SCIArc Magazine No.5 (Fall 2012)

SCI-FALL

2012

1

DINERO Eric Owen Moss

3

Public Programs

5

Faculty Profile: OYLER WU Dora Epstein Jones

7 GRADUATION PAVILION COMPETITION 11 Graduate Thesis 2012

Elena Manferdini 12 UNDERGRADUATE THESIS

PROJECT 2012

Devyn Weiser 17 Alumni News and Events 21 class notes

Comfortable being uncomfortable as an asset.

Institutional fragility as a virtue.

No long term debt.

No bureaucracy.

No tenure.

SCI-Arc travels light.

SCI-Arc has always considered itself an institutional experiment.

The SCI-Arc adventure has a price in coin and in content. Coin remains low; content high. We acknowledge both, prioritize both, but we don’t conflate the two.

Low tuition is an absolute.

That SCI-Arc fiscal pro forma is premised on a social and political aspiration to democratize the SCI-Arc student constituency.

SCI-Arc’s fiscal paradigm mandates low tuition to facilitate the broadest student access.

“There arrives finally the moment when money tires of being life’s servant, and makes itself life’s tyrant.” […with apologies to Oswald Spengler]

DINERO

But SCI-Arc rejects the premise that the measure of the value of

SCI-Arc provides financial assistance in increasing number to an increasing number of applicants.

The pedagogy is to make the architects who make the pedagogy.

No enduring ideological allegiances.

Comfortable being uncomfortable as an asset.

Institutional fragility as a virtue.

No long term debt.

No bureaucracy.

No tenure.

SCI-Arc travels light.

SCI-Arc has always considered itself an institutional experiment.

The SCI-Arc adventure has a price in coin and in content. Coin remains low; content high. We acknowledge both, prioritize both, but we don’t conflate the two.

Low tuition is an absolute.

That SCI-Arc fiscal pro forma is premised on a social and political aspiration to democratize the SCI-Arc student constituency.

SCI-Arc’s fiscal paradigm mandates low tuition to facilitate the broadest student access.

“There arrives finally the moment when money tires of being life’s servant, and makes itself life’s tyrant.” […with apologies to Oswald Spengler]

3

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

About Public Programs Lectures and discussions are webcast live at sciarc.edu/live.

RECENT

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.

Criticism, Architecture, and the Age of Twitter Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair, New York September 19

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

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.

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.

Lecture Series

Paul Goldberger

Lecture Series

PETER ZELLNER

Practices & Projects Principal, Zellnerplus; Faculty, SCIFI Coordinator, SCI-Arc Los Angeles September 26 Lecture Series

Benjamin Shapiro & Brian Whitman

The Donkey vs. the Elephant Ben Shapiro: Editor-At-Large, Breitbart News; Radio Host, KRLA 870, Los Angeles Brian Whitman: Talk Radio Personality, KRLA 870, Los Angeles October 3 Lecture Series

Patrik SchUmacher Parametric Semiology Partner, Zaha Hadid Architects, London October 10 Symposium

Angewandte Competition Why Bother?

Jeffrey Kipnis, Wolf Prix and Patrik Schumacher October 11 SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition

Zaha Hadid Architects Pleated Shell Structures October 12–December 2

SCI-Arc Library Gallery Exhibition

SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion Competition October 19–December 2 Lecture Series

heather townsend & Casey Jones

Paul Goldberger, Criticism, Architecture, and the Age of Twitter, Lecture

Lecture Series

Jimenez Lai

BS Leader, Bureau Spectacular; Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago November 7 Lecture Series

Sylvia Lavin

Everything Loose Will Land Director, Critical Studies, UCLA, Los Angeles November 14 Lecture Series

Neil Denari

Facticity Principal, NMDA; Professor, UCLA, Los Angeles November 24 Symposium

Centre Pompidou Exhibition

“Advances in Architectural Geometry” at Centre Pompidou, Paris Andrew Atwood, Herwig Baumgartner, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Marcelyn Gow, Florencia Pita, Peter Testa November 30

Building Democracy Heather Townsend: Deputy Director, U.S. Department of State Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations Casey Jones: Director of Design Excellence, U.S. Department of State Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations October 24

Zaha Hadid Architects, Pleated Shell Structures, SCI-Arc Gallery

4

OUTSIDE SCI-ARC

Lecture Series

13th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale Common Ground

Architecture and its Future February 20, 7pm

Exhibition

August 29–November 25

Exhibition showcasing 69 projects by architects, photographers, artists, critics and scholars. The show featured 57 architects representing 26 countries across 6 continents. Many responded with original proposals and installations expressly created for this Biennale, involving in their projects other colleagues with whom they share a common ground. SCI-Arc participants included Eric Owen Moss, Peter Zellner, Florencia Pita, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Elena Manferdini, Tom Wiscombe, Marcelo Spina and John Enright.

Symposium

Advances in Architectural Geometry Centre Pompidou, Paris September 27–September 30

Symposium presenting theoretical works and practices linked to new geometrical development applicable to architecture. SCI-Arc was among 15 world-renowned architecture schools invited to submit a video presentation dedicated to recent developments in architectural geometry and computation. Directed by Herwig Baumgartner and produced by Ryan Tyler Martinez (M.Arch ’13), the video featured Eric Owen Moss, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Andrew Atwood, Herwig Baumgartner Marcelyn Gow, Elena Manferdini, Florencia Pita, Marcelo Spina, Peter Testa, Devyn Weiser and Tom Wiscombe.

UPCOMING Lecture Series

Dwayne Oyler & Jenny Wu Lineworks January 16, 7pm

SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition

Marcelyn Gow Aqueotrope January 18–March 3 Lecture Series

Pier Vittorio Aureli Theory and Ethos January 23, 7pm Lecture Series

David Ruy

Returning to (Strange) Objects January 30, 7pm Lecture Series

andrew zago An Awkward Position February 6, 7pm Lecture Series

Tom Gilmore The City Chair February 13, 7pm

Ben Van Berkel Lecture Series

Eric Owen Moss

The Man from the Country Where No One Else Lives 2013 Raimund Abraham Lecture March 6, 7pm

SCI-Arc Leadership Director Eric Owen Moss Director of Academic Affairs Hsinming Fung Graduate Programs Chair Hernan Diaz Alonso Undergraduate Program Chair John Enright

Lecture Series

Chief Operating Officer Jamie Bennett

Extrastatecraft March 13, 7pm

Board of Trustees

Keller Easterling Lecture Series

Tod Machover

Mediated Music: Robotic Operas, Guitar Hero, Collaborative Symphonies and Beyond March 20, 7pm Lecture Series

Todd Gannon Prelude to the Confederacy March 27, 7pm

SCI-Arc Gallery & Library Exhibition

A Confederacy of Heretics: The Architecture Gallery, Venice 1979 March 29–July 7, 2013

Part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., an initiative of the Getty. The exhibition and public symposium are supported by grants from the Getty Foundation. Sustaining support is provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Vinyl Institute. Additional support is provided by the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

Lecture Series

Ingeborg Rocker

Recursions: Aesthetics & Logics of Computation April 3, 7pm SCI-Arc Exhibition

7th Annual Spring Show April 20–May 12

OUTSIDE SCI-ARC Exhibitions

Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. April–July 2013

Designed to continue the momentum of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945– 1980, this collaboration brings together several local arts institutions for a wideranging look at the postwar built environment of the city as a whole, from its famous residential architecture to its vast freeway network, revealing the city’s development and ongoing impact in new ways. Comprised of nine exhibitions and accompanying programs and events in and around Los Angeles, including the Getty, LACMA, MOCA, Hammer Museum, A+D Museum, the MAK Center and SCI-Arc.

Chairman Jerry Neuman Vice-Chair Joe Day (M.Arch ’94) SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss Secretary Tom Gilmore Faculty Representative Andrew Zago Alumni Representative Nerin Kadribegovic (M.Arch ’03) Student Representative Paul Andrzejczak (B.Arch ’13) Board Members at Large Rick Carter William Fain Anthony Ferguson Frank O. Gehry Russell L. Goings William Gruen Scott Hughes (M.Arch ‘97) Thom Mayne Merry Norris Greg Otto Kevin Ratner Abby Scheuer (M.Arch ‘93) Nick Seierup (B.Arch ‘79) Abby Sher Ted Tanner Honorary Members Elyse Grinstein Ray Kappe Michael Rotondi (B.Arch ‘79) Ian Robertson

5

The Warp and Weft of Oyler Wu Faculty Profile Dora Epstein Jones

Dora Epstein Jones is a theorist and teacher of architectural culture. Her work mainly focuses on the discipline of architecture, and includes interrogations on the discipline’s boundaries and operations through examinations of tectonics, practice and pedagogy, as well as (generally external) concerns such as gender, sex, mobility and criticality. She has published in Arch’it, ArcCa and other architectural journals, as well as written essays for publications by Office dA, UCLA Architecture and anthologies on gender and sex in architecture. Dr. Jones is a long-time collaborator with Jones, Partners: Architecture, and the former coordinator of Cultural Studies at SCI-Arc. Dr. Jones has been a professor at SCI-Arc for over 8 years and has taught many of the courses in the core undergraduate and graduate curricula. Jones holds a doctorate in Architecture and Urban Design and a Master in Urban Planning, both from UCLA. Dwayne Oyler currently heads the Undergraduate Thesis Design Studio at SCI-Arc. In 2000, Oyler, along with Jenny Wu, established the office of Oyler Wu Collaborative. He has also worked in the office of Toshiko Mori Architect, and collaborated with Lebbeus Woods on numerous projects.

Previously, Oyler taught at the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture in Vico Morcote, Switzerland, and in the Thesis Design Studio program at Cooper Union in New York City. He was awarded the SOM Prize and Travel Fellowship for Architecture, Design and Urban Design in 1996.

Oyler received a Bachelor of Architecture from Kansas State University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Jenny Wu currently teaches first year design studio at SCI-Arc. Prior to establishing Oyler Wu Collaborative, she was a project architect at various offices, including Architecture Research Office and Gluckman Mayner Architects in New York. From 2001 to 2002, Wu taught design studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She was awarded the Clifford Wong Prize in Housing Design while at Harvard and was a SOM Prize and Travel Fellowship finalist in 2001.

On any given day, this last summer, and the summer before, at the north end of the SCI-Arc parking lot, where the heat intensifies and swirls, you could see them both, in coveralls and work gloves, building the Graduation Pavilion. And, on any given fall day, during studio time, or seminar time, they are there too—one in a crisp cotton shirt and pressed suit; the other a knockout with beautifullypainted nails. It’s hard to believe they are the same people.

But, this is Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, the husbandand-wife team behind the Oyler Wu Collaborative. And this is precisely what they do. As architects, they are also practitioners, educators, fabricators and builders. After having received their M.Arch degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, they came to California where they have focused on two main scales of building: small-scale installations which they design and fabricate themselves, and large-scale projects in Asia and the United States.

They draw, they weld, they design and they teach—and they work easily across this spectrum.

Together they began their firm, the Oyler Wu Collaborative, in 2004. If the name sounds more like a jazz ensemble than an architectural firm, it befits a sensibility of experimental fusion that has lived happily in music for almost a century. And, like music, this collaborative fusion extends beyond the roles they play and into the work itself. They are widely recognized for their “experimental work,” and it is precisely this attitude of fusion that has brought their work to the Beijing Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the London Festival of Architecture. The studios they lead range from the very hands-on 1A “design/build” studio to the more theoretical and analytical Undergraduate Thesis, while their seminars may range from graduate-level delineation and drawing to a broad survey of culture and change in China. Dwayne Oyler also co-led the building effort for the SCI-Arc/Caltech entry into the 2011 Solar Decathlon, once again marking a unique versatility for this firm.

Despite the confusion that fusion and versatility might entail, Oyler Wu has a very strong design sensibility. They invent and elaborate basic material conditions into what may be termed “fusion tectonics” or to be more descriptive, weaving. In weaving, two or more sets of threads are interlaced; the warp threads are those that would be held in the loom at parallel lines, while the weft is shuttled through the warp (or heddle) on a pick. While most weaves are interlaced at right angles due to the construction of most looms, the fact is that both sets of threads are tectonically flexible. The warp threads might float, as in a silk weave, the weft may be made up of many different thicknesses and types and thread as in artisanal weaving, the battening may be very tight or very loose. Weaving therefore has an endless set of effects possible. The only ordination is that, once woven, the threads form a piece of cloth that no longer need the loom to remain whole.

At SCI-Arc, this sensibility has been demonstrated by two projects: Live Wire and Netscape. Live Wire, their installation for the SCI-Arc Gallery, was essentially a stair composed of metal mesh and tubing that connected the floor of the gallery to the catwalk above. A straightforward approach to the assembly would prove the mesh in need of stiffening and the tubing in need of bracing. Their assembly, however, used the two components in mutual support of each other. The geometry of the tubing, welded together, provided vertical and lateral support, while also reinforcing the outline for the mesh. Live Wire was not simply a stair—it was a continuous assembly of structure, handrail, tread, riser, and stringer in a single symphonic burst.

Netscape, the Graduation Pavilion, is more explicitly a weave.

Using a technique from knitting, a double-layered net made from 45,000 linear feet of rope stretches between a truss composed of metal tubing. Because the knit rope is not fixed at the intersec-

tions, like a conventional net, it is able to provide tension between the metal members at contorted angles usually associated with the stretch and pull of a knit sweater. Pieces of fabric were inserted between the two layers of knitted net to provide additional shade and to further create a fluid and billowing visual effect. The result is a dynamic pavilion—one engineered using feedback from the net and its contortions to the three-dimensionality of the tubing structure. While there is a visible truss, it is not the only way in which Netscape holds itself up. The truss is merely a set of points at which the load accumulates, and chooses the ground as a place to set. Netscape hovers.

The fluidity of the tectonics in the SCI-Arc installations is almost never in service of the delight of weaving in its own right.

Instead, it serves as a way of countering the typically straightforward and singular considerations of function. Just as the tectonics of the materiality are not self-possessed, form is an elaboration and excess derived from a multiple field of functional considerations.

A triangular vector of mesh appears as wings, but it is counter-balancing the arm of the riser, while it is also filtering light from the

For Oyler Wu, the analogy of “weaving” instead emphasizes a fluidity, not just between functional aspects, but as a correction to this ontological stockade. unshaded window. A knot in the knitting appears as a moment of tectonic weight in an otherwise continuous field, creating a visual spatial depth, but it is also providing structural compression, while tying up the loose ends of the knit.

For Oyler Wu, “weaving” perhaps suggests a more antiessentialist view of technology. An essentialist view of technology, according to Andrew Feenberg, has led us into believing that technology is foreign to human nature. It is characterized as cold, rational, and often possessed of its own imperatives beyond human processes. Humans therefore encounter technology as merely “functions and raw materials” and hence, create goal-oriented practices aimed towards efficiency. The essentialist view reduces technology into actors and outcomes, materials and output in a manner that can only be described as a form of social pathology. For Oyler Wu, the analogy of “weaving” instead emphasizes a fluidity, not just between many functional aspects, but also as a correction to this ontological stockade. Through weaving, both as the fabrication method and as the main visual device, the experience of the technical is inextricably tied to the practice of the technical.

This intertwining is also indicated by the way in which Oyler Wu use drawing and modeling. Typically, drawing is imagined as the predecessor to built work—the drawing literally and figuratively draws out the idea into formal and aesthetic presence prior to the development, or as a first step towards the development, of a design. For Oyler Wu, in their painstakingly analog form of pen-and-ink drawings, the sense of direct ancestry is lost. Instead, the drawings feel more like science-fictionalized instantiations of moments or moods—dense fields of straight lines producing skincell ovoids, balls of twine looping infinitely into deep space. The drawings could be studies, or they could be derivations. They are

6

certainly not primary in a chain of events, nor are they severe and analytical.

This is not to say that their design work does not have direction. Simply that the normative directives of direction (first a, then b) do not necessarily apply. Sketches—not to be confused with the drawings, usually only the quick-and-dirty seed germ of an architectural idea—often end up at the end of the process for Oyler Wu. A sketch might draw out the magic of a detail in a project already built. It might share a page used for taking indecipherable notes on a review, or get pushed aside on a journal page by a scrapbooked concert ticket. And, while many seem analytical, in that they are perspectives or sections of built projects, the source of the analysis is not often apparent. One gets the distinct sense that the sketches are far more about the power of line—thicknesses, figures and shadows—than they are about the content of the thing sketched.

Recently, a symposium was held at SCI-Arc on last year’s Angewandte Competition. The symposium featured a short lecture

by Jeffrey Kipnis, followed by a discussion among Kipnis, Patrik Schumacher, Wolf Prix, Hernan Diaz-Alonso and Eric Owen Moss.

The discussion meandered somewhat, but what seemed to emerge was a sense of a disjunction between the practice of architecture and the profession of architecture. Practice, which could range from the most speculative of work, including drawings, installations and failed entries, was cast as a form of architectural freedom—the place of experimentation, innovation, and by extension, argument, within the discipline. The profession, on the other hand, entailed only built work, specifically, buildings. The profession therefore was cast as far more restrictive in terms of local codes, clients and urban administrative agencies (no mention of liability but likely assumed), but unfortunately, the ultimate validation in cultural and political terms of the “success,” or validity, of the architecture.

Over the last year, the Oyler Wu Collaborative has received two awards that both recognize this firm as “emerging:” the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League in New York, and the Emerging Practice Award from the AIA chapter in Los Angeles. As Oyler Wu continues to emerge, to move from being mainly architects of installations to being architects of buildings, as they currently are in Taiwan, theirs may serve as an object 1 5

lesson to SCI-Arc and speak to this larger discussion in the discipline. Beginning in 2004, they have been engrossed in a design set for a series of small towers in Taipei. While their woven approach to tectonics has been helpful in terms of masking the repetitiveness of the units, they have also carried this logic into problems of functional zoning for the buildings. In one instance, the balconies from the 15-story residence tower extend and bridge into the tectonic schema for the 7-story commercial tower. This blurs the program of the two towers but also creates a series of zones defined by stainless steel mesh sunscreens and translucent glass. Like the installation work, the elaboration of functions into forms (and then, reversed, as in the use of concrete as both floor and vertical circulation), directly engages the relationship between the device and its usually direct meaning. In the case of the towers, the intertwining occurs in the deep space of program, and how these programs “speak” to each other across the building envelope and (by implication) across the city. As these towers rise, it will be interesting to note if the same interests of their practice will translate into their buildings—if it will be woven, and if it will be seamless.

As architects, they are also practitioners, educators, fabricators and builders.

1.

Netscape, SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion, Los Angeles, 2011.

2.

Live Wire. SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles, 2008.

3.

Taipei Tower 5.0, Taipei, 2012.

5

The Warp and Weft of Oyler Wu Faculty Profile Dora Epstein Jones

Dora Epstein Jones is a theorist and teacher of architectural culture. Her work mainly focuses on the discipline of architecture, and includes interrogations on the discipline’s boundaries and operations through examinations of tectonics, practice and pedagogy, as well as (generally external) concerns such as gender, sex, mobility and criticality. She has published in Arch’it, ArcCa and other architectural journals, as well as written essays for publications by Office dA, UCLA Architecture and anthologies on gender and sex in architecture. Dr. Jones is a long-time collaborator with Jones, Partners: Architecture, and the former coordinator of Cultural Studies at SCI-Arc. Dr. Jones has been a professor at SCI-Arc for over 8 years and has taught many of the courses in the core undergraduate and graduate curricula. Jones holds a doctorate in Architecture and Urban Design and a Master in Urban Planning, both from UCLA. Dwayne Oyler currently heads the Undergraduate Thesis Design Studio at SCI-Arc. In 2000, Oyler, along with Jenny Wu, established the office of Oyler Wu Collaborative. He has also worked in the office of Toshiko Mori Architect, and collaborated with Lebbeus Woods on numerous projects.

Previously, Oyler taught at the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture in Vico Morcote, Switzerland, and in the Thesis Design Studio program at Cooper Union in New York City. He was awarded the SOM Prize and Travel Fellowship for Architecture, Design and Urban Design in 1996.

Oyler received a Bachelor of Architecture from Kansas State University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Jenny Wu currently teaches first year design studio at SCI-Arc. Prior to establishing Oyler Wu Collaborative, she was a project architect at various offices, including Architecture Research Office and Gluckman Mayner Architects in New York. From 2001 to 2002, Wu taught design studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She was awarded the Clifford Wong Prize in Housing Design while at Harvard and was a SOM Prize and Travel Fellowship finalist in 2001.

On any given day, this last summer, and the summer before, at the north end of the SCI-Arc parking lot, where the heat intensifies and swirls, you could see them both, in coveralls and work gloves, building the Graduation Pavilion. And, on any given fall day, during studio time, or seminar time, they are there too—one in a crisp cotton shirt and pressed suit; the other a knockout with beautifullypainted nails. It’s hard to believe they are the same people.

But, this is Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, the husbandand-wife team behind the Oyler Wu Collaborative. And this is precisely what they do. As architects, they are also practitioners, educators, fabricators and builders. After having received their M.Arch degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, they came to California where they have focused on two main scales of building: small-scale installations which they design and fabricate themselves, and large-scale projects in Asia and the United States.

They draw, they weld, they design and they teach—and they work easily across this spectrum.

Together they began their firm, the Oyler Wu Collaborative, in 2004. If the name sounds more like a jazz ensemble than an architectural firm, it befits a sensibility of experimental fusion that has lived happily in music for almost a century. And, like music, this collaborative fusion extends beyond the roles they play and into the work itself. They are widely recognized for their “experimental work,” and it is precisely this attitude of fusion that has brought their work to the Beijing Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the London Festival of Architecture. The studios they lead range from the very hands-on 1A “design/build” studio to the more theoretical and analytical Undergraduate Thesis, while their seminars may range from graduate-level delineation and drawing to a broad survey of culture and change in China. Dwayne Oyler also co-led the building effort for the SCI-Arc/Caltech entry into the 2011 Solar Decathlon, once again marking a unique versatility for this firm.

Despite the confusion that fusion and versatility might entail, Oyler Wu has a very strong design sensibility. They invent and elaborate basic material conditions into what may be termed “fusion tectonics” or to be more descriptive, weaving. In weaving, two or more sets of threads are interlaced; the warp threads are those that would be held in the loom at parallel lines, while the weft is shuttled through the warp (or heddle) on a pick. While most weaves are interlaced at right angles due to the construction of most looms, the fact is that both sets of threads are tectonically flexible. The warp threads might float, as in a silk weave, the weft may be made up of many different thicknesses and types and thread as in artisanal weaving, the battening may be very tight or very loose. Weaving therefore has an endless set of effects possible. The only ordination is that, once woven, the threads form a piece of cloth that no longer need the loom to remain whole.

At SCI-Arc, this sensibility has been demonstrated by two projects: Live Wire and Netscape. Live Wire, their installation for the SCI-Arc Gallery, was essentially a stair composed of metal mesh and tubing that connected the floor of the gallery to the catwalk above. A straightforward approach to the assembly would prove the mesh in need of stiffening and the tubing in need of bracing. Their assembly, however, used the two components in mutual support of each other. The geometry of the tubing, welded together, provided vertical and lateral support, while also reinforcing the outline for the mesh. Live Wire was not simply a stair—it was a continuous assembly of structure, handrail, tread, riser, and stringer in a single symphonic burst.

Netscape, the Graduation Pavilion, is more explicitly a weave.

Using a technique from knitting, a double-layered net made from 45,000 linear feet of rope stretches between a truss composed of metal tubing. Because the knit rope is not fixed at the intersec2

tions, like a conventional net, it is able to provide tension between the metal members at contorted angles usually associated with the stretch and pull of a knit sweater. Pieces of fabric were inserted between the two layers of knitted net to provide additional shade and to further create a fluid and billowing visual effect. The result is a dynamic pavilion—one engineered using feedback from the net and its contortions to the three-dimensionality of the tubing structure. While there is a visible truss, it is not the only way in which Netscape holds itself up. The truss is merely a set of points at which the load accumulates, and chooses the ground as a place to set. Netscape hovers.

The fluidity of the tectonics in the SCI-Arc installations is almost never in service of the delight of weaving in its own right.

Instead, it serves as a way of countering the typically straightforward and singular considerations of function. Just as the tectonics of the materiality are not self-possessed, form is an elaboration and excess derived from a multiple field of functional considerations.

