. In the context of that, that means connecting to this extraordinary infrastructure that’s around us in the entertainment industry.

HERNAN DIAZ ALONSO is principal of the Los Angeles-based architecture office Xefirotarch. In 2005, Diaz Alonso was the winner of MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program (YAP) competition, and in 2012 he received the “Educator of the Year” Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Most recently, he won the 2013 AR+D Award for Emerging Architecture and a 2013 Progressive Architecture Award for his design of the Thyssen Bornamiza Pavilion/Museum in Patagonia, Argentina. Diaz Alonso’s architectural designs have been featured in both architecture and art exhibitions worlwide. The work has also been widely published in magazines, periodicals and books.

1.

LOOP>>60Hz: Transmissions from The Drone Orchestra, a work by John Cale and Liam Young, commissioned by the Barbican and The Space as part of Digital Revolution. 2014 2.

Specimens of Unnatural History: the Bioluminescent Billboard, the Roving Forests and an Augmented Ferret.

2010 3.

New City: The City in the Sea. Multiple channel video installation.

2014 4.

New City: Keeping Up Appearances.

Multiple channel video installation.

2014

5

LIAM YOUNG is the founder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose work explores the possibilities of fantastic, speculative and imaginary urbanisms. He tells stories about the city using fiction, film and performance as imaginative tools to explore the implications and consequences of new technologies and ecological conditions. Building his design fictions from the realities of present Young also co runs the Unknown Fields Division, a nomadic research studio that travels on location shoots and expeditions to the ends of the earth to document emerging trends and uncover the weak signals of possible futures. He has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, including the BBC, NBC, Wired, Guardian, Time magazine, and Dazed and Confused. Liam manages his time between exploring distant landscapes and visualizing the fictional worlds he extrapolates from them.

FACULTY PROFILE: LIAM YOUNG

Liam Young is a speculative architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. Trained as an architect in Australia, Young has worked for a number of the world’s leading practices including Zaha Hadid Architects and LAB Architecture Studio. As technology increasingly became the fundamental driver of urban change, he became frustrated with the slow pace of architecture and escaped the star architect system to set up his own urban futures think tank, Tomorrows Thoughts Today. Young recently joined the design faculty at SCI-Arc and in 2016, will be taking on the role of coordinator for one of the new postgraduate programs within SCI-Arc Edge, Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture. SCI-Arc’s Director Hernan Diaz Alonso sat down with Young to discuss his practice and design philosophies.

Hernan: You choose to operate in redefining and transforming the edges of what the practice of an architect is. In many ways, I consider your work still 100% architecture, but it deals with architecture in a much more contemporary way. Can you tell me a little bit of how you arrived at this?

Liam: I started out in a very traditional sense, at a very traditional architecture school. We learned what buildings were, how to make them, the real pragmatics about shaping, creating, defining, enclosing space. I worked in fairly ordinary offices, and became increasingly frustrated with the extraordinary slow pace at which architecture, in a traditional sense, actually starts to operate. I saw it becoming increasingly marginalized as a discipline that can meaningfully engage with a contemporary city in its traditional form. The traditional being the architect as the maker and shaper of building the singular objects in space.

So the work that I do has slowly been moving further and further away from that definition of what the architect is, into something which is much more about the architect as storyteller or the architect as speculator, the architect as strategist, which I do still think is very much a critical part of the discipline. But it’s trying to reevaluate what we do as a profession, which includes things beyond the making and shaping of physical buildings. For the most part, I think that an architect’s skills and education is wasted just on making buildings. We try and think about ways that architects can operate in the world with much more urgency and much more relevance. That’s about co-opting various mediums from popular culture, to try and create work that talks to people and a public that may exist outside of our small, insulated, little genre.

We now work very much outside the traditional service model of an architect. We don’t have clients. We self-initiate projects.

We make films. We tell stories. We do installations. We do performances that are all talking about architectural ideas or ideas about the city, but that take alternative forms, from national building or renderings, illustrations, plans, sections of those buildings. It’s just been a constant journey, looking at ways that the architect can stay relevant in the context of a city where the forces that now shape it exist beyond the physical spectrum, where the building as an object no longer plays the role that it once did, but the city is now about the movements of technologies. It’s now about mass media, social media. It’s now about the network, and we make work that engages in that version of the city, as opposed to the traditional one.

4

Hernan: There is a high level of acceptance of the circumstances of the cultural context in which you choose to operate. One could argue that a speculative architecture, which in the past we could call avant-garde or resistant or whatever it is, is not the case anymore. What, from your point of view, are the mechanisms in which, you, like many others, are operating, in kind of a post-critical way?

Liam: Architecture’s always had a relationship with speculation and fiction. It’s just that, at certain times, it makes more sense than others. So there was a big interest in the speculative project in the ’60s. There was with German expressionism. It’s a trait that kind of reappears, and then at various moments, depending on where the global economy is, it’s kind of crushed by an interest in making. Interest in façades or materiality by Herzog & de Meuron in the ‘90s kind of killed the paper architecture of the ’80s; the financial crash, when you saw the birth of Libeskind and Chamber Works and Zaha’s paintings, all that sort of stuff. So speculative projects have always kind of ebbed and flowed, in terms of developments to architecture.

I think we’re now in a moment where the speculative project, the future as a project, is really relevant and urgent again. Look at the tradition of science fiction across the last few years. William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the ’80s, and it was a future fiction that was about 30 or 40 years as a projection ahead. Now his books have become increasingly set closer and closer to the present, to the point where his latest books are set right now. He talks about how you used to have a period of relative certainty of 20 or 30 years where you could say that the world wasn’t going to be too different from what it was.

But now, with so many different balls in play—rapid climate change, financial collapse, ubiquitous technology—you have no period of certainty. In the next five years, there could be a radical destructive technology that would totally change the way that we operate, the way that the city works, the way that you and I communicate. So for the science fiction author, the length of the now that they can operate in is so extraordinarily short, that things are set in the present.

That’s why I think the speculative project is interesting again, because there’s so much uncertainty about our present condition, that all you can do is speculate on what could happen, and that seems to be the most relevant way of operating, and it seems to be the way that an architect can find traction and relevance again. If we speculate on what the roles those technologies may play in the city or within our culture, we can prototype them, imagine new possibilities, and we can test out ideas in that speculative space.

Hopefully that means that we can actually start to be much more active agents in shaping the futures that we want to have, as opposed to them just being dictated to us in whatever the latest tech keynote is.

Hernan: Let’s stay with this, the word “technology,” which I like to think, in many ways, we have gotten to the point that it has been demystified. Right? How do you think you set the parameters of what I call partnerships between the creativity of the author and the technology? Your work is about finding ways of human individuality within this technology. I think we are in a territory in which there is a partnership between what each of us do with the technology. How do you define your relation within that?

6

Liam: You can’t separate technology from culture. Architects have, for a long time, been at the wrong end of the technology transfer chain. If something develops in military, it then, to a certain extent, gets democratized. Eventually, at some point, architects pick it up and start running with it. I’m interested in a relationship to technology that, through speculation, puts us much further along that process, where we can see things that are just emerging, and we can imagine and speculate on what the cultural consequences or the overall architectural consequences of those technologies might be, before they become practically implementable within the building industry.

So we’re really interested in the way that these technologies define new cultural relationships. The phone isn’t just an object that makes our lives easier. It changes the way that communities are formed. It changes the nature of what the city is. It changes the nature of what a building is. I think it’s our responsibility, as designers and architects, to look not just at technology as a tool that we can deploy, but to look at all of the systems that it sets in motion, to look at, broadly, to look at cultures that are embedded within it and the cultures that give rise to it.

Take something like drone technology, for instance. You have a genre of architects that are really interested in what it means to stick a drone with a suction cup, and it builds a wall out of bricks, or tie a string to it, and it knits a new bridge or something. I’m much more interested in how drone technology will totally rewrite how we think of infrastructure in the city. Infrastructure that we thought of as being fixed, large-scale, big systems will now become totally nomadic. What are the subcultures that emerge around drone technologies? What does a goth/punk drone look like? What does a harajuku drone look like? How do people co-opt these things in the world in the same way that we’ve made phones our own bespoke objects, with our own apps, our own profiles, our own wallpapers, our own cases? Looking at the cultural implications of technology, I think, is far more interesting than just exploring it as one more tool that we have as architects in our arson.

Hernan: You’re moving your whole operation to Los Angeles and SCI-Arc. What makes it appealing for you? Why did you think that this is the right move in this moment in your career?

Liam: I would say I’m interested in the different forms of architect. I would put myself in a condition of the architect as storyteller. I think if you’re going to tell stories, this is the city to do it in.

We’ve been making films. We’ve been working with TV stations over in Europe. We’ve been doing performative pieces, and operate at a certain scale in the European context. I think part of coming out to LA is looking at ways that we can embed those sorts of projects within the machine of the entertainment industry out here. How we can find larger audiences for these types of works.

At the moment, we make a short film. It gets put up on Vimeo, it gets shown in a number of galleries—it’s within a particular audience that consumes culture like that.

I think the promise of coming out to LA is that you can create critical work that has really important ideas embedded within it, but you can co-opt—like a Trojan horse or a parasite—these bigger systems of the entertainment industry, and launch the same types of projects, but to audiences that are infinitely larger. I think that’s what architects should be doing, looking at ways that we can dis-

seminate our work and ideas which are really important and critical in thinking about the future of cities, and how we operate within them, to audiences that aren’t just other architects.

LA is a city where we can use these forms of pop media to actually broadcast our discussions much more widely. I think right now, the west coast is the place to do that. I think the east coast, as a center of cultural production, is slowly declining, and everyone’s migrating out west. I think, at least for the next five or 10 years, LA and the west coast is going to be really where everything interesting is happening. Part of that is the entertainment industry.

Part of that is also the growth of the tech sector and the movement further south from San Francisco; Google setting up offices here in LA and other big tech firms doing the same thing. So I think it’s a really interesting moment, and SCI-Arc, as a school, is in an extraordinary position to take advantage of that ground swell and that cultural shift.

Hernan: Teaching is a big part of what you do. You’re the latest addition to a very long tradition of SCI-Arc, in which the people move seamlessly between their own body of work and what they teach. To me, it’s one of the many unique qualities of this place— it’s demanded and encouraged in the faculty. So when you work with the students, what are the goals? How do you help them? And how do you define when a project works or doesn’t work?

Liam: I think if we’re interested in expanding the remit of the architect and finding new medium in which the architect can operate, then it’s also our duty, as educators, to talk to students about developing projects that allow them to build a career in those different allied and associated disciplines. So I would say that when I teach a studio in a masters program or a post-professional program, that I’m trying to work with the students to develop not their last, most substantial project within the institution, but the first project of their new career. How can they actually start to shape a body of work that is going to equip them to go out into the world and not just apply for an internship in the best architectural office they can find, but to actually set up their own practices that will really explore the different territories that an architect can operate within?

In the context of SCI-Arc, it’s to equip students with the knowledge and skills that they can then develop a project that can launch them into a career in the entertainment industry, where they can start to act as world builder or a consultant for the studio networks, where they can start to become set designers and filmmakers and animators, where they can start to tell architectural and urban stories through these media. I think that’s a really urgent thing that we should be doing, because the traditional paths an architecture student might once have taken are no longer there, or they’re increasingly boutique and marginalized.

So a successful student is one that starts to define their own direction and sets up their project work in such a way that they’re developing their own unique voice, and they start to develop the skills and the language through which to move out into a really interesting type of practice. In the context of that, that means connecting to this extraordinary infrastructure that’s around us in the entertainment industry.

HERNAN DIAZ ALONSO is principal of the Los Angeles-based architecture office Xefirotarch. In 2005, Diaz Alonso was the winner of MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program (YAP) competition, and in 2012 he received the “Educator of the Year” Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Most recently, he won the 2013 AR+D Award for Emerging Architecture and a 2013 Progressive Architecture Award for his design of the Thyssen Bornamiza Pavilion/Museum in Patagonia, Argentina. Diaz Alonso’s architectural designs have been featured in both architecture and art exhibitions worlwide. The work has also been widely published in magazines, periodicals and books.

1.

LOOP>>60Hz: Transmissions from The Drone Orchestra, a work by John Cale and Liam Young, commissioned by the Barbican and The Space as part of Digital Revolution. 2014 2.

Specimens of Unnatural History: the Bioluminescent Billboard, the Roving Forests and an Augmented Ferret.

2010 3.

New City: The City in the Sea. Multiple channel video installation.

2014 4.

New City: Keeping Up Appearances.

Multiple channel video installation.

2014

7

LEADERSHIP NEWS

SCI-Arc Magazine Issue 011

LOS ANGELES DEVELOPER TOM GILMORE APPOINTED CHAIRMAN OF SCI-ARC BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Editor-in-Chief Hernan Diaz Alonso Contributing Writers Georgiana Masgras Jake Matatyaou David Ruy Justine Smith Photography PoYao Shih Adriane Seung Yi Joshua White Adrian Wong Communications Project Manager Justine Smith Sr. Graphic Designer Kate Merritt Graphic Designer Marija Radisavljevic Public Programs & PR Manager Stephanie Atlan © 2015 SCI-Arc Publications

SCI-Arc has appointed noted Los Angeles developer Tom Gilmore as Chairman of the school’s Board of Trustees. “I am deeply honored to be named Chairman of SCI-Arc and am committed to growing our legacy of excellence and achievement in architecture and design,” said Gilmore, whose appointment coincides with a series of leadership changes at the school.

“I cannot think of a more suitable candidate to serve as Chairman of the SCI-Arc board than Tom Gilmore,” said Director Hernan Diaz Alonso. “He has been one of SCI-Arc’s pillars for many years, and we are grateful for his renewed commitment to guide the school in exploring new areas of fundraising and institutional growth.”

A member of the SCI-Arc Board since 2001, Gilmore succeeds Jerry Neuman, Real Estate, Land Use and Government Relations partner in Liner LLP, who served as chairman since 2010. “The inauguration of a new Chairman and new Director provides an extraordinary opportunity for SCI-Arc,” added Gilmore. “Our predecessors have assembled an outstanding board and faculty who share a vision for innovation, creativity, and real-world experience in our undergraduate and graduate programs. I look forward to enthusiastically supporting Hernan Diaz Alonso along with faculty, students and alumni in our goal to build on this tradition where SCI-Arc is recognized globally as the standard by which other creative institutions are measured.”

A native New Yorker and architect by training, Tom Gilmore is a downtown Los Angeles-based developer of residential and commercial properties whose early projects in the city’s historic core led to the largest resurgence of real estate investment and development the city has experienced in nearly a century. Following his move to Los Angeles in the early 90s, Gilmore partnered with Jerri Perrone

The Main Museum designed by Tom Wiscombe.

to form an independent development firm, Gilmore Associates, with the goal to embark upon the redevelopment of the city’s historic core. His vision for Downtown Los Angeles as a thriving, selfsustaining urban community led him to purchase four abandoned historic buildings: the Continental, the Hellman, the San Fernando, and the Farmers and Merchants National Bank—collectively renamed by Gilmore and Perrone as the “Old Bank District.” Gilmore was the first developer to utilize the newly minted Adaptive Reuse Ordinance of 1999, which enabled him to convert historic commercial buildings into mixed-use residences, ultimately catalyzing the widespread redevelopment and revival of Downtown.

Gilmore’s ingenuity and tenacity has been recognized through major projects he has spearheaded, most notably Vibiana, a development of the former St. Vibiana’s Cathedral as a performing arts center, event facility, and restaurants. Current projects include the transformation of historic spaces within the Hellman Building and the former Farmers and Merchants National Bank into a contemporary museum showcasing Los Angeles, dubbed the Main Museum.

