The Life of Robert Mangurian

Robert-isms “This part is going great.”

Robert would blurt this out at no particular point while working on a project. It is a quote he picked up after being present at the filming of a brain surgeon at work.

“We’ve got problems, serious problems.”

Robert would blurt this out at no particular point while working on a project (usually when things weren’t going particularly well or poorly). Alternatively, he might say, “We’re screwed.”

“I know this town like the back of ‘me’ hand.”

Robert would say this as he rolled into almost any Italian town or city, deftly maneuvering along as he drove one of his Alfas or Fiats.

“The eagle has landed.”

When arriving late at night at the Beijing Capital Airport, he would always make a call to our collaborators to let them know he was there.

“Are you talking to me?”

“Don Giordano bites, bites.”

Referring to a New York City Building Inspector “Please, I’m asking you.”

“Just put some spackle on it (preferably Synkoloid’s). It makes it look better anyway”.

His words on how to fix a blunder on a model. If it was a drawing, “use some tape” (ideally 3M transparent red lithographer’s tape).

“Now here’s an idea, ready? We can make a killing on this one.”

Numerous hair brained ideas would follow.

“You can’t go wrong, but it’s hard to get it right.”

The Life of Robert Mangurian 1941–2023

: A Celebration

Saturday October 28, 2023 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm SCI-Arc W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Guest Books : The family would be grateful if guests could kindly sign one of the several guest books.

Feel free to also leave memories, thoughts, or images.

Robert Mangurian Scholarship : In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to the “Robert Mangurian Scholarship” fund.

“Robert Mangurian was a giant, both as an architect and in the formation of SCI-Arc into what it has become. His influence in the architectural landscape in Los Angeles, Southern California, and the world at large has been massive, as well as his talent and generosity as an educator. He will be deeply missed.” — SCI-Arc Director Hernán Díaz Alonso It is in this spirit that SCI-Arc inaugurates a scholarship in Robert’s honor. Use the secure link below to support our students by making a donation to the Robert Mangurian Scholarship. sciarc.edu/giving-1/ways-to-give/online-giving

Musical Prelude : Mosaic (Instrumental Version) Album Written and Produced by Tony Mangurian Performed by Tony Mangurian and Paul Nowinski

Main Program : Welcome1 Hernán Díaz Alonso Director and CEO of SCI-Arc, Founder and Principal of Los Angeles-based Design Practice HDA-X Introduction of Host Tom Buresh Former Student and Collaborator at Studio Works, Chair Emeritus Taubman College University of Michigan, Chair Emeritus University of California Berkeley, Principal: Guthrie + Buresh Architects Tom is a Graduate of the UCLA Graduate Program in Architecture, Class of 1985 Welcome 2 Tony Mangurian Son, Musician, Producer, Composer Chapters of a Life 1–5

Reception to Follow : A Reception following the Main Program will take place in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall and the outdoor space immediately adjacent as weather allows. Light food and beverages will be served.

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Chapters of a Life

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1 1941 – late 1960s : Baltimore + Glendale + Palos Verdes + Stanford University + Europe + London + Berkeley

Glendale: He liked to say that he was the first Armenian in Glendale Stanford: Finding there were no degrees in Architecture offered Europe: Touring with Brother David in a Deux Chevaux Citroën Truckette London: Playing Bluegrass Gigs with his band – The Tennessee Three, Close Encounters with the Folk Scene, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, etc.

Berkeley: College of Environmental Design, Bachelor of Architecture Degree, the Free Speech Movement (he liked to say the movement was triggered by the Professors’ oppressive insistence that work be mounted on 24” x 36” boards), living in what is now the Chez Panisse Café Speaker : David Mangurian, Brother

Music : “Kentucky Mountain Chimes” 1:32 from the Album Cowboy The Tennessee Three with Roy Guest and Jack Fallon Robert Mangurian on solo Mandolin.

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2 late 1960s – 1970s : New York (Union Square + Greenwich Village) Rome (American Academy) New York: 33 Union Square West on floor above the Warhol Factory, Studio Works is founded 180 Bleeker Street, Greenwich Village, the domestic abode on Bleeker Street – Tony Mangurian is born Teaching at City College Rome: American Academy, Rome Prize Mid-Career Fellowship 1977

Speakers : Sam Kornhauser Architect: Schoolworks,Student at CCNY in the 1970s Craig Hodgetts Architect: Hodgetts + Fung, Former Partner and Founding Member of Studio Works

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3 1980s : Los Angeles (Venice + UCLA) Rome (Hadrian's Villa) Los Angeles: Studio Works at 4 Rose Avenue, the Boardwalk Venice, CA Teaching at UCLA Teaching and Directing the Graduate Program at SCI-Arc Santa Monica Rome: Measuring and Documenting Hadrian’s Villa operating as "Atelier Italia"

Speakers : Marianne Burkhalter Architect: Atelier Burkhalter Sumi, Collaborator at Studio Works N.Y., L.A., and Rome (pre-recorded) Billie Tsien Architect: Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, Class of 1977 UCLA Graduate School of Architecture Beth Gibb Architect: Deerbrook Lane LLC, Class of 1989 SCI-Arc Graduate Program, Member of Atelier Italia

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4 1990s : Los Angeles (Spruce Goose Site, SCI-Arc Beethoven) Houston (Teaching at Rice) Rome (Olive Groves of Tivoli) Los Angeles: Studio Works at the Howard Hughes Spruce Goose Site, Building #3 Teaching and Directing the Graduate Program at SCI-Arc, Beethoven Building, Culver City Houston: Teaching at Rice University Rome: Tivoli Italy, A little house in the olive grove name “Villa Peggy” for his mother, TIBVRTINI Olive Oil

Speakers : Michael Rotondi Architect: Roto Architects, Founder and Former Director, SCI-Arc Lars Lerup Architect: Dean Emeritus Rice University, (Tribute read by Robert Adams) William Hogan Architectural and Structural Designer, William Hogan Studio, Office of Gordon Polon Structural Engineers, Studio Works, Class of 1994/95 SCI-Arc Graduate Program

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5 21st Century : Los Angeles (Downtown Arts District) Beijing (Caochangdi Urban Village) Mumbai (Bakri Adda Byculla) Los Angeles: Studio Works at 1800 Industrial St., Arts District Downtown SCI-Arc at the Freight Yard Beijing: BASE Beijing in Caochangdi Urban Village Mumbai: BASE Mumbai, with Studio Mumbai at Bakri Adda “goat joint”

Speakers : Robert Adams Studio Director: Adams + Gilpin Design Studio, Associate Professor Taubman College University of Michigan, Co-Founder of BASE Beijing, Class of 1994 SCI-Arc Graduate Program Bijoy Jain Architect: Studio Mumbai, Former Student at Washington University St. Louis, Collaborator at Studio Works (pre-recorded)

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Musical Postlude : “Angel Band” Performed by the Stanley Brothers A 19th Century American Gospel Song

My latest sun is sinking fast My race has nearly run My strongest trials now are past My triumph is begun Oh come, angel band, come and around me stand Oh bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home Oh bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home Oh bear my longing heart to Him Who bled and died for me Whose blood now cleanses from all sin And gives me victory Oh come, angel band, come and around me stand Oh bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home Oh bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home

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Reception : Edibles TIBVRTINI Olive Oil on Grilled Ciabatta Cameo Italian Aperitivo Peanuts with thanks to Emanuele Lolli di Lusignano, Rita Lato + Michael Gruber for importing these from Italy for this event Castelvetrano Olives Fresh Red Edible Things on the Tables These have been washed and are ready to consume Gelato Bvlgarini Gelato, Vino, Cucina Red, Green and White Flavors The Proprietor Leo Bvlgarini’s family in Italy owns a part of Hadrian’s Villa, and Robert and Mary-Ann Mangurian were friends of his Aunt and Uncle - Teresa and Francesco.