A triangular vector of mesh appears as wings, but it is counter-balancing the arm of the riser, while it is also filtering light from the

For Oyler Wu, the analogy of “weaving” instead emphasizes a fluidity, not just between functional aspects, but as a correction to this ontological stockade. unshaded window. A knot in the knitting appears as a moment of tectonic weight in an otherwise continuous field, creating a visual spatial depth, but it is also providing structural compression, while tying up the loose ends of the knit.

For Oyler Wu, “weaving” perhaps suggests a more antiessentialist view of technology. An essentialist view of technology, according to Andrew Feenberg, has led us into believing that technology is foreign to human nature. It is characterized as cold, rational, and often possessed of its own imperatives beyond human processes. Humans therefore encounter technology as merely “functions and raw materials” and hence, create goal-oriented practices aimed towards efficiency. The essentialist view reduces technology into actors and outcomes, materials and output in a manner that can only be described as a form of social pathology. For Oyler Wu, the analogy of “weaving” instead emphasizes a fluidity, not just between many functional aspects, but also as a correction to this ontological stockade. Through weaving, both as the fabrication method and as the main visual device, the experience of the technical is inextricably tied to the practice of the technical.

This intertwining is also indicated by the way in which Oyler Wu use drawing and modeling. Typically, drawing is imagined as the predecessor to built work—the drawing literally and figuratively draws out the idea into formal and aesthetic presence prior to the development, or as a first step towards the development, of a design. For Oyler Wu, in their painstakingly analog form of pen-and-ink drawings, the sense of direct ancestry is lost. Instead, the drawings feel more like science-fictionalized instantiations of moments or moods—dense fields of straight lines producing skincell ovoids, balls of twine looping infinitely into deep space. The drawings could be studies, or they could be derivations. They are

6

certainly not primary in a chain of events, nor are they severe and analytical.

This is not to say that their design work does not have direction. Simply that the normative directives of direction (first a, then b) do not necessarily apply. Sketches—not to be confused with the drawings, usually only the quick-and-dirty seed germ of an architectural idea—often end up at the end of the process for Oyler Wu. A sketch might draw out the magic of a detail in a project already built. It might share a page used for taking indecipherable notes on a review, or get pushed aside on a journal page by a scrapbooked concert ticket. And, while many seem analytical, in that they are perspectives or sections of built projects, the source of the analysis is not often apparent. One gets the distinct sense that the sketches are far more about the power of line—thicknesses, figures and shadows—than they are about the content of the thing sketched.

Recently, a symposium was held at SCI-Arc on last year’s Angewandte Competition. The symposium featured a short lecture

by Jeffrey Kipnis, followed by a discussion among Kipnis, Patrik Schumacher, Wolf Prix, Hernan Diaz-Alonso and Eric Owen Moss.

The discussion meandered somewhat, but what seemed to emerge was a sense of a disjunction between the practice of architecture and the profession of architecture. Practice, which could range from the most speculative of work, including drawings, installations and failed entries, was cast as a form of architectural freedom—the place of experimentation, innovation, and by extension, argument, within the discipline. The profession, on the other hand, entailed only built work, specifically, buildings. The profession therefore was cast as far more restrictive in terms of local codes, clients and urban administrative agencies (no mention of liability but likely assumed), but unfortunately, the ultimate validation in cultural and political terms of the “success,” or validity, of the architecture.

Over the last year, the Oyler Wu Collaborative has received two awards that both recognize this firm as “emerging:” the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League in New York, and the Emerging Practice Award from the AIA chapter in Los Angeles. As Oyler Wu continues to emerge, to move from being mainly architects of installations to being architects of buildings, as they currently are in Taiwan, theirs may serve as an object 5

lesson to SCI-Arc and speak to this larger discussion in the discipline. Beginning in 2004, they have been engrossed in a design set for a series of small towers in Taipei. While their woven approach to tectonics has been helpful in terms of masking the repetitiveness of the units, they have also carried this logic into problems of functional zoning for the buildings. In one instance, the balconies from the 15-story residence tower extend and bridge into the tectonic schema for the 7-story commercial tower. This blurs the program of the two towers but also creates a series of zones defined by stainless steel mesh sunscreens and translucent glass. Like the installation work, the elaboration of functions into forms (and then, reversed, as in the use of concrete as both floor and vertical circulation), directly engages the relationship between the device and its usually direct meaning. In the case of the towers, the intertwining occurs in the deep space of program, and how these programs “speak” to each other across the building envelope and (by implication) across the city. As these towers rise, it will be interesting to note if the same interests of their practice will translate into their buildings—if it will be woven, and if it will be seamless.

As architects, they are also practitioners, educators, fabricators and builders.

1.

Netscape, SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion, Los Angeles, 2011.

2.

Live Wire. SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles, 2008.

3.

Taipei Tower 5.0, Taipei, 2012.

5

The Warp and Weft of Oyler Wu Faculty Profile Dora Epstein Jones

Dora Epstein Jones is a theorist and teacher of architectural culture. Her work mainly focuses on the discipline of architecture, and includes interrogations on the discipline’s boundaries and operations through examinations of tectonics, practice and pedagogy, as well as (generally external) concerns such as gender, sex, mobility and criticality. She has published in Arch’it, ArcCa and other architectural journals, as well as written essays for publications by Office dA, UCLA Architecture and anthologies on gender and sex in architecture. Dr. Jones is a long-time collaborator with Jones, Partners: Architecture, and the former coordinator of Cultural Studies at SCI-Arc. Dr. Jones has been a professor at SCI-Arc for over 8 years and has taught many of the courses in the core undergraduate and graduate curricula. Jones holds a doctorate in Architecture and Urban Design and a Master in Urban Planning, both from UCLA. Dwayne Oyler currently heads the Undergraduate Thesis Design Studio at SCI-Arc. In 2000, Oyler, along with Jenny Wu, established the office of Oyler Wu Collaborative. He has also worked in the office of Toshiko Mori Architect, and collaborated with Lebbeus Woods on numerous projects.

Previously, Oyler taught at the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture in Vico Morcote, Switzerland, and in the Thesis Design Studio program at Cooper Union in New York City. He was awarded the SOM Prize and Travel Fellowship for Architecture, Design and Urban Design in 1996.

Oyler received a Bachelor of Architecture from Kansas State University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Jenny Wu currently teaches first year design studio at SCI-Arc. Prior to establishing Oyler Wu Collaborative, she was a project architect at various offices, including Architecture Research Office and Gluckman Mayner Architects in New York. From 2001 to 2002, Wu taught design studios at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She was awarded the Clifford Wong Prize in Housing Design while at Harvard and was a SOM Prize and Travel Fellowship finalist in 2001.

On any given day, this last summer, and the summer before, at the north end of the SCI-Arc parking lot, where the heat intensifies and swirls, you could see them both, in coveralls and work gloves, building the Graduation Pavilion. And, on any given fall day, during studio time, or seminar time, they are there too—one in a crisp cotton shirt and pressed suit; the other a knockout with beautifullypainted nails. It’s hard to believe they are the same people.

But, this is Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu, the husbandand-wife team behind the Oyler Wu Collaborative. And this is precisely what they do. As architects, they are also practitioners, educators, fabricators and builders. After having received their M.Arch degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, they came to California where they have focused on two main scales of building: small-scale installations which they design and fabricate themselves, and large-scale projects in Asia and the United States.

They draw, they weld, they design and they teach—and they work easily across this spectrum.

Together they began their firm, the Oyler Wu Collaborative, in 2004. If the name sounds more like a jazz ensemble than an architectural firm, it befits a sensibility of experimental fusion that has lived happily in music for almost a century. And, like music, this collaborative fusion extends beyond the roles they play and into the work itself. They are widely recognized for their “experimental work,” and it is precisely this attitude of fusion that has brought their work to the Beijing Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the London Festival of Architecture. The studios they lead range from the very hands-on 1A “design/build” studio to the more theoretical and analytical Undergraduate Thesis, while their seminars may range from graduate-level delineation and drawing to a broad survey of culture and change in China. Dwayne Oyler also co-led the building effort for the SCI-Arc/Caltech entry into the 2011 Solar Decathlon, once again marking a unique versatility for this firm.

Despite the confusion that fusion and versatility might entail, Oyler Wu has a very strong design sensibility. They invent and elaborate basic material conditions into what may be termed “fusion tectonics” or to be more descriptive, weaving. In weaving, two or more sets of threads are interlaced; the warp threads are those that would be held in the loom at parallel lines, while the weft is shuttled through the warp (or heddle) on a pick. While most weaves are interlaced at right angles due to the construction of most looms, the fact is that both sets of threads are tectonically flexible. The warp threads might float, as in a silk weave, the weft may be made up of many different thicknesses and types and thread as in artisanal weaving, the battening may be very tight or very loose. Weaving therefore has an endless set of effects possible. The only ordination is that, once woven, the threads form a piece of cloth that no longer need the loom to remain whole.

At SCI-Arc, this sensibility has been demonstrated by two projects: Live Wire and Netscape. Live Wire, their installation for the SCI-Arc Gallery, was essentially a stair composed of metal mesh and tubing that connected the floor of the gallery to the catwalk above. A straightforward approach to the assembly would prove the mesh in need of stiffening and the tubing in need of bracing. Their assembly, however, used the two components in mutual support of each other. The geometry of the tubing, welded together, provided vertical and lateral support, while also reinforcing the outline for the mesh. Live Wire was not simply a stair—it was a continuous assembly of structure, handrail, tread, riser, and stringer in a single symphonic burst.

Netscape, the Graduation Pavilion, is more explicitly a weave.

Using a technique from knitting, a double-layered net made from 45,000 linear feet of rope stretches between a truss composed of 3

metal tubing. Because the knit rope is not fixed at the intersections, like a conventional net, it is able to provide tension between the metal members at contorted angles usually associated with the stretch and pull of a knit sweater. Pieces of fabric were inserted between the two layers of knitted net to provide additional shade and to further create a fluid and billowing visual effect. The result is a dynamic pavilion—one engineered using feedback from the net and its contortions to the three-dimensionality of the tubing structure. While there is a visible truss, it is not the only way in which Netscape holds itself up. The truss is merely a set of points at which the load accumulates, and chooses the ground as a place to set. Netscape hovers.

The fluidity of the tectonics in the SCI-Arc installations is almost never in service of the delight of weaving in its own right.

Instead, it serves as a way of countering the typically straightforward and singular considerations of function. Just as the tectonics of the materiality are not self-possessed, form is an elaboration and excess derived from a multiple field of functional considerations.

A triangular vector of mesh appears as wings, but it is counter-bal-

For Oyler Wu, the analogy of “weaving” instead emphasizes a fluidity, not just between functional aspects, but as a correction to this ontological stockade. ancing the arm of the riser, while it is also filtering light from the unshaded window. A knot in the knitting appears as a moment of tectonic weight in an otherwise continuous field, creating a visual spatial depth, but it is also providing structural compression, while tying up the loose ends of the knit.

For Oyler Wu, “weaving” perhaps suggests a more antiessentialist view of technology. An essentialist view of technology, according to Andrew Feenberg, has led us into believing that technology is foreign to human nature. It is characterized as cold, rational, and often possessed of its own imperatives beyond human processes. Humans therefore encounter technology as merely “functions and raw materials” and hence, create goal-oriented practices aimed towards efficiency. The essentialist view reduces technology into actors and outcomes, materials and output in a manner that can only be described as a form of social pathology. For Oyler Wu, the analogy of “weaving” instead emphasizes a fluidity, not just between many functional aspects, but also as a correction to this ontological stockade. Through weaving, both as the fabrication method and as the main visual device, the experience of the technical is inextricably tied to the practice of the technical.

This intertwining is also indicated by the way in which Oyler Wu use drawing and modeling. Typically, drawing is imagined as the predecessor to built work—the drawing literally and figuratively draws out the idea into formal and aesthetic presence prior to the development, or as a first step towards the development, of a design. For Oyler Wu, in their painstakingly analog form of pen-and-ink drawings, the sense of direct ancestry is lost. Instead, the drawings feel more like science-fictionalized instantiations of moments or moods—dense fields of straight lines producing skincell ovoids, balls of twine looping infinitely into deep space. The

6

drawings could be studies, or they could be derivations. They are certainly not primary in a chain of events, nor are they severe and analytical.

This is not to say that their design work does not have direction. Simply that the normative directives of direction (first a, then b) do not necessarily apply. Sketches—not to be confused with the drawings, usually only the quick-and-dirty seed germ of an architectural idea—often end up at the end of the process for Oyler Wu. A sketch might draw out the magic of a detail in a project already built. It might share a page used for taking indecipherable notes on a review, or get pushed aside on a journal page by a scrapbooked concert ticket. And, while many seem analytical, in that they are perspectives or sections of built projects, the source of the analysis is not often apparent. One gets the distinct sense that the sketches are far more about the power of line—thicknesses, figures and shadows—than they are about the content of the thing sketched.

Recently, a symposium was held at SCI-Arc on last year’s Angewandte Competition. The symposium featured a short lecture

by Jeffrey Kipnis, followed by a discussion among Kipnis, Patrik Schumacher, Wolf Prix, Hernan Diaz-Alonso and Eric Owen Moss.

The discussion meandered somewhat, but what seemed to emerge was a sense of a disjunction between the practice of architecture and the profession of architecture. Practice, which could range from the most speculative of work, including drawings, installations and failed entries, was cast as a form of architectural freedom—the place of experimentation, innovation, and by extension, argument, within the discipline. The profession, on the other hand, entailed only built work, specifically, buildings. The profession therefore was cast as far more restrictive in terms of local codes, clients and urban administrative agencies (no mention of liability but likely assumed), but unfortunately, the ultimate validation in cultural and political terms of the “success,” or validity, of the architecture.

Over the last year, the Oyler Wu Collaborative has received two awards that both recognize this firm as “emerging:” the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League in New York, and the Emerging Practice Award from the AIA chapter in Los Angeles. As Oyler Wu continues to emerge, to move from being mainly architects of installations to being architects of build5

ings, as they currently are in Taiwan, theirs may serve as an object lesson to SCI-Arc and speak to this larger discussion in the discipline. Beginning in 2004, they have been engrossed in a design set for a series of small towers in Taipei. While their woven approach to tectonics has been helpful in terms of masking the repetitiveness of the units, they have also carried this logic into problems of functional zoning for the buildings. In one instance, the balconies from the 15-story residence tower extend and bridge into the tectonic schema for the 7-story commercial tower. This blurs the program of the two towers but also creates a series of zones defined by stainless steel mesh sunscreens and translucent glass. Like the installation work, the elaboration of functions into forms (and then, reversed, as in the use of concrete as both floor and vertical circulation), directly engages the relationship between the device and its usually direct meaning. In the case of the towers, the intertwining occurs in the deep space of program, and how these programs “speak” to each other across the building envelope and (by implication) across the city. As these towers rise, it will be interesting to note if the same interests of their practice will translate into their

As architects, they are also practitioners, educators, fabricators and builders. buildings—if it will be woven, and if it will be seamless.

1.

Netscape, SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion, Los Angeles, 2011.

2.

Live Wire. SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles, 2008.

3.

Taipei Tower 5.0, Taipei, 2012.

7

Competition Participants Ramiro Diaz-Granados Elena Manferdini Marcelo Spina (winning entry) Tom Wiscombe Competition Jury Hernan Diaz Alonso John Enright Hsinming Fung Dwayne Oyler Eric Owen Moss Alexis Rochas Major support for SCI-Arc community initiatives is provided by a generous grant from ArtPlace.

1.

League of Shadows, Marcelo Spina, PATTERNS. Design Team: Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich 2.

Tumbleweed, Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Amorphis.

Principal: Ramiro Diaz-Granados Designer: Matthew Au Assistants: Mike Woodruff, Yogi Yoswara, Nedi Dimova 3.

Tableau Vivant, Elena Manferdini, Atelier Manferdini.

Design Team: Elena Manferdini, Laura Ferrarello, Erin Templeton, Vanessa Teng, Luis Tornel Engineering: Fabio Zangoli 4.

Cultural Pavillion, Tom Wiscombe, Tom Wiscombe Design.

Design Team: Tom Wiscombe, Zidan Zhao, Joel Kerner, Ethan Lee, Yong Ha Kim, Koho Lin, Mitch Rocheleau, Jili Huang

GRADUATION PAVILION COMPETITION

The SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion Competition was organized this summer to select a winning design for the ArtPlace funded outdoor pavilion, scheduled to be completed in spring 2013. SCI-Arc faculty members Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Elena Manferdini, Marcelo Spina and Tom Wiscombe were invited to submit concepts for the design of an innovative, technically implementable, and visually remarkable multi-purpose pavilion.

The winning entry, League of Shadows, designed by Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of PATTERNS, fully exploits the fundamental aspect underlying the pavilion, its temporal use as an outdoor event space. Their proposal to design a vaulted pavilion allows the structure a double function: that of an outdoor public event space, and a more iconic one of a formal beacon reasserting SCI-Arc’s institutional presence in downtown. Due to its placement in the SCI-Arc parking lot, the pavilion will serve as a landmark, a natural marquee of the SCI-Arc campus and the Arts District, and it will become a suitable venue for SCI-Arc to engage outside audiences from the downtown community and the larger Los Angeles area.

The Graduation Pavilion Competition was featured in the SCIArc Library Gallery from October 19th through December 2nd.

The following is an excerpt of the exhibition discussion that took place between the competition entrants and Eric Owen Moss on November 2nd.

Eric Owen Moss: The reason for the discussion, and I think it’s an unusual reason, is that you won’t find too many academic institutions commissioning architects to do projects, particularly faculty members, for all the usual political and economic reasons. For a school that prides itself on saying SCI-Arc is about the tradition of non-tradition, there is a tradition from the last three or four years where the Graduation Pavilion is designed and built for graduation and then torn down and rebuilt in a different way by a different architect. So I think that this is for us an important moment and an unusual opportunity. We got a grant and the intention was, not only to further the discussion of art and architecture here, but also to extend that discussion into the community and to make the community part of the discourse at SCI-Arc. We decided that because of the magnitude of the investment, we would put the pavilion up and we would leave it up for four years.

So what we want to do is take a few minutes to talk about what each architect did, and then discuss the projects in a critical way.

Ramiro Diaz-Granados: My interest with the project is also part of a general set of interests in terms of the relationship between objects and fields. By ‘object’ I mean a singular, well-defined thing that occupies a space. And by ‘field,’ either a multiplicity or repetition of smaller elements, or an extension or an expansion of those across a lateral terrain. So seeing the site as a field of objects, cars, or a field of parking stripes. And then the object, the quality of the object–this idea that the temporary nature, the rootlessness of the object became very important in terms of not manifesting or showing any kind of permanent connection to the ground.

Elena Manferdini: My project comes from the realization that the pavilion in the school was kind of a still life exercise, meaning that it is always the same object that people are designing. And so I thought that Tableau Vivant was the opposite, in a way, of a still life painting. Tableau Vivant is a very specific way of understanding representation where, actually, the person, the subject that sees the representation, is part of the picture plane. I also really wanted this to be an engaging pavilion for the community, at large, not only one day a week or one day in the year, but really during the entire year. And I thought what really was needed in the school

was the idea of garden. So, the hope was to create a relationship between geometry and photorealism. And the photorealism, clearly, has a subject–the idea of the garden for downtown.

Tom Wiscombe: The project has to do with what we were doing in the office this summer, which is what I would call ‘Figures in a Sack.’ The term relates to creating form that has tension embedded within it. Form where you’re not just sort of lackadaisically sculpting form, but form that you’re actually creating through synthetic materiality or, let’s say, a kind of fake stretching of a material that could never actually be that material at scale, like a rubber sack.

I guess the most important thing for me, other than the stretching and the squishing and all of that kind of lexicon, was the idea that the thing had some protection to it, but, also, came around, became massive, and had its own ground so you could feel it as a threedimensional interior space.

Marcelo Spina: We thought we wouldn’t hover horizontal like a normal pavilion would have to. But we will actually produce shadows by being vertical. The brief asked for a pavilion to be used at a particular moment in time, which is one day, two hours, in a year. The rest of the time, it’s actually non-specified. So we thought, let’s really take advantage of that and not do a thing that will just sit empty on the parking lot. The idea was to make something that will represent the school as a kind of mark. So when it’s not used as a pavilion, meaning it’s not casting shadow, which is 99 percent of the time, and it’s not being functional, it doesn’t feel empty in the parking lot. It doesn’t feel empty because it practically has no footprint. And by being on the corner, it can become an “institutional beacon,” bearing SCI-Arc’s name and being able to broadcast what we are about to a slightly different audience that has nothing to do with the school, that just passes by it.

Eric Owen Moss: For me, especially talking to students and trying to explain to students how practicing architects think about projects, the first thing that struck me is that this is a discussion within SCI-Arc. When you do a project like this, there are a couple of constituencies—the SCI-Arc constituency, the neighborhood, the local gentry, and so on. The question is really what’s the conversation you’re having? Aside from whether it operates, what does it mean to do something like this in this neighborhood, for this school, at this point in time?

Elena Manferdini: I think the argument was that the pavilion has been too much of an internal conversation. And the fact that we got this grant from the city made it very important that this conversation was actually open to the city, to the parents, whoever you want to put there.

Marcelo Spina: I think addressing different audiences is a challenge now. If there’s a meaning to the things we do—and there’s certainly meaning in terms of sources, things we’re looking at, things we’re trying to experiment with—it will have to not interfere with all those things that one will commonly assume as function. In this case, there were two main important things. Producing enough shadow so you could actually comfortably be in a ceremony like that. And framing the event in a way that produces enough of a backdrop that will offer the best possible frame for what it is, a special day.

Eric Owen Moss: The question in Ramiro’s case or in Marcelo’s case is it’s so open. Is it so open that it’s irrelevant, really? Whereas, if you look at Elena’s and you look at Tom’s—Tom’s is literally a building and Elena’s is pretty close.

8

Ramiro Diaz-Granados: I think the versatility, or let’s say the issue of flexibility in the project, was an intentional thing. The fact that pavilions are generic because of their temporary nature means that almost anything can happen there. Mine is still a space that encloses. Marcelo’s is more vertical, let’s say more wall-like.

Mine’s still horizontal.

Marcelo Spina: Ours is definitely vertical. I would tend to agree that we are closer with Ramiro in terms of the position. For me, being at the corner meant that, somehow, we had to be vertical in a way.

Eric Owen Moss: But I think, just to be clear, when you look at what Marcelo’s doing, it’s volumetric. Even the little pavilions on the side look like back stage Green Room spaces or something. In other words, you could stage something out of it, and it’s a lid.

Marcelo Spina: I don’t know if this is related [to the discussion] but I was trying to explain to the students what it is like to do a project for a client. And what is it to actually submit a project for a competition where you know that you are not the only one. You not only produce your own idea, but also learn to second-guess certain strategic conditions, which means that you want to make sure that your ideas, your stylistic predilections, your material predilections, all your intuitions, go in the right direction.

Eric Owen Moss: There is a discussion of competitions that has to be acknowledged, whether you succumb to it or not, which has to do with second-guessing the jury.

Marcelo Spina: For me, it’s not second-guessing the jury so much.

And this is maybe not the right competition, but let’s say in a competition where you know that you’re competing against hundreds.

It’s second-guessing what are the two or three moves that everyone is going to try to make. I tried to stay away, as much as possible, from those. You don’t want to put yourself in a corner, in that the project is completely unviable, just to make something different.

Tom Wiscombe: I think one of the most concrete examples of that in my experience is whether or not to break the rules of the competition.

Eric Owen Moss: It’s tough to make that guess. And there’s always the question about whether somebody, and it’s usually not everybody, will look at things, either in a different way or in a way that might be coincident with you and will say, “Wait a minute. I don’t give a damn whether they broke the rule or not. But having broken it, what they’ve done is an act of invention and imagination, ingenious. Let’s keep it in.” The question is whether that had anything to do with anything anybody did.

Marcelo Spina: If you go through the projects,Tom did a sort of enclosed building, something that would be like a classroom, and that’s an interesting take or different take. It wasn’t in the brief.

Ramiro did something that actually has trouble being recognized as an object, let’s say. And Elena did something which is incredibly graphic, you know, and it has this sort of quality of being super flat. We did something vertical that will cast a shadow and that has no footprint. I mean these are four very different ideas.