Since Gilmore’s first historic building opened to residents in 2000, more than 60,000 new residents now call downtown Los Angeles their home and more than $5 billion in residential, business, entertainment and arts projects have been introduced to the city center.

Gilmore’s commitment to the civic identity of Los Angeles is also evident in his former roles as Commissioner Chair for the LA Homeless Services Authority and Executive Committee Member of the Central City Association. He continues to be involved in civic affairs as Chairman of Sister Cities Los Angeles and as board member of the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Bureau.

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SCI-ARC APPOINTS NEW VICE DIRECTOR AND ACADEMIC PROGRAM CHAIRS In early September, SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso announced the appointment of John Enright as Vice Director/Chief Academic Officer, Elena Manferdini as Graduate Program Chair, and Tom Wiscombe as Undergraduate Program Chair. Diaz Alonso made the announcement after assuming the position of SCI-Arc Director and Chief Executive Officer on September 1.

“I am thrilled for the opportunity to work with this group of respected colleagues to define the future of architecture education at SCI-Arc,” says Diaz Alonso. “John, Elena and Tom have demonstrated an immovable commitment to innovation and academic excellence, a deep passion for teaching, and a pioneering approach to architecture education. Together, we share an ambition to showcase to the world the many different ways in which architecture and design can change it.”

John Enright, FAIA has taught at SCI-Arc since 2001, and became Undergraduate Program Chair in 2010. In his new role, Enright oversees various school functions including academic programs, planning and operations, accreditation, admissions and recruitment. Enright, along with faculty member Margaret Griffin, FAIA, is founding principal of Griffin Enright Architects. Their work has been extensively published and has received dozens of awards for design excellence including AIA Awards and The American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum.

Enright has taught design studios and technology seminars at SCI-Arc, Syracuse University, University of Houston, and University of Southern California. His academic research focuses on design and building technology, addressing new digital paradigms as applied to fabrication and construction. He has served on the advisory committee of the national AIA’s Educator Practitioners Network, and currently serves on the Los Angeles Mayor’s Design Advisory Panel and the NCARB’s Licensure Task Force. Enright received an M.Arch from Columbia University and a B.Arch from Syracuse University.

“I am honored to serve as Vice Director/Chief Academic Officer of SCI-Arc and I look forward to working with Hernan and the team he has assembled,” said Enright. “SCI-Arc has continued to be an exceptional hotbed of architectural discourse because of the dynamic faculty, dedicated students, and supportive administration, staff, and board of trustees. If from the pedagogical side our aim is clear—namely, to continue to pursue the redefinition of architectural discourse in all its forms—from an administrative side, our task should be even clearer: to create the most productive and excellent environment possible for the faculty and students to do just that.”

Elena Manferdini contributes more than 15 years of professional experience to her new role as SCI-Arc Graduate Program Chair. She has been teaching at SCI-Arc since 2003, serving most recently as coordinator of the school’s graduate thesis. “I am honored to have the opportunity to contribute to the future of SCI-Arc as Graduate Program Chair,” says Manferdini. “My commitment remains one of advancing the architectural discourse while rethinking its conventions. This is a key approach for a school dedicated to educating architects who will imagine and shape the future.”

Manferdini is founder and principal of Atelier Manferdini in Venice, CA. Her work has been recognized with awards including the 2013 COLA Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles Depart-

(L to R): Elena Manferdini, Tom Wiscombe, John Enright

ment of Cultural Affairs to support the production of original artwork, a 2013 Graham Award for architecture, and the ACADIA Innovative Research Award of Excellence. In 2011, she was recipient of a prestigious United States Artists (USA) annual grant in the category of architecture and design, while her Blossom design for Alessi received the Good Design Award. Manferdini has worked on museum installations and object designs for internationally renowned companies including Swarovski, Sephora, Driade, MTV, Fiat, Nike, Alessi, Ottaviani, Moroso, Valentino, Arktura, Lerival and BMW. Throughout the years, Manferdini has been the Howard Friedman Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of California at Berkeley and has taught at Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania and Seika University. In 2013, she received the “Educator of the Year” presidential award from AIA Los Angeles.

Manferdini received an M.Arch from UCLA and a bachelor in engineering from the University of Civil Engineering, Bologna, Italy.

Tom Wiscombe has been a senior SCI-Arc faculty member for more than 10 years. He assumes the role of Chair of the B.Arch. program after having coordinated the school’s applied studies track for six years. “I am humbled and excited to be asked to join the leadership of SCI-Arc,” said Wiscombe. “When I imagine SCI-Arc, I imagine a wonderland of bright things, dark things, alluring things like I’ve never seen anywhere else. SCI-Arc is like a parallel universe of how reality could be, should be. Now is the time for SCI-Arc to expand its reach, share its unique culture of speculation and imagination, and really show the world what architecture can do.”

Wiscombe is founder and principal of Tom Wiscombe Architecture, an internationally recognized design practice whose work stands out in terms of its mysterious figural features and tectonic inventiveness. His office is currently working on the Main Museum of Los Angeles Art with developer Tom Gilmore, located in Los Angeles’ historic core. Wiscombe has developed an international reputation, winning design competitions and exhibitions at major cultural institutions around the world. In 2014, he received Second Place in the international competition for the Kinmen Passenger Service Center, Taiwan. In 2012, he was part of the joint design team organized by Morphosis to compete for the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, which received Second Prize. Wiscombe has taught advanced research studios as Visiting Professor at PennDesign, and in 2012, he held the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professorship at Yale University. Previously, Wiscombe worked for Coop Himmelb(l)au, where he was Chief Designer for BMW World, Munich, the Museum of Confluences, Lyon, and the UFA Cinema Center, Dresden. Wiscombe received an M.Arch from UCLA and a B.Arch from the University of California at Berkeley.

9

NOW IS THEN: A REVIEW OF SCI-ARC’S RIGHT NOW SYMPOSIUM Jake Matatyaou

JAKE MATATYAOU is an educator, designer, and the principal of JUNE. He teaches design studios and seminars at SCI-Arc.

… “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association.

Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) Whether or not the medium is the message, or if it is merely a supplement that contains its own message, independent of and in excess to the content, McLuhan’s dictum invites us to consider the “psychic and social consequences” of our design decisions: “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” (1964) What, then, were the changes produced by the new (old?) discursive format of SCI-Arc’s 2015 RIGHT NOW Symposium?

This “anti-conference conference” was intended to produce chatter—abbreviated and incomplete impressions about how we talk to each other about our work as much as our work itself. Participants were told that they would not present anything, but rather have their work presented by one of five provocateurs (David Ruy, John Enright, Dora Epstein Jones, Marcelyn Gow, and Joe Day) whose use and abuse of proprietary images would open up paths for conversation previously unseen or foreclosed by disciplinary dogmas and professional constraints. The goal was not to identify, confirm, validate, or promote a universal truth, but rather to take the temperature of architectural discourse in a historically situated present.

If architecture is a discipline that commonly understands itself as being in a state of crisis, as suggested by SCI-Arc’s director Hernan Diaz Alonso in his opening remarks, a conference or a symposium assumes the responsibility of diagnosing symptoms and offering solutions for that which currently ails the discipline.

A theme is imposed, by committee or by decree, and participants are invited to engage in a kind of talking cure for their self-inflicted intellectual angst. Yet rather than follow the received norms of the conference format, the organizers of RIGHT NOW, Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe, attempted to redefine the rules of discursive engagement, inviting individuals whose work, methods, and interests share certain affinities with those being pursued by the students and faculty of SCI-Arc. Competing with entrenched vocabularies by trying to speak differently is never easy. But changing the way discourse happens is a worthwhile endeavor, especially when it has the potential to create a space for work to develop and mature. This was the task, which was conducted as a small experiment of adopting new voices and assuming new risks.

Over the course of two days, the five provocateurs presented the work of twenty-five panelists across five sessions. Provocateurs were assigned the title, theme, and panelists of their respective sessions. Similar impositions were placed on panelists, who did not know in advance what questions they would be asked or which of their images would be shown. Rather than relay and rely on resolved nuggets of knowledge, panelists and provocateurs exposed themselves to ideas in the making. Doing away with scripted monologues occasioned live discussion, replete with anecdotes, swipes, flirtations, and jabs. Several conversations

yielded surprising silence, while others enabled previously unheard voices to emerge.

The first session, led by provocateur Ruy, laid out many of the terms that were contested throughout the following sessions (e.g. abstraction, agency, estrangement, objects, strategies, tactics). Drawing on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” he challenged participants to distinguish between things as they seem and things as they are. This was a productive move, as it forced the panelists to position their work along a spectrum between the real and representation. Also telling was the omission of the traditional question-and-answer session with audience members. Whether intentional or an oversight, this exclusion was one of several referents that revealed the impossibility of relinquishing control.

In other words, it revealed the unavoidable staging within the conference/symposium format.

Though the symposium itself was staged, conversations were unchoreographed, happening real-time in front of a live audience.

It is worth pausing to reflect on the nature of what it means to do something in real-time. What is real-time, right now? What is its opposite? Unreal, fake, simulated time? And would this fictitious time stand in opposition to the now of the present, or would it be complicit in inventing unknown histories and unknowable futures?

What makes real-time—the now of RIGHT NOW—more real than past and future?

Are ontological questions, such as these, important for architecture and for architects? Symposium organizers Gannon and Wiscombe were of two minds: the former was less interested in what something is and more curious about its qualities, while the latter defended the primacy of ontologies—in all of their manifestations—for the discipline and practice of architecture.

Both the making of ontological claims and the description of effects are ways of relating to and understanding the world. Both, in other words, are ways of constructing knowledge. And while there are always conditions, constraints, and limits to any such endeavor, the rules and procedures through which we engage each other over ethical, aesthetic, and political questions—questions of value—can themselves be questioned. As Ruy remarked in the final session, we do not have to accept the world as given; we can push back, and with the help of our imagination, invent and enact new realities.

Yet worlds are not built in a vacuum, nor are they built alone.

They need others to populate and propagate ideas, tastes, and styles, some with and some against (one needs both friends and enemies, or, to soften the Schmittian binary, “colleagues with benefits,” a phrase coined during the fourth session by Epstein Jones). To echo Diaz Alonso’s closing remarks, you cannot define a radical and speculative attitude by yourself. Building constituencies is a practice, and as architects and designers, we are always constructing audiences.

10

RIGHT NOW Organized by SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso, along with faculty members Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe serving as emcees, the RIGHT NOW symposium aimed to take stock of some of the most promising directions in contemporary architecture, using the conversation, as opposed to the conference paper, as its primary catalyst. The hosts set the stage for five provocateurs to instigate unscripted conversations among a broad crosssection of today’s most exciting practitioners, using their recent work as lenses through which to examine specific topics in contemporary architecture. Aiming to tease out new ideas as opposed to harden nascent positions, RIGHT NOW was less interested in taking inventory of the latest projects than in using new work to amplify the volume of contemporary discourse and to swerve ongoing conversations in new directions.

One way to construct an audience is to simply invite some people over and see what happens. The word symposium refers to a dinner party; its etymology can be traced back to the idea of a drinking party following an evening meal. This is the occasion of Plato’s Symposium (only the guests pass on alcohol, given their lack of moderation the previous evening), where various speakers share their thoughts and opinions on the subject of erotic love. Being true to form, the organizers of RIGHT NOW provided their invited guests with a bar stocked with beer and wine throughout the first night of the symposium (the more familiar pairing of coffee and light refreshments reappeared the next morning). For a brief moment, SCI-Arc’s Keck Lecture Hall did it’s best to impersonate a darkly lit lounge bar. The performance leaned heavily on several props: bar, lighting, glass coffee table placed on a white shag carpet and encircled by a ring of black leather Barcelona chairs. Playfully dubbed “the Miesien moshpit” by provocateur Day, the setting moved in the direction of defamiliarizing the familiar and promising the possibility of achieving the organizers intention of using informality as a means of instigating unscripted conversations.

Here, in real-time, audience members witnessed the construction of content through the construction of context. “The act of creating the discourse was actively designed,” remarked provocateur Gow. This deliberate choice to actively design the discourse amplifies McLuhan’s thesis about the importance of mediation, the not taking for granted of the background (or apparatus) that organizes and conditions our thoughts and actions. Take, for example, the outfitting of panelists with clip-on microphones (more Charlie Rose than TED Talk), or the location of the camera recording the sessions and the white projector shuffling images of work produced by both panelists and provocateurs. Set some sixty feet in front of the stage, the camera performed as a proxy for the future, a silent witness to the event. And the projector, set directly behind the participants, screened a past too close to recognize, too familiar to really know. Try as we do to situate ourselves in the present, it remains both problematically and productively illusive.

If recording is a means of transmission that communicates content, it also ascribes relevance: not all presents are equally significant just as not all futures are equally possible. For a transmission to be successful it must first be received. And reception only begins when we recognize that which has been transmitted—an image, a sound, a story—as having been intended for us. This is the challenge issued by RIGHT NOW: to receive the past as an active construction of one’s own historical present. To take positions without reverting to dogmatic declarations is to be responsible to one’s own time, to think and continue to discover the gap between past and future.

1

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE Friday, September 25 Welcome Hernan Diaz Alonso Opening Remarks Todd Gannon Session One: Estrangement and Alluring Objects Provocation: David Ruy Panelists: Mark Gage, Elena Manferdini, Jason Payne, Marcelo Spina and Tom Wiscombe Saturday, September 26 Welcome Tom Wiscombe Session Two: International Practice, Publicity, and Iconicity Provocation: John Enright Panelists: Thomas Daniell, Neil Denari, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Jennifer Leung and Peter Testa Session Three: Aberrations, Synthetics and Weird Nature Provocation: Marcelyn Gow Panelists: Theo Spyropoulos, Ferda Kolatan, Lucy McRae, Rhett Russo and Casey Rehm Session Four: Character, Posture, and Legibility Provocation: Dora Epstein Jones Panelists: Florencia Pita, Jimenez Lai, Peter Trummer, Andrew Zago and Anna Neimark Session Five: Lyricism, Lies, and Other Forms of Fiction Provocation: Joe Day Panelists: Ben Bratton, Lydia Kallipoliti, Todd Gannon, Liam Young and Michael Young Closing Comments Hernan Diaz Alonso

1.

Andrew Zago, Zago Architecture The Greening of Detroit Pavilion.

2001 2.

Jason Payne, Hirsuta Variations On The Disco Ball or, The Bee Gees Have Left The Building.

2011 3.

Eva Franch i Gilabert, The Storefront for Art and Architecture Past Futures, Present, Futures.

Curated by Eva Franch. Image by Naho Kubota. Design by by Leong Leong (Dominc Leong and Chris Leong). 2012 4.

Lucy McRae TransNatural Campaign. 2011 5.

Mark Young, Young & Ayata Vessel Collective, Bauhaus Museum Dessau International Competition.

2015 6.

Mark Foster Gage Architects Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. 2014 7.

Theo Spyropoulos, Minimaforms Petting Zoo. 2013 8.

Peter Testa, Testa & Weiser Carbon Tower Prototype. 2002 9.

M. Casey Rehm, Kinch Striated Vistas v1 with Yuna Yagi.

2015 10.

Audience members at the symposium.

11.

Ilaria Mazzoleni and Ramiro Diaz-Granados.

12.

Provocateur Joe Day during his panel discussion.

13.

Hernan Diaz Alonso at the podium.

9

NOW IS THEN: A REVIEW OF SCI-ARC’S RIGHT NOW SYMPOSIUM Jake Matatyaou

JAKE MATATYAOU is an educator, designer, and the principal of JUNE. He teaches design studios and seminars at SCI-Arc.

… “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association.

Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) Whether or not the medium is the message, or if it is merely a supplement that contains its own message, independent of and in excess to the content, McLuhan’s dictum invites us to consider the “psychic and social consequences” of our design decisions: “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” (1964) What, then, were the changes produced by the new (old?) discursive format of SCI-Arc’s 2015 RIGHT NOW Symposium?