Libations Still Water Sparkling Water White Wine: Ercole Bianco Monferrato Red Wine: Ercole Barbera del Monferrato Campari + Soda w/ Orange Slice Florals The VLB, or Very Large Bouquet, will be viewable in the outdoor space adjacent to the Keck Lecture Hall immediately following the main program.

The VLB has been very graciously gifted by the SCI-Arc Graduate Student Class of 2002.

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A Note on the Tables + Goats : BASIC Table BASIC Table is made from one sheet of 4’ x 8’ plywood with nearly zero waste. It is intended as an alternative to the Drafting Table as a work surface for architects in the digital age. With the reproportioned or stretched top, the dead space behind the computer monitor goes away or is replaced by a useful and more accessible and visible space beside it. The table was designed at Studio Works with Earl Tres Parson and this edition was constructed for a SCI-Arc Studio with William Hogan.

SIMPLE Table/Fish Cleaning Table SIMPLE Table, or “A Simple Table for a Simple Life” was inspired by a wooden “sink” that Robert and Mary-Ann spotted in a swampy field near New Orleans on one of their trips there. They trapsed across the field and measured and photographed the “table”. The tabletop had a depression and a drain hole, a slope and a flat area, presumably for cleaning fi sh caught in the nearby bayous.

It was made for standing height. The flat-topped red tables were constructed at Studio Works with George Newburn and Tomaso Bradshaw and other Atelier Italia alumni as viewing surfaces for the yellow tracing paper drawings of measured spaces of Hadrian’s Villa as part of an exhibition at SCI-Arc curated by Gary Paige. At Studio Works, an edition of seated height tables was also produced and covered with blue-green auto body putty instead of the red.

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GOATS Robert loved goats (and dogs, crows, cows, and all animals) very much. From rural China to the Roman Countryside to urban Istanbul and Mumbai, he would take any opportunity possible to stop and pet the animals. While living and working for 5 weeks in Mumbai, every afternoon he and Mary-Ann would take a break, buy some goat food greens, and head to the Mustafa Bazar Wood Market to feed the goats that the migrant workers who lived and worked there kept.

Notes on the Artifacts : Color Pigments Collected over many years from many places in the world including Italy (especially Bologna), Turkey, Mumbai, and Egypt Plaster Sheets Robert learned from a Master Maker in Rome how to cast and screed plaster. Riffing off of his work, he invented screeded plaster sheets to use in making architectural models. One more riff was his addition of pigments to make color plaster sheets.

When he proudly returned to the Master to show him the color plaster, the Master scolded him, insisting that to capture the best shadows, plaster should always, and only, be white.

Orange Rakes and Olive Branches In 1999 Robert and Mary-Ann acquired an olive grove of about 90 trees and a small house (3 x 5 meters) that they named “Villa Peggy” after Robert’s mother. With their Italian friends, the Lolli di Lusignano family, they founded “TIBVRTINI” Olive Oil and began importing and distributing it in the U.S. The orange rakes are called “manuccia” or “little hands” in Italian. They are used to comb the olives off the branches.

“TIBVRTINI” is still harvested in this traditional way, by hand, rather than by machines. Every Fall was a pilgrimage to the “Campagna Romana”—the Roman Countryside—to harvest the olives and partake of a rustic Italian way of life.

Red Gladiolus Robert’s favorite flowers- he usually gave them but rarely received them.

Lancia Flaminia 1960 Coupe Robert owned two of these all aluminum bodied Lancias - a Coupe and a Convertible. The Coupe gained notoriety as it was once the subject of a semester-long studio at SCI-Arc taught by Craig Hodgetts and Bahram Shirdel.

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Robert Mangurian Sheet of Studies: BASIC Table January 2010

Selected Tributes : Serious Post-Modern Men Mark Mack Robert Mangurian: In Memoriam Peter Martinez Zellner A Facebook Eulogy Dora Epstein Jones To Mango Eric Owen Moss A Note to Mary-Ann Ai Weiwei Robert Mangurian: A Personal Reflection Steven Holl A Personal Letter from Haldenstein Peter Zumthor Robert Mangurian Shelly Kappe Losing a Friend Coy Howard Robert’s Rules of Order Hadley Soutter Arnold A Note to Mary-Ann Mary Miss Robert Heather Kurze In Memory of Robert Mangurian in New York Lester Walker

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Cars, Shop Works, Music Michael Gruber Dispatch from Hong Kong Gary Paige “let’s” William Hogan

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Serious Post-Modern Men Mark Mack My first ever published architectural writing was a critical review of Robert Mangurian and Craig Hodgetts Southside Settlement Building in Columbus, Ohio. Progressive Architecture Magazine hired me to fly to Columbus and tour the newly finished Building and its setting and to commit my opinion to paper. I had not written anything on or about architecture in a magazine before, except for descriptions of my own published work, I found out later that Robert Mangurian pressed PA (Progressive Architecture Magazine), for me to write the review of their building that started in 1979.

On the 8th of December of 1980 I toured the building with the director of this not-for-profit neighborhood educational complex at sunset. Designated to serve urban youth in a problematic area of the city, it was built of tough and unassuming materials fittingly creating a nurturing cultural sanctuary in an area of urban and social neglect.

As I settled for the night in a neighborhood basic motel with Cable TV before returning to California the next day. It was a very cold day and I snacked un-healthy corn chips watching one of my first Monday Night football game featuring Howard Cosell moderating the match between the Miami Dolphins and the New England Patriots.

Calling a close game, Mr. Cosell announced in his sports news manner that John Lennon has been shot and killed. I could not believe to hear this news broken by a sports reporter.

Darkness set over me unable to even think about writing about architecture and its meaning. The next morning, I dragged myself to the building again and its drab surroundings. Everything was dark for me then, all the brutality that marks the American past seem to me embodied in that particular neighborhood, with its liquor stores, its coin operated laundry shops and fast-food restaurants.

The building with its celebration of typologies that were rooted in a world that was idealistic and universal, with courtyards and

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architectural familiarity found in the age of humanism, offered a somber yet optimistic respite from the frivolous expressionism of Postmodern architects of that time. Its scale was broken down to play within the scale of the neighborhood, yet it forms and materials merged pragmatism and nostalgia in a very rough spot of a malnourished urban and social landscape.

Mangurian and Hodgetts work on the Southside of Columbus, John Lennon’s death and Howard Cosell’s Monday Night football have merged for me to create one of those incredible confluences that make up these boulders of a memorial landscape that becomes unforgettable.

As I became closer with Robert Mangurian, over the next decade I started to see him as hoarder of haptic and well understood architectural typologies that he used in is work. He surrounds himself with objects and collections of meaning ful and irreverent definitions, he celebrated techniques of model-building and visual stimulation that were unique, and he captures your attention with drawn out explanations in a slight and pleasant stutter.

Every time I entered his studio, from the digs on the Venice Boardwalk - now a discotheque, to the industrial barrack in the former Howard Hughes airplane facilities - now a New Urbanism development called Playa Vista, I marvel at the sheer amount of models, objects and drawings stacked over each other waiting to tell stories of architecture and life.