1

Eric Owen Moss: I think, from our point of view, the reason that Marcelo’s project was given the commission had to do with its positioning—where it was; and had to do with the fact that it allowed, given this climate, all sorts of things to happen in the shadow of the piece without obligating you to chase around it. It was infinitely large, rather than finite, so it looked like it could work at a smaller scale and not devour everyone, and it looked like it could work at a larger scale. I think part of the appeal was how it was made and how it was made as an object. And I think there was some sense that the form language of the project, given what we see a lot of in the architecture discussion now, was a genuine effort to find something that we didn’t quite recognize and we couldn’t quite name and we didn’t quite know. That it seems to be a hybrid of a number of possibilities, notwithstanding it had a substantial amount of power as a piece of investigation. It looked to me to like something that wasn’t finished, in that he didn’t quite know how to finish it, and that it would be interesting to see in the process of building it where it would wind up, and it might wind up a little bit differently. I think learning about Marcelo’s, by taking it through a couple of studios and engineering it and constructing it, is going to be a terrific lesson for us and for the school and for the architect.

2

7

Competition Participants Ramiro Diaz-Granados Elena Manferdini Marcelo Spina (winning entry) Tom Wiscombe Competition Jury Hernan Diaz Alonso John Enright Hsinming Fung Dwayne Oyler Eric Owen Moss Alexis Rochas Major support for SCI-Arc community initiatives is provided by a generous grant from ArtPlace.

1.

League of Shadows, Marcelo Spina, PATTERNS. Design Team: Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich 2.

Tumbleweed, Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Amorphis.

Principal: Ramiro Diaz-Granados Designer: Matthew Au Assistants: Mike Woodruff, Yogi Yoswara, Nedi Dimova 3.

Tableau Vivant, Elena Manferdini, Atelier Manferdini.

Design Team: Elena Manferdini, Laura Ferrarello, Erin Templeton, Vanessa Teng, Luis Tornel Engineering: Fabio Zangoli 4.

Cultural Pavillion, Tom Wiscombe, Tom Wiscombe Design.

Design Team: Tom Wiscombe, Zidan Zhao, Joel Kerner, Ethan Lee, Yong Ha Kim, Koho Lin, Mitch Rocheleau, Jili Huang

GRADUATION PAVILION COMPETITION

The SCI-Arc Graduation Pavilion Competition was organized this summer to select a winning design for the ArtPlace funded outdoor pavilion, scheduled to be completed in spring 2013. SCI-Arc faculty members Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Elena Manferdini, Marcelo Spina and Tom Wiscombe were invited to submit concepts for the design of an innovative, technically implementable, and visually remarkable multi-purpose pavilion.

The winning entry, League of Shadows, designed by Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of PATTERNS, fully exploits the fundamental aspect underlying the pavilion, its temporal use as an outdoor event space. Their proposal to design a vaulted pavilion allows the structure a double function: that of an outdoor public event space, and a more iconic one of a formal beacon reasserting SCI-Arc’s institutional presence in downtown. Due to its placement in the SCI-Arc parking lot, the pavilion will serve as a landmark, a natural marquee of the SCI-Arc campus and the Arts District, and it will become a suitable venue for SCI-Arc to engage outside audiences from the downtown community and the larger Los Angeles area.

The Graduation Pavilion Competition was featured in the SCIArc Library Gallery from October 19th through December 2nd.

The following is an excerpt of the exhibition discussion that took place between the competition entrants and Eric Owen Moss on November 2nd.

Eric Owen Moss: The reason for the discussion, and I think it’s an unusual reason, is that you won’t find too many academic institutions commissioning architects to do projects, particularly faculty members, for all the usual political and economic reasons. For a school that prides itself on saying SCI-Arc is about the tradition of non-tradition, there is a tradition from the last three or four years where the Graduation Pavilion is designed and built for graduation and then torn down and rebuilt in a different way by a different architect. So I think that this is for us an important moment and an unusual opportunity. We got a grant and the intention was, not only to further the discussion of art and architecture here, but also to extend that discussion into the community and to make the community part of the discourse at SCI-Arc. We decided that because of the magnitude of the investment, we would put the pavilion up and we would leave it up for four years.

So what we want to do is take a few minutes to talk about what each architect did, and then discuss the projects in a critical way.

Ramiro Diaz-Granados: My interest with the project is also part of a general set of interests in terms of the relationship between objects and fields. By ‘object’ I mean a singular, well-defined thing that occupies a space. And by ‘field,’ either a multiplicity or repetition of smaller elements, or an extension or an expansion of those across a lateral terrain. So seeing the site as a field of objects, cars, or a field of parking stripes. And then the object, the quality of the object–this idea that the temporary nature, the rootlessness of the object became very important in terms of not manifesting or showing any kind of permanent connection to the ground.

Elena Manferdini: My project comes from the realization that the pavilion in the school was kind of a still life exercise, meaning that it is always the same object that people are designing. And so I thought that Tableau Vivant was the opposite, in a way, of a still life painting. Tableau Vivant is a very specific way of understanding representation where, actually, the person, the subject that sees the representation, is part of the picture plane. I also really wanted this to be an engaging pavilion for the community, at large, not only one day a week or one day in the year, but really during the 8

entire year. And I thought what really was needed in the school was the idea of garden. So, the hope was to create a relationship between geometry and photorealism. And the photorealism, clearly, has a subject–the idea of the garden for downtown.

Tom Wiscombe: The project has to do with what we were doing in the office this summer, which is what I would call ‘Figures in a Sack.’ The term relates to creating form that has tension embedded within it. Form where you’re not just sort of lackadaisically sculpting form, but form that you’re actually creating through synthetic materiality or, let’s say, a kind of fake stretching of a material that could never actually be that material at scale, like a rubber sack.

I guess the most important thing for me, other than the stretching and the squishing and all of that kind of lexicon, was the idea that the thing had some protection to it, but, also, came around, became massive, and had its own ground so you could feel it as a threedimensional interior space.

3

Marcelo Spina: We thought we wouldn’t hover horizontal like a normal pavilion would have to. But we will actually produce shadows by being vertical. The brief asked for a pavilion to be used at a particular moment in time, which is one day, two hours, in a year. The rest of the time, it’s actually non-specified. So we thought, let’s really take advantage of that and not do a thing that will just sit empty on the parking lot. The idea was to make something that will represent the school as a kind of mark. So when it’s not used as a pavilion, meaning it’s not casting shadow, which is 99 percent of the time, and it’s not being functional, it doesn’t feel empty in the parking lot. It doesn’t feel empty because it practically has no footprint. And by being on the corner, it can become an “institutional beacon,” bearing SCI-Arc’s name and being able to broadcast what we are about to a slightly different audience that has nothing to do with the school, that just passes by it.

Eric Owen Moss: For me, especially talking to students and trying to explain to students how practicing architects think about projects, the first thing that struck me is that this is a discussion within SCI-Arc. When you do a project like this, there are a couple of constituencies—the SCI-Arc constituency, the neighborhood, the local gentry, and so on. The question is really what’s the conversation you’re having? Aside from whether it operates, what does it mean to do something like this in this neighborhood, for this school, at this point in time?

Elena Manferdini: I think the argument was that the pavilion has been too much of an internal conversation. And the fact that we got this grant from the city made it very important that this conversation was actually open to the city, to the parents, whoever you want to put there.

Marcelo Spina: I think addressing different audiences is a challenge now. If there’s a meaning to the things we do—and there’s certainly meaning in terms of sources, things we’re looking at, things we’re trying to experiment with—it will have to not interfere with all those things that one will commonly assume as function. In this case, there were two main important things. Producing enough shadow so you could actually comfortably be in a ceremony like that. And framing the event in a way that produces enough of a backdrop that will offer the best possible frame for what it is, a special day.

Eric Owen Moss: The question in Ramiro’s case or in Marcelo’s case is it’s so open. Is it so open that it’s irrelevant, really? Whereas, if you look at Elena’s and you look at Tom’s—Tom’s is literally a building and Elena’s is pretty close.

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Ramiro Diaz-Granados: I think the versatility, or let’s say the issue of flexibility in the project, was an intentional thing. The fact that pavilions are generic because of their temporary nature means that almost anything can happen there. Mine is still a space that encloses. Marcelo’s is more vertical, let’s say more wall-like.

Mine’s still horizontal.

Marcelo Spina: Ours is definitely vertical. I would tend to agree that we are closer with Ramiro in terms of the position. For me, being at the corner meant that, somehow, we had to be vertical in a way.

Eric Owen Moss: But I think, just to be clear, when you look at what Marcelo’s doing, it’s volumetric. Even the little pavilions on the side look like back stage Green Room spaces or something. In other words, you could stage something out of it, and it’s a lid.

Marcelo Spina: I don’t know if this is related [to the discussion] but I was trying to explain to the students what it is like to do a project for a client. And what is it to actually submit a project for a competition where you know that you are not the only one. You not only produce your own idea, but also learn to second-guess certain strategic conditions, which means that you want to make sure that your ideas, your stylistic predilections, your material predilections, all your intuitions, go in the right direction.

Eric Owen Moss: There is a discussion of competitions that has to be acknowledged, whether you succumb to it or not, which has to do with second-guessing the jury.

Marcelo Spina: For me, it’s not second-guessing the jury so much.

And this is maybe not the right competition, but let’s say in a competition where you know that you’re competing against hundreds.

It’s second-guessing what are the two or three moves that everyone is going to try to make. I tried to stay away, as much as possible, from those. You don’t want to put yourself in a corner, in that the project is completely unviable, just to make something different.

Tom Wiscombe: I think one of the most concrete examples of that in my experience is whether or not to break the rules of the competition.

Eric Owen Moss: It’s tough to make that guess. And there’s always the question about whether somebody, and it’s usually not everybody, will look at things, either in a different way or in a way that might be coincident with you and will say, “Wait a minute. I don’t give a damn whether they broke the rule or not. But having broken it, what they’ve done is an act of invention and imagination, ingenious. Let’s keep it in.” The question is whether that had anything to do with anything anybody did.

Marcelo Spina: If you go through the projects,Tom did a sort of enclosed building, something that would be like a classroom, and that’s an interesting take or different take. It wasn’t in the brief.

Ramiro did something that actually has trouble being recognized as an object, let’s say. And Elena did something which is incredibly graphic, you know, and it has this sort of quality of being super flat. We did something vertical that will cast a shadow and that has no footprint. I mean these are four very different ideas.

Eric Owen Moss: I think, from our point of view, the reason that Marcelo’s project was given the commission had to do with its positioning—where it was; and had to do with the fact that it allowed, given this climate, all sorts of things to happen in the shadow of the piece without obligating you to chase around it. It was infinitely large, rather than finite, so it looked like it could work at a smaller scale and not devour everyone, and it looked like it could work at a larger scale. I think part of the appeal was how it was made and how it was made as an object. And I think there was some sense that the form language of the project, given what we see a lot of in the architecture discussion now, was a genuine effort to find something that we didn’t quite recognize and we couldn’t quite name and we didn’t quite know. That it seems to be a hybrid of a number of possibilities, notwithstanding it had a substantial amount of power as a piece of investigation. It looked to me to like something that wasn’t finished, in that he didn’t quite know how to finish it, and that it would be interesting to see in the process of building it where it would wind up, and it might wind up a little bit differently. I think learning about Marcelo’s, by taking it through a couple of studios and engineering it and constructing it, is going to be a terrific lesson for us and for the school and for the architect.

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news

LEBBEUS WOODS: 1940-2012

1,400 steel rods were drilled into the floors running SCI-Arc’s quarter mile by students in a workshop led by Lebbeus Woods in 2003.

I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world. All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what would happen if we lived by a different set of rules. – Lebbeus Woods

If he really felt as cynical and skeptical as he sometimes would say, then why the hell draw this stuff? There’s an incredible amount of power just in the draftsmanship. He’s like Durer—you know, woodcuts, 15th-century stuff. There’s content—intellectual content, social content, artistic content, political content—but the very act of making these sort of remarkable things and his drawing capacity made a kind of new language. – Eric Owen Moss

Lebbeus Woods, an experimental architect who inspired colleagues and architecture students with radically inventive designs and installations that evoked futuristic worlds and cityscapes, died October 30 in Manhattan at the age of 72. He is survived by his wife, Aleksandra Wagner, and three children.

Woods was born May 31, 1940, in Lansing, Mich. He studied engineering at Purdue University and received his master’s degree in architecture from the University of Illinois. He then joined Eero Saarinen and Associates in 1964, working on their landmark Ford Foundation building in New York. In the 1970s, Woods devoted himself fully to theory and experimental work, and in 1988, he co-founded the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture.

Woods began teaching at the Cooper Union in 1987, at various times leading Architectonics, Thesis, and Design studios. He also taught frequently at other schools, including SCI-Arc. In 2003, he worked with more than a dozen students at SCI-Arc to create a sprawling, temporary installation of 1,400 steel rods running the length of the school.

His visions of urban spaces ravaged by war were published in numerous books, among them Anarchitecture, War and Architecture, and Radical Reconstruction. Although Woods’s designs were rarely constructed, they were considered widely influential and were exhibited in museums around the world. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art plans an exhibition of his work beginning in February 2013.

This year Woods realized a longtime dream with the construction of his only permanent structure, a pavilion for a housing complex designed by Steven Holl in Chengdu, China. Woods collaborated on the work, called the Light Pavilion, with architect Christoph Kumpusch. It was completed in October.

Lebbeus was a man of many gifts. He was an incisive, razor-sharp thinker, who sought out the flash points of political and social conflict and made them the bricks and mortar of his architecture. He was the most talented draughtsman of his generation—more than drawings, parallel universes flowed from his pencil. But his rarest gift—one that he cultivated throughout his life—was his generous, absorbent and humble mind. He didn’t just teach; he never stopped learning. He was happiest with a crowd of young people around him, deep in conversation, every generational barrier cast aside: happiest not because they worshipped him as a hero, but because new worlds were unfolding in front of him. When we invited him to take part in Postopolis NYC, the first of a series of bloggers summits organized with Geoff Manaugh at Storefront gallery, he was so excited by the possibilities of the web that when he returned home he set up his own blog. The conversation that began that afternoon in Storefront will continue long after the sad day of his passing. – Peter Eisenman, Architect and Professor of Architecture at Yale University. Excerpted from The Guardian, Architecture and Design Blog with Oliver Wainwright, October 31, 2012.

The freedom of spirit in Architecture that Lebbeus Woods embodied carried with it a rare idealism. Lebbeus had very passionate beliefs and a deep philosophical commitment to Architecture. He often spoke of the importance of ideas and an understanding of our world. His designs were politically charged fields of reality that he created. – Steven Holl, Principal at Steven Holl Architects. Excerpted from tribute to Lebbeus Woods, October 30, 2012.

It’s funny how, when you listened to Leb sometimes, you might conclude that, intellectually, he was extremely pessimistic. A cynic even. And yet when you look at the work, the ambitions for architecture, the precision, and the density of the drawings transcended any sense of pessimism. Quite the opposite. The act of doing that work makes Leb an enduring voice for the prowess of architecture as he insisted it be defined. Drawing transformed him, and he transformed drawing, and together they transformed the discourse. We ain’t forgetting. – Eric Owen Moss, SCI-Arc Director, Principal & Lead Designer at Eric Owen Moss Architects. October 31, 2012.

In word and deed, Lebbeus reminded colleagues and students that drawing was the highest form and clearest expression of architecture. To watch his hand draft was to watch his mind at work.

His lines were vectors, lines with direction and purpose, lines that danced. In an age of digitally powered representation, he powerfully communicated with ink and graphite. Yet he was never old school; no one took the future more seriously than Lebbeus Woods. Over a glass of Grey Goose and pineapple juice, Lebbeus challenged his friends time and again to stay smart, savvy and creatively supple. His humour was dark, his voice booming and his eyes always bright. – Geoff Manaugh, Writer and editor of BLDGBLOG. Excerptedfrom The Guardian, Architecture and Design Blog with Oliver Wainwright, October 31, 2012.

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SCI-ARC PRESENTS ADVANCES IN ARCHITECTURAL GEOMETRY FILM AT CENTRE POMPIDOU SYMPOSIUM IN PARIS

Faculty Lectures, Exhibitions, Awards & Competitions

Earlier this year, SCI-Arc was invited along with 14 internationally renowned schools of architecture to submit a video presentation dedicated to the school’s most recent discourse on developments in architectural geometry and computation. This presentation was shown at the Advances in Architectural Geometry (AAG) symposium held September 27-30 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The event introduced theoretical works and practices linked to new geometrical development applicable to architecture, and made it possible for a large public to discover some of the most provocative and design challenging experiments currently being carried out at SCI-Arc and other top architecture schools in the world.

The AAG symposium has become a reference in the professional field of architecture and is supported by the direct participation of some of the most distinguished architectural design and engineering offices, along with academic laboratories. The SCIArc produced film features interviews with Director Eric Owen Moss of Eric Owen Moss Architects and Graduate Programs Chair Hernan Diaz Alonso of Xefirotarch, and faculty members Andrew Atwood of First Office, Herwig Baumgartner of B+U Architects, Marcelyn Gow of Servo Los Angeles, Elena Manferdini of Atelier Manferdini, Florencia Pita of Fpmod, Marcelo Spina of Patterns, Devyn Weiser of Testa/Weiser and Tom Wiscombe of Tom Wiscombe Design.

The SCI-Arc film can be found at www.vimeo.com/sciarc/ architecturalgeometry. It was directed by faculty member Herwig Baumgartner, with filming and editing by graduate student Ryan Tyler Martinez (M.Arch 2 ’13) and interviews by Marcelyn Gow.

HEATHER FLOOD (M.ARCH ’04) Unfinished Business exhibition co-curator, Los Angeles Forum July 2012

GROUP PROJECT BY SCIFI STUDENTS EXHIBITED AT THE VENICE BIENNALE SCI-Arc’s dedicated urban design program Future Initiatives (SCIFI) participated in the Venice Biennale as part of an exhibition of innovative urban visions for Maribor, the European Capital of Culture 2012. The installation Maribor 2112 Ai (100YR City) was featured in the Slovenian and Australian Pavilions.

Exhibition Director and curator Tom Kovac and Fleur Watson have selected works by SCI-Arc students Yuan He (SCIFI ’12), Janiva Henry (SCIFI ’12) and Winnie Yeng (SCIFI ’12) to be shown alongside designs by a leading group of international thinkers and educators investigating the future of the city of Maribor in Slovenia.

As part of the city’s festivities, Maribor 2112 Ai (100YR City) investigated and identified disruptive patterns of global change and envisaged impacts on architecture, urbanism and life in the extreme future—demonstrating how new forms of practice are responding to external demands on architecture.

SCIFI co-coordinator Peter Zellner publicly presented the work produced for Maribor by the Future Initiatives program at the Venice Biennale. The student work was also on view in the SCIArc Gallery in September, part of an end-of-year exhibition for the Future Initiatives M.DesR Class of 2012.

ANDREW ATWOOD 2012 Metabolic Studio/Annenberg Foundation Grant, Form Prototyping with Sand with Alex Robinson

HSINMING FUNG 2012 R+D Award Winner, Hodgetts + Fung, 2012. AWA Administrators Conference, Austin, Texas November 2012

HSINMING FUNG DESIGNS AWARD WINNING PROTOTYPE FOR LAUSD In the LA Unified School District (LAUSD), there are tens-ofthousands of deteriorating portable classroom units that have long exceeded their intended 20 year life-span. This past July, Hsinming Fung and her design studio, Hodgetts + Fung, were awarded a 2012 R+D Award for developing an economical, efficient, and lasting architectural solution to this problem.

The project is called Building Blocks and is a fully-scalable “kit of parts” construction system that can be deployed rapidly to accommodate a vast variety of sites. This flexibility in potential siting is allowed by structural, mechanical, and construction systems designed to perform properly in a full spectrum of environmental challenges.

The progressive centerpiece of the design is the fiberglass roof module, which contains integrated lighting and an operable baffle that allows for daylighting and natural ventilation in the classroom.

These modules are being fabricated by a fiberglass specialist and have been documented in several remarkable time lapse videos.

Building Blocks is not only structurally groundbreaking, but it promises to dramatically improve the classroom environment while substantially lowering costs.

MARCELYN GOW More than Sound exhibition design, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm September 2012 ELENA MANFERDINI COME IN! Les Femmes exhibitor A+D Museum, Los Angeles July 12–September 8, 2012 One Show Design Gold Pencil and Core77 Design Awards for Sensorium installation ERIC OWEN MOSS Extension of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, 3rd Place, International Competition, Eric Owen Moss Architects and Susanne Zottl Architektin, February 2012 Stanford University lecture, Terra Nova lecture series, May 2012 DWAYNE OYLER & JENNY WU Screenplay installation at Dwell on Design, Los Angeles, June 2012 AIA Los Angeles Presidential Award for Emerging Practice, 2012 FLORENCIA PITA Florencia Pita/FP mod exhibition University of Michigan Museum of Art January 19–June 16, 2013 JONAH ROWEN Honorable Mention, City Visions Competition, Over New York project PETER TESTA & DEVYN WEISER Collaboration Machines lecture Aalto University Digital Design Laboratory Helsinki, Finland October 11, 2012 EMILY WHITE (M.ARCH ’06) COME IN! Les Femmes exhibitor A+D Museum, Los Angeles July 12–September 8, 2012 TOM WISCOMBE Awarded Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professorship at Yale University, Fall 2012 ANDREW ZAGO Aesthetics/Anesthetics exhibitor Storefront for Art and Architecture New York, June 26–July 28, 2012

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GRADUATE THESIS 2012: A VISION OF HOW THINGS WILL BE Elena Manferdini

Elena Manferdini is the Graduate Thesis Coordinator at SCI-Arc, and for the past 8 years has been teaching architectural design studios and visual studies seminars. She is the principal of Atelier Manferdini, founded in 2004, a design office located in Los Angeles, California. Her practice is based on a multi-scale work methodology and embraces the philosophy that design can participate in a wide range of multidisciplinary developments that define our culture. Her architectural projects have been exhibited in both architecture and art museums internationally. Manferdini graduated from the University of Civil Engineering (Bologna, Italy) and later from University of California, Los Angeles (Master of Architecture and Urban Design). She has lectured widely, including at MIT, Princeton, and Bauhaus. Atelier Manferdini has been feature extensively in national and international media including A+U, Domus, The New York Times, Icon and Form.

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Kyle von Hasseln + Elizabeth von Hasseln Phantom Geometry 2.

Chloe Brunner Dweller on the Threshold 3.

Daniel Berlin Rendezvous: Subverting the latent relationship between a stack and a pile 4.

Gonzalo Padilla Villamizar Seamless Incongruence 5.

Erin Besler Low Fidelity 6.

Michael Nesbit Towards (Ph2)Latness 7.

Fernando Herrera Unravelled

The Graduate Thesis Program at SCI-Arc represents the culmination of the master curriculum and is therefore the most significant test of the students’ and school’s ability to synthesize and produce critical and rigorous architecture.

Looking at the work produced by our students in the past two years, it is clear that SCI-Arc as an institution has unquestionably reached a mature stage, and that our thesis program has been able to demonstrate its ability to own the choice of what designers need to know and think about today, fostering a broad culture of ideas, inquiry and position-taking. At the crossroads of independent researches and collective allegiances, SCI-Arc’s thesis is structured to foster an open-ended spirit of inquiry, responding to shifts in society, technology and culture that define our contemporary architectural field.

This year’s group of award winning projects is an example of the various architectural trajectories and research agendas present in the school. For example Erin Besler’s and Kyle and Elizabeth von Hasseln’s theses explore various modes of representation developed with the use of the SCI-Arc robotic laboratory. Maya Alam’s interest revolves around issues of politics and gestalt in our discipline. Ben Warwas’ and Dale Strong’s projects are an example of familiar architectural language that engages with collective narratives. Daniel Berlin tackles classical notions of architectural compositions, while Fernando Herrera’s project is an example of mastery in digital formalism that the school has been invested in for several years.

The year-long thesis program, divided into Thesis Research during spring and a Design Thesis Studio during summer, is precisely the place in the curriculum where students are asked to produce significance and originality, advancing the state of the art rather than simply compiling what already exists. A set of choreographed lecture series, weekly group meetings, public round tables, symposia and critical debates has been held in order to promote the creation of their arguments. At the beginning of spring 2012, our faculty members Todd Gannon, Marcelyn Gow and Andrew Zago held three lectures tracing a genealogy of experiments in research strategies, tactics and alternative modes of creative tropes in contemporary architecture. Special attention has been given to the relationship between architectural modes of representation and specific methods of inquiry. Students have been encouraged to discern among the various methods of representation the ones that support their thesis trajectories and are able to become instrumental to develop a proof of concept.