This “anti-conference conference” was intended to produce chatter—abbreviated and incomplete impressions about how we talk to each other about our work as much as our work itself.

Participants were told that they would not present anything, but rather have their work presented by one of five provocateurs (David Ruy, John Enright, Dora Epstein Jones, Marcelyn Gow, and Joe Day) whose use and abuse of proprietary images would open up paths for conversation previously unseen or foreclosed by disciplinary dogmas and professional constraints. The goal was not to identify, confirm, validate, or promote a universal truth, but rather to take the temperature of architectural discourse in a historically situated present.

If architecture is a discipline that commonly understands itself as being in a state of crisis, as suggested by SCI-Arc’s director Hernan Diaz Alonso in his opening remarks, a conference or a symposium assumes the responsibility of diagnosing symptoms and offering solutions for that which currently ails the discipline.

A theme is imposed, by committee or by decree, and participants are invited to engage in a kind of talking cure for their self-inflicted intellectual angst. Yet rather than follow the received norms of the conference format, the organizers of RIGHT NOW, Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe, attempted to redefine the rules of discursive engagement, inviting individuals whose work, methods, and interests share certain affinities with those being pursued by the students and faculty of SCI-Arc. Competing with entrenched vocabularies by trying to speak differently is never easy. But changing the way discourse happens is a worthwhile endeavor, especially when it has the potential to create a space for work to develop and mature. This was the task, which was conducted as a small experiment of adopting new voices and assuming new risks.

Over the course of two days, the five provocateurs presented the work of twenty-five panelists across five sessions. Provocateurs were assigned the title, theme, and panelists of their respective sessions. Similar impositions were placed on panelists, who did not know in advance what questions they would be asked or which of their images would be shown. Rather than relay and rely on resolved nuggets of knowledge, panelists and provocateurs exposed themselves to ideas in the making. Doing away with scripted monologues occasioned live discussion, replete with anecdotes, swipes, flirtations, and jabs. Several conversations 12

yielded surprising silence, while others enabled previously unheard voices to emerge.

The first session, led by provocateur Ruy, laid out many of the terms that were contested throughout the following sessions (e.g. abstraction, agency, estrangement, objects, strategies, tactics). Drawing on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” he challenged participants to distinguish between things as they seem and things as they are. This was a productive move, as it forced the panelists to position their work along a spectrum between the real and representation. Also telling was the omission of the traditional question-and-answer session with audience members. Whether intentional or an oversight, this exclusion was one of several referents that revealed the impossibility of relinquishing control.

In other words, it revealed the unavoidable staging within the conference/symposium format.

Though the symposium itself was staged, conversations were unchoreographed, happening real-time in front of a live audience.

It is worth pausing to reflect on the nature of what it means to do something in real-time. What is real-time, right now? What is its opposite? Unreal, fake, simulated time? And would this fictitious time stand in opposition to the now of the present, or would it be complicit in inventing unknown histories and unknowable futures?

What makes real-time—the now of RIGHT NOW—more real than past and future?

Are ontological questions, such as these, important for architecture and for architects? Symposium organizers Gannon and Wiscombe were of two minds: the former was less interested in what something is and more curious about its qualities, while the latter defended the primacy of ontologies—in all of their manifestations—for the discipline and practice of architecture.

Both the making of ontological claims and the description of effects are ways of relating to and understanding the world. Both, in other words, are ways of constructing knowledge. And while there are always conditions, constraints, and limits to any such endeavor, the rules and procedures through which we engage each other over ethical, aesthetic, and political questions—questions of value—can themselves be questioned. As Ruy remarked in the final session, we do not have to accept the world as given; we can push back, and with the help of our imagination, invent and enact new realities.

Yet worlds are not built in a vacuum, nor are they built alone.

They need others to populate and propagate ideas, tastes, and styles, some with and some against (one needs both friends and enemies, or, to soften the Schmittian binary, “colleagues with benefits,” a phrase coined during the fourth session by Epstein Jones). To echo Diaz Alonso’s closing remarks, you cannot define a radical and speculative attitude by yourself. Building constituencies is a practice, and as architects and designers, we are always constructing audiences.

13

10

RIGHT NOW Organized by SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso, along with faculty members Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe serving as emcees, the RIGHT NOW symposium aimed to take stock of some of the most promising directions in contemporary architecture, using the conversation, as opposed to the conference paper, as its primary catalyst. The hosts set the stage for five provocateurs to instigate unscripted conversations among a broad cross-section of today’s most exciting practitioners, using their recent work as lenses through which to examine specific topics in contemporary architecture. Aiming to tease out new ideas as opposed to harden nascent positions, RIGHT NOW was less interested in taking inventory of the latest projects than in using new work to amplify the volume of contemporary discourse and to swerve ongoing conversations in new directions.

One way to construct an audience is to simply invite some people over and see what happens. The word symposium refers to a dinner party; its etymology can be traced back to the idea of a drinking party following an evening meal. This is the occasion of Plato’s Symposium (only the guests pass on alcohol, given their lack of moderation the previous evening), where various speakers share their thoughts and opinions on the subject of erotic love. Being true to form, the organizers of RIGHT NOW provided their invited guests with a bar stocked with beer and wine throughout the first night of the symposium (the more familiar pairing of coffee and light refreshments reappeared the next morning). For a brief moment, SCI-Arc’s Keck Lecture Hall did it’s best to impersonate a darkly lit lounge bar. The performance leaned heavily on several props: bar, lighting, glass coffee table placed on a white shag carpet and encircled by a ring of black leather Barcelona chairs. Playfully dubbed “the Miesien moshpit” by provocateur Day, the setting moved in the direction of defamiliarizing the familiar and promising the possibility of achieving the organizers intention of using informality as a means of instigating unscripted conversations.

Here, in real-time, audience members witnessed the construction of content through the construction of context. “The act of creating the discourse was actively designed,” remarked provocateur Gow. This deliberate choice to actively design the discourse amplifies McLuhan’s thesis about the importance of mediation, the not taking for granted of the background (or apparatus) that organizes and conditions our thoughts and actions. Take, for example, the outfitting of panelists with clipon microphones (more Charlie Rose than TED Talk), or the location of the camera recording the sessions and the white projector shuffling images of work produced by both panelists and provocateurs. Set some sixty feet in front of the stage, the camera performed as a proxy for the future, a silent witness to the event. And the projector, set directly behind the participants, screened a past too close to recognize, too familiar to really know.

Try as we do to situate ourselves in the present, it remains both problematically and productively illusive.

If recording is a means of transmission that communicates content, it also ascribes relevance: not all presents are equally significant just as not all futures are equally possible. For a transmission to be successful it must first be received. And reception only begins when we recognize that which has been transmitted—an image, a sound, a story—as having been intended for us. This is the challenge issued by RIGHT NOW: to receive the past as an active construction of one’s own historical present. To take positions without reverting to dogmatic declarations is to be responsible to one’s own time, to think and continue to discover

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE Friday, September 25 Welcome Hernan Diaz Alonso Opening Remarks Todd Gannon Session One: Estrangement and Alluring Objects Provocation: David Ruy Panelists: Mark Gage, Elena Manferdini, Jason Payne, Marcelo Spina and Tom Wiscombe Saturday, September 26 Welcome Tom Wiscombe Session Two: International Practice, Publicity, and Iconicity Provocation: John Enright Panelists: Thomas Daniell, Neil Denari, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Jennifer Leung and Peter Testa Session Three: Aberrations, Synthetics and Weird Nature Provocation: Marcelyn Gow Panelists: Theo Spyropoulos, Ferda Kolatan, Lucy McRae, Rhett Russo and Casey Rehm Session Four: Character, Posture, and Legibility Provocation: Dora Epstein Jones Panelists: Florencia Pita, Jimenez Lai, Peter Trummer, Andrew Zago and Anna Neimark Session Five: Lyricism, Lies, and Other Forms of Fiction Provocation: Joe Day Panelists: Ben Bratton, Lydia Kallipoliti, Todd Gannon, Liam Young and Michael Young Closing Comments Hernan Diaz Alonso

1.

Andrew Zago, Zago Architecture The Greening of Detroit Pavilion.

2001 2.

Jason Payne, Hirsuta Variations On The Disco Ball or, The Bee Gees Have Left The Building.

2011 3.

Eva Franch i Gilabert, The Storefront for Art and Architecture Past Futures, Present, Futures.

Curated by Eva Franch. Image by Naho Kubota. Design by by Leong Leong (Dominc Leong and Chris Leong). 2012 4.

Lucy McRae TransNatural Campaign. 2011 5.

Mark Young, Young & Ayata Vessel Collective, Bauhaus Museum Dessau International Competition.

2015 6.

Mark Foster Gage Architects Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. 2014 7.

Theo Spyropoulos, Minimaforms Petting Zoo. 2013 8.

Peter Testa, Testa & Weiser Carbon Tower Prototype. 2002 9.

M. Casey Rehm, Kinch Striated Vistas v1 with Yuna Yagi.

2015 10.

Audience members at the symposium.

11.

Ilaria Mazzoleni and Ramiro Diaz-Granados.

12.

Provocateur Joe Day during his panel discussion.

13.

Hernan Diaz Alonso at the podium.

9

NOW IS THEN: A REVIEW OF SCI-ARC’S RIGHT NOW SYMPOSIUM Jake Matatyaou

JAKE MATATYAOU is an educator, designer, and the principal of JUNE. He teaches design studios and seminars at SCI-Arc.

… “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association.

Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) Whether or not the medium is the message, or if it is merely a supplement that contains its own message, independent of and in excess to the content, McLuhan’s dictum invites us to consider the “psychic and social consequences” of our design decisions: “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” (1964) What, then, were the changes produced by the new (old?) discursive format of SCI-Arc’s 2015 RIGHT NOW Symposium?

This “anti-conference conference” was intended to produce chatter—abbreviated and incomplete impressions about how we talk to each other about our work as much as our work itself.

Participants were told that they would not present anything, but rather have their work presented by one of five provocateurs (David Ruy, John Enright, Dora Epstein Jones, Marcelyn Gow, and Joe Day) whose use and abuse of proprietary images would open up paths for conversation previously unseen or foreclosed by disciplinary dogmas and professional constraints. The goal was not to identify, confirm, validate, or promote a universal truth, but rather to take the temperature of architectural discourse in a historically situated present.

If architecture is a discipline that commonly understands itself as being in a state of crisis, as suggested by SCI-Arc’s director Hernan Diaz Alonso in his opening remarks, a conference or a symposium assumes the responsibility of diagnosing symptoms and offering solutions for that which currently ails the discipline.

A theme is imposed, by committee or by decree, and participants are invited to engage in a kind of talking cure for their self-inflicted intellectual angst. Yet rather than follow the received norms of the conference format, the organizers of RIGHT NOW, Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe, attempted to redefine the rules of discursive engagement, inviting individuals whose work, methods, and interests share certain affinities with those being pursued by the students and faculty of SCI-Arc. Competing with entrenched vocabularies by trying to speak differently is never easy. But changing the way discourse happens is a worthwhile endeavor, especially when it has the potential to create a space for work to develop and mature. This was the task, which was conducted as a small experiment of adopting new voices and assuming new risks.

Over the course of two days, the five provocateurs presented the work of twenty-five panelists across five sessions. Provocateurs were assigned the title, theme, and panelists of their respective sessions. Similar impositions were placed on panelists, who did not know in advance what questions they would be asked or which of their images would be shown. Rather than relay and rely on resolved nuggets of knowledge, panelists and provocateurs exposed themselves to ideas in the making. Doing away with scripted monologues occasioned live discussion, replete with anecdotes, swipes, flirtations, and jabs. Several conversations 3

yielded surprising silence, while others enabled previously unheard voices to emerge.

The first session, led by provocateur Ruy, laid out many of the terms that were contested throughout the following sessions (e.g. abstraction, agency, estrangement, objects, strategies, tactics). Drawing on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” he challenged participants to distinguish between things as they seem and things as they are. This was a productive move, as it forced the panelists to position their work along a spectrum between the real and representation. Also telling was the omission of the traditional question-and-answer session with audience members. Whether intentional or an oversight, this exclusion was one of several referents that revealed the impossibility of relinquishing control.

In other words, it revealed the unavoidable staging within the conference/symposium format.

Though the symposium itself was staged, conversations were unchoreographed, happening real-time in front of a live audience.

It is worth pausing to reflect on the nature of what it means to do something in real-time. What is real-time, right now? What is its opposite? Unreal, fake, simulated time? And would this fictitious time stand in opposition to the now of the present, or would it be complicit in inventing unknown histories and unknowable futures?

What makes real-time—the now of RIGHT NOW—more real than past and future?

Are ontological questions, such as these, important for architecture and for architects? Symposium organizers Gannon and Wiscombe were of two minds: the former was less interested in what something is and more curious about its qualities, while the latter defended the primacy of ontologies—in all of their manifestations—for the discipline and practice of architecture.

Both the making of ontological claims and the description of effects are ways of relating to and understanding the world. Both, in other words, are ways of constructing knowledge. And while there are always conditions, constraints, and limits to any such endeavor, the rules and procedures through which we engage each other over ethical, aesthetic, and political questions—questions of value—can themselves be questioned. As Ruy remarked in the final session, we do not have to accept the world as given; we can push back, and with the help of our imagination, invent and enact new realities.

Yet worlds are not built in a vacuum, nor are they built alone.

They need others to populate and propagate ideas, tastes, and styles, some with and some against (one needs both friends and enemies, or, to soften the Schmittian binary, “colleagues with benefits,” a phrase coined during the fourth session by Epstein Jones). To echo Diaz Alonso’s closing remarks, you cannot define a radical and speculative attitude by yourself. Building constituencies is a practice, and as architects and designers, we are always constructing audiences.

10

RIGHT NOW Organized by SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso, along with faculty members Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe serving as emcees, the RIGHT NOW symposium aimed to take stock of some of the most promising directions in contemporary architecture, using the conversation, as opposed to the conference paper, as its primary catalyst. The hosts set the stage for five provocateurs to instigate unscripted conversations among a broad cross-section of today’s most exciting practitioners, using their recent work as lenses through which to examine specific topics in contemporary architecture. Aiming to tease out new ideas as opposed to harden nascent positions, RIGHT NOW was less interested in taking inventory of the latest projects than in using new work to amplify the volume of contemporary discourse and to swerve ongoing conversations in new directions.

One way to construct an audience is to simply invite some people over and see what happens. The word symposium refers to a dinner party; its etymology can be traced back to the idea of a drinking party following an evening meal. This is the occasion of Plato’s Symposium (only the guests pass on alcohol, given their lack of moderation the previous evening), where various speakers share their thoughts and opinions on the subject of erotic love. Being true to form, the organizers of RIGHT NOW provided their invited guests with a bar stocked with beer and wine throughout the first night of the symposium (the more familiar pairing of coffee and light refreshments reappeared the next morning). For a brief moment, SCI-Arc’s Keck Lecture Hall did it’s best to impersonate a darkly lit lounge bar. The performance leaned heavily on several props: bar, lighting, glass coffee table placed on a white shag carpet and encircled by a ring of black leather Barcelona chairs. Playfully dubbed “the Miesien moshpit” by provocateur Day, the setting moved in the direction of defamiliarizing the familiar and promising the possibility of achieving the organizers intention of using informality as a means of instigating unscripted conversations.