In 1982 we wanted to create an Architectural Summer Studio abroad in Umbria together, where he found a farmhouse with ancient roman remnants in the grounds of a mature Olives grove.

Unfortunately, I had to cancel my engagement since my son was born at the same time, we had already printed our announcements on ancient sepia-colored transparent sheets on an ancient letterpress he organized.

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Robert and his trusted partner Mary-Ann Ray continued and realized this fledgling enterprise - the studio abroad and managed to bring back many bottles of self-produced olive oil to give to friends besides commercially selling it. I always wondered what would have become of me had I gone to Italy with him then,

would I have followed his lead and immerse myself into that ancient culture with its comfort of familiarity and clarity. I guess we were going in different direction, me as a father of a newborn assuring stability through commercial success as an architect and he is going ever so deeper into the understanding of a culture and its material manifestations, applying his understandings to teach architecture to others.

Yet with the visions of a world based by clarity and intellectual pleasure he still managed to be an enigma to many of us. On one hand he was always driving slightly banged up vintage convertible Cadillacs while on the other hand storing a totally disassembled, meticulously organized by parts Alfa Romeo Giulia GT in a rented garage. The automotive parts were displayed like art or historical objects on the walls, from chrome bumpers, electrical harnesses and dismembered transmission housings.

As I wrote in an essay for the Harvard Architectural Review in 1984 under the title Other Architecture (or the Need for Serious Post Modernism) their (Hodgetts/Mangurian) buildings “… create an architectural culture expressing popular and refined values alike…. not through prissy application of architectural motifs and styles but through the creation of enduring buildings standing on their own feet …addresses the issues of context with restrained articulation and celebrates the architecture in an elemental, archetypal, understated and silent way…… ” Mark Mack is a world-renowned architect, author, professor emeritus at UCLA Graduate School of Architecture, and DJ based in Venice, California.

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Robert Mangurian: In Memorium Peter Martinez Zellner Like others, I have/had a complicated reading of (and relationship with) Robert Mangurian. When I first met Robert in the fall of 1999, I immediately disliked him.

I was the then-incoming and, I will readily admit now, very arrogant Thesis Coordinator at SCI-Arc. I crossed Robert at the mid-review by preventing one of his students from moving their work on the wall a few hours before the review.

The student was upset and exhausted, and I stupidly said there was no more time or room to make any more changes and that it was just the mid-review and to let it go. That upset the student some more, and by the time Robert got wind of it, he didn’t like my decision or me, and he made that terrifyingly clear.

Initially, I didn’t respond well to Robert’s approach to handling me, and me being my younger and more unstable hothead self, I yelled back at him. It escalated quickly, and I stupidly threatened a physical altercation in the parking lot of the Marina campus.

In retrospect, I am not at all proud of how I behaved on our first encounter, it was rude and childish.

I can’t even fathom my mindset then, but Robert seemed to appreciate the shouty, and quickly unhinged side of me, and perhaps for that reason alone, he started to like me. A few years later, after I was unceremoniously booted out of SCI-Arc for bad behavior and then came back with my tail between my legs, Robert and Mary-Ann graciously lent some beautiful drawings and a model to an exhibition I co-curated at SCI-Arc. After that, I always enjoyed attending the studio reviews MaryAnn and Robert elaborately staged. There was always delicious food and some of their excellent olive oil to go around. Like their teachers, their students’ work was always oddly profound and strong and vulnerable.

Over time I came to value Robert for his humanity, warts and all, and I grew very fond of Robert and Mary-Ann as a couple.

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Their presence at SCI-Arc reminded me of what I loved about the school when I first arrived in LA: its earnestness, the unapologetic rough edges, a collective commitment to making things in the world as a natural extension to talking about them, and there was SCIArc’s rotating cast of rowdy misfits, weirdos, and strong characters.

Robert and Mary-Ann’s reviews always had a festive quality that suggested that architectural education is more than just checking off the boxes on a syllabus or mastering some software. The way Mary-Ann and Robert taught was special and unique, like their few but influential and idiosyncratic buildings.

Robert’s way of being in the world as a teacher and an architect is almost impossible to reproduce now. It doesn’t seem like there’s much room in the world, our profession, or the academy for his personality type anymore. That is too bad, or maybe it is for the better. Hard to tell.

I admire Robert for what he believed in as an architect, his brilliance as a designer, and most importantly, what he stood for as a teacher.

Robert always put his students’ growth and personal development first, never seeing teaching as a means to an end but an end in itself.

This weekend, like many others, I mourn Robert Mangurian.

Vale Robert Mangurian, 1941-2023.

Robert Robert was fierce.

Robert was kind.

Robert was generous.

Robert was impossible.

Robert was brilliant.

Robert was imprudent.

Robert was outrageous.

Robert was subtle.

Robert was kind-hearted.

Robert was unreasonable.

Robert was a mensch.

Robert was injudicious.

Robert was an innocent.

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Robert was hardly innocent.

Robert was hard (or easy) to appreciate.

Robert needed to be understood.

Robert was an antagonist.

Robert was a protagonist.

Robert loved the world.

Robert was beloved.

Peter Martinez Zellner is a Design Principal at OFICINA MARTINEZ ZELLNER LLC, and Founder of the Free School of Architecture. This text was first published in The Horizontal Fault.

A Facebook Eulogy Dora Epstein Jones I’ve spent the last 12 hours trying to figure out how to properly eulogize this man. I’m still not sure I have it but maybe that’s the point: Mango always slid out of definition. Broadly speaking, he seemed the most Marxist of the LA Heretics, quick to blame capitalism and rightly so. However, he was also deeply a formalist, if not a downright classicist. He tormented circles, grids, and columns, and yet kept them ever-present in the work. He found soft forms of pedagogy, and yet demanded the hard-work, multiple iteration ethic for his students. He loathed all forms of accumulation, hubris, and arrogance. He spent a full hour explaining to me why the garbage cans at SCI-Arc were poorly designed. He was energetic, restless, unrestrained, unapologetically artistic, and very often lol funny. I’m glad to have known him these last 25 years.

RIP Mango but you probably won’t.

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Dora Epstein Jones, Ph.D., is a theorist and teacher of architectural culture and is a Professor of Practice at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture.

To Mango Eric Owen Moss ‘An architect’s reach should exceed his grasp.

Or what’s architecture for?’

‘Time and the River’, Thomas Wolf said.

‘Drop your architecture in the river,’ Gideon said.

Time adjudicates.

‘See if it floats, From the past to the future.’

Mango floats to the future.

Mango’s promise to architecture.

Mango as architecture’s promise.

Principle as principle.

Transient the dote.

Perseverance the antidote.

The query: Not what’s new?

(And what’s not?)

But what’s new about what’s new?

Less what the profession thinks More what we think about what the profession thinks.

Less what the academy thinks.

More what we think about what the academy thinks.

Mango architecture.

Eye’s eye.

Hand’s hand.

Heart’s heart.

Mango, the method: Imagines.

Makes.

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Interrogates.

Contests.

Reimagines.

Reimagines the reimagining.

In perpetuity.

Less me vs you.

More me vs me.

Mango’s lesson: Fit and misfit?

Misfit’s a perfect fit.

Suddenly Hadrian.

Old tablets and new.

Old ain’t only old.

New ain’t always new.

The Mangurian story amends architecture’s story.

An architect’s reach should exceed her grasp.

Or what’s architecture for?

Eric Owen Moss practices architecture at his LA-based firm Eric Owen Moss Architects (EOMA). He teaches at SCI-Arc where he also served as the Director from 2002-2015.