During the past three years Distinguished Faculty member Jeff Kipnis has joined our SCI-Arc thesis research advisors Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Wes Jones, Florencia Pita, Peter Testa, Andrew Zago, and Peter Zellner as Special Advisor, along with Todd Gannon and Marcelyn Gow, our cultural studies advisors for graduate thesis. Kipnis’ role has been to focus the students’ energy towards the production of new disciplinary knowledge through a series of one-on-one reviews of the work and several master lectures. These highly curated meetings held during the spring semester have helped the students understand their specific positions within the context of contemporary discourse. Kipnis’ main contribution to SCI-Arc has been to promote a culture in the school where thesis is understood not only as a research of knowledge or a display of competence, but also a critical framework for an educated aesthetic act aimed at creating something of-themoment.

A couple of years ago the Graduate Thesis Symposium was introduced as a platform for discussion about how critical ideas are produced in our field. Sanford Kwinter, Peter Eisenman and Sylvia Lavin have been invited to share with students and faculty

their take on thesis and architecture at large.

Finally, a long weekend of final reviews held by international juries invited from all around the world makes SCI-Arc a fundamental international hub of debate and exchange. Such initiative constitutes an overlapped structure where multiple contents and activities are exchanged, beyond the pedagogical main objective, to assess students’ work. These reviews are a way for SCI-Arc to shape the field of architecture and put forward a new generation of architects whose designs are not just a visual construction of what things might look like in the future, but a vision of how things will be.

GEHRY PRIZE Kyle von Hasseln + Elizabeth von Hasseln Phantom Geometry Advisors: Devyn Weiser & Peter Testa This thesis is about a way of making, a way of using information by developing a system for moving streaming information through physical space—in the form of light—to generate material form.

This system is a full-scale, generative fabrication process that is innately non-linear, is interruptible and corruptible at any time, and does not rely on periodic flattening to 2D. The project builds upon the unique design platform of the SCI-Arc Robot House.

MERIT GRADUATE THESIS Maya Alam The Bastardized Gestalt: Lobotomy of the Familiar Advisor: Elena Manferdini The Bastardized Gestalt explores the defamiliarization of two specific architectural styles—baroque and brutalism—through matters of a fragmented whole. It exploits the irreconcilable by overlaying the pictorial and the geometrical deformation, the 2D and 3D, tied together by means of the subconscious idea of the unified whole.

Daniel Berlin Rendezvous: Subverting the latent relationship between a stack and a pile Advisor: Eric Owen Moss Challenging orthodox conceptions of “meaning,” this thesis asks: Can architecture ever be appropriate? Taking this subjective mind-set literally with the intention of propelling an act of design, the project engenders a situation where multiple ontologies productively collide—a location at the margins where meanings fray—where it slips from a homogeneous totem toward a delicious heterogeneous confection.

Erin Besler Low Fidelity Advisor: Andrew Atwood Low Fidelity proposes to reestablish the gap between disciplinary mediums; not by returning to old models, but by inverting those models, flipping them on their heads, and shaking out architecture’s characteristic methods along with those mediums absorbed by the collapse. Low Fidelity activates tension between architectural mediums and alienates objects of representation to locate alternative sites for design.

Fernando Herrera Unravelled Advisor: Hernan Diaz Alonso Surface has a long-standing relationship with architecture and has been the primary component through which we communicate architectural composition. However the less obvious contributor that has had its hand in the making of architecture is the line. The line has typically been the ghostwriter for compositions that have been manifested through surface. The ambition of this project is to remove the surface avatar and reveal the line as the protagonist of this project.

Dale Strong Working Blue Advisor: Andrew Zago This thesis is investigating formal architectural conditions existing between abstraction and legibility, which challenge notions of sobriety and solemnity in architecture. To counter the seriousness of the surrounding and help lighten the mood, this thesis will make a serious attempt to introduce comic and licentious characteristics to the new building.

Ben Warwas Field So Good Advisor: Florencia Pita The field has been used to create and describe many different aspects of architecture at various scales. But when the field is used as a non-referential pattern to liberate architecture from the dead weight of theory and pure space, it becomes the most powerful.

Field So Good has taken those techniques and developed them into an architecture that combines form with the application of field into a cohesive result.

UNDERGraduate Thesis PROJECT 2012

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Devyn Weiser The Undergraduate Program at SCI-Arc culminates in an exciting year-long thesis project that synthesizes the curriculum of Design Studios with Cultural, Applied, Visual and General Studies.

Students spend their final year of study articulating relevant disciplinary arguments instantiated in highly developed architectural projects. In this way, the thesis supports individual inquiry and collaborative research while also opening up new models of practice. The students have taken on this challenge with intensity and creativity to make SCI-Arc’s undergraduate thesis project one of the most important public events at the school every spring semester.

In 2012 design faculty members and thesis advisors Dwayne Oyler, Florencia Pita, Michael Rotondi, and Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator Devyn Weiser were joined by Dora Epstein Jones as Cultural Studies Advisor and Distinguished Faculty Jeff Kipnis as Special Advisor. Jeff Kipnis met with students during the thesis preparation seminar in the fall and at multiple times during the spring semester, including a series of Master Class lectures over the academic year.

This year’s group of thesis projects represents a broad range of topics, reflecting the pedagogical diversity of the school and students’ individual interests. The seven selected projects included in this issue examine and contribute contemporary formal strategies tied to particular aspects of surface, volume, and envelope; material, fabrication, and construction strategies tied to advances in both traditional materials and composite technology; and more conceptual strategies tied to specific techniques of representation and critiques of architectural conventions. All projects evidence a sophisticated use and application of digital tools and methodologies integral to SCI-Arc’s pedagogical program in the last decade. Selected projects reflect a diminished presence of large urban proposals in favor of comprehensively and rigorously designed medium and smaller scale architectural projects with a focus on the core of architecture.

Under the direction of Undergraduate Program Chair John Enright, the program has been progressively renewed as evidenced by the quality of work produced in the thesis. SCI-Arc undergraduates today have a unique breadth of disciplinary knowledge and technical capabilities. Their skill sets range from conventional techniques of representation in architecture and CAD/CAM modeling to scripting, programming, and controlling CNC machines and the family of six-axis robots. The 2012 undergraduate thesis included for the first time projects based in the Robot House and it is anticipated that this will be a continuing albeit specialized niche within the Undergraduate Thesis program.

As design becomes an increasingly important paradigm for innovation and business development, the individual initiative and entrepreneurial dimension of the undergraduate thesis project gains significance and relevance to our graduates, the profession, and global economy. The SCI-Arc Undergraduate Program now ranks #1 in the Western US, according to the 2013 Best Architecture and Design Schools Survey conducted by the Greenway Group and Design Intelligence, with recent graduates attending top graduate schools Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and Princeton University School of Architecture to name a few. SCI-Arc undergraduates are highly valued by leading local and global practices.

Students from the last three graduating classes have gone on to employment at Pritzker Prize winning firms in Los Angeles such as Gehry Partners and Morphosis, as well as offices all around the world from Asymptote in New York, to MAD Studio in Beijing, and Ateliers Jean Nouvel in Paris.

Undergraduate thesis at SCI-Arc continues to gain intensity as a crucible for contemporary architectural discourse, proposing theoretical and conceptual frameworks; developing techniques at the convergence of analog and digital technology; and realizing new

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material and cultural projects.

BEST UNDERGRADUATE THESIS Paul Ferrier Cambon Window-as-Volume Advisor: Dwayne Oyler As the mediator between the human made and the environment, the window is one of architecture’s most powerful tools for placing us in the world. Window-as-Volume challenges architecture’s enclosure and therefore how we distinguish between the inside and out by intensifying interior spatial conditions. A new spatial dimension to the flat window can shift the window’s objective from framing us in an environment towards suspending us in the view itself.

MERIT UNDERGRADUATE THESIS Chloe Brunner Dweller on the Threshold Advisor: Devyn Weiser From Jefferson’s grid to Google Earth, the earth’s surface has been conventionally navigated through abstract devices constructed of points, lines, and planes—providing society a means to orient itself. Conventional modes of architectural representation deploy a similar method of projection—therefore imitating and re-enforcing the navigation of space through a projection of the two-dimensional. This thesis maps the earth through a ‘thick’ representation of the two-dimensional, offering an alternative reading of space by rending tangible the otherwise immaterial landscape.

Timothy Cheng + Nathan Eugene Meyers Form in Form Advisor: Devyn Weiser Form in Form explores the fabrication process as an architectural catalyst by embedding formwork into architectural form rather than limiting it to a geometrical template to be discarded, despite enormous effort and expense. In this way, the thesis proposes an inversion of the typical design process. The structural framework is first embedded into the envelope, which is then folded into the architectural form. This new tectonic proposition is tested through a series of prototype pavilions for London’s West End. Emmy Maruta Soft Boiled Advisor: Florencia Pita This thesis seeks “twoness” through defining notions of soft and hard. The twoness in this project is featured in the voluptuous surface and sharp skin.

The two combined create a friction that affects the surface’s reflection and luminosity that results in an optical disturbance in the curvature, making it difficult to understand where the surface lies, therefore creating an architectural blur. This oscillation between mediums pushes architecture out beyond its own envelope allowing for palpability.

Michael Nesbit Towards (Ph2)Latness Advisor: Dwayne Oyler Architecture is built on our ability to use representation as an effect for production… sketch to model, model to drawing, drawing to building. Within our contemporary discipline, we have been given an extensive tool set that has pushed architecture forward, but due to immediacy the process has eliminated many of our previous entry points. This thesis will represent construction diagrams of the drawing. By placing emphasis on the drawing and not the object, we re-insert our role of judgment back into representation, allowing the drawing to produce something far greater than the thing originally represented.

Joshua Stanton Smith Sanctuarium Advisor: Michael Rotondi An architecture of time is an architecture of the past’s laws, the present’s rules, and the future’s ideas. In this integration of realities, architecture and technology advance together towards an open-source future. It is a future where architecture has the ability to purely exist. It is a challenge that forces the boundary between architecture’s form and the technology that makes it possible to become indistinguishable; where new questions arise about the meaning of ground plane, form, displacement and existence.

Gonzalo Padilla Villamizar Seamless Incongruence Advisor: Florencia Pita In architecture, when congruency is high, the elements produce a “seamless effect” that allows continuity.

When incongruence is high, the difference between the elements force the materialization of connections that produces the effect of an “architectural collage,” rendering visible the discrepancies between elements to the point of creating discontinuity. This thesis challenges this dichotomy by interchanging both conditions through the use of incongruent elements to create a “seamless effect.”

Devyn Weiser is the Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator at SCI-Arc, joining the SCI-Arc Design Faculty in 2006.

She is the principal-in-charge at Testa/ Weiser and co-founder of the MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG). At Testa/Weiser she leads a wide range of projects from industrial design to architecture and infrastructure. With a consortium of industry partners she directs ESCape, an open source platform for decentralized waste-to-energy (WtE) solutions. Weiser’s work has been exhibited at leading museums and galleries worldwide, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; National Building Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Art Center, Tokyo; and Beijing Architecture Biennale. She has been a Visiting Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Weiser holds a B.F.A. and B.Arch (with honors) from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a MSAAD from Columbia University.

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Timothy Cheng + Nathan Eugene Meyers Form in Form 9.

Ben Warwas Field So Good 10.

Emmy Maruta Soft Boiled 11.

Dale Strong Working Blue 12.

Joshua Stanton Smith Sanctuarium 13.

Maya Alam The Bastardized Gestalt: Lobotomy of the Familiar 14.

Paul Ferrier Cambon Window-as-Volume

11

GRADUATE THESIS 2012: A VISION OF HOW THINGS WILL BE Elena Manferdini

Elena Manferdini is the Graduate Thesis Coordinator at SCI-Arc, and for the past 8 years has been teaching architectural design studios and visual studies seminars. She is the principal of Atelier Manferdini, founded in 2004, a design office located in Los Angeles, California. Her practice is based on a multi-scale work methodology and embraces the philosophy that design can participate in a wide range of multidisciplinary developments that define our culture. Her architectural projects have been exhibited in both architecture and art museums internationally. Manferdini graduated from the University of Civil Engineering (Bologna, Italy) and later from University of California, Los Angeles (Master of Architecture and Urban Design). She has lectured widely, including at MIT, Princeton, and Bauhaus. Atelier Manferdini has been feature extensively in national and international media including A+U, Domus, The New York Times, Icon and Form.

1.

Kyle von Hasseln + Elizabeth von Hasseln Phantom Geometry 2.

Chloe Brunner Dweller on the Threshold 3.

Daniel Berlin Rendezvous: Subverting the latent relationship between a stack and a pile 4.

Gonzalo Padilla Villamizar Seamless Incongruence 5.

Erin Besler Low Fidelity 6.

Michael Nesbit Towards (Ph2)Latness 7.

Fernando Herrera Unravelled

The Graduate Thesis Program at SCI-Arc represents the culmination of the master curriculum and is therefore the most significant test of the students’ and school’s ability to synthesize and produce critical and rigorous architecture.

Looking at the work produced by our students in the past two years, it is clear that SCI-Arc as an institution has unquestionably reached a mature stage, and that our thesis program has been able to demonstrate its ability to own the choice of what designers need to know and think about today, fostering a broad culture of ideas, inquiry and position-taking. At the crossroads of independent researches and collective allegiances, SCI-Arc’s thesis is structured to foster an open-ended spirit of inquiry, responding to shifts in society, technology and culture that define our contemporary architectural field.

This year’s group of award winning projects is an example of the various architectural trajectories and research agendas present in the school. For example Erin Besler’s and Kyle and Elizabeth von Hasseln’s theses explore various modes of representation developed with the use of the SCI-Arc robotic laboratory. Maya Alam’s interest revolves around issues of politics and gestalt in our discipline. Ben Warwas’ and Dale Strong’s projects are an example of familiar architectural language that engages with collective narratives. Daniel Berlin tackles classical notions of architectural compositions, while Fernando Herrera’s project is an example of mastery in digital formalism that the school has been invested in for several years.

The year-long thesis program, divided into Thesis Research during spring and a Design Thesis Studio during summer, is precisely the place in the curriculum where students are asked to produce significance and originality, advancing the state of the art rather than simply compiling what already exists. A set of choreographed lecture series, weekly group meetings, public round tables, symposia and critical debates has been held in order to promote the creation of their arguments. At the beginning of spring 2012, our faculty members Todd Gannon, Marcelyn Gow and Andrew Zago held three lectures tracing a genealogy of experiments in research strategies, tactics and alternative modes of creative tropes in contemporary architecture. Special attention has been given to the relationship between architectural modes of representation and specific methods of inquiry. Students have been encouraged to discern among the various methods of representation the ones that support their thesis trajectories and are able to become instrumental to develop a proof of concept.

During the past three years Distinguished Faculty member Jeff Kipnis has joined our SCI-Arc thesis research advisors Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Wes Jones, Florencia Pita, Peter Testa, Andrew Zago, and Peter Zellner as Special Advisor, along with Todd Gannon and Marcelyn Gow, our cultural studies advisors for graduate thesis. Kipnis’ role has been to focus the students’ energy towards the production of new disciplinary knowledge through a series of one-on-one reviews of the work and several master lectures. These highly curated meetings held during the spring semester have helped the students understand their specific positions within the context of contemporary discourse. Kipnis’ main contribution to SCI-Arc has been to promote a culture in the school where thesis is understood not only as a research of knowledge or a display of competence, but also a critical framework for an educated aesthetic act aimed at creating something of-themoment.

A couple of years ago the Graduate Thesis Symposium was introduced as a platform for discussion about how critical ideas are produced in our field. Sanford Kwinter, Peter Eisenman and Sylvia Lavin have been invited to share with students and faculty 14

their take on thesis and architecture at large.

Finally, a long weekend of final reviews held by international juries invited from all around the world makes SCI-Arc a fundamental international hub of debate and exchange. Such initiative constitutes an overlapped structure where multiple contents and activities are exchanged, beyond the pedagogical main objective, to assess students’ work. These reviews are a way for SCI-Arc to shape the field of architecture and put forward a new generation of architects whose designs are not just a visual construction of what things might look like in the future, but a vision of how things will be.

GEHRY PRIZE Kyle von Hasseln + Elizabeth von Hasseln Phantom Geometry Advisors: Devyn Weiser & Peter Testa This thesis is about a way of making, a way of using information by developing a system for moving streaming information through physical space—in the form of light—to generate material form.

This system is a full-scale, generative fabrication process that is innately non-linear, is interruptible and corruptible at any time, and does not rely on periodic flattening to 2D. The project builds upon the unique design platform of the SCI-Arc Robot House.

MERIT GRADUATE THESIS Maya Alam The Bastardized Gestalt: Lobotomy of the Familiar Advisor: Elena Manferdini The Bastardized Gestalt explores the defamiliarization of two specific architectural styles—baroque and brutalism—through matters of a fragmented whole. It exploits the irreconcilable by overlaying the pictorial and the geometrical deformation, the 2D and 3D, tied together by means of the subconscious idea of the unified whole.

Daniel Berlin Rendezvous: Subverting the latent relationship between a stack and a pile Advisor: Eric Owen Moss Challenging orthodox conceptions of “meaning,” this thesis asks: Can architecture ever be appropriate? Taking this subjective mind-set literally with the intention of propelling an act of design, the project engenders a situation where multiple ontologies productively collide—a location at the margins where meanings fray—where it slips from a homogeneous totem toward a delicious heterogeneous confection.

Erin Besler Low Fidelity Advisor: Andrew Atwood Low Fidelity proposes to reestablish the gap between disciplinary mediums; not by returning to old models, but by inverting those models, flipping them on their heads, and shaking out architecture’s characteristic methods along with those mediums absorbed by the collapse. Low Fidelity activates tension between architectural mediums and alienates objects of representation to locate alternative sites for design.

Fernando Herrera Unravelled Advisor: Hernan Diaz Alonso Surface has a long-standing relationship with architecture and has been the primary component through which we communicate architectural composition. However the less obvious contributor that has had its hand in the making of architecture is the line. The line has typically been the ghostwriter for compositions that have been manifested through surface. The ambition of this project is to remove the surface avatar and reveal the line as the protagonist of this project.

Dale Strong Working Blue Advisor: Andrew Zago This thesis is investigating formal architectural conditions existing between abstraction and legibility, which challenge notions of sobriety and solemnity in architecture. To counter the seriousness of the surrounding and help lighten the mood, this thesis will make a serious attempt to introduce comic and licentious characteristics to the new building.

Ben Warwas Field So Good Advisor: Florencia Pita The field has been used to create and describe many different aspects of architecture at various scales. But when the field is used as a non-referential pattern to liberate architecture from the dead weight of theory and pure space, it becomes the most powerful.

Field So Good has taken those techniques and developed them into an architecture that combines form with the application of field into a cohesive result.

UNDERGraduate Thesis PROJECT 2012

12

Devyn Weiser The Undergraduate Program at SCI-Arc culminates in an exciting year-long thesis project that synthesizes the curriculum of Design Studios with Cultural, Applied, Visual and General Studies.

Students spend their final year of study articulating relevant disciplinary arguments instantiated in highly developed architectural projects. In this way, the thesis supports individual inquiry and collaborative research while also opening up new models of practice. The students have taken on this challenge with intensity and creativity to make SCI-Arc’s undergraduate thesis project one of the most important public events at the school every spring semester.

In 2012 design faculty members and thesis advisors Dwayne Oyler, Florencia Pita, Michael Rotondi, and Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator Devyn Weiser were joined by Dora Epstein Jones as Cultural Studies Advisor and Distinguished Faculty Jeff Kipnis as Special Advisor. Jeff Kipnis met with students during the thesis preparation seminar in the fall and at multiple times during the spring semester, including a series of Master Class lectures over the academic year.

This year’s group of thesis projects represents a broad range of topics, reflecting the pedagogical diversity of the school and students’ individual interests. The seven selected projects included in this issue examine and contribute contemporary formal strategies tied to particular aspects of surface, volume, and envelope; material, fabrication, and construction strategies tied to advances in both traditional materials and composite technology; and more conceptual strategies tied to specific techniques of representation and critiques of architectural conventions. All projects evidence a sophisticated use and application of digital tools and methodologies integral to SCI-Arc’s pedagogical program in the last decade. Selected projects reflect a diminished presence of large urban proposals in favor of comprehensively and rigorously designed medium and smaller scale architectural projects with a focus on the core of architecture.

Under the direction of Undergraduate Program Chair John Enright, the program has been progressively renewed as evidenced by the quality of work produced in the thesis. SCI-Arc undergraduates today have a unique breadth of disciplinary knowledge and technical capabilities. Their skill sets range from conventional techniques of representation in architecture and CAD/CAM modeling to scripting, programming, and controlling CNC machines and the family of six-axis robots. The 2012 undergraduate thesis included for the first time projects based in the Robot House and it is anticipated that this will be a continuing albeit specialized niche within the Undergraduate Thesis program.

As design becomes an increasingly important paradigm for innovation and business development, the individual initiative and entrepreneurial dimension of the undergraduate thesis project gains significance and relevance to our graduates, the profession, and global economy. The SCI-Arc Undergraduate Program now ranks #1 in the Western US, according to the 2013 Best Architecture and Design Schools Survey conducted by the Greenway Group and Design Intelligence, with recent graduates attending top graduate schools Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and Princeton University School of Architecture to name a few. SCI-Arc undergraduates are highly valued by leading local and global practices.

Students from the last three graduating classes have gone on to employment at Pritzker Prize winning firms in Los Angeles such as Gehry Partners and Morphosis, as well as offices all around the world from Asymptote in New York, to MAD Studio in Beijing, and Ateliers Jean Nouvel in Paris.

Undergraduate thesis at SCI-Arc continues to gain intensity as a crucible for contemporary architectural discourse, proposing theoretical and conceptual frameworks; developing techniques at the convergence of analog and digital technology; and realizing new material and cultural projects.

BEST UNDERGRADUATE THESIS Paul Ferrier Cambon Window-as-Volume Advisor: Dwayne Oyler As the mediator between the human made and the environment, the window is one of architecture’s most powerful tools for placing us in the world. Window-as-Volume challenges architecture’s enclosure and therefore how we distinguish between the inside and out by intensifying interior spatial conditions. A new spatial dimension to the flat window can shift the window’s objective from framing us in an environment towards suspending us in the view itself.

MERIT UNDERGRADUATE THESIS Chloe Brunner Dweller on the Threshold Advisor: Devyn Weiser From Jefferson’s grid to Google Earth, the earth’s surface has been conventionally navigated through abstract devices constructed of points, lines, and planes—providing society a means to orient itself. Conventional modes of architectural representation deploy a similar method of projection—therefore imitating and re-enforcing the navigation of space through a projection of the two-dimensional. This thesis maps the earth through a ‘thick’ representation of the two-dimensional, offering an alternative reading of space by rending tangible the otherwise immaterial landscape.

Timothy Cheng + Nathan Eugene Meyers Form in Form Advisor: Devyn Weiser Form in Form explores the fabrication process as an architectural catalyst by embedding formwork into architectural form rather than limiting it to a geometrical template to be discarded, despite enormous effort and expense. In this way, the thesis proposes an inversion of the typical design process. The structural framework is first embedded into the envelope, which is then folded into the architectural form. This new tectonic proposition is tested through a series of prototype pavilions for London’s West End. Emmy Maruta Soft Boiled Advisor: Florencia Pita This thesis seeks “twoness” through defining notions of soft and hard. The twoness in this project is featured in the voluptuous surface and sharp skin.

The two combined create a friction that affects the surface’s reflection and luminosity that results in an optical disturbance in the curvature, making it difficult to understand where the surface lies, therefore creating an architectural blur. This oscillation between mediums pushes architecture out beyond its own envelope allowing for palpability.

Michael Nesbit Towards (Ph2)Latness Advisor: Dwayne Oyler Architecture is built on our ability to use representation as an effect for production… sketch to model, model to drawing, drawing to building. Within our contemporary discipline, we have been given an extensive tool set that has pushed architecture forward, but due to immediacy the process has eliminated many of our previous entry points. This thesis will represent construction diagrams of the drawing. By placing emphasis on the drawing and not the object, we re-insert our role of judgment back into representation, allowing the drawing to produce something far greater than the thing originally represented.

Joshua Stanton Smith Sanctuarium Advisor: Michael Rotondi An architecture of time is an architecture of the past’s laws, the present’s rules, and the future’s ideas. In this integration of realities, architecture and technology advance together towards an open-source future. It is a future where architecture has the ability to purely exist. It is a challenge that forces the boundary between architecture’s form and the technology that makes it possible to become indistinguishable; where new questions arise about the meaning of ground plane, form, displacement and existence.

Gonzalo Padilla Villamizar Seamless Incongruence Advisor: Florencia Pita In architecture, when congruency is high, the elements produce a “seamless effect” that allows continuity.