Here, in real-time, audience members witnessed the construction of content through the construction of context. “The act of creating the discourse was actively designed,” remarked provocateur Gow. This deliberate choice to actively design the discourse amplifies McLuhan’s thesis about the importance of mediation, the not taking for granted of the background (or apparatus) that organizes and conditions our thoughts and actions. Take, for example, the outfitting of panelists with clipon microphones (more Charlie Rose than TED Talk), or the location of the camera recording the sessions and the white projector shuffling images of work produced by both panelists and provocateurs. Set some sixty feet in front of the stage, the camera performed as a proxy for the future, a silent witness to the event. And the projector, set directly behind the participants, screened a past too close to recognize, too familiar to really know.

Try as we do to situate ourselves in the present, it remains both problematically and productively illusive.

If recording is a means of transmission that communicates content, it also ascribes relevance: not all presents are equally significant just as not all futures are equally possible. For a transmission to be successful it must first be received. And reception only begins when we recognize that which has been transmitted—an image, a sound, a story—as having been intended for us. This is the challenge issued by RIGHT NOW: to receive the past as an active construction of one’s own historical present. To take positions without reverting to dogmatic declarations is to be responsible to one’s own time, to think and continue to discover 4

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE Friday, September 25 Welcome Hernan Diaz Alonso Opening Remarks Todd Gannon Session One: Estrangement and Alluring Objects Provocation: David Ruy Panelists: Mark Gage, Elena Manferdini, Jason Payne, Marcelo Spina and Tom Wiscombe Saturday, September 26 Welcome Tom Wiscombe Session Two: International Practice, Publicity, and Iconicity Provocation: John Enright Panelists: Thomas Daniell, Neil Denari, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Jennifer Leung and Peter Testa Session Three: Aberrations, Synthetics and Weird Nature Provocation: Marcelyn Gow Panelists: Theo Spyropoulos, Ferda Kolatan, Lucy McRae, Rhett Russo and Casey Rehm Session Four: Character, Posture, and Legibility Provocation: Dora Epstein Jones Panelists: Florencia Pita, Jimenez Lai, Peter Trummer, Andrew Zago and Anna Neimark Session Five: Lyricism, Lies, and Other Forms of Fiction Provocation: Joe Day Panelists: Ben Bratton, Lydia Kallipoliti, Todd Gannon, Liam Young and Michael Young Closing Comments Hernan Diaz Alonso

1.

Andrew Zago, Zago Architecture The Greening of Detroit Pavilion.

2001 2.

Jason Payne, Hirsuta Variations On The Disco Ball or, The Bee Gees Have Left The Building.

2011 3.

Eva Franch i Gilabert, The Storefront for Art and Architecture Past Futures, Present, Futures.

Curated by Eva Franch. Image by Naho Kubota. Design by by Leong Leong (Dominc Leong and Chris Leong). 2012 4.

Lucy McRae TransNatural Campaign. 2011 5.

Mark Young, Young & Ayata Vessel Collective, Bauhaus Museum Dessau International Competition.

2015 6.

Mark Foster Gage Architects Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. 2014 7.

Theo Spyropoulos, Minimaforms Petting Zoo. 2013 8.

Peter Testa, Testa & Weiser Carbon Tower Prototype. 2002 9.

M. Casey Rehm, Kinch Striated Vistas v1 with Yuna Yagi.

2015 10.

Audience members at the symposium.

11.

Ilaria Mazzoleni and Ramiro Diaz-Granados.

12.

Provocateur Joe Day during his panel discussion.

13.

Hernan Diaz Alonso at the podium.

9

NOW IS THEN: A REVIEW OF SCI-ARC’S RIGHT NOW SYMPOSIUM Jake Matatyaou

JAKE MATATYAOU is an educator, designer, and the principal of JUNE. He teaches design studios and seminars at SCI-Arc.

… “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association.

Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) Whether or not the medium is the message, or if it is merely a supplement that contains its own message, independent of and in excess to the content, McLuhan’s dictum invites us to consider the “psychic and social consequences” of our design decisions: “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” (1964) What, then, were the changes produced by the new (old?) discursive format of SCI-Arc’s 2015 RIGHT NOW Symposium?

This “anti-conference conference” was intended to produce chatter—abbreviated and incomplete impressions about how we talk to each other about our work as much as our work itself.

Participants were told that they would not present anything, but rather have their work presented by one of five provocateurs (David Ruy, John Enright, Dora Epstein Jones, Marcelyn Gow, and Joe Day) whose use and abuse of proprietary images would open up paths for conversation previously unseen or foreclosed by disciplinary dogmas and professional constraints. The goal was not to identify, confirm, validate, or promote a universal truth, but rather to take the temperature of architectural discourse in a historically situated present.

If architecture is a discipline that commonly understands itself as being in a state of crisis, as suggested by SCI-Arc’s director Hernan Diaz Alonso in his opening remarks, a conference or a symposium assumes the responsibility of diagnosing symptoms and offering solutions for that which currently ails the discipline.

A theme is imposed, by committee or by decree, and participants are invited to engage in a kind of talking cure for their self-inflicted intellectual angst. Yet rather than follow the received norms of the conference format, the organizers of RIGHT NOW, Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe, attempted to redefine the rules of discursive engagement, inviting individuals whose work, methods, and interests share certain affinities with those being pursued by the students and faculty of SCI-Arc. Competing with entrenched vocabularies by trying to speak differently is never easy. But changing the way discourse happens is a worthwhile endeavor, especially when it has the potential to create a space for work to develop and mature. This was the task, which was conducted as a small experiment of adopting new voices and assuming new risks.

Over the course of two days, the five provocateurs presented the work of twenty-five panelists across five sessions. Provocateurs were assigned the title, theme, and panelists of their respective sessions. Similar impositions were placed on panelists, who did not know in advance what questions they would be asked or which of their images would be shown. Rather than relay and rely on resolved nuggets of knowledge, panelists and provocateurs exposed themselves to ideas in the making. Doing away with scripted monologues occasioned live discussion, replete with anecdotes, swipes, flirtations, and jabs. Several conversations 6

yielded surprising silence, while others enabled previously unheard voices to emerge.

The first session, led by provocateur Ruy, laid out many of the terms that were contested throughout the following sessions (e.g. abstraction, agency, estrangement, objects, strategies, tactics). Drawing on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” he challenged participants to distinguish between things as they seem and things as they are. This was a productive move, as it forced the panelists to position their work along a spectrum between the real and representation. Also telling was the omission of the traditional question-and-answer session with audience members. Whether intentional or an oversight, this exclusion was one of several referents that revealed the impossibility of relinquishing control.

In other words, it revealed the unavoidable staging within the conference/symposium format.

Though the symposium itself was staged, conversations were unchoreographed, happening real-time in front of a live audience.

It is worth pausing to reflect on the nature of what it means to do something in real-time. What is real-time, right now? What is its opposite? Unreal, fake, simulated time? And would this fictitious time stand in opposition to the now of the present, or would it be complicit in inventing unknown histories and unknowable futures?

What makes real-time—the now of RIGHT NOW—more real than past and future?

Are ontological questions, such as these, important for architecture and for architects? Symposium organizers Gannon and Wiscombe were of two minds: the former was less interested in what something is and more curious about its qualities, while the latter defended the primacy of ontologies—in all of their manifestations—for the discipline and practice of architecture.

Both the making of ontological claims and the description of effects are ways of relating to and understanding the world. Both, in other words, are ways of constructing knowledge. And while there are always conditions, constraints, and limits to any such endeavor, the rules and procedures through which we engage each other over ethical, aesthetic, and political questions—questions of value—can themselves be questioned. As Ruy remarked in the final session, we do not have to accept the world as given; we can push back, and with the help of our imagination, invent and enact new realities.

Yet worlds are not built in a vacuum, nor are they built alone.

They need others to populate and propagate ideas, tastes, and styles, some with and some against (one needs both friends and enemies, or, to soften the Schmittian binary, “colleagues with benefits,” a phrase coined during the fourth session by Epstein Jones). To echo Diaz Alonso’s closing remarks, you cannot define a radical and speculative attitude by yourself. Building constituencies is a practice, and as architects and designers, we are always constructing audiences.

10

RIGHT NOW Organized by SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso, along with faculty members Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe serving as emcees, the RIGHT NOW symposium aimed to take stock of some of the most promising directions in contemporary architecture, using the conversation, as opposed to the conference paper, as its primary catalyst. The hosts set the stage for five provocateurs to instigate unscripted conversations among a broad cross-section of today’s most exciting practitioners, using their recent work as lenses through which to examine specific topics in contemporary architecture. Aiming to tease out new ideas as opposed to harden nascent positions, RIGHT NOW was less interested in taking inventory of the latest projects than in using new work to amplify the volume of contemporary discourse and to swerve ongoing conversations in new directions.

One way to construct an audience is to simply invite some people over and see what happens. The word symposium refers to a dinner party; its etymology can be traced back to the idea of a drinking party following an evening meal. This is the occasion of Plato’s Symposium (only the guests pass on alcohol, given their lack of moderation the previous evening), where various speakers share their thoughts and opinions on the subject of erotic love. Being true to form, the organizers of RIGHT NOW provided their invited guests with a bar stocked with beer and wine throughout the first night of the symposium (the more familiar pairing of coffee and light refreshments reappeared the next morning). For a brief moment, SCI-Arc’s Keck Lecture Hall did it’s best to impersonate a darkly lit lounge bar. The performance leaned heavily on several props: bar, lighting, glass coffee table placed on a white shag carpet and encircled by a ring of black leather Barcelona chairs. Playfully dubbed “the Miesien moshpit” by provocateur Day, the setting moved in the direction of defamiliarizing the familiar and promising the possibility of achieving the organizers intention of using informality as a means of instigating unscripted conversations.

Here, in real-time, audience members witnessed the construction of content through the construction of context. “The act of creating the discourse was actively designed,” remarked provocateur Gow. This deliberate choice to actively design the discourse amplifies McLuhan’s thesis about the importance of mediation, the not taking for granted of the background (or apparatus) that organizes and conditions our thoughts and actions. Take, for example, the outfitting of panelists with clipon microphones (more Charlie Rose than TED Talk), or the location of the camera recording the sessions and the white projector shuffling images of work produced by both panelists and provocateurs. Set some sixty feet in front of the stage, the camera performed as a proxy for the future, a silent witness to the event. And the projector, set directly behind the participants, screened a past too close to recognize, too familiar to really know.

Try as we do to situate ourselves in the present, it remains both problematically and productively illusive.

If recording is a means of transmission that communicates content, it also ascribes relevance: not all presents are equally significant just as not all futures are equally possible. For a transmission to be successful it must first be received. And reception only begins when we recognize that which has been transmitted—an image, a sound, a story—as having been intended for us. This is the challenge issued by RIGHT NOW: to receive the past as an active construction of one’s own historical present. To take positions without reverting to dogmatic declarations is to be responsible to one’s own time, to think and continue to discover

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE Friday, September 25 Welcome Hernan Diaz Alonso Opening Remarks Todd Gannon Session One: Estrangement and Alluring Objects Provocation: David Ruy Panelists: Mark Gage, Elena Manferdini, Jason Payne, Marcelo Spina and Tom Wiscombe Saturday, September 26 Welcome Tom Wiscombe Session Two: International Practice, Publicity, and Iconicity Provocation: John Enright Panelists: Thomas Daniell, Neil Denari, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Jennifer Leung and Peter Testa Session Three: Aberrations, Synthetics and Weird Nature Provocation: Marcelyn Gow Panelists: Theo Spyropoulos, Ferda Kolatan, Lucy McRae, Rhett Russo and Casey Rehm Session Four: Character, Posture, and Legibility Provocation: Dora Epstein Jones Panelists: Florencia Pita, Jimenez Lai, Peter Trummer, Andrew Zago and Anna Neimark Session Five: Lyricism, Lies, and Other Forms of Fiction Provocation: Joe Day Panelists: Ben Bratton, Lydia Kallipoliti, Todd Gannon, Liam Young and Michael Young Closing Comments Hernan Diaz Alonso

1.

Andrew Zago, Zago Architecture The Greening of Detroit Pavilion.

2001 2.

Jason Payne, Hirsuta Variations On The Disco Ball or, The Bee Gees Have Left The Building.

2011 3.

Eva Franch i Gilabert, The Storefront for Art and Architecture Past Futures, Present, Futures.

Curated by Eva Franch. Image by Naho Kubota. Design by by Leong Leong (Dominc Leong and Chris Leong). 2012 4.

Lucy McRae TransNatural Campaign. 2011 5.

Mark Young, Young & Ayata Vessel Collective, Bauhaus Museum Dessau International Competition.

2015 6.

Mark Foster Gage Architects Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. 2014 7.

Theo Spyropoulos, Minimaforms Petting Zoo. 2013 8.

Peter Testa, Testa & Weiser Carbon Tower Prototype. 2002 9.

M. Casey Rehm, Kinch Striated Vistas v1 with Yuna Yagi.

2015 10.

Audience members at the symposium.

11.

Ilaria Mazzoleni and Ramiro Diaz-Granados.

12.

Provocateur Joe Day during his panel discussion.

13.

Hernan Diaz Alonso at the podium.

9

NOW IS THEN: A REVIEW OF SCI-ARC’S RIGHT NOW SYMPOSIUM Jake Matatyaou

JAKE MATATYAOU is an educator, designer, and the principal of JUNE. He teaches design studios and seminars at SCI-Arc.

… “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association.

Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) Whether or not the medium is the message, or if it is merely a supplement that contains its own message, independent of and in excess to the content, McLuhan’s dictum invites us to consider the “psychic and social consequences” of our design decisions: “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” (1964) What, then, were the changes produced by the new (old?) discursive format of SCI-Arc’s 2015 RIGHT NOW Symposium?

This “anti-conference conference” was intended to produce chatter—abbreviated and incomplete impressions about how we talk to each other about our work as much as our work itself.

Participants were told that they would not present anything, but rather have their work presented by one of five provocateurs (David Ruy, John Enright, Dora Epstein Jones, Marcelyn Gow, and Joe Day) whose use and abuse of proprietary images would open up paths for conversation previously unseen or foreclosed by disciplinary dogmas and professional constraints. The goal was not to identify, confirm, validate, or promote a universal truth, but rather to take the temperature of architectural discourse in a historically situated present.

If architecture is a discipline that commonly understands itself as being in a state of crisis, as suggested by SCI-Arc’s director Hernan Diaz Alonso in his opening remarks, a conference or a symposium assumes the responsibility of diagnosing symptoms and offering solutions for that which currently ails the discipline.

A theme is imposed, by committee or by decree, and participants are invited to engage in a kind of talking cure for their self-inflicted intellectual angst. Yet rather than follow the received norms of the conference format, the organizers of RIGHT NOW, Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe, attempted to redefine the rules of discursive engagement, inviting individuals whose work, methods, and interests share certain affinities with those being pursued by the students and faculty of SCI-Arc. Competing with entrenched vocabularies by trying to speak differently is never easy. But changing the way discourse happens is a worthwhile endeavor, especially when it has the potential to create a space for work to develop and mature. This was the task, which was conducted as a small experiment of adopting new voices and assuming new risks.

Over the course of two days, the five provocateurs presented the work of twenty-five panelists across five sessions. Provocateurs were assigned the title, theme, and panelists of their respective sessions. Similar impositions were placed on panelists, who did not know in advance what questions they would be asked or which of their images would be shown. Rather than relay and rely on resolved nuggets of knowledge, panelists and provocateurs exposed themselves to ideas in the making. Doing away with scripted monologues occasioned live discussion, replete with anecdotes, swipes, flirtations, and jabs. Several conversations 8

yielded surprising silence, while others enabled previously unheard voices to emerge.

The first session, led by provocateur Ruy, laid out many of the terms that were contested throughout the following sessions (e.g. abstraction, agency, estrangement, objects, strategies, tactics). Drawing on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” he challenged participants to distinguish between things as they seem and things as they are. This was a productive move, as it forced the panelists to position their work along a spectrum between the real and representation. Also telling was the omission of the traditional question-and-answer session with audience members. Whether intentional or an oversight, this exclusion was one of several referents that revealed the impossibility of relinquishing control.