A Note to Mary-Ann Ai Weiwei In my mind, you and Robert are always youthful, lively, constantly in search of new concepts and sensory experiences. He will never leave me, and I am grateful for having known you both.

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Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian, and activist. Ai grew up in the far northwest of China, where he lived under harsh conditions due to his father’s exile. As an activist, he has been openly critical of the Chinese Government’s stance on democracy and human rights.

Robert Mangurian: A Personal Reflection Steven Holl The architect Robert Mangurian, who left this world July 5, 2023, was a legendary teacher at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles as well as a provocative architect. I first met Robert in 1980 at a dinner organized by Billie Tsien and Tod Williams to celebrate the 1980 Progressive Architecture publication of our first built projects. A few years later, he invited me to lecture at SCI-Arc. I arrived on an economy New York-LA flight and Robert picked me up in an old Chevrolet station wagon, driving me to the lecture, after which I slept on the concrete fl oor of a storefront studio of Gary Paige. Together with Mark Mack and Morphosis, we were forging an angry rebuttal to then predominant corporate and postmodern works. Mark Mack wrote an article in The Harvard Review in 1984 entitled “Other Architecture”: “Their [Hodgetts/ Mangurian] buildings create an architecture culture expressing popular and refined values alike… not through prissy application of architectural motifs and styles but through the creation of enduring buildings standing on their own feet… addressing the issues of context with restrained articulation, celebrating architecture in an elemental, archetypical, understated and silent way.” Mark Mack had recently started Archetype Magazine and I had recently started the magazine Pamphlet Architecture with William Stout. (Robert’s partner Mary-Ann Ray would author Pamphlet Architecture 20: Seven partly underground rooms and buildings for water, ice, and midgets).

The 1980s was a heady time full of enthusiasm for change in architecture culture. My first wife, Janet Cross, worked at Studio Works Architects, Robert’s Los Angeles atelier, where she worked on huge models for James Turrell’s Roden Crater. She remembers Robert’s old white Cadillac was parked in front of the garage door when Turrell came one night to see progress on the model. (Robert was away in Rome with Mary-Ann Ray). Janet had to slide the model out under the Cadillac for Turrell.

A realization of the spectacular central circular void court of the Gagosian Gallery and House in Venice, California (1980-81) was widely published, setting Studio Works Architects in the forefront of inspiring new urban architecture. Its huge blank frame street

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facade stood as an index of the secret void within.

Years later, Robert and Mary-Ann created an amazing teaching program and studio in Beijing called B.A.S.E. I had just been invited to do my first buildings in China in Nanjing and Beijing, so I would often visit them, giving lectures at B.A.S.E. and enjoying symposium-like dinners with enthusiastic students. There was a surreal mystique to the way Robert taught architecture.

Architecture and art were an entangled continuum mixed with his strange sense of humor. Values and ideals were the serious focus.

Robert Mangurian was a rare architect and individual—a provocateur, a dedicated fabricator, and a deeply poetic teacher. We will miss his spiritual presence.

Steven Holl is an internationally recognized American architect and watercolorist at his innovative architecture and urban design practice in New York. He is a Professor at Columbia University, and in 2010 founded ‘T’ Space- a multidisciplinary arts organization in Rhinebeck, New York.

A Personal Letter from Haldenstein Peter Zumthor I feel sad that Robert has died. It felt so good to think that soon I could show to him the new LACMA building, thank him for introducing me to Los Angeles, listening to his critical comments brought forward with both intensity and subtle humor.

You know, Robert’s way of thinking and teaching opened up a new world for me. All my teaching and model building ever since was influenced largely by him. I’m so grateful that I could spend a semester with him and you and David (Gregor) at SCI-Arc, working late, having drinks at Gilbert’s on Pico. Unforgettable.

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Peter Zumthor is a Swiss architect whose work is frequently described as uncompromising and minimalist. Though managing a relatively small firm, he is the winner of the 2009 Pritzker Prize and 2013 RIBA Royal Gold Medal. His project for the new LA County Museum of Art is currently under construction.

Robert Mangurian Shelly Kappe Robert Mangurian became Chairman of the Graduate Program in 1987, and successfully held that position for ten years. During that time, he supported the European Studies Program in the SCI-Arc villa in Vico Morcote (Lugano), Switzerland by giving graduate students the opportunity to travel and study abroad, for which they received credit. Mangurian also inaugurated the popular custom of inviting guest critics from all over the world to jury the student presentations, making them a more exciting event. This has continued to the present day, and has also influenced other schools.

Shelly Kappe is an architectural historian and academic and was a founding member of SCI-Arc in 1972.

Losing a Friend Coy Howard Losing a friend is always diffi cult, and I am sad. With losing Robert, I feel we, SCI-Arc, the discipline of architecture, and in a real sense the world has lost a rarity—a man of intense commitment and passion in all areas of his life. Robert knew his gift was giving and he gave to us all, always freely, and often fiercely. Love you Robert.

Coy Howard is a multidisciplinary designer whose furniture is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Denver Art Museum. He has taught at UCLA, Otis College where he Chaired the program in Environmental Design and SCI-Arc where he served as Director of the Undergraduate Program.

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Robert’s Rules of Order Hadley Soutter Arnold Pigments. Seed packets. Cars. Obscure tools. A street lamp hung in a particular way, the shape of a chair, a slab of stone. Small plastic objects. Color fields. Vernaculars. Infrastructures. Informal urbanisms. Don’t look toward power and authority, look away from it.

Collect. Photograph. Map. Diagram. Draw. Consider, convert; tweak, transform, transmute, transmogrify.

“Gather with an eye toward making,” Robert once said.

Robert’s credo of ‘gather with an eye toward making’ unfolded at real scale in real time when he built the graduate program. We were, in part, what he gathered with an eye toward (re)making architectural education. Gather eclectic nonconforming candidates— many of us with zero experience in architecture—with a track record of critical thinking. Put them in bullpens led by architects, artists, film theorists, cabinetmakers, urbanists. Push us outside and into encounters with other sites, economies, cultures. And, together, make—document, draw, build, refine, break, refine again, replicate—not only stuff, but an educational model, together.

‘Make with an eye toward destroying’ might have been another one of his credos? Robert as we know tried to blow all of us up at one time or another—blow up our preconceptions, blow up our world views, blow up the expectations of our cultures, blow up the pretenses of our ‘profession,’ and sometimes of course he just wanted to blow us—like actually us—up: a yelling match over the Xerox machine, a heavy object thrown.

That came with Robert territory, and, as dysfunctional as it may sound in hindsight, I think many of us would say yes, that was part of the bargain. Alongside the intelligence, wit, humor, and the wizardry of his eyes and hands at work, it was well worth it. Blowing up the constructs of inherited expectations freed us to remake them, and yes, some volatility-spillover was the price of admission. And made us braver.

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The spectacular alchemy of the class, whether straight from rehab or Ivy League, camping in a van or sleeping under the desks, full of doubt, debate, persistence, swagger, humility, invention, and more persistence, remains at work 30 years out: a cohort pushing still at the boundaries of the discipline, with respect, affection, and shared if widely scattered inspiration. A cohort that was wildly critical and utterly uncynical, we believed—at SCIArc as in life—that we had skin in the game in a way that mattered, at the school and in the world.

Many of us worked outside the classroom with Robert on the mechanics of SCIArc itself. The Academic Council, created in the school’s founding documents and made up of half students and half faculty, governed. There were serious growing pains at the school’s 20-year mark: tuition going up, not enough money to offer talented capable students if we were going to poach them from the maw of more conventional schools, overhead ballooning.