When incongruence is high, the difference between the elements force the materialization of connections that produces the effect of an “architectural collage,” rendering visible the discrepancies between elements to the point of creating discontinuity. This thesis challenges this dichotomy by interchanging both conditions through the use of incongruent elements to create a “seamless effect.”

Devyn Weiser is the Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator at SCI-Arc, joining the SCI-Arc Design Faculty in 2006.

She is the principal-in-charge at Testa/ Weiser and co-founder of the MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG). At Testa/Weiser she leads a wide range of projects from industrial design to architecture and infrastructure. With a consortium of industry partners she directs ESCape, an open source platform for decentralized waste-to-energy (WtE) solutions. Weiser’s work has been exhibited at leading museums and galleries worldwide, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; National Building Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Art Center, Tokyo; and Beijing Architecture Biennale. She has been a Visiting Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Weiser holds a B.F.A. and B.Arch (with honors) from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a MSAAD from Columbia University.

8.

Timothy Cheng + Nathan Eugene Meyers Form in Form 9.

Ben Warwas Field So Good 10.

Emmy Maruta Soft Boiled 11.

Dale Strong Working Blue 12.

Joshua Stanton Smith Sanctuarium 13.

Maya Alam The Bastardized Gestalt: Lobotomy of the Familiar 14.

Paul Ferrier Cambon Window-as-Volume

11

GRADUATE THESIS 2012: A VISION OF HOW THINGS WILL BE Elena Manferdini

Elena Manferdini is the Graduate Thesis Coordinator at SCI-Arc, and for the past 8 years has been teaching architectural design studios and visual studies seminars. She is the principal of Atelier Manferdini, founded in 2004, a design office located in Los Angeles, California. Her practice is based on a multi-scale work methodology and embraces the philosophy that design can participate in a wide range of multidisciplinary developments that define our culture. Her architectural projects have been exhibited in both architecture and art museums internationally. Manferdini graduated from the University of Civil Engineering (Bologna, Italy) and later from University of California, Los Angeles (Master of Architecture and Urban Design). She has lectured widely, including at MIT, Princeton, and Bauhaus. Atelier Manferdini has been feature extensively in national and international media including A+U, Domus, The New York Times, Icon and Form.

1.

Kyle von Hasseln + Elizabeth von Hasseln Phantom Geometry 2.

Chloe Brunner Dweller on the Threshold 3.

Daniel Berlin Rendezvous: Subverting the latent relationship between a stack and a pile 4.

Gonzalo Padilla Villamizar Seamless Incongruence 5.

Erin Besler Low Fidelity 6.

Michael Nesbit Towards (Ph2)Latness 7.

Fernando Herrera Unravelled

The Graduate Thesis Program at SCI-Arc represents the culmination of the master curriculum and is therefore the most significant test of the students’ and school’s ability to synthesize and produce critical and rigorous architecture.

Looking at the work produced by our students in the past two years, it is clear that SCI-Arc as an institution has unquestionably reached a mature stage, and that our thesis program has been able to demonstrate its ability to own the choice of what designers need to know and think about today, fostering a broad culture of ideas, inquiry and position-taking. At the crossroads of independent researches and collective allegiances, SCI-Arc’s thesis is structured to foster an open-ended spirit of inquiry, responding to shifts in society, technology and culture that define our contemporary architectural field.

This year’s group of award winning projects is an example of the various architectural trajectories and research agendas present in the school. For example Erin Besler’s and Kyle and Elizabeth von Hasseln’s theses explore various modes of representation developed with the use of the SCI-Arc robotic laboratory. Maya Alam’s interest revolves around issues of politics and gestalt in our discipline. Ben Warwas’ and Dale Strong’s projects are an example of familiar architectural language that engages with collective 2

narratives. Daniel Berlin tackles classical notions of architectural

compositions, while Fernando Herrera’s project is an example of mastery in digital formalism that the school has been invested in for several years.

The year-long thesis program, divided into Thesis Research during spring and a Design Thesis Studio during summer, is precisely the place in the curriculum where students are asked to produce significance and originality, advancing the state of the art rather than simply compiling what already exists. A set of choreographed lecture series, weekly group meetings, public round tables, symposia and critical debates has been held in order to promote the creation of their arguments. At the beginning of spring 2012, GEHRY PRIZE

MERIT GRADUATE THESIS Kyle von Hasseln + Elizabeth von Hasseln Phantom Geometry Advisors: Devyn Weiser & Peter Testa This thesis is about a way of making, a way of using information by developing a system for moving streaming information through physical space—in the form of light—to generate material form.

This system is a full-scale, generative fabrication process that is innately non-linear, is interruptible and corruptible at any time, and does not rely on periodic flattening to 2D. The project builds upon the unique design platform of the SCI-Arc Robot House.

Maya Alam The Bastardized Gestalt: Lobotomy of the Familiar Advisor: Elena Manferdini The Bastardized Gestalt explores the defamiliarization of two specific architectural styles—baroque and brutalism—through matters of a fragmented whole. It exploits the irreconcilable by overlaying the pictorial and the geometrical deformation, the 2D and 3D, tied together by means of the subconscious idea of the unified whole.

Daniel Berlin

UNDERGraduate Thesis PROJECT 2012

12

Devyn Weiser The Undergraduate Program at SCI-Arc culminates in an exciting year-long thesis project that synthesizes the curriculum of Design Studios with Cultural, Applied, Visual and General Studies.

Students spend their final year of study articulating relevant disciplinary arguments instantiated in highly developed architectural projects. In this way, the thesis supports individual inquiry and collaborative research while also opening up new models of practice. The students have taken on this challenge with intensity and creativity to make SCI-Arc’s undergraduate thesis project one of the most important public events at the school every spring semester.

In 2012 design faculty members and thesis advisors Dwayne Oyler, Florencia Pita, Michael Rotondi, and Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator Devyn Weiser were joined by Dora Epstein Jones as Cultural Studies Advisor and Distinguished Faculty Jeff Kipnis as Special Advisor. Jeff Kipnis met with students during the thesis preparation seminar in the fall and at multiple times during the spring semester, including a series of Master Class lectures over the academic year.

This year’s group of thesis projects represents a broad range of topics, reflecting the pedagogical diversity of the school and students’ individual interests. The seven selected projects included in this issue examine and contribute contemporary formal strategies 4

5

tied to particular aspects of surface, volume, and envelope; material, fabrication, and construction strategies tied to advances in both traditional materials and composite technology; and more conceptual strategies tied to specific techniques of representation and critiques of architectural conventions. All projects evidence a sophisticated use and application of digital tools and methodologies integral to SCI-Arc’s pedagogical program in the last decade. Selected projects reflect a diminished presence of large urban proposals in favor of comprehensively and rigorously designed medium and smaller scale architectural projects with a focus on the core of architecture.

Under the direction of Undergraduate Program Chair John Enright, the program has been progressively renewed as evidenced by the quality of work produced in the thesis. SCI-Arc undergraduates today have a unique breadth of disciplinary knowledge and technical capabilities. Their skill sets range from conventional techniques of representation in architecture and CAD/CAM modeling to scripting, programming, and controlling CNC machines and the family of six-axis robots. The 2012 undergraduate thesis included for the first time projects based in the Robot House and it is anticipated that this will be a continuing albeit specialized niche within the Undergraduate Thesis program.

As design becomes an increasingly important paradigm for innovation and business development, the individual initiative and entrepreneurial dimension of the undergraduate thesis project gains significance and relevance to our graduates, the profession, and global economy. The SCI-Arc Undergraduate Program now ranks #1 in the Western US, according to the 2013 Best Architecture and Design Schools Survey conducted by the Greenway Group and Design Intelligence, with recent graduates attending top graduate schools Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and Princeton University School of Architecture to name a few. SCI-Arc undergraduates are highly valued by leading local and global practices.

Students from the last three graduating classes have gone on to employment at Pritzker Prize winning firms in Los Angeles such as Gehry Partners and Morphosis, as well as offices all around the world from Asymptote in New York, to MAD Studio in Beijing, and Ateliers Jean Nouvel in Paris.

Undergraduate thesis at SCI-Arc continues to gain intensity as a crucible for contemporary architectural discourse, proposing

BEST UNDERGRADUATE THESIS Paul Ferrier Cambon Window-as-Volume Advisor: Dwayne Oyler As the mediator between the human made and the environment, the window is one of architecture’s most powerful tools for placing us in the world. Window-as-Volume challenges architecture’s enclosure and therefore how we distinguish between the inside and out by intensifying interior spatial conditions. A new spatial dimension to the flat window can shift the window’s objective from framing us in an environment towards suspending us in the view itself.

MERIT UNDERGRADUATE THESIS Chloe Brunner Dweller on the Threshold Advisor: Devyn Weiser From Jefferson’s grid to Google Earth, the earth’s surface has been conventionally navigated through abstract devices constructed of points, lines, and planes—providing society a means to orient itself. Conventional modes of architectural representation deploy a similar method of projection—therefore imitating and re-enforcing the navigation of space through a projection of the two-dimensional. This thesis maps the earth through a ‘thick’ representation of the two-dimensional, offering an alternative reading of space by rending tangible the otherwise immaterial landscape.

Timothy Cheng + Nathan Eugene Meyers Form in Form Advisor: Devyn Weiser Form in Form explores the fabrication process as an architectural catalyst by embedding formwork into architectural form rather than limiting it to a geometrical template to be discarded, despite enormous effort and expense. In this way, the thesis proposes an inversion of the typical design process. The structural framework is first embedded into the envelope, which is then folded into the architectural form. This new tectonic proposition is tested through a series of prototype pavilions for London’s West End. Emmy Maruta Soft Boiled Advisor: Florencia Pita This thesis seeks “twoness” through defining notions of soft and hard. The twoness in this project is featured in the voluptuous surface and sharp skin.

The two combined create a friction that affects the surface’s reflection and luminosity that results in an optical disturbance in the curvature, making it difficult to understand where the surface lies, therefore creating an architectural blur. This oscillation between mediums pushes architecture out beyond its own envelope allowing for palpability.

Michael Nesbit Towards (Ph2)Latness Advisor: Dwayne Oyler Architecture is built on our ability to use representation as an effect for production… sketch to model, model to drawing, drawing to building. Within our contemporary discipline, we have been given an extensive tool set that has pushed architecture forward, but due to immediacy the process has eliminated many of our previous entry points. This thesis will represent construction diagrams of the drawing. By placing emphasis on the drawing and not the object, we re-insert our role of judgment back into representation, allowing the drawing to produce something far greater than the thing originally represented.

Joshua Stanton Smith Sanctuarium Advisor: Michael Rotondi An architecture of time is an architecture of the past’s laws, the present’s rules, and the future’s ideas. In this integration of realities, architecture and technology advance together towards an open-source future. It is a future where architecture has the ability to purely exist. It is a challenge that forces the boundary between architecture’s form and the technology that makes it possible to become indistinguishable; where new questions arise about the meaning of ground plane, form, displacement and existence.

Gonzalo Padilla Villamizar Seamless Incongruence Advisor: Florencia Pita In architecture, when congruency is high, the elements produce a “seamless effect” that allows continuity.

When incongruence is high, the difference between the elements force the materialization of connections that produces the effect of an “architectural collage,” rendering visible the discrepancies between elements to the point of creating discontinuity. This thesis challenges this dichotomy by interchanging both conditions through the use of incongruent elements to create a “seamless effect.”

Devyn Weiser is the Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator at SCI-Arc, joining the SCI-Arc Design Faculty in 2006.

She is the principal-in-charge at Testa/ Weiser and co-founder of the MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG). At Testa/Weiser she leads a wide range of projects from industrial design to architecture and infrastructure. With a consortium of industry partners she directs ESCape, an open source platform for decentralized waste-to-energy (WtE) solutions. Weiser’s work has been exhibited at leading museums and galleries worldwide, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; National Building Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Art Center, Tokyo; and Beijing Architecture Biennale. She has been a Visiting Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Weiser holds a B.F.A. and B.Arch (with honors) from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a MSAAD from Columbia University.

8.

Timothy Cheng + Nathan Eugene Meyers Form in Form 9.

Ben Warwas Field So Good 10.

Emmy Maruta Soft Boiled 11.

Dale Strong Working Blue 12.

Joshua Stanton Smith Sanctuarium 13.

Maya Alam The Bastardized Gestalt: Lobotomy of the Familiar 14.

Paul Ferrier Cambon Window-as-Volume

11

GRADUATE THESIS 2012: A VISION OF HOW THINGS WILL BE Elena Manferdini

Elena Manferdini is the Graduate Thesis Coordinator at SCI-Arc, and for the past 8 years has been teaching architectural design studios and visual studies seminars. She is the principal of Atelier Manferdini, founded in 2004, a design office located in Los Angeles, California. Her practice is based on a multi-scale work methodology and embraces the philosophy that design can participate in a wide range of multidisciplinary developments that define our culture. Her architectural projects have been exhibited in both architecture and art museums internationally. Manferdini graduated from the University of Civil Engineering (Bologna, Italy) and later from University of California, Los Angeles (Master of Architecture and Urban Design). She has lectured widely, including at MIT, Princeton, and Bauhaus. Atelier Manferdini has been feature extensively in national and international media including A+U, Domus, The New York Times, Icon and Form.

1.

Kyle von Hasseln + Elizabeth von Hasseln Phantom Geometry 2.

Chloe Brunner Dweller on the Threshold 3.

Daniel Berlin Rendezvous: Subverting the latent relationship between a stack and a pile 4.

Gonzalo Padilla Villamizar Seamless Incongruence 5.

Erin Besler Low Fidelity 6.

Michael Nesbit Towards (Ph2)Latness 7.

Fernando Herrera Unravelled

The Graduate Thesis Program at SCI-Arc represents the culmination of the master curriculum and is therefore the most significant test of the students’ and school’s ability to synthesize and produce critical and rigorous architecture.

Looking at the work produced by our students in the past two years, it is clear that SCI-Arc as an institution has unquestionably reached a mature stage, and that our thesis program has been able to demonstrate its ability to own the choice of what designers need to know and think about today, fostering a broad culture of ideas, inquiry and position-taking. At the crossroads of independent researches and collective allegiances, SCI-Arc’s thesis is structured to foster an open-ended spirit of inquiry, responding to shifts in society, technology and culture that define our contemporary architectural field.

This year’s group of award winning projects is an example of the various architectural trajectories and research agendas present in the school. For example Erin Besler’s and Kyle and Elizabeth von Hasseln’s theses explore various modes of representation developed with the use of the SCI-Arc robotic laboratory. Maya Alam’s interest revolves around issues of politics and gestalt in our discipline. Ben Warwas’ and Dale Strong’s projects are an example of familiar architectural language that engages with collective narratives. Daniel Berlin tackles classical notions of architectural

compositions, while Fernando Herrera’s project is an example of mastery in digital formalism that the school has been invested in for several years.

The year-long thesis program, divided into Thesis Research during spring and a Design Thesis Studio during summer, is precisely the place in the curriculum where students are asked to produce significance and originality, advancing the state of the art rather than simply compiling what already exists. A set of choreographed lecture series, weekly group meetings, public round tables, symposia and critical debates has been held in order to promote the creation of their arguments. At the beginning of spring 2012, GEHRY PRIZE

Kyle von Hasseln + Elizabeth von Hasseln Phantom Geometry Advisors: Devyn Weiser & Peter Testa This thesis is about a way of making, a way of using information by developing a system for moving streaming information through physical space—in the form of light—to generate material form.

This system is a full-scale, generative fabrication process that is innately non-linear, is interruptible and corruptible at any time, and does not rely on

periodic flattening to 2D. The project builds upon the unique design platform of the SCI-Arc Robot House.

MERIT GRADUATE THESIS Maya Alam The Bastardized Gestalt: Lobotomy of the Familiar Advisor: Elena Manferdini The Bastardized Gestalt explores the defamiliarization of two specific architectural styles—baroque and brutalism—through matters of a fragmented whole. It exploits the irreconcilable by

12

Devyn Weiser is the Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator at SCI-Arc, joining the SCI-Arc Design Faculty in 2006.

She is the principal-in-charge at Testa/ Weiser and co-founder of the MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG). At Testa/Weiser she leads a wide range of projects from industrial design to architecture and infrastructure. With a consortium of industry partners she directs ESCape, an open source platform for decentralized waste-to-energy (WtE) solutions. Weiser’s work has been exhibited at leading museums and galleries worldwide, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; National Building Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Art Center, Tokyo; and Beijing Architecture Biennale. She has been a Visiting Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Weiser holds a B.F.A. and B.Arch (with honors) from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a MSAAD from Columbia University.

The Undergraduate Program at SCI-Arc culminates in an exciting year-long thesis project that synthesizes the curriculum of Design Studios with Cultural, Applied, Visual and General Studies.

Students spend their final year of study articulating relevant disciplinary arguments instantiated in highly developed architectural projects. In this way, the thesis supports individual inquiry and collaborative research while also opening up new models of practice. The students have taken on this challenge with intensity and creativity to make SCI-Arc’s undergraduate thesis project one of the most important public events at the school every spring semester.

In 2012 design faculty members and thesis advisors Dwayne Oyler, Florencia Pita, Michael Rotondi, and Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator Devyn Weiser were joined by Dora Epstein Jones as Cultural Studies Advisor and Distinguished Faculty Jeff Kipnis as Special Advisor. Jeff Kipnis met with students during the thesis preparation seminar in the fall and at multiple times during the spring semester, including a series of Master Class lectures over the academic year.

This year’s group of thesis projects represents a broad range of topics, reflecting the pedagogical diversity of the school and students’ individual interests. The seven selected projects included in this issue examine and contribute contemporary formal strategies tied to particular aspects of surface, volume, and envelope; material, fabrication, and construction strategies tied to advances in both traditional materials and composite technology; and more conceptual strategies tied to specific techniques of representation and critiques of architectural conventions. All projects evidence a sophisticated use and application of digital tools and methodologies integral to SCI-Arc’s pedagogical program in the last decade. Selected projects reflect a diminished presence of large urban proposals in favor of comprehensively and rigorously designed medium and smaller scale architectural projects with a focus on the core of architecture.

Under the direction of Undergraduate Program Chair John Enright, the program has been progressively renewed as evidenced by the quality of work produced in the thesis. SCI-Arc undergraduates today have a unique breadth of disciplinary knowledge and technical capabilities. Their skill sets range from conventional techniques of representation in architecture and CAD/CAM modeling to scripting, programming, and controlling CNC machines and the 9

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BEST UNDERGRADUATE THESIS Paul Ferrier Cambon Window-as-Volume Advisor: Dwayne Oyler As the mediator between the human made and the environment, the window is one of architecture’s most powerful tools for placing us in the world. Window-as-Volume challenges architecture’s enclosure and therefore how we distinguish between the inside and out by intensifying interior spatial conditions. A new spatial dimension to the flat window can shift the window’s objective from framing us in an environment towards suspending us in the view itself.

MERIT UNDERGRADUATE THESIS Chloe Brunner Dweller on the Threshold Advisor: Devyn Weiser From Jefferson’s grid to Google Earth, the earth’s surface has been conventionally navigated through abstract devices constructed of points, lines, and planes—providing society a means to orient itself. Conventional modes of architectural representation deploy a similar method of projection—therefore imitating and re-enforcing the navigation of space through a projection of the two-dimensional. This thesis maps the earth through a ‘thick’ representation of the two-dimensional, offering an alternative reading of space by rending tangible the otherwise immaterial landscape.

Timothy Cheng + Nathan Eugene Meyers Form in Form Advisor: Devyn Weiser Form in Form explores the fabrication process as an architectural catalyst by embedding formwork into architectural

form rather than limiting it to a geometrical template to be discarded, despite enormous effort and expense. In this way, the thesis proposes an inversion of the typical design process. The structural framework is first embedded into the envelope, which is then folded into the architectural form. This new tectonic proposition is tested through a series of prototype pavilions for London’s West End. Emmy Maruta Soft Boiled Advisor: Florencia Pita This thesis seeks “twoness” through defining notions of soft and hard. The twoness in this project is featured in the voluptuous surface and sharp skin.

The two combined create a friction that affects the surface’s reflection and luminosity that results in an optical disturbance in the curvature, making it difficult to understand where the surface lies, therefore creating an architectural blur. This oscillation between mediums pushes architecture out beyond its own envelope allowing for palpability.

Michael Nesbit Towards (Ph2)Latness Advisor: Dwayne Oyler Architecture is built on our ability to use representation as an effect for production… sketch to model, model to drawing, drawing to building. Within our contemporary discipline, we have been given an extensive tool set that has pushed architecture forward, but due to immediacy the process has eliminated many of our previous entry points. This thesis will represent construction diagrams of the drawing. By placing emphasis on the drawing and not the object, we re-insert our role of judgment back into representation, allowing the drawing to produce something far greater than the thing original-

8.

Timothy Cheng + Nathan Eugene Meyers Form in Form 9.

Ben Warwas Field So Good 10.

Emmy Maruta Soft Boiled 11.

Dale Strong Working Blue 12.

Joshua Stanton Smith Sanctuarium 13.

Maya Alam The Bastardized Gestalt: Lobotomy of the Familiar 14.

Paul Ferrier Cambon Window-as-Volume

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GRADUATE THESIS 2012: A VISION OF HOW THINGS WILL BE Elena Manferdini

Elena Manferdini is the Graduate Thesis Coordinator at SCI-Arc, and for the past 8 years has been teaching architectural design studios and visual studies seminars. She is the principal of Atelier Manferdini, founded in 2004, a design office located in Los Angeles, California. Her practice is based on a multi-scale work methodology and embraces the philosophy that design can participate in a wide range of multidisciplinary developments that define our culture. Her architectural projects have been exhibited in both architecture and art museums internationally. Manferdini graduated from the University of Civil Engineering (Bologna, Italy) and later from University of California, Los Angeles (Master of Architecture and Urban Design). She has lectured widely, including at MIT, Princeton, and Bauhaus. Atelier Manferdini has been feature extensively in national and international media including A+U, Domus, The New York Times, Icon and Form.

1.

Kyle von Hasseln + Elizabeth von Hasseln Phantom Geometry 2.

Chloe Brunner Dweller on the Threshold 3.

Daniel Berlin Rendezvous: Subverting the latent relationship between a stack and a pile 4.

Gonzalo Padilla Villamizar Seamless Incongruence 5.

Erin Besler Low Fidelity 6.

Michael Nesbit Towards (Ph2)Latness 7.

Fernando Herrera Unravelled

The Graduate Thesis Program at SCI-Arc represents the culmination of the master curriculum and is therefore the most significant test of the students’ and school’s ability to synthesize and produce critical and rigorous architecture.

Looking at the work produced by our students in the past two years, it is clear that SCI-Arc as an institution has unquestionably reached a mature stage, and that our thesis program has been able to demonstrate its ability to own the choice of what designers need to know and think about today, fostering a broad culture of ideas, inquiry and position-taking. At the crossroads of independent researches and collective allegiances, SCI-Arc’s thesis is structured to foster an open-ended spirit of inquiry, responding to shifts in society, technology and culture that define our contemporary architectural field.

This year’s group of award winning projects is an example of the various architectural trajectories and research agendas present in the school. For example Erin Besler’s and Kyle and Elizabeth von Hasseln’s theses explore various modes of representation developed with the use of the SCI-Arc robotic laboratory. Maya Alam’s interest revolves around issues of politics and gestalt in our discipline. Ben Warwas’ and Dale Strong’s projects are an example of familiar architectural language that engages with collective narratives. Daniel Berlin tackles classical notions of architectural

are produced in our field. Sanford Kwinter, Peter Eisenman and Sylvia Lavin have been invited to share with students and faculty their take on thesis and architecture at large.

Finally, a long weekend of final reviews held by international juries invited from all around the world makes SCI-Arc a fundamental international hub of debate and exchange. Such initiative constitutes an overlapped structure where multiple contents and activities are exchanged, beyond the pedagogical main objective, to assess students’ work. These reviews are a way for SCI-Arc to shape the field of architecture and put forward a new generation of architects whose designs are not just a visual construction of what things

compositions, while Fernando Herrera’s project is an example of mastery in digital formalism that the school has been invested in for several years.

The year-long thesis program, divided into Thesis Research during spring and a Design Thesis Studio during summer, is precisely the place in the curriculum where students are asked to produce significance and originality, advancing the state of the art rather than simply compiling what already exists. A set of choreographed lecture series, weekly group meetings, public round tables, symposia and critical debates has been held in order to promote the creation of their arguments. At the beginning of spring 2012, our faculty members Todd Gannon, Marcelyn Gow and Andrew Zago held three lectures tracing a genealogy of experiments in research strategies, tactics and alternative modes of creative tropes in contemporary architecture. Special attention has been given to the relationship between architectural modes of representation and specific methods of inquiry. Students have been encouraged to discern among the various methods of representation the ones that support their thesis trajectories and are able to become instrumental to develop a proof of concept.