In other words, it revealed the unavoidable staging within the conference/symposium format.

Though the symposium itself was staged, conversations were unchoreographed, happening real-time in front of a live audience.

It is worth pausing to reflect on the nature of what it means to do something in real-time. What is real-time, right now? What is its opposite? Unreal, fake, simulated time? And would this fictitious time stand in opposition to the now of the present, or would it be complicit in inventing unknown histories and unknowable futures?

What makes real-time—the now of RIGHT NOW—more real than past and future?

Are ontological questions, such as these, important for architecture and for architects? Symposium organizers Gannon and Wiscombe were of two minds: the former was less interested in what something is and more curious about its qualities, while the latter defended the primacy of ontologies—in all of their manifestations—for the discipline and practice of architecture.

Both the making of ontological claims and the description of effects are ways of relating to and understanding the world. Both, in other words, are ways of constructing knowledge. And while there are always conditions, constraints, and limits to any such endeavor, the rules and procedures through which we engage each other over ethical, aesthetic, and political questions—questions of value—can themselves be questioned. As Ruy remarked in the final session, we do not have to accept the world as given; we can push back, and with the help of our imagination, invent and enact new realities.

Yet worlds are not built in a vacuum, nor are they built alone.

They need others to populate and propagate ideas, tastes, and styles, some with and some against (one needs both friends and enemies, or, to soften the Schmittian binary, “colleagues with benefits,” a phrase coined during the fourth session by Epstein Jones). To echo Diaz Alonso’s closing remarks, you cannot define a radical and speculative attitude by yourself. Building constituencies is a practice, and as architects and designers, we are always constructing audiences.

10

RIGHT NOW Organized by SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso, along with faculty members Todd Gannon and Tom Wiscombe serving as emcees, the RIGHT NOW symposium aimed to take stock of some of the most promising directions in contemporary architecture, using the conversation, as opposed to the conference paper, as its primary catalyst. The hosts set the stage for five provocateurs to instigate unscripted conversations among a broad cross-section of today’s most exciting practitioners, using their recent work as lenses through which to examine specific topics in contemporary architecture. Aiming to tease out new ideas as opposed to harden nascent positions, RIGHT NOW was less interested in taking inventory of the latest projects than in using new work to amplify the volume of contemporary discourse and to swerve ongoing conversations in new directions.

One way to construct an audience is to simply invite some people over and see what happens. The word symposium refers to a dinner party; its etymology can be traced back to the idea of a drinking party following an evening meal. This is the occasion of Plato’s Symposium (only the guests pass on alcohol, given their lack of moderation the previous evening), where various speakers share their thoughts and opinions on the subject of erotic love. Being true to form, the organizers of RIGHT NOW provided their invited guests with a bar stocked with beer and wine throughout the first night of the symposium (the more familiar pairing of coffee and light refreshments reappeared the next morning). For a brief moment, SCI-Arc’s Keck Lecture Hall did it’s best to impersonate a darkly lit lounge bar. The performance leaned heavily on several props: bar, lighting, glass coffee table placed on a white shag carpet and encircled by a ring of black leather Barcelona chairs. Playfully dubbed “the Miesien moshpit” by provocateur Day, the setting moved in the direction of defamiliarizing the familiar and promising the possibility of achieving the organizers intention of using informality as a means of instigating unscripted conversations.

Here, in real-time, audience members witnessed the construction of content through the construction of context. “The act of creating the discourse was actively designed,” remarked provocateur Gow. This deliberate choice to actively design the discourse amplifies McLuhan’s thesis about the importance of mediation, the not taking for granted of the background (or apparatus) that organizes and conditions our thoughts and actions. Take, for example, the outfitting of panelists with clipon microphones (more Charlie Rose than TED Talk), or the location of the camera recording the sessions and the white projector shuffling images of work produced by both panelists and provocateurs. Set some sixty feet in front of the stage, the camera performed as a proxy for the future, a silent witness to the event. And the projector, set directly behind the participants, screened a past too close to recognize, too familiar to really know.

Try as we do to situate ourselves in the present, it remains both problematically and productively illusive.

If recording is a means of transmission that communicates content, it also ascribes relevance: not all presents are equally significant just as not all futures are equally possible. For a transmission to be successful it must first be received. And reception only begins when we recognize that which has been transmitted—an image, a sound, a story—as having been intended for us. This is the challenge issued by RIGHT NOW: to receive the past as an active construction of one’s own historical present. To take positions without reverting to dogmatic declarations is to be responsible to one’s own time, to think and continue to discover 9

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE Friday, September 25 Welcome Hernan Diaz Alonso Opening Remarks Todd Gannon Session One: Estrangement and Alluring Objects Provocation: David Ruy Panelists: Mark Gage, Elena Manferdini, Jason Payne, Marcelo Spina and Tom Wiscombe Saturday, September 26 Welcome Tom Wiscombe Session Two: International Practice, Publicity, and Iconicity Provocation: John Enright Panelists: Thomas Daniell, Neil Denari, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Jennifer Leung and Peter Testa Session Three: Aberrations, Synthetics and Weird Nature Provocation: Marcelyn Gow Panelists: Theo Spyropoulos, Ferda Kolatan, Lucy McRae, Rhett Russo and Casey Rehm Session Four: Character, Posture, and Legibility Provocation: Dora Epstein Jones Panelists: Florencia Pita, Jimenez Lai, Peter Trummer, Andrew Zago and Anna Neimark Session Five: Lyricism, Lies, and Other Forms of Fiction Provocation: Joe Day Panelists: Ben Bratton, Lydia Kallipoliti, Todd Gannon, Liam Young and Michael Young Closing Comments Hernan Diaz Alonso

1.

Andrew Zago, Zago Architecture The Greening of Detroit Pavilion.

2001 2.

Jason Payne, Hirsuta Variations On The Disco Ball or, The Bee Gees Have Left The Building.

2011 3.

Eva Franch i Gilabert, The Storefront for Art and Architecture Past Futures, Present, Futures.

Curated by Eva Franch. Image by Naho Kubota. Design by by Leong Leong (Dominc Leong and Chris Leong). 2012 4.

Lucy McRae TransNatural Campaign. 2011 5.

Mark Young, Young & Ayata Vessel Collective, Bauhaus Museum Dessau International Competition.

2015 6.

Mark Foster Gage Architects Guggenheim Helsinki Design Competition. 2014 7.

Theo Spyropoulos, Minimaforms Petting Zoo. 2013 8.

Peter Testa, Testa & Weiser Carbon Tower Prototype. 2002 9.

M. Casey Rehm, Kinch Striated Vistas v1 with Yuna Yagi.

2015 10.

Audience members at the symposium.

11.

Ilaria Mazzoleni and Ramiro Diaz-Granados.

12.

Provocateur Joe Day during his panel discussion.

13.

Hernan Diaz Alonso at the podium.

11

DAVID RUY is an architect, theorist and educator with an extensive background in academia. Currently, he is an associate professor at Pratt Institute, where he coordinates the institute’s urban design program. Ruy has previously been on the faculties of Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in the United States and Europe. In parallel to his academic appointments, Ruy is co-director of Ruy Klein with Karel Klein in New York City. His practice examines contemporary problems at the intersection of architecture, nature, and technology. The work of Ruy Klein has been widely published and exhibited and has been the recipient of numerous awards including the 2011 Emerging Voices Award of the Architectural League.

SCI-ARC EDGE, CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IN ARCHITECTURE

In November, SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso announced the launch of SCI-Arc EDGE, Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture. Beginning in fall 2016, the new center is intended to serve as a platform for multiple postgraduate programs—with programs intended to crossbreed and inform each other and provide a space where new conversations can take place. Diaz Alonso and advisor to the center, architect and educator David Ruy, sat down to talk about SCI-Arc EDGE, the philosophy behind it, and the fields of study it will offer.

WHAT IS SCI-ARC EDGE, CENTER FOR ADVANCED STUDIES IN ARCHITECTURE, AND WHAT DOES IT BRING TO SCI-ARC?

Hernan: It is part of an effort to keep SCI-Arc moving forward.

We’ve decided to expand our postgraduate programs and develop it into a completely new part of the school dedicated to advanced studies. This isn’t going to be just another department at the school. The programs will still finish with a master’s degree, but more important than the degree itself is our commitment to an entirely new model for advanced studies in architecture. We wanted to design a new platform for speculation where a completely new kind of conversation can take place. Within the context of a new center at SCI-Arc, we hope the postgraduate programs will influence each other and set in motion the next round of architectural innovation. One of the beautiful things about SCI-Arc, because we are solely a school of architecture and not a university, is that we have a high level of flexibility and can be very nimble. It was important for us to take advantage of what is unique about SCI-Arc. We’re not burdened by academic conventions. When we see where we need to go, we go there quickly.

David: It is called SCI-Arc EDGE because the most advanced studies in any field pushes on the boundaries of what is known. I think what we consider to be core knowledge is always defined by experiments at the edge of what is known. Everything that we now consider to be canonical, or simply normal, was at one time a crazy idea. The name should indicate that this is not your typical academic program. I’ve always found elite R&D organizations fascinating. Organizations like ARPA, Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, Xerox PARC, and Google X are closer to the intentions and ambitions of SCI-Arc EDGE. ARPA in the ’60s developed a crazy idea that most experts thought was impossible or just plain weird. That idea is what we today call ‘the Internet.’

Hernan: Within the structure of the school, the idea is to build a long-term sustainable platform for how new ideas can continue to evolve and adapt. I’d like to see it become a rapid response laboratory for architecture that is permanently under construction.

WHAT ARE THE PROGRAMS OF STUDY IN SCI-ARC EDGE?

Hernan: SCI-Arc EDGE is launching with four program of study.

The first is a Master of Science in Architectural Technologies, which will be led by Marcelo Spina. It’s going to be driven by a consideration of technology’s relationship to architecture. It’s going to be both conceptual and technical. It will involve hands on experience with cutting edge technologies, but also cutting edge speculation about the meaning and aesthetics of technology in contemporary architectural production. Today, we may be interested in robotic fabrication and computational methodologies.

But in later years, it might be machine vision and synthetic biology. Technologies change, but the problem of technology remains the same. There’s going to be a commitment to new applications, but it’s not about accepting technologies as given, but to speculate

about the ways in which even known technologies can be used to produce new architectural effects.

The second program is a Master of Arts in Fiction and Entertainment, and will be led by Liam Young. As we all know, the world has become a very strange place, and I think much of this strangeness comes from the absolutely explosive growth of media in the past twenty years. New media such as YouTube, Netflix, iTunes, and Xbox have joined older media such as cinema and television to produce an endless multiplication of fictions and entertainments that now constitute cultural production. The production and consumption of fiction and entertainment has become an undeniable influence on contemporary life, and I think architecture has been slow to acknowledge this even though it’s something that should have our attention. This program is going to expand the horizon of what the architect’s job might be in the coming years and study in great detail exactly how culture is being manufactured today. Why shouldn’t an architect design the next Hollywood blockbuster or must-own video game? Or design the next social media campaign? Or the next Presidential debate? Without a doubt, this program is going to interface with LA’s long standing media industries like cinema, television, video games, post-production, advertising and marketing etc. So this program is a natural fit for SCI-Arc and Los Angeles in general.

The third program is a Master of Science in the Design of Cities, led by Peter Trummer. As has been much observed and documented in recent years, the majority of the world’s population now lives in cities. The tipping point was approximately 10 years ago. This trend is only going to accelerate. How are we to understand the design of cities when urbanization is now a planetary phenomenon? To engage the full depth and drama of urban phenomenon today, things like asset urbanism, big data, smart cities, extra-territorial space, and new legal definitions of property are all going to have to be studied. I think the problem with most urban design programs today is that they get lost in the complexities of market forces, governmental policies, and ecological anxieties and never actually get around to designing anything. I think what is completely underestimated is the power of the architectural imagination and how it might influence all of these complex forces of urbanization. I think this will be a very important new kind of urban design program that is going to allow architects to reengage the ambition to design cities.

The fourth program is a Master of Science in Theory and Pedagogy, which will be led by David Ruy. I think in the academic world today, something is missing. There are degree programs that train practicing professionals, and then there are more advanced PhD programs that train scholars. What’s missing is a program where the next generation of studio instructors will be trained. Something that has been evolving throughout the second half of the twentieth century is a kind of architect-theorist-educator hybrid and the design studio is where you generally find them. I think David is the perfect example of this new kind of hybrid. This is a unique academic animal that doesn’t hide in the ivory tower, but is always swimming in the oceans of contemporary culture. I think the reasons for why this happened are actually quite complex, but it’s amazing to me that it hasn’t really been recognized as a specific type of career as of yet. This program is intended to train architects specifically for this unique architectural role and give them an opportunity to understand and break into the academic culture. I think this program is quite innovative in this respect and offers something that you won’t find anywhere else.

In addition to these four program tracks, there is a fellowship being offered in Synthetic Landscapes, with Marcelyn Gow and Margaret Griffin as advisers, which will eventually lead to a fifth program at SCI-Arc EDGE. This fellowship is intended to explore

12

the design and theory of what might be the problems of the 21st century landscape. Future landscapes I think will be defined by strange interactions between machinic and natural organizations.

Los Angeles, in some sense, has always been a synthetic landscape, and given contemporary pressures with regard to water or energy management, and how the city is going to grow and densify, LA itself is going to be an incredible laboratory for what a post-sustainable landscape architecture agenda might be.

I should point out that two of these programs are building on the successes of previous postgraduate programs. The ESTm and SCIFI programs were already dealing with technology and urban design. So these have been absorbed into the platform of SCI-Arc EDGE. It’s important that there’s a continuity of certain things that were already set in motion in previous years. There is always an interesting balance in each program at the school we need to strike—how do you create conditions for individuals to develop their intuition and imagination while acquiring a mature awareness that any form of architectural thinking is a collective construction?

The idea of creating a new center for advanced studies at SCI-Arc is to make a place where many different problems and ambitions can influence and contaminate each other. Most schools are curated and the experience of the student can be overly scripted and predetermined—like a garden. Gardens can be nice and pleasant to be in but the experience is predictable. In contrast, I would like to see SCI-Arc EDGE become more like a jungle. You may define a set of conditions or interests, but then you should be willing to accept that there’s a certain level of unpredictability in moving forward.

I’m much more interested in that idea, which I would not apply to each corner of the curriculum in a school like SCI-Arc, but certainly for SCI-Arc EDGE, the principle of a jungle seems necessary when the goal is radical innovation.

SO HOW ARE PEOPLE WHO’VE COMPLETED THESE PROGRAMS MORE COMPETITIVE IN THE DESIGN FIELD?

Hernan: I think it’s becoming more and more difficult for traditional programs of architecture to predict what’s going to be relevant and productive in the world tomorrow. Coming through a platform like this can do two things. First, it will provide you with an ethic of being radically engaged in the ever-changing conditions of the now. Second, it will provide you with a conceptual apparatus for making course corrections as situations change in the future. SCI-Arc EDGE is itself being designed according to these principles. The platform is being set up in such a way where the programs will be able to adapt and evolve with the times, and thereby constantly remain relevant and keep the pulse of our contemporary forms of production. In addition to obtaining jobs at the cutting edge, I think SCI-Arc EDGE will also have a role to play in generating jobs that don’t even exist yet. The idea is to start producing graduates that can operate in a much larger field and really expand the idea of architecture as a whole. The slogan that we’ve been pushing the most is SCI-Arc equals architecture, architecture does not equal buildings. Hopefully we create graduates that are better prepared for the workforce, and who can also work in territories where historically graduates from a school of architecture would not go. There is a pragmatism here that I think is important for an institution like SCI-Arc; to produce people who become leaders in many fields, and not just in the production of building, or drawings, like in the traditional domain. The idea is to really expand the possibilities of job offers for an architect.