With a maturing commitment to SCIArc not just surviving but enduring, work went into building the board and raising funds.

With that came the risk of drifting away from origins—the communitarian collective of students and faculty working together to set direction, drive inquiry, detonate the boundaries of discovery.

More resources might mean greater institutional longevity and broader access to any committed student regardless of ability to pay.

Those resources might also mean fatter salaries, higher overhead, more conventional “selling points” to attract those students. If so, what part(s) of SCIArc’s soul were at risk of getting sold in the bargain? It was a time of rigorous vigilance and wide participation across the student body.

Working closely with Robert and others, advocating for keeping a ‘flat’ (nonhierarchical) collaborative and affordable school, guarding against a potential future of well-resourced complacency, were formative experiences for many of us. We came away, and remain, committed to expanding access, pushing boundaries, and deliberately keeping overheads lean in our own practices and programs.

Thirty years out, many of us operate in a realm Robert’s graduate program modelled: scrappy is where invention thrives; growth for the sake of growth is not inherently meaning ful; impact is not a function of resources; it’s a function of imagination meeting need.

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Robert didn’t preach that stuff; he created it, as ethos and sensibility—in the fi eld, in the studio, and in places in between.

Hospitality was a hallmark of that ethos and sensibility. The design of events routinely punctuated curriculum and extended it.

Generosity within constraints; collective collaboration; reconfiguring everyday objects into unforgettable installations. Plywood crawfish tables in the Berkeley Street parking lot. Miles-long tables of students, alumni, faculty, and board feasting under eucalyptus trees behind the Spruce Goose building. A sun-shade sail erected for a meeting on the roof of 5454 Beethoven. Dinner and a violin atop Roccabruna tower.

All of it was indistinguishable from teaching, and a continual demonstration of an argument for a counter-education and a counter-architecture. Seek the unseen; identify its potentials; reveal an armature (build architecture only when you have to); bring food, color, people. The act of hospitality galvanized purpose; choreographed collaboration; animated design-production as dramaturgy; and renewed belief in the vital potentials, splendor even, of public space.

Recently alumni, principally of the Mangurian-led era, once again worked together to frame questions about the relationships between SCI-Arc’s resources, overhead, access, impact, and mission or ’soul.’

That work is tribute to the impact SCI-Arc had on us, with a direct lineage traceable to Robert (and Ray). May today’s students create comparable opportunities to look hard and lead critically, resetting the SCIArc table as necessary.

Before, during, and after grad school, I worked as an editor; one project was Frank Gehry’s Complete Works. I got to know FOG a bit during that process. Frank once said to me, “Mangurian is a genius trapped in a [diffi cult] personality.” (FOG used a different adjective). I thought, takes one to know one, and shared the story with Robert. Robert was delighted, eyebrows raised in elfen surprise: Really? Frank said that about me? Robert did not care at all about the [difficult] personality part; he loved that someone of FOG’s public stature saw him as a genius.

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I prefer to think of Robert as radical alchemist, still entangled in our imaginations, goading and drawing us further into inquisitive

encounter with matter and energy, history and people, gathering all experience with an eye toward making a world we actually want to live in.

And yes, we may have to blow some stuff up along the way.

Hadley Soutter Arnold, SCI-Arc Graduate Class of 1994, serves as Executive Director of the Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University. ALI’s mission is to advance design innovation at the nexus of water, energy, and climate change. She has taught at Woodbury University and at USC.

A Note to Mary-Ann Mary Miss It’s hard to imagine such a vibrant spirit no longer being of this world. Even though we have not been in touch for years, it was somehow important to me that he was out there, interacting, asking questions, reflecting on things in his very particular way.

I really enjoyed the time working together with both of you in St Louis. I especially appreciated what I saw as Robert’s bringing the world into the work while at the same time owning it in a very personal way.

It was a wonderful experience for me and has helped allow me to take on my current projects—being willing to work at the scale of the city.

Mary Miss is an American artist and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public administrators.

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Robert Heather Kurze He was one of a kind. He saw the world around him with such curiosity and enthusiasm. He found possibilities and excitement in all of it, and he taught us to do the same.

No one has had a more profound impact on my life than Robert.

He showed me how to see for which I have always been grateful.

Rome, December 1976 Walking back from dinner to the American Academy in Rome, both drunk, Robert stopped in front a parked car. He launched into an explanation of the importance of the design of this car.

Something about how the joints between panels didn’t coincide with the joints between forms.

UCLA Studio, Summer 1976, about 3am.

While working on the fabric scrim that was to be part of the up-coming Venice Biennale, Robert made a loud noise and declared it was the sound of the standards dropping.

Rose Ave. Studio, Summer 1976 While building hundreds of individual Bristol board models, at maybe 1” to 20’ scale, later to be covered in Bondo, of the buildings in downtown Minneapolis for the Walker Art Center’s “The River: Images of the Mississippi, Plans for the development of Nicollet Island,” Robert told me “If there’s a slow way to do it, you’ll find it.”

American Academy in Rome Robert endlessly saying, “Call collect, it’s cheaper.”

UCLA Studio, Spring 1978 Robert, speaking as my thesis advisor, “It could be good, it could be bad. Depends on how it looks.”

SCI-Arc 1987

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On a card for me that Ruth passed around when my son was born, “Remember, the chance at great architecture comes maybe once in a lifetime. Babies are born every day.”

American Academy in Rome, Spring 1977 Robert came bounding into the studio declaring he had bought a trunk full of Lancia carburetors to take home, “I’m going to make a killing!” And then something about shipping costs.

Rose Ave. Studio, Summers 1976,1977 Unoffi cial design competition, best lunch spread and best dish stacking, between summer workers shortly before our afternoon swim.

Venezia Mestre Station, January 1977 While waiting overnight in the station café for the UCLA students to arrive, assembling a packet for each student including among other things a little gridded notebook, a gettone, a Falk map of Rome, and a tin of Coccoina paste.

Heather Kurze is a practicing Architect and an Instructor at Pasadena City College in Visual Arts and Media Studies. She has taught at SCI-Arc and served as the Dean of the School of Art and Design at Woodbury University. She is a Graduate of the UCLA Graduate Program in Architecture, Class of 1978.

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In Memory of Robert Mangurian in New York Lester Walker In the late 60’s, Rob and I had so much in common that we couldn’t help but be best friends. We had our college degrees; we were founding partners in our new architecture firm – Studio Works; we were fellow adjunct professors at the CCNY School of Architecture, we both had beautiful baby boys, we both were involved in failing marriages, and we both lived in Greenwich Village, NYC, within walking distance of our office. We usually walked home together after work, we always took the subway together to CCNY and we spent most holidays and weekends together. I’m proud to say that I was there at the beginning of this unique person’s career.

Our office had been started by Craig Hodgetts and me just after architecture school when we were offered a beautiful space on Union Square complete with desks, files, typewriters, even phones, by our mentor at Yale, the great architect, James Stirling. (He was wrapping up his work in NYC and wanted to give us a good start). Within a year, we expanded by adding Rob and Keith Goddard as new partners and immediately changed our name to Studio Works.

Thus the story of our office began.

Our eleven-story building was wonderful – suitable for a televi¬sion sit-com. The NY Communist Party was on the third floor and a modeling agency was on the Second. Saul Steinberg, the famous graphic artist was living on the eleventh floor and Andy Warhol’s Factory was on the fi fth. We were right in the middle on the seventh floor. This was the era of Warhol’s super stars so we took great pride in knowing the likes of Cherry Vanilla, Ultra Violet, Joe Dallesandro, and, of course, Andy. Our tiny elevator was always a thrill.