During the past three years Distinguished Faculty member Jeff Kipnis has joined our SCI-Arc thesis research advisors Ramiro Diaz-Granados, Wes Jones, Florencia Pita, Peter Testa, Andrew Zago, and Peter Zellner as Special Advisor, along with Todd Gannon and Marcelyn Gow, our cultural studies advisors for graduate thesis. Kipnis’ role has been to focus the students’ energy towards the production of new disciplinary knowledge through a series of one-on-one reviews of the work and several master lectures. These highly curated meetings held during the spring semester have helped the students understand their specific positions within the context of contemporary discourse. Kipnis’ main contribution to SCI-Arc has been to promote a culture in the school where thesis is understood not only as a research of knowledge or a display of competence, but also a critical framework for an educated aesthetic act aimed at creating something of-themoment.

A couple of years ago the Graduate Thesis Symposium was introduced as a platform for discussion about how critical ideas

Dale Strong Working Blue Advisor: Andrew Zago This thesis is investigating formal architectural conditions existing between abstraction and legibility, which challenge notions of sobriety and solemnity in architecture. To counter the seriousness of the surrounding and help lighten the mood, this thesis will make a serious attempt to introduce comic and licentious characteristics to the new building.

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GEHRY PRIZE

Kyle von Hasseln + Elizabeth von Hasseln Phantom Geometry Advisors: Devyn Weiser & Peter Testa This thesis is about a way of making, a way of using information by developing a system for moving streaming information through physical space—in the form of light—to generate material form.

This system is a full-scale, generative fabrication process that is innately non-linear, is interruptible and corruptible at any time, and does not rely on periodic flattening to 2D. The project builds upon the unique design platform of the SCI-Arc Robot House.

MERIT GRADUATE THESIS Maya Alam The Bastardized Gestalt: Lobotomy of the Familiar Advisor: Elena Manferdini The Bastardized Gestalt explores the defamiliarization of two specific architectural styles—baroque and brutalism—through matters of a fragmented whole. It exploits the irreconcilable by overlaying the pictorial and the geometrical deformation, the 2D and 3D, tied together by means of the subconscious idea of the unified whole.

Daniel Berlin Rendezvous: Subverting the latent relationship between a stack and a pile Advisor: Eric Owen Moss Challenging orthodox conceptions of “meaning,” this thesis asks: Can architecture ever be appropriate? Taking this subjective mind-set literally with the intention of propelling an act of design, the project engenders a situation where multiple ontologies productively collide—a location at the margins where meanings fray—where it slips from a homogeneous totem toward a delicious heterogeneous confection.

Erin Besler Low Fidelity Advisor: Andrew Atwood Low Fidelity proposes to reestablish the gap between disciplinary mediums; not by returning to old models, but by inverting those models, flipping them on their heads, and shaking out architecture’s characteristic methods along with those mediums absorbed by the collapse. Low Fidelity activates tension between architectural mediums and alienates objects of representation to locate alternative sites for design.

Fernando Herrera Unravelled Advisor: Hernan Diaz Alonso Surface has a long-standing relationship with architecture and has been the primary component through which we communicate architectural composition. However the less obvious contributor that has had its hand in the making of architecture is the line. The line has typically been the ghostwriter for compositions that have been manifested through surface. The ambition of this project is to remove the surface avatar and reveal the line as the protagonist of this project.

Ben Warwas Field So Good Advisor: Florencia Pita The field has been used to create and describe many different aspects of architecture at various scales. But when the field is used as a non-referential pattern to liberate architecture from the dead weight of theory and pure space, it becomes the most powerful.

Field So Good has taken those techniques and developed them into an architecture that combines form with the application of field into a cohesive result.

UNDERGraduate Thesis PROJECT 2012

12

Devyn Weiser

12

The Undergraduate Program at SCI-Arc culminates in an exciting year-long thesis project that synthesizes the curriculum of Design Studios with Cultural, Applied, Visual and General Studies.

Students spend their final year of study articulating relevant disciplinary arguments instantiated in highly developed architectural projects. In this way, the thesis supports individual inquiry and collaborative research while also opening up new models of practice. The students have taken on this challenge with intensity and creativity to make SCI-Arc’s undergraduate thesis project one of the most important public events at the school every spring semester.

In 2012 design faculty members and thesis advisors Dwayne Oyler, Florencia Pita, Michael Rotondi, and Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator Devyn Weiser were joined by Dora Epstein Jones as Cultural Studies Advisor and Distinguished Faculty Jeff Kipnis as Special Advisor. Jeff Kipnis met with students during the thesis preparation seminar in the fall and at multiple times during the spring semester, including a series of Master Class lectures over the academic year.

This year’s group of thesis projects represents a broad range of topics, reflecting the pedagogical diversity of the school and students’ individual interests. The seven selected projects included in this issue examine and contribute contemporary formal strategies tied to particular aspects of surface, volume, and envelope; material, fabrication, and construction strategies tied to advances in both traditional materials and composite technology; and more conceptual strategies tied to specific techniques of representation and critiques of architectural conventions. All projects evidence a sophisticated use and application of digital tools and methodologies integral to SCI-Arc’s pedagogical program in the last decade. Selected projects reflect a diminished presence of large urban proposals in favor of comprehensively and rigorously designed medium and smaller scale architectural projects with a focus on the core of architecture.

Under the direction of Undergraduate Program Chair John Enright, the program has been progressively renewed as evidenced by the quality of work produced in the thesis. SCI-Arc undergraduates today have a unique breadth of disciplinary knowledge and technical capabilities. Their skill sets range from conventional techniques of representation in architecture and CAD/CAM modeling to scripting, programming, and controlling CNC machines and the family of six-axis robots. The 2012 undergraduate thesis included for the first time projects based in the Robot House and it is anticipated that this will be a continuing albeit specialized niche within the Undergraduate Thesis program.

As design becomes an increasingly important paradigm for innovation and business development, the individual initiative and entrepreneurial dimension of the undergraduate thesis project gains significance and relevance to our graduates, the profession, and global economy. The SCI-Arc Undergraduate Program now ranks #1 in the Western US, according to the 2013 Best Architecture and Design Schools Survey conducted by the Greenway Group and Design Intelligence, with recent graduates attending top graduate schools Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and Princeton University School of Architecture to name a few. SCI-Arc undergraduates are highly valued by leading local and global practices.

Students from the last three graduating classes have gone on to employment at Pritzker Prize winning firms in Los Angeles such as Gehry Partners and Morphosis, as well as offices all around the world from Asymptote in New York, to MAD Studio in Beijing, and Ateliers Jean Nouvel in Paris.

Undergraduate thesis at SCI-Arc continues to gain intensity

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BEST UNDERGRADUATE THESIS Paul Ferrier Cambon Window-as-Volume Advisor: Dwayne Oyler As the mediator between the human made and the environment, the window is one of architecture’s most powerful tools for placing us in the world. Window-as-Volume challenges architecture’s enclosure and therefore how we distinguish between the inside and out by intensifying interior spatial conditions. A new spatial dimension to the flat window can shift the window’s objective from framing us in an environment towards suspending us in the view itself.

MERIT UNDERGRADUATE THESIS Chloe Brunner Dweller on the Threshold Advisor: Devyn Weiser From Jefferson’s grid to Google Earth, the earth’s surface has been conventionally navigated through abstract devices constructed of points, lines, and planes—providing society a means to orient itself. Conventional modes of architectural representation deploy a similar method of projection—therefore imitating and re-enforcing the navigation of space through a projection of the two-dimensional. This thesis maps the earth through a ‘thick’ representation of the two-dimensional, offering an alternative reading of space by rending tangible the otherwise immaterial landscape.

Timothy Cheng + Nathan Eugene Meyers Form in Form Advisor: Devyn Weiser Form in Form explores the fabrication process as an architectural catalyst by embedding formwork into architectural form rather than limiting it to a geometrical template to be discarded, despite enormous effort and expense. In this way, the thesis proposes an inversion of the typical design process. The structural framework is first embedded into the envelope, which is then folded into the architectural form. This new tectonic proposition is tested through a series of prototype pavilions for London’s West End. Emmy Maruta Soft Boiled Advisor: Florencia Pita This thesis seeks “twoness” through defining notions of soft and hard. The twoness in this project is featured in the voluptuous surface and sharp skin.

The two combined create a friction that affects the surface’s reflection and luminosity that results in an optical disturbance in the curvature, making it difficult to understand where the surface lies, therefore creating an architectural blur. This oscillation between mediums pushes architecture out beyond its own envelope allowing for palpability.

Michael Nesbit Towards (Ph2)Latness Advisor: Dwayne Oyler Architecture is built on our ability to use representation as an effect for production… sketch to model, model to drawing, drawing to building. Within our contemporary discipline, we have been given an extensive tool set that has pushed architecture forward, but due to immediacy the process has eliminated many of our previous entry points. This thesis will represent construction diagrams of the drawing. By placing emphasis on the drawing and not the object, we re-insert our role of judgment back into representation, allowing the drawing to produce something far greater than the thing originally represented.

Joshua Stanton Smith Sanctuarium Advisor: Michael Rotondi An architecture of time is an architecture of the past’s laws, the present’s rules, and the future’s ideas. In this integration of realities, architecture and technology advance together towards an open-source future. It is a future where architecture has the ability to purely exist. It is a challenge that forces the boundary between architecture’s form and the technology that makes it possible to become indistinguishable; where new questions arise about the meaning of ground plane, form, displacement and existence.

Gonzalo Padilla Villamizar Seamless Incongruence Advisor: Florencia Pita In architecture, when congruency is high, the elements produce a “seamless effect” that allows continuity.

When incongruence is high, the difference between the elements force the materialization of connections that produces the effect of an “architectural collage,” rendering visible the discrepancies between elements to the point of creating discontinuity. This thesis challenges this dichotomy by interchanging both conditions through the use of incongruent elements to create a “seamless effect.”

Devyn Weiser is the Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator at SCI-Arc, joining the SCI-Arc Design Faculty in 2006.

She is the principal-in-charge at Testa/ Weiser and co-founder of the MIT Emergent Design Group (EDG). At Testa/Weiser she leads a wide range of projects from industrial design to architecture and infrastructure. With a consortium of industry partners she directs ESCape, an open source platform for decentralized waste-to-energy (WtE) solutions. Weiser’s work has been exhibited at leading museums and galleries worldwide, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; National Building Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Art Center, Tokyo; and Beijing Architecture Biennale. She has been a Visiting Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Weiser holds a B.F.A. and B.Arch (with honors) from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a MSAAD from Columbia University.

8.

Timothy Cheng + Nathan Eugene Meyers Form in Form 9.

Ben Warwas Field So Good 10.

Emmy Maruta Soft Boiled 11.

Dale Strong Working Blue 12.

Joshua Stanton Smith Sanctuarium 13.

Maya Alam The Bastardized Gestalt: Lobotomy of the Familiar 14.

Paul Ferrier Cambon Window-as-Volume

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BUILDING THE FUTURE WITH GENEROUS SUPPORT FROM SCI-ARC DONORS Sarah Sullivan

Sarah Sullivan is the Chief Advancement Officer at SCI-Arc. She has over 20 years of experience working in cultural organizations and institutions of higher education in Southern California, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Getty Museum, The Hammer Museum, Art Center College of Design and the California Institute of the Arts. For over ten years, she has held positions in development, notably Director, Campus Development Initiative at Art Center and Executive Director of Development at CalArts. Sullivan has broad experience in fundraising and working with boards, faculty and students to increase scholarship, capital, project and unrestricted support. While at CalArts, Sullivan played a key role in securing funding to complete The Wild Beast, a new music pavilion designed

by Hodgetts + Fung. Sullivan holds a master’s degree in Medieval History from the University of California, Los Angeles and bachelor’s degrees in French and Art History from the University of Texas at Austin.

SCI-Arc has always embraced change. From the moment the school first opened its doors, SCI-Arc’s leadership, faculty and students knew they would be constantly redefining what architecture is and what it could be. The openness and energy of the early years’ rebellious bohemianism was focused more on experimental educational concepts than institutional pragmatism. But throughout the years, whether building design studios from scratch, moving graduation from spring to fall, or relocating the school to its current location in downtown Los Angeles, the school has thrived within this culture of innovation. Now at its 40th anniversary, alumni, influential design leaders and prominent national foundations have recognized the school’s achievements and unique culture and are investing in its future.

A series of gifts to the school are building on this foundation, beginning with two unprecedented endowment gifts from alumni Monique Birault (M.Arch ’92) and Christopher Kennedy (M.Arch ’99). Birault, who has been actively involved with SCIArc since her time as a student in the 1990s, decided to mark the school’s 40th anniversary by making a planned gift. “This simple gesture,” she said, “will support young minds and help ensure the future of SCI-Arc.” Kennedy and his wife Hildegard have endowed a named scholarship, the first such scholarship funded by an alum. As a student, Kennedy arrived at SCI-Arc after a successful 30-year career as a dentist and, years later, he wanted to ensure that other “second career” students also had the opportunity to enjoy the open-mindedness and challenge of a SCI-Arc education. By endowing a scholarship for these students, the Kennedys have created a perpetual stream of support for generations of students to come.

Over the summer, two of SCI-Arc’s current trustees made major commitments to the school: Frank Gehry and his wife Berta endowed the Gehry Prize, which will be awarded annually to the best graduate thesis at SCI-Arc, and a planned gift from Tom Gilmore will create SCI-Arc’s first named chair, the Gilmore City Chair. “These gifts represent major investments in SCI-Arc and will help us support the education of our outstanding student body and position the school for a stronger future,” said SCI-Arc board chairman Jerry Neuman. “The entire SCI-Arc community is enormously grateful to Frank, Berta and Tom for their leadership and generosity.”

A world-renowned architect whose iconic projects are considered among the most important works of contemporary architecture, Gehry has played an active role in the evolution of SCI-Arc since its beginning in 1972. Throughout the years, he has taught studios, participated in juries, given talks, and since 1990, served as a trustee. And now he has solidified his commitment to SCI-Arc with an endowment gift that will perpetually recognize the school’s most talented students. “Thanks to this contribution and the creation of the Gehry Prize, we can warranty that SCI-Arc’s advocacy for architecture as a rousing, speculative adventure will endure,” said SCI-Arc director Eric Owen Moss.

For SCI-Arc’s talented students, the prospect of a prize with such a prestigious name is motivating. Kyle (M.Arch ’12) and Liz (M.Arch ’12) von Hasseln, who were recently awarded the inaugural Gehry Prize, affirmed, “We are very grateful that Frank and Berta Gehry have chosen to support the work being done at SCI-Arc and to make their longstanding relationship with the school a part of their legacy. We are honored to be the inaugural Gehry Prize winners and humbled to be counted among its future recipients.”

While the Gehry gift supports students, Tom Gilmore’s estate will support faculty. A native New Yorker and architect and designer by training, Gilmore moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, a time when the historic core of downtown Los Angeles had been all but abandoned. Within a few years of arriving on the West Coast, Gilmore had begun acquiring and rehabilitating historic buildings.

In many people’s minds, Gilmore was the animating force behind adaptive reuse development in downtown Los Angeles—a risktaking, committed urban guy whose efforts totally revitalized the Old Bank District and served as a model for other developers.

When Gilmore, a SCI-Arc trustee since 2001, approached SCI-Arc about including the school in his estate plans, a dialogue about his interests ensued. “Design, architecture and cities have played a defining role in my life,” he said, “and these interests originally led me to SCI-Arc. As I began to consider my gift, I wanted to acknowledge these influences in a meaningful way.

The idea of creating a named chair, the Gilmore City Chair, seemed like a natural fit.”

In responding to Gilmore’s generosity, Moss quoted Machiavelli, “I believe the greatest good to be done is that which one does to one’s own city.” Moss continued, “In Gilmore’s case, he has done the greatest good. Los Angeles is a better city because of his efforts, and now SCI-Arc is a stronger school because of his generosity. We look forward to the creation of the Gilmore City Chair and the permanent focus it will bring to the exploration of cities at SCI-Arc.” While these endowment gifts will provide greater financial stability in the future, SCI-Arc has also secured a series of grants from prominent foundations to fund current projects. Design Immersion Days, the school’s summer program for high school students, was launched with generous seed funding from the Ahmanson Foundation. Now heading into its third summer, the list of supporters for this program is growing.

A major grant from ArtPlace—a collaboration of leading foundations, government agencies and financial institutions that are investing in creative placemaking—is allowing the school to invest in its building and the surrounding neighborhood. SCI-Arc was one of a handful of grantees selected from a field of over 2,000 applicants to receive this prestigious grant. The funds will be used to build two new venues on campus, an indoor amphitheater, the Hispanic Steps, and an outdoor pavilion—both gathering spaces for the SCI-Arc community and our neighbors. Now that SCIArc owns its building and is putting down permanent roots in the community, the school is striving for an active porosity: ideas and people moving in and out.

The Getty Foundation has also provided generous support for two major projects: the newly launched SCI-Arc Media Archive (sma.sciarc.edu) and the upcoming exhibition, A Confederacy of Heretics: The Architecture Gallery, Venice 1979, which will be part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in LA, an initiative of the Getty. Due to the ambitious scope of these undertakings, both were unimaginable without philanthropic support.

Thanks to supporters like the Getty Foundation, SCI-Arc has been able to dedicate resources to programmatic initiatives that complement and enhance the school’s educational mission.

“Each of these donors, in their own way, is helping SCI-Arc to build its future,” affirmed Jerry Neuman. “Now, thanks to their generosity, it will be a future with greater financial stability and support for our talented students and faculty.”

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SCI-ARC LAUNCHES COMPREHENSIVE MEDIA ARCHIVE AT SMA.SCIARC.EDU

DIRECTORS, FACULTY AND ALUMNI WIN 2012 AIA | LA AWARDS The recently announced 2012 AIA | LA Presidential, Design and NextLA Awards from the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects recognized several SCI-Arc faculty, alumni and leadership for their unyielding contribution to advancing the architecture profession and their support to architectural initiatives in Los Angeles.

Presidential award winners included SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss, who received the 25-Year Award for his design of the Petal House; faculty members Jenny Wu and Dwayne Oyler of Oyler Wu Collaborative, recipients of the Emerging Practice award; Graduate Programs Chair Hernan Diaz Alonso, recognized with the Educator Award; and visiting faculty member Julie Eizenberg and partner Hank Koning of Koning Eizenberg Architecture, awarded the 2012 AIA | LA Gold Medal.

Design Awards went to faculty members Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78) of Michael W. Folonis Architects, Marcelo Spina of PATTERNS, and Peter Zellner of ZELLNERPLUS. The Cultural Affairs Commission Award was received by alumnus Nick Seierup (B.Arch ’79), who serves on the SCI-Arc Board of Trustees.

NextLA Award winners included Angela Brooks (M.Arch ’91) of Brooks+Scarpa; Griffin Enright Architects’ Margaret Griffin, SCI-Arc faculty, and John Enright, SCI-Arc Undergraduate Program Chair; alumni Scott Hughes (M.Arch ’97) and John Umbanhowar (M.Arch ’98) of Hughesumbanhowar Architects; SCI-Arc trustee Bill Fain of Johnson Fain; alumna Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01) of Platform for Architecture + Research; and Marcelo Spina.

MARCELO SPINA COMPLETES MULTI-FAMILY HOUSING PROJECT IN ARGENTINA SCI-Arc faculty member Marcelo Spina and partner Georgina Huljich of Los Angeles-based PATTERNS completed Jujuy Redux, a multi-family housing project in Rosario, Argentina. Consisting of thirteen small, shared-floor units and a duplex organized in a cross-ventilated layout, the mid-rise apartment building proposes a subtle delineated mass, operating both at the scale of the entire volume and the scale of each apartment. The project took four years to complete. Most recently, Spina and Huljich were awarded one of the prestigious 2012 United States Artists (USA) fellowship grants in the architecture and design category.

More than 3,000 architecture and design-related topics are covered in 1,000-plus hours of recordings made available to the public in the new SCI-Arc Media Archive (SMA), which launched late September. An online showcase of public events held at the school from 1974 to the present, the SMA features essential voices from five decades of creative experimental design lectures and events videotaped at the school.

Found at sma.sciarc.edu, the archive is home to more than 600 videos of public events, features 700-plus speakers, and forms a comprehensive digital media platform designed to be useful for students and scholars, but also for anybody with an interest in architecture, Los Angeles and experimental design. It provides access to never-before-seen footage of some of the most influential architecture and design leaders and artists, including Frank O. Gehry, Zaha Hadid, David Hockney, Rem Koolhaas, John Lautner, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Kazuyo Sejima, and many more. Many appear more than once, providing opportunities for analysis of their development over a long span of their careers.

“This website is a wonderful resource and a great archive for anyone interested in modern architecture and its major players from the past four decades,” comments Sarah Weber, Director of Education at the Los Angeles Conservancy. “Looking at some of the longer lectures, I found myself wishing I could hear shorter clips from them, only to discover that they were already there. As the content on this site continues to grow, I can only imagine that it will become one of the ‘go-to’ resources for primary media sources in modern architecture.”

Major support for the SCI-Arc Media Archive was provided

by The Getty Foundation as part of the Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture initiative. Additional support was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. These transformative grants were used by SCI-Arc to digitize, describe and organize one of the most complete architectural archival collections of its kind in the world.

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SCI-Arc Magazine Issue 005

WOLF PRIX LEAVES THE ANGEWANDTE

Editor-in-Chief Hsinming Fung Contributing Writers Georgiana Ceausu Carol Cheh Dora Epstein-Jones Elena Manferdini Eric Owen Moss Aimee Richer Justine Smith Sarah Sullivan Devyn Weiser SCI-Arc Publications Project Manager Justine Smith Online Media and Public Relations Georgiana Ceausu Senior Graphic Designer Alicia Patel

…sooner or later one of us must know, but you just did what you’re supposed to do. – Bob Dylan Over the course of its history Vienna has often been at the center of an intense and sometimes controversial discourse regarding the meanings of art, of literature, of music, and of architecture.

The Angewandte under the direction of architect Wolf Prix has added an essential component to the world architecture story. Mr. Prix, with humor, resolve, and a unique vision of the power of contemporary architecture has lead the Angewandte charge. That high design adventure turned architecture’s orthodoxy on its head, and Wolf’s leadership was ratified by an enormous influx of exceptional students and faculty from around the world, debating, lecturing, jurying and exhibiting.

That raucous rap now comes to an end… ...but if you listen closely you can still hear Wolf’s music as it plays in your head.

Eric Owen Moss

Graphic Designer Kate Merritt Photography General Karim Attoui Ann Johansson Laura Kwak Chung Ming Lam Scott Mayoral Kate Merritt Yuan Mu Alicia Patel Alumni Events John Faier Ulf Wallin AIA LA 2012 Awards Gala David Lena Designed by SCI-Arc Publications © 2012 SCI-Arc Publications

WOLF PRIX TAKES ISSUE WITH THE STATE OF THE VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE Praise be to Nero’s Neptune.

The Titanic sails at dawn.

And everybody’s shouting “Which Side Are You On?” – Bob Dylan, “Desolation Row,” 1966 If one did not know that the media constantly exaggerates, one could almost conclude–as the Süddeutsche Zeitung has–that the Venice Biennale of Architecture really is the world’s most important architecture exhibition.

However, I believe that the word “exhibition” is not intended to describe an exhibition in this case, but rather that the notion only designates the event per se. In other words, an industry meeting, like a product fair. Other critics fail to even question the purpose of the exhibition; instead they immediately conclude that the coming together, the meeting, the networking is the key aspect. That’s that!

I would like to maintain at this juncture that the meaning of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, for theoretical arguments, has been increasingly losing significance since its beginnings with the “Strada Novissima” by Paolo Portoghesi in 1980. Even the personal significance for the participants is very low when compared to the Art Biennale. So let us not deny the truth. This event is an expensive danse macabre. In a city of plunder (an exhibition of plunder) hordes of tourists (architects) roll along broken infrastructure in order to satisfy their petit bourgeois desire for education (in the case of the architects: vanity, envy, schadenfreude, suspicions).

Even the glamour that the visitors are supposed to feel is staid and faked by the media for whom a star architect is like a film star.

In truth it is all hollow, arduous, exhausting, bleak and boring.