Somebody who has “an architectural education” can be almost like a public intellect, or a commercial intellect, or whatever we want to call it. And I think this is going to be necessary not only for SCI-Arc, but for architecture at large.

David: In traditional research universities around the world, this is a problem that’s been recognized by presidents, provosts, and deans. There is a general recognition that the jobs of the future, or even the very near future, will be different from the jobs we have today. And the challenge is how to anticipate not only new jobs but new bodies of knowledge as well. ‘Interdisciplinary’ has been a cliché word at the university in recent history. The need to formulate crossovers has been recognized. However, they all tend to fail because there’s an attempt to script it from top down. The only cases where some success has been seen are in far messier situations where people from different places of expertise just started talking to each other in a ‘jungle-like’ environment (to use Hernan’s metaphor). For example, when biologists and engineers first started talking to each other in a more casual, unscripted way, it led to biomechanical engineering, which is now an entirely new department at the university and a new kind of job. A place like SCI-Arc is incredibly well equipped to be agile and promiscuous in this way, and I think SCI-Arc EDGE can be a completely new kind of platform for these unscripted conversations and collaborations that are so necessary right now.

DO YOU HAVE ANY WORDS OF ADVICE FOR PROGRAM APPLICANTS?

Hernan: My desire is that these programs become full of people that are passionate, committed, and a bit fanatical. They should believe that architecture can still be an agent of transformation and change. My advice to applicants is to be fearless. Don’t be so worried about the end game and be open to exploring new territory. Do not come here with the idea that we’re going to give you a simple formula or recipe for success. When you come to SCI-Arc EDGE, you will be immersed in the purest state of speculation and will work within the most advantageous conditions possible.

You will walk away enlightened and empowered.

David: I think it would be good to arrive with a strong desire to be at the very edge of what we know, and be interested not in a distant far away future but in the immediate future. I think the ‘now’ is fundamentally an elusive thing, and I think it’s a mistake to fall into some trend forecasting mentality. Instead, you shouldn’t underestimate your role in producing the now. Instead of waiting for the world to tell you where it wants to go, you should feel the obligation to participate in the designing of that destiny. I love the William Gibson quote, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” I think SCI-Arc EDGE will be at the front of that line of distribution.

13

SCI-ARC ALUMNI COUNCIL 2015-2016 Bryan Flaig (M.Arch ’05) Beth Gibb (M.Arch ’89) Luis Herrera (B.Arch ’96) Beth Holden (B.Arch ’98) Zachery Main (B.Arch ’13) Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01) Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ’04) Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76) Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09) Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90) Dana Swinsky (M.Arch ’89) Vlado Valkof (M.DesR ’04) Naia Waters (’98) Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02) John Winston (M.Arch ’04) Michael Young (M.Arch ’10)

MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI COUNCIL

Meanwhile, during the last four decades a rather naughty institution has grown up in—you guessed it—the City of Dreams. Unashamedly wanting to be the AA of the West, it has actually become something else: a continually creative powerhouse. SCI-Arc has the distinction that every one of its five directors is an exceptionally talented and recognised designer. Founder Ray Kappe (he of the quintessential Californian escape houses, with broad overhangs and lush horizontals) was succeeded by Michael Rotondi (co-founder of Morphosis). The institute was then passed on to Neil Denari (most talented of the Machine Architects), before being placed in the hands of Eric Owen Moss (exotic re-creator of Culver City) and has now been delivered to Hernan Diaz Alonso (juiciest and most ebullient of digital creatives). It’s heady stuff—and worth noting that (so far) it operates alongside teaching staff that are always conspicuous for doing their own things far from the mannerisms of the leader. Where else is the car park consistently crowded at midnight?

Somehow, the place has always reflected the city’s creativity in manipulating images, stories, sounds and now software.

Peter Cook, “In the end it’s about the people. Not the buildings or curriculum.”

The Architectural Review. October 5, 2015.

Dear Alumni, I ask each of you to stop by the school either online or in person to experience the creative energy that defines SCI-Arc. It doesn’t matter what decade or what building you studied in—the common thread that unites us across the forty-three years is the intensity of the experience. As the Alumni Council works to strengthen the SCI-Arc community we agree with Peter Cook’s quote “it’s about the people.”

The Council’s goal this year is not only to reconnect us to each other, but also for all alumni to become ambassadors for the school. I ask each of you to tell the SCI-Arc story to someone not in the architectural community. We want to spread the idea of SCI-Arc beyond the design community. Where else but SCI-Arc would the finale of new “asphalt opera” HOPSCOTCH—a mobile opera for 24 cars–take place?

We ask alumni to explore ways to embed SCI-Arc into our culture, definitely in Los Angeles, but also beyond.

This year we are continuing the very successful Soirees@7 (re-living Fridays at 5).

Our first event was a special evening showing for Alumni at the A+D Museum on November 5, honoring Jennifer Marmon’s (M.Arch ’01) work in the exhibit Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles. We encourage those of you in other cities to consider hosting your own Soirées@7 to get local alumni together.

Please join us and our new director, Hernan Diaz Alonso, as SCI-Arc enters a new era in an always vibrant Los Angeles.

Sincerely,

Beth Gibb (M.Arch ’89) Chair, Alumni Council 2014-15

14

NEWS

SCI-ARC RECONNECTS WITH ALUMNI IN ASIA This summer, SCI-Arc’s Chief of Strategic Advancement Hsinming Fung met with alumni in Beijing, Singapore and Shanghai. Shanghai-based alumni Steven Ma (M.Arch ’10) and Bin Liu (M.Arch ’10) hosted a successful cocktail party well attended by over 40 SCI-Arc alumni and friends. Ma has recently taken lead in establishing a program for SCI-Arc and Chinese students in Shanghai. Dovetailing with this new responsibility, Ma will also become the first of several soon-to-be appointed Alumni Ambassadors for SCI-Arc. This fall SCI-Arc has begun to actively recruit for this position as it begins to engage alumni through a more formalized alumni chapter program. Alumni Ambassadors will serve as point persons in their respective regions for alumni, prospective students, and those interested in connecting with the SCI-Arc community. If you are interested becoming an Alumni Ambassador or wish to commit to establishing a SCI-Arc Alumni Chapter in your area please email the Office of Strategic Advancement & International/Special Programs at advancement@sciarc.edu to be included in future announcements.

1

P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S Oblicuo

FACULTY, ALUMNI SELECTED TO EXHIBIT IN CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE BIENNIAL 3

4

SCI-ARC SHANGHAI PROGRAM As part of new Director Hernan Diaz Alonso’s directive for the global expansion of SCI-Arc, beginning Summer 2016, SCI-Arc Shanghai is the first in a series of international workshops, preparatory programs, conferences and symposia intended to expand SCI-Arc’s outstanding reputation for architectural education and speculative learning to a broader audience. Hsinming Fung, Chief of Strategic Advancement and International/Special Programs, describes the importance of this new platform: “Today, the world is more closely knit than ever, and the field of architecture is an international discussion. I’m excited about SCI-Arc’s global initiative because we are a school that is committed to the future of our field. It makes sense to expand our presence, and it’s wonderful that Shanghai will be our first.”

Distinguished graduate Steven Ma (M.Arch ’10) principal and founder of China’s first 3D printing firm, Xuberance, will lead the four-week full-time program. SCI-Arc Shanghai will offer a creative and intensive fabrication and design experience for all students interested in pursuing a career in architecture. It is intended to jumpstart a graduate education at SCI-Arc, and may offer entrance scholarships to individuals noted for top performance marks in the program. The courses will offer the latest design process of additive manufacturing and robotics. Studios will combine complex digital sculpting /modeling, industrial design engineering and 3D printing.

Reciprocal programs are also being coordinated in Mexico, South America and Europe, as key sites for pedagogy, scholarship and advanced architectural discourse and exchange. For more information on SCI-Arc Shanghai, as well as upcoming international workshops and opportunities, please consult our website at www.sciarc.edu.

The inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, North America’s largest survey of contemporary architecture, opened to the public in early October with an ambitious collection of gallery installations, performances, talks and tours scattered across the city. The event features an impressive list of international studios selected by co-artistic directors Joseph Grima and Sarah Herda.

SCI-Arc participants include design faculty Marcelo Spina of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, whose project “Oblicuo” was designed in collaboration with design faculty Casey Rehm, and computational design faculty Satoru Sugihara of ATLV, whose biennial project was proposed in collaboration with SCI-Arc alumna Erin Besler (M.Arch ’12) of Belser + Sons.

The inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial takes its title, The State of the Art of Architecture, from a 1977 conference organized by architect Stanley Tigerman, which invited leading American designers to Chicago to discuss the current state of the field. The Biennial’s goal was to expand the spirit and scope of this event by inviting both emerging and established practices from across the world to Chicago to demonstrate how groundbreaking advances in architectural design are tackling the most pressing issues of today.

With an incredible breadth of design approaches, research interests, and cultural perspectives, the Biennial offers a global stage for debate and the exchange of ideas, while at the same time enriching Chicago’s unique role in history as a crucible of architectural innovation.

On May 14, alumni and faculty gathered for a SCI-Arc reception hosted during the AIA Convention in Atlanta to celebrate with SCI-Arc faculty member Margaret Griffin, FAIA, who was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows, and Barbara Bestor, AIA (M.Arch ’92), the recipient of a 2015 Institute Honor Award for Interior Architecture.

1.

Joshua Coggeshall (M.Arch ’97), Margaret Griffin, SCI-Arc Trustee Nick Seierup (M.Arch ’79) 2.

Peter Arnold (M.Arch ’94), Barbara Bestor (M.Arch ’92) Christine (Lawson) Nocar (M.Arch ’92) On November 5, alumni and friends met at A+D Museum to celebrate the work of alumna Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01), Founding Partner of Platform for Architecture + Research (PAR). Jennifer’s office had a project featured in Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles. PAR, along with collaborating engineers BuroHappold, presented their project.

3/5.

Alumni and guests.

4.

Alumni Harrison Timothy Higgins (M.Arch ’94) and Mok Wai Wan (B.Arch ’93) pictured centered with guests Arthur Martinez and Oleg Korchinski.

6.

Curators Danielle Rago and Sam Lubell, A+D Museum Board President John R. Dale, FAIA, SCI-Arc Alumni Rep Dan Weinreber, Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01) and Courtney Crosson from BuroHappold.

On May 7, SCI-Arc held an event for alumni and friends at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York.

7.

Alumni and guests.

8.

Yu Liu (M.Arch ’14), center, with other guests.

9.

Graciela Hodgson (M.Arch ’07), center, with other guests.

On July 24, Shanghai-based alumni Steven Ma (M.Arch ’10) and Bin Liu (M.Arch ’10) hosted a SCI-Arc alumni and friends cocktail party.

10.

Alumni and current students with Hsinming Fung in center (L to R): Santino Medina (M.Arch ‘06), Lyla Wu (M.Arch ’09), Elena Larionova, Steven Ma (M.Arch ’08), Christopher Nolop, Leirah Wang, Kenji Hattori, Meghan Hui, and Tatiana Sarkisian, among others.

5

6

13

MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI COUNCIL

Meanwhile, during the last four decades a rather naughty institution has grown up in—you guessed it—the City of Dreams. Unashamedly wanting to be the AA of the West, it has actually become something else: a continually creative powerhouse. SCI-Arc has the distinction that every one of its five directors is an exceptionally talented and recognised designer. Founder Ray Kappe (he of the quintessential Californian escape houses, with broad overhangs and lush horizontals) was succeeded by Michael Rotondi (co-founder of Morphosis). The institute was then passed on to Neil Denari (most talented of the Machine Architects), before being placed in the hands of Eric Owen Moss (exotic re-creator of Culver City) and has now been delivered to Hernan Diaz Alonso (juiciest and most ebullient of digital creatives). It’s heady stuff—and worth noting that (so far) it operates alongside teaching staff that are always conspicuous for doing their own things far from the mannerisms of the leader. Where else is the car park consistently crowded at midnight?

Somehow, the place has always reflected the city’s creativity in manipulating images, stories, sounds and now software.

SCI-ARC ALUMNI COUNCIL 2015-2016 Bryan Flaig (M.Arch ’05) Beth Gibb (M.Arch ’89) Luis Herrera (B.Arch ’96) Beth Holden (B.Arch ’98) Zachery Main (B.Arch ’13) Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01) Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ’04) Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76) Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09) Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90) Dana Swinsky (M.Arch ’89) Vlado Valkof (M.DesR ’04) Naia Waters (’98) Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02) John Winston (M.Arch ’04) Michael Young (M.Arch ’10)

7

Peter Cook, “In the end it’s about the people. Not the buildings or curriculum.”

The Architectural Review. October 5, 2015.

Dear Alumni, I ask each of you to stop by the school either online or in person to experience the creative energy that defines SCI-Arc. It doesn’t matter what decade or what building you studied in—the common thread that unites us across the forty-three years is the intensity of the experience. As the Alumni Council works to strengthen the SCI-Arc community we agree with Peter Cook’s quote “it’s about the people.”

The Council’s goal this year is not only to reconnect us to each other, but also for all alumni to become ambassadors for the school. I ask each of you to tell the SCI-Arc 8 to someone not in the architectural community. We want to9 spread the idea story of SCI-Arc beyond the design community. Where else but SCI-Arc would the finale of new “asphalt opera” HOPSCOTCH—a mobile opera for 24 cars–take place?

We ask alumni to explore ways to embed SCI-Arc into our culture, definitely in Los Angeles, but also beyond.

This year we are continuing the very successful Soirees@7 (re-living Fridays at 5).

Our first event was a special evening showing for Alumni at the A+D Museum on November 5, honoring Jennifer Marmon’s (M.Arch ’01) work in the exhibit Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles. We encourage those of you in other cities to consider hosting your own Soirées@7 to get local alumni together.

Please join us and our new director, Hernan Diaz Alonso, as SCI-Arc enters a new era in an always vibrant Los Angeles.

Sincerely,

Beth Gibb (M.Arch ’89) Chair, Alumni Council 2014-15

10

14

NEWS

SCI-ARC RECONNECTS WITH ALUMNI IN ASIA

P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S Oblicuo

FACULTY, ALUMNI SELECTED TO EXHIBIT IN CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE BIENNIAL The inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, North America’s largest survey of contemporary architecture, opened to the public in early October with an ambitious collection of gallery installations, performances, talks and tours scattered across the city. The event features an impressive list of international studios selected by co-artistic directors Joseph Grima and Sarah Herda.

SCI-Arc participants include design faculty Marcelo Spina of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, whose project “Oblicuo” was designed in collaboration with design faculty Casey Rehm, and computational design faculty Satoru Sugihara of ATLV, whose biennial project was proposed in collaboration with SCI-Arc alumna Erin Besler (M.Arch ’12) of Belser + Sons.

The inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial takes its title, The State of the Art of Architecture, from a 1977 conference organized by architect Stanley Tigerman, which invited leading American designers to Chicago to discuss the current state of the field. The Biennial’s goal was to expand the spirit and scope of this event by inviting both emerging and established practices from across the world to Chicago to demonstrate how groundbreaking advances in architectural design are tackling the most pressing issues of today.

With an incredible breadth of design approaches, research interests, and cultural perspectives, the Biennial offers a global stage for debate and the exchange of ideas, while at the same time enriching Chicago’s unique role in history as a crucible of architectural innovation.