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One morning Rob and I were in the elevator on our way up to our office when we realized we were ascending with Paul Morrisey, Warhol’s film guy. So, Rob says, “Paul, when are you going to

put us in one of your films’? Paul looks disgusted and says, “Well what do you guys do”? Rob says, “We’re architects”. Paul looks even more disgusted and says, “That’s too boring”. In a few months, FLESH was released, taking NYC by storm and it’s star, Joe Dallesandro, was an architect! The next time we caught Paul in the elevator, Rob says “Paul, WTF”?. Paul says, “We needed him to have a boring job”.

The next morning Rob showed up at the offce with a ratty AM radio that he lowered by its cord out of our window dropping it two stories, to the Warhol floor, and blasted the worst elevator music ever heard (radio station WPAT). They couldn’t get to it because it was too far out. The music was really loud, really awful and they couldn’t stop it. Rob was happy.

The CCNY Architecture School was located in an old glass and concrete block building west of the campus on Broadway and 133rd street. Because it was so “rustic” and beat up, it made for a great place to “experiment”. Rob and I as adjunct professors, took full advantage of this by having our students build full scale mock-ups of their projects in our classroom spaces. We used any recyclable light weight material you could imagine: cardboard, Homosote, EMT electric tubing, thin wood studs, carpet tubes, etc. We were both very active in our teaching to say the least. We filled the building with our student’s work, all the time.

As an example, at that time a typical Walker project that Rob loved and advised on, was to have my students design a lightweight, pre-fab bridge to span a kiddie swimming pool. Each student was to carry their bridge parts to the pool, assemble it, walk over it and then take it apart. The morning of the jury, we placed the pool in the school’s large entry lobby, filled it with water and a hungry piranha fi sh which we had purchased at the local Woolworths.

Practically the whole school showed up after hearing what was happening. What a learning experience! Every kind of structure you could imagine spanned the pool, one after another, and when one failed, it was as exciting as exciting could be. By the way, the best bridge was constructed by a student in a few seconds with three 2x8’s and three pegs, before he walked over it, picked up his girlfriend and carried her back over it again to a roaring standing ovation from the 150 on-lookers who had gathered there.

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Rob and I loved our teaching at CCNY and tended to support and embolden each other during our entire time there. We were always controversial but, for the most part, the administration tolerated us, yet took pride in the aesthetic our students created. One year in 1969 we got all excited about the possibility of building a “city” with our students and their recycled structures. We designed it to last a week and it was to be built on donated land near a small town in the Catskill Mountains. We thought it was such a good idea that we had our students make posters which we sent to all the architecture schools in the USA. We called it “Whiz Bang Quick City”.

It was a great success, with over 1500 architecture students from all over the country descending on a 20-acre grassy property, building a temporary “city” in a day, living there, exchanging ideas with a TV station (WBQC), 2 radio stations and a multitude of events in inflatables, domes, space frames and other student built structures. Everybody joined in a parade at the end of the week.

We dismantled in a day and left the land as we had found it. To us this was architectural education as it should be in the 60’s and 70’s. Hands on and fun!

At this point, I should say that Rob’s students loved him. Let’s say that again, “Rob’s students loved him”!

Looking back now, it would have been obvious that he was going to be a great success in any educational endeavor. His energy, his unique intelligence and humor, and his warmth would serve him well. Meanwhile back at our offi ce, we always seemed to have work and we did take this very seriously. We seemed to put everything we had into each of our projects. Keith worked primarily on graphics, and Craig, Rob and I were usually involved in all phases of the work. We cared about one another. We developed clever rules where each of us had to respect the other’s ideas. We were really young, filled with our own egos, and satisfied that we were having some success. It seemed like anything we did, individually or collectively, was published and/or received some award. As a group, the four of us stayed together for about five years. Eventually we grew apart. However, our love and respect for one another never changed.

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In 1980 Rob got me invited to UCLA, where he was teaching, to lecture about my work. We used this opportunity to spend a week together—I had never been to LA! We had a great time experiencing his life and the city. The last day of my stay, he decided to give me a “tour”. We piled into his 1960 aluminum Lancia Flaminia convertible (he had two—one for driving and one for parts) and began what was to become a memorable landmark trip for me. Beginning at the tombstone of Rudolph Valentino with all its lipstick smears, and the “I told you I was sick” mon¬ument, we continued to the Marilyn Monroe crypt. We saw the “Hollywood” sign on our way to the Frank Gehry House, then we pulled up to the new home of Charles Moore where we were lucky enough to get a personal house tour by the great architect himself. We ended the trip with Chinese food at a place (I think) called the New Moon where an over excited Telly Savalas entered yelling “Who loves ya baby,” to a resounding standing ovation by everyone in the restaurant. I looked at Rob. He said, “That’s the end of the tour”.

What a memory! What a wonderful human being he was.

Lester R. Walker is an American architect and author based in Woodstock New York. He is a former adjunct professor of architecture at City College of New York. Among other accomplishments, Les Walker was a pioneer in the tiny house movement.

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Cars, Shop Works, Music Michael Gruber CARS The Fiat Broke Down.

The red Fiat 131, laden down low with 5 students and tons of shovels, brooms, measuring tapes and lunch coolers, bottomed out over some metal obstacle at one of the back gates at Hadrian’s Vil¬la during our entry for a days-worth of work. We all were to work there until the afternoon then drive the two Fiat’s up to Bologna for a short field trip to see old fortress farmhouses and Bologna City. But now the red Fiat’s muffler was torn off, and worse, oil was leaking from the oil pan. Robert and I left the students at the Villa to measure a building planned for that day while we set off into town with the Fiat to look for a repair shop.

We did find a muffler shop open and found a way to ask them to repair the car. They said they could do the muffler, but not the leaking oil pan. Being the clever and resourceful person that Robert was, we discussed a possible long shot: I would go off to a nearby store and pick up a couple bars of soap. Thinking that oil and water -read that as ‘soap’ as well—doesn’t naturally mix, we rubbed the bar of soap over the open crack in that oil pan clogging the crack until it was jammed full of the soap. Voila! No more leaking! With the muffler fixed and all our fingers crossed for hope about the soap, we set off back to the Villa. There we checked the car and still no more leaking. With that good sign - as well as the usual ideal of adventure—we all decided to chance the 400 kilometer drive up to Bologna. Checking the car at every exit to see if our luck would hold, we finally made it to Bologna without losing oil at the bottom of the car. The soap was holding! This luck continued for several days of travel until the team returned back another 400 kilometers to the Ronciglione home base.

This was classic, clever Roberto.

SHOP WORKS

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The vinyl tile kicked back.

The sliver of vinyl fl oor tile decided it wanted to be a part of

Robert and shot backwards from the table saw at great velocity, and straight into Robert’s stomach. Any projectile shooting back from a table saw is dangerous and this sharp, thin piece of vinyl floor tile cut him like a dagger would. Robert was taken back but did not show the team working there that anything happened.

Except for the blood stain on his white shirt. To him it was more important to keep the team working on that St Louis project down at Hodgetts & Fung’s Studio space that late night. There was a schedule to maintain, and buildings to model and build; art to make. Anyway, who would ever make a model out of colorful vinyl floor tiles? He would.

This was classic, inventive Roberto.

MUSIC Houses in Motion.