It is no longer about lively discussion and criticism of topics in contemporary architecture, but rather about empty, conservative, and perhaps populist shells that are charged with feigned meaning.

What a great Architecture Biennale it would have been had they

established forums and put out themes which would have provided a chance to look behind the scenes at the decision-making, instead of boring exhibitions. Take, for example, the dispute about the train station in Stuttgart. Or the reasons for the cost explosion for prominent buildings such as the Elbe Philharmonic Hall. Or the political arguments about mosques and minarets—in other words, the disputes about the localization of an idea. Why the market for singlefamily homes in the U.S. has collapsed and how power politics is conducted through settlement architecture. These topics would be worthy of discussion—not who is and who is not a star architect.

However, instead of that we face: “People Meet in Architecture,” and now “Common Ground.” In other words: compromise.

It cannot get any worse!

This situation conjures an image of the Venetian carnival—one can imagine all the architects in Pierrot costumes surrounded by masked critics and dancing the Dance Banale. Or, even better, the architects are playing on a sinking gondola like the erstwhile orchestra on the Titanic playing their last song, while outside in the real world our leaky trade is sinking into powerlessness and irrelevance. This is because politicians and project managers, investors and bureaucrats have been deciding our built environment for a long time now. Not the architects.

While in Russia artists are stubbornly resisting the authoritarian regime, the current director of the Architecture Biennale considers these characteristics to be obstacles for our profession, and he explains in an interview that space must be taken from the genius. One would have to show him Pussy Riots in order for him to finally understand our society.

Furthermore, I consider that the Venice Biennale of Architecture needs to be reorganized.

Wolf D. Prix / COOP HIMMELB(L)AU 08. 24.2012

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15

SCI-Arc Magazine Issue 005 Editor-in-Chief Hsinming Fung Contributing Writers Georgiana Ceausu Carol Cheh Dora Epstein-Jones Elena Manferdini Eric Owen Moss Aimee Richer Justine Smith Sarah Sullivan Devyn Weiser SCI-Arc Publications Project Manager Justine Smith Online Media and Public Relations Georgiana Ceausu Senior Graphic Designer Alicia Patel Graphic Designer Kate Merritt Photography General Karim Attoui Ann Johansson Laura Kwak Chung Ming Lam Scott Mayoral Kate Merritt Yuan Mu Alicia Patel Alumni Events John Faier Ulf Wallin AIA LA 2012 Awards Gala David Lena Designed by SCI-Arc Publications Š 2012 SCI-Arc Publications

16

SCI-ARC STORE New to the SCI-Arc Store are t-shirts showcasing statements taken from Director Eric Owen Moss’ address to the 2012 incoming students.

SCI-ARC COMPLETES TWO WORKSHOPS IN NEW ABROAD SERIES Mexico City and Bogota, Colombia took center stage in the two inaugural international workshops hosted by SCI-Arc as part of its newly launched SCI-Arc ABROAD series of itinerant educational initiatives to establish an active dialogue with talented and inquisitive students abroad.

Taught by SCI-Arc faculty as well as architects who practice locally, these SCI-Arc ABROAD workshops aim at propagating the school’s unique design culture across borders, and establish an open forum for the advancement of architectural education.

The 1-week workshops surveyed the role of geo-sensorial instrumentation in the development of an architectural design process.

Students from throughout Mexico and Colombia came together to form a collaborative design laboratory atmosphere as they analyzed the way ubiquitous geo-tagging sensors affect our experience of geography, environment and infrastructure.

A collection of their work can be browsed at www.sciarcabroad.info. SCI-Arc ABROAD workshops in Chile and Argentina are forthcoming for spring 2013.

ARCHITECT KURT MEYER TURNS 90 To Kurt…a unique voice, an exceptional leader, a long-time supporter of all things SCI-Arc—many happy returns. Here’s to another 90. All the best. – Eric Owen Moss Born and educated in Zurich, Switzerland, architect Kurt W. Meyer began his professional career in the United States in 1948.

Founding Kurt Meyer and Associates (now Meyer & Allen Associates) in 1957, Meyer has combined his professional career with service to numerous civic and professional organizations.

He served as a director of the City of Los Angeles’ Community Redevelopment Agency from 1973 to 1979 and was chairman from 1976 to 1978. Meyer is a Fellow Emeritus of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and throughout his career, has been an active member, participating as chairman and director of many committees. Other involvements include serving on the Advisory Council of the Los Angeles Conservancy and as a member of the California Historical Society and the Historic Preservation Foundation. Meyer served as chairman of the board of trustees of SCI-Arc from 1987-89.

Material Beyond Materials: Composite Tectonics Editors: Marcelyn Gow & Marcelo Spina SCI-Arc Publications (September 2012) There are a multitude of different approaches regarding the application and significance of composites in contemporary design, many of which are represented by the speakers who participated in the SCI-Arc-hosted conference, Material Beyond Materials: Composite Tectonics. The event centered on investigating the relationships that currently exist between technological advances in materials, innovations in the building industry, and contemporary design discourse and pedagogy. This book documents one of the largest events SCI-Arc has ever organized, and probably the first one with a direct emphasis on advanced materials and their use in the architecture field. Available online on Amazon and at the SCIArc Supply Store.

Again, Who Says?

Eric Owen Moss SCI-Arc Press (June 2012) A follow up to Who Says What Architecture Is?, the Who Says bundle presents a collection of SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss’ introductions, essays and lectures. Moss draws from a wide range of literary, philosophical and historic sources to discuss the work of architects and theorists from all over the world who have lectured at SCI-Arc, as well as central themes such as modernism and the urban development of Los Angeles. Available at the SCI-Arc Supply Store.

“Thank you for the brilliant pocket anthologies of your occasional texts and your equally pithy, rhythmic/ironic introductions to lecturers at SCI-Arc, and elsewhere. Will I make the grade as a subject in the next volume…Hmm?”

– Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University, New York “Eric, Who Says is definitely your work, a kind of alchemist transformation of inglorious obligatory lecture introductions into a new material, a new substance. Instead of summarizing the subject, you open it wide to further interpretation. It seems that what you do in writing is exactly what you do daily, letting concrete speak its mind, glass hide whatever it encloses and stone decline carrying any load. I am so glad to supply you material for this unique metamorphose of yours.”

– Zvi Hecker, Architect, Berlin

17

alumni news and events

On October 18, 2012, Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90) of Scrafano Architects and Joel Huffman (M.Arch ’93) of Vertu Architecture and Design hosted a SCI-Arc Midwest Alumni and Friends event at the Vertu offices in Chicago.

MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI COUNCIL

1.

David Erven (M.Arch ’09) and HsinKuang Chen (M.Arch ’09) 2.

Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90), Hsinming Fung, and Joel Huffman (M. Arch ’93) 3.

Joshua Coggeshall (M.Arch ’99) and Paul Benigno (M.Arch ’96) On May 18, 2012, Kiyokazu Arai (M. Arch ’83) of ARAI Architects hosted a SCI-Arc Alumni and Friends event at his newly opened restaurant and office in Tokyo, Japan.

4.

Hector Campagna (B.Arch ’13), Ronny Eckels (M.Arch ’13), Malek Idriss (M. Arch ’13), Rania Hoteit (M.Arch ’13), and Kiyokazu Arai (M.Arch ’83) On May 17, 2012, SCI-Arc Undergraduate Programs Director John Enright was celebrated at an AIA | SCI-Arc Alumni and Friends event at the Archer Modern Flagship Showroom in Washington DC. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) honored Enright at the 2012 AIA National Convention and Design Exposition for his elevation to Fellow.

5.

Nich Seirup (B.Arch ’79) and Thomas Anderson (B.Arch ’79) 6.

Michael Cook (M.Arch ’95) and Hope Mitnick (M.Arch ’94) 7.

SCI-Arc Chief Advancement Officer Sarah Sullivan, John Enright, Scott Hughes (M.Arch ’97) and Angie Brooks (M.Arch ’91) 8.

Kevin Sperry (M.Arch ’04) and Asako Hiraoka-Sperry (M.Arch ’04) with their son Kenzo 9.

Jonathan Cantwell (M.Arch ’00) and his wife Elizabeth Dranitzke

Dear Fellow Alumni, I am pleased to be writing to you as the Chair of the Alumni Council for 2012-13.

First of all, I would like to offer many thanks to Dean Nota for his leadership as the past chair. As a current faculty member at SCI-Arc and an active participant in the design field, I am hoping to be a connecting force between the school and alumni so that together we can achieve our mutual interest, not only in specific niches but more widely and inclusively.

Two years ago, the Council was founded by a diverse group of alumni from a variety of years, degrees, campuses and professions with the goal of providing a vital link between alumni and the school. By creating opportunities to deepen connections and promote the school, the Council is committed to working with the entire community to advance SCI-Arc’s mission and priorities.

Since its inception, the Alumni Council has worked closely with the Office of Development and Alumni Affairs on behalf of the entire alumni body of nearly 4,000 graduates of SCI-Arc. From the development of the SCI-Arc Alumni Portal, an online gallery and news source created by alumni for alumni, to hosting friends and alumni gatherings in locations as far flung as London, Tokyo and Chicago; from mentoring students as they prepare for their professional careers to helping identify and recruit the next generation of talented students, the Alumni Council is actively involved in the life of the school.

Looking ahead, we will continue our efforts this year, with a particular focus on helping to make the school’s 40th anniversary a meaningful milestone. Members of the Council will be reaching out to alumni and friends, encouraging them to be a part of the 40th celebration on April 19th and 20th. Organized to coincide with the Undergraduate Thesis review and Spring Show, when many high profile architects are on campus, this celebration will provide opportunities to see the work of SCI-Arc’s talented students, to meet faculty, to reconnect with other alumni, and to support SCI-Arc. For further information and ongoing updates on plans for the weekend along with the names of alumni who plan to attend, please visit 40.sciarc.edu.

There are many ways for alumni to be engaged in the life of the school. If you are interested in contributing to the vibrancy of the SCI-Arc community, please contact Aimee Richer, Associate Director of Annual Giving and Alumni Affairs, at aimee_richer@sciarc.edu for more information. I hope you will plan to be part of SCI-Arc’s 40th celebration weekend on April 19th and 20th. Join us and (re)connect with alumni, students and faculty from all four decades!

Sincerely,

Cara Lee (M. Arch ’96) Chair, 2012-13 Alumni Council SCI-Arc Faculty lee+mundwiler architects

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Glenn White and Alex White: SCI-Arc’s First Father and Son Team

MICHAEL FOLONIS WINS TWO AWARDS FOR UCLA MEDICAL CENTER

Michael W. Folonis Architects, the Santa Monica-based firm of alumnus and faculty member Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78), has received two prestigious awards for the design of the new UCLA Outpatient Surgery and Oncology Center (UCLA OSOC) in Santa Monica. The Westside Urban Form recognized the project with a Design Award in the Public/Institutional category, while a Citation Award was received in the 2012 Modern Healthcare Design Awards.

Folonis designed the UCLA OSOC 50,000-square-foot hybrid medical facility to house community outpatient surgery and oncol1

3

ogy treatment, as well as academic and medical office facilities for UCLA medical students and faculty. The building, developed by Randall Miller of Nautilus Group, features a cutting-edge, fully automated parking system that reduces the garage footprint by 50 percent and increases energy efficiency to help meet LEED Gold certification requirements.

The architects were inspired by Modernist principles of indoor-outdoor connectivity, passive solar design, and a reduced materials palette to create a patient-focused healing environment that achieves a high standard of efficiency in healthcare design.

For an enhanced indoor-outdoor connection, sightlines are maximized to invite exterior views, while “micro-gardens” direct patients to various service areas. Previously, the medical building has

SCI-Arc Alumni in Spain

Alumnus Tristan Lopez-Chicheri (B.Arch ’82) hosted an alumni reunion at his office in Madrid, Spain in October to coincide with a visit from former faculty member Bill Simonian and his wife Vicky. From left to right: Raquel Vasallo (B.Arch ’00), Manuel de la Iglesia (B.Arch ’80), Begonia Diaz-Urgorri (M.Arch ’95), Vicky and Bill Simonian, Tristan Lopez-Chicheri (B.Arch ’82), and Leon Benacerraf (M.Arch ’93).

If you would like to connect with fellow alumni in your area, contact Aimee Richer, Associate Director of Alumni Affairs at 213356-5388 or aimee_richer@sciarc.edu.

4

2

It was SCI-Arc’s spirit of creativity and innovation that moved Glenn White, the school’s first Native American graduate, to choose this school over more conventional architecture academies.

Now, 13 years after completing his B.Arch., White is looking on proudly as his son Alex, 18, begins his first year as a SCI-Arc undergraduate.

Creativity, curiosity, and a knack for building things seem to be built into the White family’s genes. Alex’s older sister, Rachel, is enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM). Alex, perhaps taking after his father, seemed to have a natural gift for architectural problem solving from a very young age. Before he even turned 10 years old, he could single-handedly assemble Ikea furniture that his parents brought home without even looking at the instructions.

“This is all I know,” Alex shyly says when asked why he chose SCI-Arc. “I was always around it because of my dad.” His excitement and happiness are palpable, however, when walking through the school campus, showing off the busy studios and the many examples of creative projects that stud the hallways. He is clearly in this for the love of it, not out of some sense of family duty.

Glenn, who runs a freelance design practice out of his home, reminisces fondly about his SCI-Arc years and important mentors like Michele Saee and Michael Rotondi. “It’s exactly the same now as it was before—a hive of creative energy. The only thing that’s new is the computers. Back in my day, we had to do everything by hand.” Although Glenn is enjoying his life in Los Angeles, he looks forward to returning home to his native South Dakota one day so he can “give a lifetime of learning” back to the youth of his tribe, the Standing Rock Sioux of the Lakota Nation.

2012 GEHRY PRIZE GOES TO HUSBAND-AND-WIFE TEAM OF M.ARCH GRADUATES SCI-Arc awarded its inaugural Gehry Prize on September 9 at the 2012 Graduation Ceremony to husband-and-wife team, Kyle and Liz von Hasseln for their Phantom Geometry project, with thesis advisors Devyn Weiser and Peter Testa. The couple developed a giant dual-robot DLP 3D printer to build material form from streaming data. The system uses UV light from a modified DLP projector to continuously and selectively cure resin until the material reification of streaming data emerges.

Generated in the SCI-Arc Robot House, this system of fabrication introduces real-time feed-back mechanisms, being interruptible and corruptible at any time. Its streaming data input may be transformed or modified at any time, and as a result, such interventions impact emerging downstream geometry.

The project was showcased in the 2012 Selected Thesis Exhibition in the SCI-Arc Gallery. In addition, the thesis model was part of the group exhibition Disoriented Orientation/Oriented Disorientation, which opened November 15 at the Wharton & Espinosa gallery in the Pacific Design Center.

17

alumni news and events

On October 18, 2012, Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90) of Scrafano Architects and Joel Huffman (M.Arch ’93) of Vertu Architecture and Design hosted a SCI-Arc Midwest Alumni and Friends event at the Vertu offices in Chicago.

MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI COUNCIL

1.

David Erven (M.Arch ’09) and HsinKuang Chen (M.Arch ’09) 2.

Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90), Hsinming Fung, and Joel Huffman (M. Arch ’93) 3.

Joshua Coggeshall (M.Arch ’99) and Paul Benigno (M.Arch ’96) On May 18, 2012, Kiyokazu Arai (M. Arch ’83) of ARAI Architects hosted a SCI-Arc Alumni and Friends event at his newly opened restaurant and office in Tokyo, Japan.

4.

Hector Campagna (B.Arch ’13), Ronny Eckels (M.Arch ’13), Malek Idriss (M. Arch ’13), Rania Hoteit (M.Arch ’13), and Kiyokazu Arai (M.Arch ’83) On May 17, 2012, SCI-Arc Undergraduate Programs Director John Enright was celebrated at an AIA | SCI-Arc Alumni and Friends event at the Archer Modern Flagship Showroom in Washington DC. The American Institute of Architects (AIA) honored Enright at the 2012 AIA National Convention and Design Exposition for his elevation to Fellow.

5.

Nich Seirup (B.Arch ’79) and Thomas Anderson (B.Arch ’79) 6.

Michael Cook (M.Arch ’95) and Hope Mitnick (M.Arch ’94) 7.

SCI-Arc Chief Advancement Officer Sarah Sullivan, John Enright, Scott Hughes (M.Arch ’97) and Angie Brooks (M.Arch ’91) 8.

Kevin Sperry (M.Arch ’04) and Asako Hiraoka-Sperry (M.Arch ’04) with their son Kenzo 9.

Jonathan Cantwell (M.Arch ’00) and his wife Elizabeth Dranitzke

Dear Fellow Alumni, I am pleased to be writing to you as the Chair of the Alumni Council for 2012-13.

First of all, I would like to offer many thanks to Dean Nota for his leadership as the past chair. As a current faculty member at SCI-Arc and an active participant in the design field, I am hoping to be a connecting force between the school and alumni so that together we can achieve our mutual interest, not only in specific niches but more widely and inclusively.

Two years ago, the Council was founded by a diverse group of alumni from a variety of years, degrees, campuses and professions with the goal of providing a vital link between alumni and the school. By creating opportunities to deepen connections and promote the school, the Council is committed to working with the entire community to advance SCI-Arc’s mission and priorities.

Since its inception, the Alumni Council has worked closely with the Office of Development and Alumni Affairs on behalf of the entire alumni body of nearly 5

6

4,000 graduates of SCI-Arc. From the development of the SCI-Arc Alumni Portal, an online gallery and news source created by alumni for alumni, to hosting friends and alumni gatherings in locations as far flung as London, Tokyo and Chicago; from mentoring students as they prepare for their professional careers to helping identify and recruit the next generation of talented students, the Alumni Council is actively involved in the life of the school.

Looking ahead, we will continue our efforts this year, with a particular focus on helping to make the school’s 40th anniversary a meaningful milestone. Members of the Council will be reaching out to alumni and friends, encouraging them to be a part of the 40th celebration on April 19th and 20th. Organized to coincide with the Undergraduate Thesis review and Spring Show, when many high profile architects are on campus, this celebration will provide opportunities to see the work of SCI-Arc’s talented students, to meet faculty, to reconnect with other alumni, and to support SCI-Arc. For further information and ongoing updates on plans for the weekend along with the names of alumni who plan to attend, please visit 40.sciarc.edu.

There are many ways for alumni to be engaged in the life of the school. If you are interested in contributing to the vibrancy of the SCI-Arc community, please contact Aimee Richer, Associate Director of Annual Giving and Alumni Affairs, at aimee_richer@sciarc.edu for more information. I hope you will plan to be part of SCI-Arc’s 40th celebration weekend on April 19th and 20th. Join us and (re)connect with alumni, students and faculty from all four decades!

7

Sincerely,

Cara Lee (M. Arch ’96) Chair, 2012-13 Alumni Council SCI-Arc Faculty lee+mundwiler architects 8

9

18

MICHAEL FOLONIS WINS TWO AWARDS FOR UCLA MEDICAL CENTER

Michael W. Folonis Architects, the Santa Monica-based firm of alumnus and faculty member Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78), has received two prestigious awards for the design of the new UCLA Outpatient Surgery and Oncology Center (UCLA OSOC) in Santa Monica. The Westside Urban Form recognized the project with a Design Award in the Public/Institutional category, while a Citation Award was received in the 2012 Modern Healthcare Design Awards.

Folonis designed the UCLA OSOC 50,000-square-foot hybrid medical facility to house community outpatient surgery and oncology treatment, as well as academic and medical office facilities for UCLA medical students and faculty. The building, developed by Randall Miller of Nautilus Group, features a cutting-edge, fully automated parking system that reduces the garage footprint by 50 percent and increases energy efficiency to help meet LEED Gold certification requirements.

The architects were inspired by Modernist principles of indoor-outdoor connectivity, passive solar design, and a reduced materials palette to create a patient-focused healing environment that achieves a high standard of efficiency in healthcare design.

For an enhanced indoor-outdoor connection, sightlines are maximized to invite exterior views, while “micro-gardens” direct patients to various service areas. Previously, the medical building has been honored with four awards, including a 2010 Westside Urban Forum Design Award.

SCI-Arc Alumni in Spain

Alumnus Tristan Lopez-Chicheri (B.Arch ’82) hosted an alumni reunion at his office in Madrid, Spain in October to coincide with a visit from former faculty member Bill Simonian and his wife Vicky. From left to right: Raquel Vasallo (B.Arch ’00), Manuel de la Iglesia (B.Arch ’80), Begonia Diaz-Urgorri (M.Arch ’95), Vicky and Bill Simonian, Tristan Lopez-Chicheri (B.Arch ’82), and Leon Benacerraf (M.Arch ’93).

If you would like to connect with fellow alumni in your area, contact Aimee Richer, Associate Director of Alumni Affairs at 213356-5388 or aimee_richer@sciarc.edu.

Glenn White and Alex White: SCI-Arc’s First Father and Son Team It was SCI-Arc’s spirit of creativity and innovation that moved Glenn White, the school’s first Native American graduate, to choose this school over more conventional architecture academies.

Now, 13 years after completing his B.Arch., White is looking on proudly as his son Alex, 18, begins his first year as a SCI-Arc undergraduate.

Creativity, curiosity, and a knack for building things seem to be built into the White family’s genes. Alex’s older sister, Rachel, is enrolled at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM). Alex, perhaps taking after his father, seemed to have a natural gift for architectural problem solving from a very young age. Before he even turned 10 years old, he could single-handedly assemble Ikea furniture that his parents brought home without even looking at the instructions.

“This is all I know,” Alex shyly says when asked why he chose SCI-Arc. “I was always around it because of my dad.” His excitement and happiness are palpable, however, when walking through the school campus, showing off the busy studios and the many examples of creative projects that stud the hallways. He is clearly in this for the love of it, not out of some sense of family duty.

Glenn, who runs a freelance design practice out of his home, reminisces fondly about his SCI-Arc years and important mentors like Michele Saee and Michael Rotondi. “It’s exactly the same now as it was before—a hive of creative energy. The only thing that’s new is the computers. Back in my day, we had to do everything by hand.” Although Glenn is enjoying his life in Los Angeles, he looks forward to returning home to his native South Dakota one day so he can “give a lifetime of learning” back to the youth of his tribe, the Standing Rock Sioux of the Lakota Nation.

2012 GEHRY PRIZE GOES TO HUSBAND-AND-WIFE TEAM OF M.ARCH GRADUATES SCI-Arc awarded its inaugural Gehry Prize on September 9 at the 2012 Graduation Ceremony to husband-and-wife team, Kyle and Liz von Hasseln for their Phantom Geometry project, with thesis advisors Devyn Weiser and Peter Testa. The couple developed a giant dual-robot DLP 3D printer to build material form from streaming data. The system uses UV light from a modified DLP projector to continuously and selectively cure resin until the material reification of streaming data emerges.

Generated in the SCI-Arc Robot House, this system of fabrication introduces real-time feed-back mechanisms, being interruptible and corruptible at any time. Its streaming data input may be transformed or modified at any time, and as a result, such interventions impact emerging downstream geometry.

The project was showcased in the 2012 Selected Thesis Exhibition in the SCI-Arc Gallery. In addition, the thesis model was part of the group exhibition Disoriented Orientation/Oriented Disorientation, which opened November 15 at the Wharton & Espinosa gallery in the Pacific Design Center.

19

Alumni News and Events

RECENT ALUMNi SPAN THE GLOBE

Emmy Maruta (B.Arch ’12)

Alina Amiri (M.Arch ’10)

LannaSemel (M.Arch ’11) Sergio S. Ochoa (B.Arch ’11)

Like soccer, architecture is an international sport. Graduates of SCI-Arc can find opportunities for work all over the world. We checked in with five recent grads to see what they’re up to.

Jeffrey Lam (B.Arch ’12) is an architectural assistant at eightsixthree, a boutique design studio based in Hong Kong. At this small and nimble operation, Lam enjoys the opportunity to see concepts through from design to construction. He is currently at work designing a façade for a shopping mall in Tianjin, China.

At the other end of the globe, Emmy Maruta (B.Arch ’12) is designing and researching products for ADDLab (Aalto Digital Design Laboratory), an international design research laboratory in Finland. Maruta is putting her digital design training to good use in collaborative projects with material scientists and engineers.

On the same continent, Alina Amiri (M.Arch ’10) recently landed a new job doing design and research for [Ay] Architects, an innovative global research laboratory based in Paris. She has lived

Jeffrey Lam (B.Arch ’12)

in Paris for two years following her graduation from SCI-Arc and is now fluent in French. She finds international living highly inspirational and recommends it to new graduates!