This summer, SCI-Arc’s Chief of Strategic Advancement Hsinming Fung met with alumni in Beijing, Singapore and Shanghai. Shanghai-based alumni Steven Ma (M.Arch ’10) and Bin Liu (M.Arch ’10) hosted a successful cocktail party well attended by over 40 SCI-Arc alumni and friends. Ma has recently taken lead in establishing a program for SCI-Arc and Chinese students in Shanghai. Dovetailing with this new responsibility, Ma will also become the first of several soon-to-be appointed Alumni Ambassadors for SCI-Arc. This fall SCI-Arc has begun to actively recruit for this position as it begins to engage alumni through a more formalized alumni chapter program. Alumni Ambassadors will serve as point persons in their respective regions for alumni, prospective students, and those interested in connecting with the SCI-Arc community. If you are interested becoming an Alumni Ambassador or wish to commit to establishing a SCI-Arc Alumni Chapter in your area please email the Office of Strategic Advancement & International/Special Programs at advancement@sciarc.edu to be included in future announcements.

SCI-ARC SHANGHAI PROGRAM As part of new Director Hernan Diaz Alonso’s directive for the global expansion of SCI-Arc, beginning Summer 2016, SCI-Arc Shanghai is the first in a series of international workshops, preparatory programs, conferences and symposia intended to expand SCI-Arc’s outstanding reputation for architectural education and speculative learning to a broader audience. Hsinming Fung, Chief of Strategic Advancement and International/Special Programs, describes the importance of this new platform: “Today, the world is more closely knit than ever, and the field of architecture is an international discussion. I’m excited about SCI-Arc’s global initiative because we are a school that is committed to the future of our field. It makes sense to expand our presence, and it’s wonderful that Shanghai will be our first.”

Distinguished graduate Steven Ma (M.Arch ’10) principal and founder of China’s first 3D printing firm, Xuberance, will lead the four-week full-time program. SCI-Arc Shanghai will offer a creative and intensive fabrication and design experience for all students interested in pursuing a career in architecture. It is intended to jumpstart a graduate education at SCI-Arc, and may offer entrance scholarships to individuals noted for top performance marks in the program. The courses will offer the latest design process of additive manufacturing and robotics. Studios will combine complex digital sculpting /modeling, industrial design engineering and 3D printing.

Reciprocal programs are also being coordinated in Mexico, South America and Europe, as key sites for pedagogy, scholarship and advanced architectural discourse and exchange. For more information on SCI-Arc Shanghai, as well as upcoming international workshops and opportunities, please consult our website at www.sciarc.edu.

On May 14, alumni and faculty gathered for a SCI-Arc reception hosted during the AIA Convention in Atlanta to celebrate with SCI-Arc faculty member Margaret Griffin, FAIA, who was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows, and Barbara Bestor, AIA (M.Arch ’92), the recipient of a 2015 Institute Honor Award for Interior Architecture.

1.

Joshua Coggeshall (M.Arch ’97), Margaret Griffin, SCI-Arc Trustee Nick Seierup (M.Arch ’79) 2.

Peter Arnold (M.Arch ’94), Barbara Bestor (M.Arch ’92) Christine (Lawson) Nocar (M.Arch ’92) On November 5, alumni and friends met at A+D Museum to celebrate the work of alumna Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01), Founding Partner of Platform for Architecture + Research (PAR). Jennifer’s office had a project featured in Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles. PAR, along with collaborating engineers BuroHappold, presented their project.

3/5.

Alumni and guests.

4.

Alumni Harrison Timothy Higgins (M.Arch ’94) and Mok Wai Wan (B.Arch ’93) pictured centered with guests Arthur Martinez and Oleg Korchinski.

6.

Curators Danielle Rago and Sam Lubell, A+D Museum Board President John R. Dale, FAIA, SCI-Arc Alumni Rep Dan Weinreber, Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01) and Courtney Crosson from BuroHappold.

On May 7, SCI-Arc held an event for alumni and friends at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York.

7.

Alumni and guests.

8.

Yu Liu (M.Arch ’14), center, with other guests.

9.

Graciela Hodgson (M.Arch ’07), center, with other guests.

On July 24, Shanghai-based alumni Steven Ma (M.Arch ’10) and Bin Liu (M.Arch ’10) hosted a SCI-Arc alumni and friends cocktail party.

10.

Alumni and current students with Hsinming Fung in center (L to R): Santino Medina (M.Arch ‘06), Lyla Wu (M.Arch ’09), Elena Larionova, Steven Ma (M.Arch ’08), Christopher Nolop, Leirah Wang, Kenji Hattori, Meghan Hui, and Tatiana Sarkisian, among others.

15

OFFICE OF STRATEGIC ADVANCEMENT Chief of Strategic Advancement & International/Special Projects Hsinming Fung Associate Director of Development Maria Robinson Glover Research & Grant Coordinator Dora Epstein Jones Development Services Coordinator Lydia Chapman

LIBERAL ARTS MASTERCLASS SERIES LAUNCHED Tom Wiscombe, Chair of SCI-Arc’s B.Arch program, launched a Liberal Arts Masterclass series this fall designed as an integral part of a deep and immersive curriculum for undergraduate students in art, philosophy and culture. The series brings leading thinkers, theorists and philosophers into direct and informal contact with undergraduate students to engage their learning and develop their expertise. Masterclass guest lecturers presenting at SCI-Arc this fall included philosopher Graham Harman and theorist Benjamin Bratton, who engaged with students on issues related to philosophy, computing, ontology, objects, and their potential relationship to architecture. Students were invited to act as discussants and interlocutors on sophisticated and advanced topics, not within an introductory model of survey thinking, but to build critical thinking and communication to the highest level of confidence and ability. Broadly speaking, SCI-Arc’s Masterclass series is designed to move students pedagogically from “discourse consumers” to “discourse producers.”

WIETSMA ALUMNI CHALLENGE WINDING DOWN Last fall SCI-Arc alumnus William “Bill” Wietsma (B. Arch ’77) presented the 2015 Alumni Challenge to increase the number of alumni who support the school annually at the leadership level.

With wife Caroline, Bill agreed to match all alumni donations of $1,000 or more. For every $4,000 in new alumni dollars the couple would contribute $1,000 up to a combined total of $100,000.

Launched in December 2014, SCI-Arc will continue to collect gifts to meet the challenge through the end of December 2015.

All alumni who give $1,000 or more to the Alumni Challenge will automatically become part of the school’s inaugural Director’s Circle—a group representing leadership donors committed to SCI-Arc, its future, and its students. Alumni may also elect to pledge their gift of $1,000 or more as an automatically recurring monthly contribution to fulfill their commitment. For more information, please contact the Office of Strategic Advancement & International/Special Programs at advancement@sciarc.edu or call 213-356-5347.

SCI-ARC STUDENT WINS 2015 AWAF SCHOLARSHIP SCI-Arc graduate student Sara “Noni” Pittenger (M.Arch ’15) has been selected to receive a 2015 scholarship award from the Association for Women in Architecture + Design. The competitive annual award is offered to women pursuing higher education in architecture, urban planning, civil engineering and environmental design. Pittenger’s portfolio of work submitted for the award included several of her projects developed as a graduate student at SCI-Arc. Those included an urban housing project in Barcelona, Spain, a design for the United States Embassy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a conceptual design for an affordable single family home, the IVRV House (shown here) designed for families in the Habitat for Humanity home ownership program.

The IVRV House is currently being built by SCI-Arc in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles and the LA County Community Development Commission. Pettinger presented the project as part of her master thesis this fall.

The architectural competition for the Yokohama International Passenger Terminal was famously intense, requiring the winning team from Foreign Office Architects (FOA) to rethink the established template of terminal design.

SCI-ARC PARTICIPATES IN SYMPOSIUM ON CONTINUOUS ARCHITECTURE When the competition for Japan’s Yokohama Port Terminal was announced in 1995, few predicted the powerful discourse that would ensue across the discipline. A new generation of architects and theorists seized it as a platform to explore emerging modalities in design and design technology. The commission attracted more 600 entries from around the world in what became Japan’s largest international design competition to date, leading up to a watershed moment for the discipline of architecture.

A 2-day symposium hosted by the University of Tokyo from June 6-7 marked the 20th anniversary of the Yokohama competition. It invited SCI-Arc directors and design faculty to join in conversation noted faculty and theorists from Columbia University’s GSAPP, Princeton University School of Architecture, and the University of Tokyo. Titled The Saga of Continuous Architecture, the event featured a series of discussions with architects and theorists including SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso, Cultural Studies Coordinator Todd Gannon, and visiting critic Jeffrey Kipnis, in conversation with architects Arata Isozaki, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Jesse Reiser, Nanako Umemoto, Kazuyo Sejima, and Liam Young, among others.

The symposium’s goal was to trace the birth and development of the notion of Continuous Architecture, which became the basis for the design of the Yokohama, inviting participants to reengage Yokohama with neither nostalgia nor negativity. Discussions were complemented by a keynote lecture and closing remarks by Arata Isozaki, who served on the original competition jury. A group of students enrolled in SCI-Arc’s 2015 Japan study-abroad studio led by design faculty John Bohn attended the symposium, working with peers from the University of Tokyo in related workshops.

16

SCI-ARC LEADERSHIP Director/CEO Hernan Diaz ALonso Vice Director/Chief Academic Officer John Enright Undergraduate Program Chair Tom Wiscombe Graduate Program Chair Elena Manferdin BOARD OF TRUSTEES Chairman Tom Gilmore Vice-Chair Kevin Ratner SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso Secretary Abby Sher Treasurer Daniel Swartz Faculty Representative Andrew Zago Alumni Representative Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02)

Elena Manferdini Human Scale

ELENA MANFERDINI DESIGNS INSTALLATION FOR SEOUL ART SHOW

FACULTY & ALUMUS SELECTED FOR 2016 VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE

At Human Scale, a BMW-sponsored installation designed by SCIArc Graduate Program Chair Elena Manferdini, explored the role of automobiles in shaping our cities and our lives. On view May 2015 at the Design ArtWork Fair in Seoul, Korea, the show explored ways in which the city can change when people are placed at the center of the urban equation. It imagined what could happen in the near future if cars, humans and cities were to coexist, instead of existing in opposition to each other. Placing visitors at the center of the urban experience, Manferdini’s experiential installation had visitors feeling larger than usual. The volume of the buildings and the shadows on the floors and walls created a dynamic experience of density and at the same time, the shift of scale made them aware of their bodies being at center of the city.

This installation in Seoul is part of a larger body of work capturing Manferdini’s interpretation of the city. It complements another exhibition of the architect’s work, Building the Picture, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Twelve winning design teams have been announced for the United States Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale, including design faculty Florencia Pita and Jackilin Hah Bloom of Pita+Bloom, Andrew Zago of Zago Architecture, and alumnus Albert Pope (B.Arch ’78) of Present Future. Titled The Architectural Imagination the U.S. pavilion exhibition will explore the possibilities of Detroit as a laboratory for “the innovative power of architecture.”

The 12 winners of the open call for portfolios traveled to Detroit this fall for site visits and community meetings and to begin work on their designs. Their mission: to propose urban solutions that can be applied in cities around the world to address 21st-century social and environmental issues. U.S. pavilion curators Cynthia Davidson and Monica Ponce de Leon selected the 12 teams of architects from more than 250 submissions. The Biennale’s 15th international architecture exhibition will take place May 28-November 27, 2016.

Student Representative Deborah Garcia (B.Arch ’17) Board Members at Large Richard Baptie Rick Carter Joe Day (M. Arch ’94) Tim Disney William H. Fain, Jr. Anthony Ferguson Frank O. Gehry Russell L. Goings III Scott Hughes (M. Arch ’97) Thom Mayne Jerry Neuman Merry Norris Greg Otto Abigail Scheuer (M. Arch ’93) Nick Seierup (B. Arch ’79) Ted Tanner Honorary Members Elyse Grinstein Ray Kappe Ian Robertson Michael Rotondi (B. Arch ’75)

17

CLASS NOTES

1970s Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76) was featured in Dwell Magazine’s Dwell on Design as part of their annual LA design exhibition and home tour series. The tour included three of Nota’s recent projects: The Yu Residence, Olivares Residence & Madans-Rymers Residence.

Steven Lombardi (B.Arch ’79) was by recognized by CMACN / AIACC Concrete Masonry Design Awards, 2015 for the Dorado House in La Jolla Shores. His Sorrento House and the Weightless Lounge at the San Diego Art Fair were recognized with 2015 Architecture Design Awards from AIA San Diego. SLA continues his multidiscipline design approach with a diverse of residential, interiors, lighting, furniture, art installations, mixed use & transportation projects.

1980s Bill Huang (B.Arch ’84) was recently a panelist on the first of a series of forums on the housing crisis hosted by KPCC. Morgan Conolly (M.Arch ’85) was a consulting architect for the renovation of a 1909 historic commercial building near San Francisco’s Union Square.

Morgan wrote an article about the Orpheum Theater featured in the Argonaut, a magazine devoted to the history of San Francisco.

Barbara Ann Spencer (B.Arch ’87) has been hired to work for Nicholas Jacob Architects, located in Ipswich, Suffolk. Nicholas Jacob Architects has won many awards for heritage and conservation architecture, as well as adaptive reuse and contemporary extensions to historic buildings. This work is continuing the long process towards Spencer qualifying as an architect in the UK, which does not recognize the US license or architectural degree.

Julee Herdt (M.Arch ’88), AIA was recently issued a patent for her structural insulated panel system, BioSIPS, invented though research, teaching, full-scale application and testing as a Professor of Architecture at the University of Colorado. This is the first architecture patent in CU’s history.

BioSIPs can be fabricated from a wide range of waste fibers such as postconsumer paper, wood waste, plants and agro-waste, as well as many other fibers. Herdt’s building inventions have been awarded the State of Colorado, U.S. Green Building Council’s Product of the Year Award, as well as numerous other awards and citations.

1990s Geofrey Collins (M.Arch ’92) has relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, after 25 years in L.A. Geofrey Collins Living Design continues to build houses

in L.A. and is working on several projects in NM including a 7000 sq ft house.

Lawrence O’Toole’s (M.Arch ’93) firm LOT Architecture & Design in Honolulu is designing a solar case study house in Diamond Head, Hawaii. This year he designed a country estate on the north shore of Kauai and completed residences in Oslo, Norway and Haena, Hawaii. O’Toole has also been doing a line of textile designs for Studio DR. Mok Wai Wan (B.Arch ’93) and Oleg Korchinski (B.Arch ’13) with Tim Higgins (M. Arch ’94) have created Haphazard Gallery on Sawtelle Blvd in Los Angeles. Haphazard’s mission is to provide a space to feature contemporary art and design which functions outside from traditional art discourse done by emerging artists.

Peter Arnold (M.Arch ’94) and Hadley Arnold (M.Arch ’97) are founding co-directors of the Arid Lands Institute (ALI), a design-centered research platform devoted to making drylands “water-smart” the world over. The ALI was selected by the AIA’s College of Fellows for this year’s Latrobe Prize, granting funds for a two-year research effort and was on the jury of Archinect’s “Dry Futures” competition.

Tim Higgins (M.Arch ’94) established the Higgins Trust in support of urban art, architecture, and progressive social change in cities. The Trust’s first action was to endow the Higgins Professorship in Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where Tim has lived since retiring in 2013.

Jennifer Siegal (M.Arch ’94) is a producer and host of an upcoming TV program on Mobile Architecture. Her newest modular project Vertical Venice Prefab was delivered and set in just one day. A video of the install is available on YouTube. Siegal’s drone installation project Surfing Interzone was displayed at A+D Museum’s WestEdge Design show. Jennifer was a visiting artist and lecturer at Columbus College of Art & Design in 2015, and her lecture Jewish American Architects was delivered at the JCC in Irvine, CA. Elmar Kleiner (M.Arch ’94), Founder and Director of OIA, just completed the master plan for a green sustainable industrial lifestyle campus project in the north of Thailand, with production facilities for 5000 people.