Work was never work while working with Robert because the Studio was always filled with music. His entire life was involved with music which seemed to transcend into the work and life he made. From his early performances in Bluegrass up to the latest neat rock alternative song to listen to. From Earl Shruggs to Talking Heads. From David Bowie to Brian Eno. Sometimes, while working, the music would loop over and over and over again.

Was this his ‘casino-esque’ method for us not to notice how time was flying by? No. The type of music he selected and the manner of playing it was all calculated to help stimulate all listening to it as a ‘parallel’ to the work that he wanted to get done. Listening to Harry Dean Stanton as Travis Henderson in the soundtrack to the film ‘Paris Texas’ go through his relationship narration was a highlight for Robert. Certain things like that would hit home for him and find a way to become the environment of his life. And for others.

This was classic, endearing Roberto.

Michael Gruber is an Architect at StudioMIG, a longtime collaborator at Studio Works, and was the Director of the Richard Meier and Partners Model Studio for the Getty Museum and Center. Class of 1986 SCI-Arc Graduate Program.

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Dispatch from Hong Kong Gary Paige I’m pretty sure the first time I saw Robert Mangurian was at the SCI-Arc Berkeley St. campus, in the alley between the main building and the graduate annex. He was setting up a model building shop for SCI-Arc. It’s a memorable image: a guy dressed in a white shirt and white pants… covered in saw dust. This was probably 1981 or 1982. SCI-Arc was still a relatively small community of adventurers, misfits, and nonconformists. Even so, the guy in white made a curious impression. The word was that he was from back east, played the mandolin, had a studio in the same building as Warhol’s Factory, was a partner in Studio Works, and fortunately for many of us, came to SCI-Arc to teach and run the graduate program.

I’m not exactly certain how it happened, but it wasn’t long before I was enlisted (along with Rick Cortez and other students) to build a 150-foot-long wall in the graduate annex to display student work. This would be the first of many hands-on projects that Robert created at SCI-Arc that would have a lasting influence on the ethos and culture of the school as well as many of us that were students or teachers at the time.

Architecture and making were synonymous for Robert—models, drawings, furniture, books, and buildings. And along with his partner Mary-Ann Ray and their students, he never missed an opportunity to roll his sleeves up and get in the trenches to work, whether it was building desks for the incoming graduate students, surveying the structures at Hadrian’s Villa, organizing the thesis reviews at SCI-Arc, building a memorable exhibition, hosting a late night BBQ, co-founding BASE Beijing, or supporting young instructors with teaching assignments and SCI-Arc-related building projects.

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Robert was an architect’s architect and a teacher’s teacher. His commitment to architecture and education is legendary and an inspiration to generations of students that had the opportunity to study with him. His approach was more of a collaboration than that of a master architect. He was a partner in research and truly enjoyed working with others, and his manner of teaching and

practice reflected that. At the same time, he was someone with clearly defined interests and a point of view and generously offered them to all that were interested.

When a team of us were working on the Freight Depot building, Robert made a point of sharing his knowledge, experience, and resources with us to make the project a better one. He made certain the various SCI-Arc constituencies and interests were represented, attended weekly construction meetings, recommended consultants, and was always there to provide advice and make suggestions about the design. Later, when I started running the USC China study abroad program, Robert and Mary-Ann shared their contacts, course material, and hosted a tour of Caochangdi, Ai Weiwei’s studio, and some rural villages they were working in for the USC students when we were last there.

A remarkably unique and principled individual, architecture and teaching were a calling for Robert. He lived what he taught and taught by example, giving his knowledge and insights generously to others and without conditions. That is, perhaps, the greatest gift a teacher can give and one that I’m truly grateful to Robert for. He will be missed.

Gary Paige is a principal of GPS [Gary Paige Studio], a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary design firm with a diverse port¬folio ranging in scale and media from art installations and architec¬ture to furniture and graphic design. He is a Professor of Practice in Architecture at the University of Southern California.

Class of 1980 SCI-Arc Graduate Program where he also taught and served as the Director of the Undergraduate Program. His Studio designed the renovation of the Freight Yard Building that is home to SCI-Arc to this day.

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“let’s” William Hogan In 1988 I was a 27-year-old Admission Officer—and former client of course, as we all were—at Impact Drug and Alcohol Residential Treatment Center in Pasadena, CA. Impact, like SCI-Arc, was started in the early 1970s by a small group of true believers who were out to change the discipline and with it their own lives. And over the last 50 years both institutions have indeed risen to the prominence and acclaim they command today. Nor does one take those visionary successes as mere coincidence, rather feedback-loop evidence that, as diffi cult as it can surely be to live in Los Angeles, we are citizens of one of the world’s great City-States.

In the late 1980s Impact was growing signifi cantly and Jim Stillwell the Executive Director and my first Boss and Mentor, seeing opportunity, offered to send several of us to Grad School to get MFCC or LCSW licenses. One of my Admissions Office colleagues took the offer and is a successful Psychologist in the Bay Area to this day.

I said I would seriously consider it. I had been at Impact over 4 years, loved working a powerfully human-centered, high stakes, high reward profession, and loved my Impact Family. The internal dialog began.

It so happened that an old friend visiting from back east suggested a road trip to the Salk Institute. We headed south in my Caltrans Orange 1974 Dodge Ramcharger, AKA the Open Container.

By the time we gained the middle of the Salk’s travertine plaza something in my hot-rodder’s heart dropped into place, and I thought, wow, if this was Architecture, I’m pretty sure I would rather fail at it than succeed at something else.

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Never - ever - known for alacrity, two days later I was up those very code-questionable stairs on Berkeley talking to Registrar Lisa Russo.

Architecture school is of course notoriously difficult but I had learned something quite powerful about myself at Impact. I knew in my heart that if I could get clean, complete treatment and the staff training program, then stay clean on the street, I could do absolutely anything.

I was interviewed by Tom Buresh, our esteemed MC in this Celebration. We toured the Graduate Studios. It was the middle of the semester. Semi-chaos, searching for... Again, a Clarity. “I belong here.” I’d had that experience once before in my life, 4 years previous, when I arrived at Impact...

One should be so doubly-blessed.

SCI-Arc was the only school to which I applied.

I crafted my application portfolio in the Impact Facilities Shop.

It was a freakout of polished aluminum, rosewood, leather, and brass which I as recall Tom accurately characterized as deranged, and am certain earned me admission to SCI-Arc, more than any of the material contained within.

When in the Summer of 1990 it came time to say goodbye, the Senior’s Counselor’s Office was the place to be. Near the end of the party Jim Stillwell presented me with the biggest and best drafting set you could get. German, of course, which I used throughout grad school. In a class of 40 it was like “go ask Bill, he’s got one of those bitchin’ beam compasses…” That’s right, peasant!

Many years later I designed a building on the Impact Campus...

Jim died a month after Robert.

One knows now that what I responded to so viscerally the day I set foot in that SCI-Arc studio was, fundamentally, Robert’s vision.

Crucially shaped by it in time, now forever. An experience shared with so many.

Nor was SCI-Arc a one-off. Rather, the organizing principle itself: Studio Works-early-mid-late, SCI-Arc Woodshop, Atelier Italia,

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Getty Model Shop, BASE Beijing... all of a whole. Aligned.

Layered.

Johns ( Jasper), stacking numbers. Eameses, bending plywood.