Meanwhile, back in the US, Lanna Semel (M.Arch ’11) has joined the “Work-2 Studio” division of Gensler, a top-ranked New York design and architecture firm that she first interned with in 2010. Staying in touch with her mentors there while she completed her education at SCI-Arc paid off; after almost a year at the company, she is amazed by how much she is learning.

And finally, Sergio S. Ochoa (B.Arch ’11) didn’t have to go far at all to find his dream job as junior architect for the Los Angeles office of Arquitectonica, an internationally recognized firm whose projects include luxury hotels, high-rise residential and mixed-use buildings, and sports complexes. Ochoa is currently focusing on residential projects in the Bay Area.

SCI-ARC ROBOT FEATURED IN SAN FRANCISCO ACADIA CONFERENCE Robot House faculty members Brandon Kruysman (ESTm ’11) and Jonathan Proto (ESTm ’11) traveled to San Francisco in October together with the lab’s Staubli TX60L ‘baby robot’ for a daylong workshop on 5-axis robotic fabrication held at the ACADIA 2012 Synthetic Digital Ecologies conference. Focused on technical and creative applications using robots, the workshop featured a demonstration of the custom robot control plugin for Maya developed by Kruysman and Proto at SCI-Arc. On view during the 2012 ACADIA weekend was the Wild Cards exhibition at the California College of the Arts, which explored ideas of leveraging material and materiality as a ‘wild card’ in the design process. Contrary to many recent digital design processes where emergent complexity is internalized in a controlled model, in this exhibition materials and material properties act as

wild cards: “objects of low probability, but high impact.” Modes of control and precision were questioned through the unpredictability of materiality, recombined with digital techniques and precision.

Approaches to craft and fabrication, previously focused on precision and control, were reconceived as techniques opened to play, fluctuation and erratic behavior. An intentionally vulnerable position, these projects relinquish design agency in order to embrace risk and material propensity.

Exhibiting SCI-Arc faculty and alumni included Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu of Oyler Wu Collaborative, Elena Manferdini of Atelier Manferdini, Brandon Kruysman (ESTm ’11) and Jonathan Proto (ESTm ’11) of Kruysman | Proto, and Benjamin Ball (B.Arch ’03) and Gaston Nogues (B.Arch ’93) of Ball-Nogues Studio.

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PROJECTS FEATURED IN THE ALUMNI PORTAL Earlier this year, the Exhibits and Media Outreach Committee of the Alumni Council launched the SCI-Arc Alumni Portal, an online gallery and news source created by alumni for alumni. The portal is a vital link to upcoming events, relevant resources, and most importantly, an opportunity for alumni to exhibit their work. The portal is updated weekly and features a wide range of projects. It can be found at sciarcalumni.org.

SCI-Arc Alumni Council 2012-13 Tima Bell (M.Arch ’99) Lilliana Castro (B.Arch ’09) Eric Cheong (M.Arch ’05) Joshua Coggeshall (M.Arch ’97) Samson Chua (M.Arch ’02) Michael Cook (M.Arch ’95) Beth Gibb (M.Arch ’89) Julee Herdt (M.Arch ’88) Nerin Kadribegovic (M.Arch ’03) Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96) Santino Medina (M.Arch ’06) Mirai Morita (M.Arch ’06) Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ’04) Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76) Johnny Ramirios (B.Arch ’05) Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09) Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo (M.Arch ’07) Pia Schneider (M.Arch ’86) Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90) Steven Morales Suarez (B.Arch ’04) Joe Tarr (M.Arch ’08) Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02) Kevin Wronske (B.Arch ’02) Office of Development and Alumni Affairs Chief Advancement Officer Sarah Sullivan Associate Director of Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations Dawn Mori Associate Director of Annual Giving and Alumni Affairs Aimee Richer Development and Alumni Affairs Associate Rebecca Silva

Steve McConnell (B.Arch ’84) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Campus, Seattle, 2011. Partner-in-Charge, NBBJ. © Benjamin Benschneider, courtesy NBBJ

Ben Levin (B.Arch ’80) South Region Elementary School No. 2, Los Angeles, CA. Completed August 2010. Principal, DLR Group WWCOT.

Wilfried Hackenbroich (M.Arch ’93) uboot.com OMD Trade Fair Stand, Dusseldorf, 2007. Founder, Hackenbroich Architekten.

Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations Associate Frances Muenzer

CLASS NOTES

1970S

Dean Nota’s (B.Arch ’74) Reyna Residence in Hermosa Beach has recently been included in the Beach Cities Modern Home Tour curated by Ingrid Spencer, former managing editor of the Architectural Record. The architectural tour featured eight South Bay homes, including one Richard Neutra home in Palos Verdes Estates, Calif.

Arnold Stalk, PhD. (B.Arch ’77) has received a Community Associations Institute Ordinary People/Extraordinary Measures award for co-founding the Veteran’s Village in Las Vegas, an innovative housing and supportive service residence providing safe and decent housing for U.S. veterans.

Richard J. Levy, AIA, APA (B.Arch ’78) has recently exhibited a limited edition of his photographic prints in the Historic American Buildings Survey— Library of Congress exhibition at the AIA Los Angeles. An award-winning architectural photographer, Levy has continued to practice in the offices of noted architects. An active member of the AIA, the American Photographic Artists, and the Los Angeles Conservancy, Levy has had his work exhibited and published nationally and internationally.

Steven Lombardi’s (B. Arch ’79) multi-disciplinary firm has recently completed a wide range of projects, including Last Wave, a sculpture made out of recycled surfboards, a multi-family housing project in Ocean Beach, Calif. and the Barcelona Interior in San Diego’s Point Loma. In addition to working on two new homes, Steven Lombardi Architects has also completed the schematics for a 400-meterlong high-speed train station in Kuwait City. Earlier this year, the firm designed Wahines, a women’s clothing store in Ocean Beach, Calif.

1980s

Bruce Biesman-Simons (B.Arch ’81) was elected new president of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy Board of Directors. His San Pedro, Calif. architecture firm has worked on projects such as EuroDisneyland’s Entertainment Center, as well as several projects for the Land Conservancy.

Rick Gooding (B.Arch ’84) of Chu + Gooding Architects in Los Angeles exhibited more than 30 of his graphite drawings and sketches in an exhibition dubbed Subterranea, hosted earlier this year at the Wedge Gallery at Woodbury University School of Architecture.

Karen M’Closkey (B.Arch ’84), an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, has won the Garden Club of America Rome Prize.

She has completed her fellowship at the American Academy in Rome this

past fall, where her proposed research topic was A Field Guide to Rome: Baedeker and Beyond.

Eyal Perchik (B.Arch ’85) was promoted to Principal of Los Angeles based CO Architects. Perchik, AIA, who joined the firm in 2001 as a Senior Associate, has upwards of 25 years of experience in healthcare projects and has coordinated more than two million square feet of healthcare construction.

Historian Michael Jacob Rochlin (B.Arch ’87) has put his Echo Park home up for sale after seven years of work on the 1922 bungalow. Rochlin’s projects include the California School of Professional Psychology Rosemont Campus (now the Kerden School), Sketcher’s Van Nuys, and the documentation of Anoakia, Anita Baldwin’s Arcadia Estate. He has written ten books and is currently teaching at Otis College.

1990s

Pam Kinzie’s (M.Arch ’90) residential renovation of her Calistoga, Calif. home is among the 8 homes featured in the recently published book, Atomic Ranch Midcentury Interiors by Michelle Gringeri-Brown and Jim Brown.

Yasi Vafai (B.Arch ’90) and Robert Thibodeau (M.Arch ’93) of du Architects have recently completed the design of the flagship Made In Earth jewelry store in Venice, Calif.

Angela Brooks (M.Arch ’91) and partner Lawrence Scarpa of Los Angeles-based Brooks + Scarpa received a 2012 AIA | LA Next LA award for their design of the Parque de Investigation, Innovacion y Tecnologica in Apocada, Mexico. Earlier this year, they unveiled their proposal for an addition to the 1929 historic Kimball Art Center located in the heart of downtown Park City, Utah. Additionally, their Rose Gardens affordable apartment building in Palm Springs was certified LEED Gold for its energy-saving and environmentally sustainable features.

D.B. Kim (M.Arch ’91) was recently featured in an interview published by Interior Design magazine. He is principal of Philadelphia-based Daroff Design, which specializes in comprehensive solutions for hotel, restaurant, retail, and corporate clients. A hospitality phenomenon for 15-plus years, Kim’s notable credits include the Westin Renewal First Class Lounge, Westin’s in-airport partnership with United Airlines.

Christopher Mercier (M.Arch ’91) of Inglewood-based {fer}Studio exhibited in the Breaking Conventions: Art + Architecture group show featuring sketches, process paintings and the developmental process in art, hosted at PS Zasks Gallery in Rolling Hills Estates, Calif.

Ate Atema (M.Arch ’93) of New York-based Atema Architecture completed the design for the TED Conferences office space, a project also featured as the cover story of Roger magazine’s summer ’12 issue. Atema’s design emphasizes the importance of collaborative, non-static workplaces, where space is organized around a large and malleable theater, with “soft architecture” allowing the team to bend and shape their environment.

Joel Huffman (M.Arch ’93) of Vertu Architecture and Design was one of only four Americans invited to exhibit at Palazzo Bembo during the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. Titled A New Architecture: Harmonic Morphology, Huffman’s project was included in the Traces of Centuries and Future Steps exhibition organized by the Global Art Affairs Foundation. Huffman and fellow alumna Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90) of Scrafano Architects hosted the SCI-Arc Midwest Alumni & Friends Cocktail Party at the Vertu offices.

Lawrence O’Toole (M.Arch ’93) of Kauai-based LOT is currently working on a new series of experimental pieces for LOT Modern Advanced Furniture and Accessories. His O Tables, made of up-cycled board foam, were featured in Angeleno Interiors and Modern Luxury Hawaii’s summer ’12 issues.

O’Toole also did the art direction and set design for Whitespace, a progressive dance performance and film shot in New York City. He teaches Design at the University of Hawaii outpost, Kauai Community College.

Keith Krumwiede (M.Arch ’94) was appointed to the faculty of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, College of Architecture and Design. Krumwiede, whose research focuses on the development of sustainable, climate-responsive, mid-rise urban housing prototypes, is working on a book, Gross Domestic Product, about the recent history of the American singlefamily house with attention to the changes that occurred in its design, production, and delivery during the last housing boom. Earlier this year, Krumwiede exhibited his Freedomland project at the Woodbury University West Hollywood Gallery.

George Alexandris (B.Arch ’99) was appointed VP of development for The Hutton Company in Chattanooga, Tenn. During his tenure with the company, Alexandris has successfully managed more than 100 retail projects from conception to completion, with duties including oversight of due diligence, project entitlements, civil engineering and architectural design, as well as coordinating the construction of the projects by the Hutton Construction company.

Julien De Smedt (’99) of JDS Architects took part in a recent Belgian economic mission to Turkey presided

by Prince Philippe of Belgium. In addition, one of his projects, BE Build-

ings was featured in an exhibition at the Istanbul Design Biennial. De Smedt is currently at work on a proposal for a 350-key sports oriented resort and marina along the Mediterranean coast of the Adana province in Turkey. His project for the Antwerp police headquarters in Belgium and that of a house in the Jura region of France are both near completion.

2000s

Jonathan Moore (M.Arch ’00) of ROJO Architecture based in Tampa, Fla. recently completed the Portland Apartments, a 12-story building in downtown St. Petersburg, Fla. It features 68 affordable housing units, covered parking, fitness center, Internet Café, and a third-floor rooftop patio. Previously, ROJO has completed more than 85 churches, and hundreds of commercial office projects, schools, childcare and financial institutions.

Adam Goldstein (M.Arch ’01), Christian Schultz (M.Arch ’01) and partner Leslie Kale of the Santa Monica based Studio Collective have recently been featured in Angeleno Interiors, Variety and Los Angeles Times. With some big-name projects already in their portfolio, including the SLS Hotel and the Hyde Lounge at Staples Center, the trio has just completed work on Brent Bolthouse’s Bungalow at the Fairmont Hotel. They are also at work on an extreme makeover of the former Hamburger Hamlet in West Hollywood, and a complete overhaul of the Largo space on Fairfax.

Frédérick Nosbusch (’01) of Luxembourg-based n-lab recently completed his MAR project, a single-family home in a suburb of Luxembourg City.

Kevin Wronske (B.Arch ’02) and brother Hardy Wronske of Heyday Partnership have completed the model home for a six-home development in Silver Lake. Their most ambitious design yet, this project advances the firm’s mission to redefine the spec home by looking beyond the existing paradigm of banal stucco boxes in favor of progressive infill homes that are smarter, healthier and greener.

Nerin Kadribegovic, AIA (M.Arch ’03) was promoted to principal of Lehrer Architects in Los Angeles. He has taken a leadership position in managing and directing business development and the firm’s operations, including playing a paramount role in the recent formation of LAWRL Design, LLP, a strategic partnership with Cleveland-based architecture firm Westlake Reed Leskosky. As principal, Kadribegovic is also responsible for project direction and management.

Heather Flood (M.Arch ’04) of F-lab has exhibited her Wonder Wall installation at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, part of a group show including work from the nine winners of the 2012 C.O.L.A Visual Artist Fellowship.

Jonathan Racek (M.Arch ’04) was selected as one of Building Design + Construction’s 40 Under 40. He is director of PlaygroundIDEAS in Bloomington, Ind., a nonprofit organization that trains local people in developing countries to build their own playgrounds. So far, his team led construction of 100-plus low-cost, sustainable and safe playgrounds in Cambodia, Peru and Thailand. Racek is also co-founder and principal of architectural and furniture design studio STEW Design Workshop.

Cameron Schmitt (M.Arch ’04), Director of Design and Construction at SBE Entertainment in Los Angeles, has in the last six months opened the Greystone Manor Nightclub in Los Angeles, Mercato Di Vetro Restaurant in West Hollywood, Hyde Lounge at The Bellagio in Las Vegas, and two Katsuya Restaurants in San Diego and Houston.

Emily White (M.Arch ’06) and Lisa Little (M.Arch ’06) of Layer LA exhibited their new installation, A Loose Horizon, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, as part of the public programming to celebrate the museum’s 10-year anniversary. In addition, one of White’s paper constructions was on view at the A+D Museum group show COME IN! Les Femmes.

Also featured in the all-women exhibition were alumni Lilliana Castro (B.Arch ’08) of Archeffect Design, Cathy Johnson (M.Arch ’05) and Rebecca Rudolph (M.Arch ’00) of Design Bitches, and Iris Anna Regn (M.Arch ’94) of Durfee-Regn.

Adam Gebrian (SCIFI ’08) has founded the For a New Prague organization in the capital city of the Czech Republic. His team advocates for quality architecture, responsible city development, and general improvement of architecture in the public sector. Gebrian writes architecture reviews for the local Lidové noviny publication, moderates a local radio show dubbed Demolition, curates architecture exhibitions, judges design competitions, and until recently, he also taught at Technical University of Liberec.

Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09) of M-Rad won 2nd place in the eco-focused international design competition, Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI). His design was selected from 250 public artwork entries for Freshkills Park in New York City. Rosenberg’s proposal would generate 250MW of renewable energy annually, enough to provide 500 homes in the area half of their total annual electricity demands.

2010s

Bin Lu (M.Arch ’10) of BLUA has recently completed the design of the Civic Sports Center in Hangzhou, China, commissioned by the Hangzhou Sports Development Group. In addition to his practice, Lu is also a Director with Los Angeles-based DRDS, focusing on the Chinese market.

SCI-ARC DONORS

Academic Year 2011-12 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.

$300,000 and Above ArtPlace $100,000-$299,999 Getty Foundation Berta and Frank Gehry $50,000-$99,999 Ralph M. Parsons Foundation The Ahmanson Foundation $10,000-$49,999 Bechtel Project Planning & Development Group Monique Birault (M.Arch ‘92) Bosch Bowling Family Foundation City of Los Angeles - Department of Cultural Affairs Tim and Neda Disney Wiliam Fain Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Green Foundation Jewish Communal Fund Johnson Fain Hildegard Kennedy and Christopher Kennedy (M.Arch ‘99) Arthur Max Thom Mayne Jerry Neuman Alex Pettas (M.Arch ‘06) Abigail Scheuer (M. Arch ‘93) The Vinyl Institute W.M. Keck Foundation ZBrush/Pixologic, Inc. Stephanie Bowling Zeigler (M. Arch ‘95) $5,000-$9,999 Carolyn and Jamie Bennett Forest City Diane Ghirardo Hammel, Green and Abrahamson, Inc. Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation LA Metro North Sails Kevin Ratner $1,000-$4,999 A&P Technology, Inc. Anthony R. Anderson (M.Arch ‘04) Anonymous Balzac Communications & Marketing Richard Baptie BDO USA, LLP California Community Foundation Rick Carter Kenneth Chang Nina Hachigian and Joe Day (M. Arch ‘94) DLR Group WWCOT Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund Anthony Ferguson Chris Genik John R.Geresi Tom Gilmore Grey Goose Vodka Hathaway Dinwiddie Construction Co. Hexcel Corporation Scott Hughes (M.Arch ‘97)

Shelly and Ray Kappe Sandra Kobayashi and Alec Kobayashi (M.Arch ‘90) Emily Kovner and Eric Owen Moss Jerry Ku Marcos Lozano Menn, Van Kuik & Walker, Inc. Momentum Group Network of Executive Women in Hospitality Merry Norris OLIN Pasadena Art Alliance Paton Group Perkins + Will - Los Angeles Ian F. Robertson Roscoe & Swanson Accountancy Corporation Robyne Savel and Mark H. Savel (B. Arch ‘78) Cherry Lietz Snelling (M.Arch ‘97) Martin Sosin-Stratton-Petit Foundation Ted Tanner Teijin Aramid USA Incorporated Dominik Von Bueren (M.Arch ‘99) $500- $999 Griffin Enright Architects Russell Goings William Huang (B.Arch ‘84) David Koch (M.Arch ‘97) Chiang T. Kuik (B.Arch ‘87) Matteo Maverix Solutions David J. Neuman, FAIA Michael Rotondi (B.Arch ‘75) Sarah Sullivan The Dow Chemical Company Vectorply Corporation Greg Walsh Up to $500 Anabelle Adler (M.Arch ‘95) Bandar Sulaiman Alkahlan (M.Arch ‘08) Volkan Alkanoglu Atta H. Alsaleh (M.Arch ‘88) Jean Amador (B.Arch ‘86) and William Amador (B.Arch ‘86) Anheuser-Busch Zuma Arechiga Michael Avila (B.Arch ‘88) Ball-Nogues Studio Christopher Banks Yuval Bar-Zemer Herwig Baumgartner Jonathan P. Bell Barbara Bestor (M.Arch ‘92) Pooja Bhagat (MRD ‘01) Jackilin Hah Bloom Neal Borsuk (M.Arch ‘89) Fernando Bracer (M.Arch ‘94) Silvia Braun (M.Arch 99’) John Buchanan (M.Arch ‘95) Dana Cantelmo (M.Arch ‘89) Jonathan Cantwell (M.Arch ‘00) Aviva B. Carmy (M.Arch ‘80) Victor Manuel Castillo (M.Arch ‘01) Liza Chandra (M.Arch ‘87) Adele Chatfield-Taylor Chevron Corporation Chomarat North America Annie Chu (B.Arch ‘83) and Rick Gooding (B.Arch ‘84) Elena Coleman (M.Arch ‘06) Kim Colin (M.Arch ‘94) Kris Conner (M.Arch ‘07) Bill Craig Wim de Wit Jeanice Deeb (M.Arch ‘91)

Heidi Duckler Edward Cella Art+Architecture Steven Ehrlich Edmund M. Einy (B.Arch ‘83) Craig Elliott (B.Arch ‘88) Kathleen Lehnert and Edwin Emerson (M.Arch ‘03) Juan Carlos Esquivel Tom Evans (B.Arch ‘88) Kyla Farrell (M.Arch ‘07) Fiber Glass Industries Filtec Precise Bernadette Fox (B.Arch ‘87) Craig Fraulino Architect (B.Arch ‘80) Stephen Garrett Catherine Garrison (M.Arch ‘02) Pavel Pan Getov (M.Arch ‘93) Elizabeth Anne Gibb (M.Arch ‘89) Marcelyn Gow David Lawrence Gray William Gruen Peter Grueneisen (M.Arch ‘90) Harrison Higgins (M.Arch ‘94) Beth Holden (B.Arch ‘98) Kathryn and Con Howe Emily Jagoda (M.Arch ‘95) Sook Jin Jo Louis DeLong Joyner (M.Arch ‘85) Coomy Kadribegovic (MRD ‘01) and Nerin Kadribegovic ( M.Arch ‘03) Jordan A. Kanter (M.Arch ‘08) Michael Kaufman (M.Arch ‘82) Elizabeth Marie Keslacy (M.Arch ‘04) Steven Seong Wook Kim (B.Arch ‘98) D.B. Kim (M.Arch ‘91) Scott David Kissack Hunter Knight (M.Arch ‘06) Julie and Hank Koning Bill Kramer Veit Kugel (M.Arch ‘97) Jason Langkammerer (M.Arch ‘99) Alain Lauriault Tiffiny Lendrum Aaron Leppanen (M.Arch ‘06) Mina Javid and Robert Ley Max Liao LOT (M.Arch ‘93) Andrea Lenardin Madden (M.Arch ‘98) Zachary Martin-Schoch (M.Arch ‘11) Thea Massouh (M.Arch ‘04) Lisa McDonnell and Barbara Bongiovanni Talbot McLanahan (M.Arch ‘95) Neil McLean (B.Arch ‘89) Kevin McMahon Santino Medina (M.Arch ‘06) Richard Meier Partners Architects LLP Rachel Melvald Christopher Mercier (M.Arch ‘91) Harriet Morgan Dawn Mori Janine Moss (M.Arch ‘90) Frances Muenzer Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ‘04) David Nosanchuk (M.Arch ‘96) Dean Nota (B.Arch ‘76) Rod Nourafshan Alan Olick Polly Osborne (M.Arch ‘87) Greg Otto Catherine Pack (M.Arch ‘02) Martin Paull (B.Arch ‘87) Aida and Malcolm Peck Kirk Allen Phillips (M.Arch ‘00) Steven Purvis (M.Arch ‘06) Johnny Ramirios (B.Arch ‘05) Glenn Rappaport (M.Arch ‘87) Kelly Reid Mark Rolfs (M.Arch ‘97) David Ross (B.Arch ‘81)

Gregory M. Roth (M.Arch ‘95) Lisa A. Russo Eric Safyan Architect PC (MRD ‘02) Saint-Gobain Adfors America, Inc. Nancy Samovar Sonia Sanchez Nancy and Berry Sanders Christian Schnyder (M.Arch ‘95) Erik Schonsett (B.Arch ‘04) Christian Schulz (M.Arch ‘01) Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ‘90) Nick Seierup (B.Arch ‘79) Neal Shalat (M.Arch ‘86) Gerry Shapiro (B.Arch ‘80) Abby Sher David Shoucair (B.Arch ‘79) Alan Sieroty Buck Silva Harris Silver (M.Arch ‘11) Janet Simon (M.Arch ‘94) and Ron McCoy Vicky and Bill Simonian Amy Sims (M.Arch ‘93) Chris Skeens (M.Arch ‘12) Nina Smith-Gardiner (M.Arch ‘92) Thomas Sokol Derek Sola (M.Arch ‘98) Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc. John Southern (M.Arch ‘02) John Souza (B.Arch ‘74) Don Spivack Randy Spiwak (B.Arch ‘79) Daniel Swartz Michael Swischuk (M.Arch ‘92) Julie D. Taylor Warren Techentin Architecture Thema Robert Thibodeau (M.Arch ‘93) Chan Tom Evan Marc Tribus (M.Arch ‘04) Anne Troutman (M.Arch ‘87) and Aleks Instanbullu John Umbanhowar (M.Arch ‘98) Danna Vest (B.Arch ‘81) Kipling and Willliam Wagner (B.Arch ‘03) Frances Diemoz and Alan Webber Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ‘02) Emily White (M.Arch ‘06) Allyne Winderman Barclay Woodbury Peter Wowkowych (M.Arch ‘97) Kevin Wronske (B.Arch ‘02) Michael James Wysochanski (M.Arch ‘09) Andrew Zago Brian Miles Zentmeyer (M.Arch ‘11) Carlos Zubieta (B.Arch ‘94) (Gifts and commitments from 9/1/11 through 8/31/12)

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Kyle von Hasseln + Elizabeth von Hasseln Phantom Geometry Image by Devyn Weiser