Marlies Breuss (M.Arch ’95), founder of HOLODECK architects based in Vienna, won the competition for the Austrian Embassy in Bangkok, now under construction. In Berlin, the office designed the exhibition Double Vision: Albrecht Dürer & William Kentridge at the Kulturforum. The exhibition is on display until March 2016.

Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96), founder of leeMundwiler Architecture, was invited

by Kent State University to lecture this

Fall. “dISTRACT/////ed: to/////dISRUPT” showcased leeMundwiler’s endeavor in pursuing R&D with the exhibition series Image of the Absence, focused on identifying and analyzing disengaged and unchallenged approaches in current architectural design. Lee is currently leading her team with a fresh R&D concept to the 2016 Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition invited by the Global Art Affairs Foundation based in Amsterdam.

David Montalba (B.Arch ’96) AIA, has been recognized for two of his recent projects for their contextual and innovative designs. The Row’s first flagship store, done in close collaboration with designers Ashely Olsen and Mary-Kate Olsen and interior designer Courtney Applebaum, received an AIACC Design Award, a Los Angeles Business Council Architecture Award and was shortlisted for the 2015 World Architecture Festival. Studio Dental, a mobile dental unit, won an AIA Academy of Architecture for Health National Healthcare Design Award, AIACC Design Award, and AIA San Francisco Design Award. At an international level, the project was honored with a Green Good Design Award.

Mimi Zeiger (M.Arch ’98) is currently the West Coast Editor of The Architects Newspaper. An exhibition Zeiger curated with Tim Durfee, Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City, will travel to Shenzhen for the 2015 BiCity Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture.

2000s Robb Walker (M.Arch ’02) has been named President of Ryan Associates in San Francisco. Ryan Associates, operating in San Francisco and New York, is a General Contractor specializing exclusively in high-end residential projects. Building for an exclusive clientele, Ryan Associates has teamed with internationally recognized architects including Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Robert AM Stern Architects, Herzog & deMeuron, Olle Lundberg Design, ARO, Gluckman Mayner, Legoretta y Legoretta, Marmol Radziner, Olson Kundig, Steven Holl, and Todd Williams & Billie Tsien.

Benjamin Ball (B.Arch ’03) and Gaston Nogues (B. Arch ’93) of Ball-Nogues Studio completed two permanent installations this year: Proscenium for Portland State University and Orchard at El Cariso Park in Sylmar, California. In July, their project Pulp Pavilion was on the cover of Architect Magazine and won the Architect Magazine R&D First Award.

They also won an Americans for the Arts, Public Art Network Year in Review Award for the installation Air Garden at Los Angeles International Airport, as well as a WAN (World Architecture News) 21 for 21 Award. In August, they completed the Cotsen Residency, at the Armory Center for the Arts.

Karim Moussawer (M.DesR ’03) of PARALX, an Architecture and Design practice he founded, has won the 2015 AIA NextLA Merit Award for the T3 Tower project in Beirut, Lebanon.

Norio Watanabe (M.Arch ’02-’03) has designed a concept for Arai Design Center, the core of the readjustment of the Arai district in Sendai. The building aims to become an area landmark.

Sarah Lorenzen (M.DesR ’04) was conferred the 2015 Educator Award from the American Institute of Architects Los Angeles (AIA|LA). Sarah is currently an Associate Professor and Chair at Cal Poly Pomona.

Kristopher Conner (M.Arch ’07) has founded a new practice with his partner James Perry in Santa Monica, CA. Conner & Perry Architects, Inc. is continuing work on the Goldstein Entertainment Complex, a multi-phase project adjacent to the famous John Lautner designed Sheats-Goldstein Residence, and will soon be breaking ground on a 6,700 square foot residence in the Pacific Palisades.

Sarah West (M.Arch ’07) and Christopher Field of W/Field Workshop recently completed two installations: Ghost Barn, a large site-specific installation in rural Wisconsin which reinterprets barn form and imagery in fabric animated by wind currents; and Silk Bloom, a series of folded steel flowers wrapped with graphic patterns, which was fabricated with Rives Rash (M.Arch ’03) of Rash, LLC and installed at three sites for the Breeder’s Cup events in Lexington, KY. Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09) founding principal of M-Rad, has moved their headquarters to their own 5000 sq ft building in Culver City. Matthew recently spoke at Dwell on Design LA and Dwell on Design NY with Miguel McKelvey (WeWork) and Morris Adjmi (Morris Adjmi Architects) on “The New Meaning of Hospitality.” He has been invited to speak at IIDEX Toronto on “Manufacturing Serendipity” in December. Rosenberg has recently signed several new projects, including a 740 sq ft boutique hotel in Hudson Yards of Manhattan, a boutique hotel on Hollywood Blvd, and a restaurant and entertainment space in the Staples Center. Matthew has been invited to sit on the Design Committee for the Hollywood Central Park.

2010s Francisco Alarcon Ruiz (M.Arch ’11) was part of 5790projects, a group show at the Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock from Nov 8–Dec 3, focused on emerging artists from Los Angeles. Francisco deconstructs the topographies that have formed the foundation of his architectural career.

Tom Ames (SCIFI ’11) has recently accepted a design position at MBH Architects in the San Francisco Bay

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Area. He will be working on multifamily residential, hospitality, and additional projects within their Urban Studio.

Wanda Dalla Costa (M.DesR ’11) AIA, AAA, LEED AP is the 2016 Visiting Eminent Scholar at Arizona State University, Del E. Webb School of Construction. Her specialization is indigenous planning, architecture and construction. Costa has been working in the field of indigenous design for 18 years, is the founder of Red Quill Architecture in Los Angeles and is a member of the Saddle Lake First Nation in northern Alberta. She will be teaching a graduate level theory course, working with local tribes on culturally responsive design methodology, and publishing her work Indigenous Architecture Frameworks.

Wisarut Eric Wattanachote (M.Arch ’12) recently founded WIWA-STUDIO, a design studio based in LA and Bangkok for design/visualization services. While working at Rottet Studio (2012-2015), he worked on the design for the Viking Star cruise liner and collaborated with MAD Architects on 8600 Wilshire, a residential project in Beverly Hills. Wattanachote is adjunct professor at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok in the International Program in Design and Architecture.

Ryan Vincent Manning (M.Arch ’14), along with principals J.P. Maruszczak and Roger Connah of Heron-Mazy, won an Honorable Mention for their project How You Can Rhino the Jingo Out of Everything & Architecture Gets More Than A Skin, which was published in Blank Space’s Fairy Tales: When Architecture Tells a Story Volume 2. Their project Machines of Ascensional Grace was included in the Concordia Lighthouse Competition from matterbetter. And their film Future is Never: Manifesto 3.0 was selected in the Dallas Video Festival. Manning currently serves as visiting faculty at IOUD: Institute of Urban Design @ University of Innsbruck.

Mary Franck (ESTm ’15) was commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum to create an installation as part of the exhibit New Experiments in Art and Technology. The piece, Gilded and Unreal, is on view until January 2016. Franck will be teaching an Emerging Technology Studio in Stanford’s Art and Art History department for the upcoming winter quarter.

Shahe Gregorian (B.Arch ’15) and project partner Jacob Zindroski’s (B.Arch ’15) thesis project was recently featured in the Beautiful Decay exhibition at Opa-locka Communitiy Development Corporation’s (OLCDC) gallery The ARC in Miami.

Pierina Merino (B.Arch ’15) is working as an Architectural Designer at Gehry Partners. Merino is also developing a curated platform for digitally fabricated products called Nextify (@Nextifyup).

SCI-Arc gratefully acknowledges the following individuals and organizations whose support allows the school to educate the architects and designers who will imagine and shape our future. $50,000 and Above Anonymous $10,000-$49,999 California Community Foundation Joe Day (M.Arch ’94) Tim Disney Frank Gehry Green Foundation Johnson Fain Kenneth T. & Eileen L. Norris Foundation National Endowment for the Arts Abby Sher Ted Tanner The La Vida Feliz Foundation The Vinyl Institute US Bank W.M. Keck Foundation ToonJin Wong $5,000-$9,999 Kenneth Chang Forest City Gensler - Los Angeles Abigail Scheuer Pasadena Art Alliance SCI-Arc Student Union Sean O’Connor Lighting Siemen’s Industry, Inc CBRE Walter P. Moore and Associates, Inc $1,000-$4,999 Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis LLP Anthony Anderson (M.Arch ’04) Arup North America, Ltd Noah Auerhahn Barcelona Regional John Boccardo (M.Arch ’84) Bremco Construction Inc. C. W. Howe Partners, Inc. Annie Chu (B.Arch ’83) Community Films, LLC John Enright Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund Freedman Family Fund Chris Genik Carol Hove-Ahmanson (M.Arch ’88) Shelly and Raymond Kappe Jeffrey Kipnis Kenneth Klausner Linear City Development Thom Mayne James McMillan Merry Norris Contemporary Art Margi Nothard (M.Arch ’92) Perkins+Will - Los Angeles Michael Poris (M.Arch ’90) Richard Meier Partners Architects LLP Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLPSan Francisco Reed Stilwell (M.Arch ’98) Lee Tabler (B.Arch ’76) Greg Walsh Stephanie Bowling Zeigler (M.Arch ’95) $500-$999 American Architectural Foundation Atlas Capital Group LLC Kal Benuska Bucilla Group Architecture Huei Ju Cheng Henry Cobb CTMax Development Inc.

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Lynn Fujioka Pavel Getov Elizabeth Anne Gibb Russell L. Goings Hennessey + Ingalls Emily Hope Shu-Chih Huang Donald Pugh Christine Rafferty Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90) Sarah Sullivan Jun Tan $100 to $499 Peter Abrahams Bret Alexander William Amador (B.Arch ’86) Chantal Aquin (M.Arch ’99) Emmanuel Argueta (B.Arch ’12) Gordon Atkinson (BA ’89) Jeffrey Auerhahn Christopher Aykanian (M.Arch ’89) Katie Baad Aramaies Baghdasraian George Bandarian Robert Bangham (M.Arch ’90) Curime Batliner (M.Arch ’11) David Becker (M.Arch ’86) Hamid Behdad Tima Bell (M.Arch ’99) David Bergman Barbara Bestor (M.Arch ’92) Luann Bice Monique Birault (M.Arch ’92) BKL/A Architecture LLC John Bohn Jeff Bolen (B.Arch ’88) Wendelyn Bone (M.Arch ’99) Tom Bonner Neal Borsuk (M.Arch ’89) BPlusU Bridgwater Consulting Group Inc. Sean Briski John Brumfield Jay Bush (M.Arch ’91) Paul Cambon (B.Arch ’12) Jonathan Cantwell (M.Arch ’00) Cynthia Carlson (M.Arch ’90) Aviva Carmy (M.Arch ’80) I Fei Chang Wilson Chang (M.Arch ’12) Siying Chen (MRD ’04) Simon K. Chiu Seyoung Choi (MRD ’10) Lanabel Cho-Josten (M.Arch ’88) Deeing Chu (B.Arch ’80) Todd Conversano (M.Arch ’88) Cora A Swartz Trust Ronald John Culver (B.Arch ’04) Kevin Daly David Lawrence Gray Architects Ehrlich Architects David Eisenstadt Todd Erlandson (M.Arch ’94) Juan Esquivel Jonathan Evans (M.Arch ’88) Jeffrey Eyster (M.Arch ’98) Mehrdad Farivar Tom Farrage (B.Arch ’87) Matthew Fineout (M.Arch ’90) Heather Flood (M.Arch ’04) Laura Foster (M.Arch ’99) Todd Gannon Francesca Garcia-Marques Mark Gee (M.Arch ’99) Keith Gendel (M.Arch ’06) Marcelyn Gow David Gray Peter Grueneisen (M.Arch ’90) Hovik Hacobian

Robert Hale Shannon Han (M.Arch ’06) Celestin Hariton Armen Hayrapetian Stephen Hegedus (B.Arch ’00) Jose Herrasti Luis Herrera (B.Arch ’01) David Hertz (B.Arch ’83) Alan Hess Andreas Hierholzer (M.Arch ’90) Beth Holden (B.Arch ’98) Vartan Hovanesian Coy Howard Con Howe Gary Hulton (M.Arch ’89) Thai Huynh Christopher S. Hylen Brian Iwashita Robert Jackson (M.Arch ’87) Louis Joyner (M.Arch ’85) Nerin Kadribegovic (M.Arch ’03) Jacqueline Kahn-Trauberman (M.Arch ’80) Irene Kelly Elizabeth Keslacy (M.Arch ’04) Michael Kiner (M.Arch ’79) Alec Kobayashi (M.Arch ’89) Chung Kuo David Lafaille Christopher Lang Jason Langkammerer (M.Arch ’99) Darcy Lawes Quanghuy Le Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96) Jenna Lerner Richard Levin Tracy Wade Levine (M.Arch ’90) Geoffrey Lewis (B.Arch ’89) Mary Little John Lodge (M.Arch ’94) M.G. Skinner & Associates, Inc. Andrea Madden (M.Arch ’98) Carlos Madrid III (M.Arch ’95) Hassan Majd (B.Arch ’90) Charles J. Malaret Nathan Malka Teresa Mark Jennifer Hurd Marmon (M.Arch ’01) Josep Mateo Martinez Ryan Martinez (M.Arch ’13) McCormick Distilling Co., Inc. Richard J. McGeagh Talbot McLanahan (M.Arch ’95) Menendez Architects P.C. Martin Mervel (M.Arch ’81) Dawn Mori Christopher Mount Hernan Munayco (B.Arch ’99) Seiji Naganuma Paul Nakazawa Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ’04) Judith Newmark (M.Arch ’81) Hoainam Ngo Robert Noble Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76) Nikolas Patsaouras Matthew Pickner (B.Arch ’85) PNC Foundation Darcey Prichard Maritza Przekop (B.Arch ’80) PSOMAS Michael Quirk Andrea Rawlings (B.Arch ’82) Mary-Ann Ray Jean-Michel Reynolds Ian Robertson Mark Rolfs (M.Arch ’97) Dan Rosenfeld David Ross (B.Arch ’81) Lisa Russo

Edward Saidkhanian Owen Sarmiento Zachary Savitz Carol Schlanger- Helvey Karolin Schmidbaur David Shoucair (B.Arch ’79) Jonathan Siegel (B.Arch ’80) Greg Slowik (M.Arch ’94) Nina Smith-Gardiner (M.Arch ’92) L. Gustaf Soderbergh Timothy Sola (M.Arch ’08) Derek Sola (M.Arch ’98) John Southern (M.Arch ’02) John Souza (B.Arch ’74) Marcelo Spina Randy Spiwak (B.Arch ’79) Arnold Stalk (B.Arch ’77) Andrew J. Starrels Amy Stepanian Studio Works Manori Sumanasinghe (B.Arch ’14) Daniel Swartz Eva Sweeney (M.Arch ’98) Testa & Weiser Inc Annie Thiel Patrick Tighe Dane Twichell (M.Arch ’90) Yasi Vafai (B.Arch ’90) David Valdes (M.Arch ’99) Gregory Van Grunsven (M.Arch ‘07) Ron Verdier (B.Arch ’90) Danna Vest (B.Arch ’81) Allyne Winderman Thomas Wiscombe Lacona Woltmon Kevin Wronske (B.Arch ’02) Judith Wyle (M.Arch ’88) Xefirotarch Lynda Yonamine Jinsa Yoon (M.Arch ’12) Edward Zadeh Andrew Zago Peter Zellner Jed Zimmerman (B.Arch ’87) And we thank the following for their in-kind support: Pearl Brickman (M.Arch ’89) The Home Depot Foundation Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design Morphosis Architects Gary Ochoa RTKL Associates Inc. Chris Seals (M.Arch ’96) Julie Taylor Anne Troutman (M.Arch ’87) (Gifts and commitments from 9/1/14 through 8/31/15)

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