Never one for tightly executed plans, after mangling a third-year studio I took a Semester off. The reset was expansive, connecting me to a new group of classmates now colleagues and a summer spent at Atelier Italia. I arrived early, keen to get to work. Robert, Mary-Ann and I jump in the Fiat 131. The DO LIST: A) Alfa Parts. B) Prosciutto.

Holy Crap I freaking LOVE the way architecture happens over here!

Thesis cometh, bringing with it the irresistible (to some of us) siren song of a colored plaster model. I need to work straight through Christmas to pull it off. Who to enlist? Ah, of course. Zed. Muslim. He flies in from NYC on Christmas Eve. We pick up In-N-Out on the way back to SCI-Arc. Robert, my Thesis Advisor, checks on me. I am found working diligently on the underside of an elevated 4’ x 14’ model base. He wants a word above deck.

“You know, Bill, I think you are happiest when you are making.”

I’m too exhausted to use words, so he hastens to add “Oh, me too...”

Thank god.

However, he does secure Zed’s promise that henceforth I will only be allowed to work on things that are visible to other human beings. Although as anyone who has seen the UNDERSIDE of the Getty Site Models knows, that is pretty much the pot calling the kettle black.

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I started working at Studio Works straight out of SCI-Arc. It was all tooling, all the time: The Getty Model Shop slipped, unaltered, between mezzanine columns from the 1940’s at Hughes Aircraft Playa Vista with 1-1/2” clear. Meant to be.

Early on I was invited to interview at a storied local corporate firm.

Went, took a pass. The die was struck.

A big believer in Architecture and an even bigger believer in people - aka users of architecture - Robert guided the revelation of myself to myself. Prickly as f-k at times. Who cares. Not me.

Touchstone Roberto-isms: 1) “Empty the trash.” (Provided you’ve actually been working, it’s yours) 2) “Strive for work that is simply stated, and strongly felt.”

(Agreed) 3) “I can’t think for you.” (Scary) 4) “What are you up to?” (Scariest) Of course it was through Robert that I met the two other great mentors of my life-- now close collaborators and friends-- MaryAnn Ray, and Structural Engineer Gordon Polon.

I was engineering for Gordon when the call came in. “Bill, it’s showtime.”

We sealed my return-to-Studio Works deal (the first of a series) with dinner at Musso and Frank, put on my bucket list after the fact.

Showtime produced the first ground up high school that Los Angeles Unified had built in a generation. We were the smallest design team (so good to be in touch for this Celebration) working the largest Prop BB project. Emphasis large. 900-plus 3’ x 4’ sheets set, and something like 2500 plan check corrections. Stamping that job out at DSA a personal Everest and source of unshakable confidence to this day.

Equally important to Studio Works praxis were, of course, cars.

Preferably Italian, though OG Caddys good too, particularly if the suspension was a bit tired: Dude, is that thing bagged???

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Compressors in the trunk?

The 1967 Maserati Mexico, our fever dream... oversize pistons CNC’d at JE in OC, NASCAR-style. Pitted brake calipers plated with chrome hard-facing and centerless ground back to spec.

Twin gas tanks to LA Galvanizing in Huntington Park—just down Alameda from my thesis site—that in turn of course re-quired a visit to an aging Marlowe Mars, owner of L & F In¬dustries, Huntington Park, and known to Robert as the maker of the main entrance doors to NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain during the Cold War and much more recently the ring bearing and superstructure for the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Gra¬ham, AZ, the subject-program of a recent 2GA Studio (requiring a movable-feast-whole-class-road-trip, naturally), that veritable heart of the SCI-Arc Graduate curriculum, new teaching careers launching-- Roger, Lorcan- Rome Prize colleagues tapped—Pel¬li (Pellegrino D’Acierno)—later, let’s paint the expresso machine Ferrari Red - let’s make a stressed skin roof for a garden shed at King’s Road house- let’s assemble it on a 4 ton black granite surface plate from the Spruce Goose building- let’s put micarta on everything- let’s use greenhouse framing to make that canopysketch it up the best you can I’ve got a really good engineer we’ll go talk to- let’s use VHB to assemble the Fin-Ply tables- let’s acid etch the windows in stainless - let’s make the Montessori model in finger-jointed-beech- let’s salvage unobtainably beautiful vintage vertical grain fir from the Hughes machine shop to build our new staircase downtown- let’s save every piece- let’s collect the world- let’s adore the world- let’s- let’s- let’s...

Parts of a whole.

I miss you, Robert. So much...

William Hogan practices Architectural and Structural Design at William Hogan Studio and at the Offi ce of Gordon Polon Consulting Engineers. As a long-time collaborator at Studio Works served as Senior Project Manager and Partner. Class of 1994/95 SCI-Arc Graduate Program

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Plan of Hadrian’s Villa Panel 2 of 6 1781

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A Note on the Fonts

Bembo is named for Manutius's first publication with it, a small 1496 book by the poet and cleric Pietro Bembo. The italic is based on handwritten work by Giovanni Antonio Tagliente, a calligrapher who worked as a printer in the 1520s, after the time of Manutius and Griffo.

Designed during the Renaissance by Francesco Griffo, who has been recently described as the father of the occidental typography, the Bembo represents the victory of movable type printing in the “battle of beauty” with the hand-written letters of the amanuensis.

The Bembo typeface was cut by Francesco Griffo, a Venetian goldsmith who had become a punchcutter and worked for revered printer Aldus Manutius. Being a punchcutter meant that Griffo spent his days punching out the shape of a typeface into steel.

Futura is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Paul Renner and released in 1927. It was designed as a contribution on the New Frankfurt-project. It is based on geometric shapes, especially the circle, similar in spirit to the Bauhaus design style of the period.

Described as “the typeface of our time” and “a face representing the new typography of the European avant-garde”, Futura was released to stand out against the sans-serif and more elaborate, handwritten-style typefaces that were popular at the time in order to promote simplicity, modernism and industrialization. It was the first font to go to the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission.

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Acknowledgements

Oversight: Beth Gibb, SCI-Arc Class of 1989, Atelier Italia with Mary-Ann Ray

Alumni of SCI-Arc + Atelier Italia+Studio Works: Robert Adams, SCI-Arc Class of 1994 + Studio Works Peter Arnold, SCI-Arc Class of 1994 + Studio Works Samson Chua, SCI-Arc Class of 2002 Kai Cole, SCI-Arc Class of 2002 Laura Cowan, SCI-Arc Class of 2002 Catherine Garrison, SCI-Arc Class of 2002 Michael Gruber, SCI-Arc Class of 1986 + Studio Works Olive Gruber William Hogan, III, SCI-Arc Class of 1994/95, Atelier Italia + Studio Works Hisako Ichiki, SCI-Arc Class of 2002 Liza Kerrigan, Atelier Italia 1987 Debbie Mackler SCI-Arc Class of 1994 Cathy Pack, SCI-Arc Class of 2002 + Studio Works Iris Regn, SCI-Arc Class of 1994 Poonam Sharma, SCI-Arc Class of 2002 + Studio Works Hector Solis, Studio Works Evelyn Tickle, SCI-Arc Class of 1994, Atelier Italia Anastasia Tomakova, SCI-Arc Class of 2020 Esmerelda Ward, SCI-Arc Class of 2002 + Studio Works Beatrice Wong, Otis College

SCI-Arc Leadership and Staff: Hernán Díaz Alonso, Director and CEO of SCI-Arc Yasil Navarro, Public Programs Coordinator Phil Logan, A/V Manager and Team Marija Radisavljevic, Art Director and Team Emil Tatevossian, Facilities Director and Team Gabriel Hernandez, Maintenance

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