SCI-Arc Magazine No. 8 (Spring 2014) by SCI-Arc

ISSUE 008

1 HOW THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION ENDED Eric Owen Moss 3 PUBLIC PROGRAMS

5 FACULTY PROFILE: FLORENCIA PITA Marcelyn Gow

7 DESIGNING DISCOURSE Todd Gannon

17 CLASS NOTES

Eric Owen Moss

HOW THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION ENDED

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

ABOUT PUBLIC PROGRAMS All events begin at 7pm unless otherwise noted. Lectures take place in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall.

UPCOMING

SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition

HEATHER FLOOD

September 15–September 25

The Lecture Series is broadcast live at sciarc.edu/live. Lectures are also archived for future viewing, and can be found online in the SCI-Arc Media Archive at sma.sciarc.edu. 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. 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 Gallery Exhibition

Punk’d June 20–August 3 Opening reception and discussion, Friday, June 20 Lecture Series

HUBERT KLUMPNER + ALFREDO BRILLEMBOURG September 10

Lecture Series

VICENTE GUALLART FURIO September 24

SCI-Arc Campus Event

GRADUATE THESIS & GRADUATION September 5–September 7

SELECTED THESIS EXHIBITION SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition

BRYAN CANTLEY October 10–November 30

SCI-Arc Library Gallery Exhibition

IDEA OFFICE/RUSSELL THOMSEN + ERIC KAHN October 10–November 30 Lecture Series

FLORENCIA PITA + JACKILIN BLOOM November 5

RECENT

Lecture Series SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition

JEFFREY KIPNIS + STEPHEN TURK

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.

Figure Ground Game, An Architecturalists Show January 17–March 2 Lecture Series

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

LARS MÜLLER

2014: Avant-Garde is Analog January 31 Lecture Series

BARRY BERGDOLL

Out of Site/In Plain View: On the Origins of Modernity of the Architecture Exhibition February 5 Lecture Series

ANTONI VIVES

Barcelona 5.0. Polis is Back February 12 Lecture Series

KEVIN RATNER

Forest City Open City. How We Develop February 19 Lecture Series

WOLF D. PRIX

Visions in Exile or: Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted Raimund Abraham Lecture March 5 Jeffrey Kipnis + Stephen Turk Figure Ground Game, An Architecturalists Show

Lecture Series

SHARON JOHNSTON & MARK LEE Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die March 12

SCI-Arc Library Exhibition

FLORENCIA PITA/FPMOD UMMA Table & Objects March 14–April 20 Lecture Series

STAN ALLEN

Landscapes and Buildings March 19 SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition

HERWIG BAUMGARTNER + SCOTT URIU Apertures April 11–May 18

SCI-Arc Exhibition

UNDERGRADUATE THESIS & SPRING SHOW April 19–May 4

Undergraduate Thesis Reviews

OUTSIDE SCI-ARC Conference

GLOBALIZING ARCHITECTURE / FLOWS AND DISRUPTIONS

April 10–12, 2014 ACSA 102nd Annual Meeting, Miami Participants from SCI-Arc included Hsinming Fung, Dora Epstein Jones, and Anna Neimark. Event

LEBBEUS WOODS, A CELEBRATION April 25–6, 2014 The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union Two days of public tributes, reminiscences, panels and films celebrating the late artist, architect and educator. Participants from SCI-Arc included Eric Owen Moss, Thom Mayne, Dwayne Oyler, and Wolf Prix.

Herwig Baumgartner + Scott Uriu Apertures

FLORENCIA PITA CHARACTERIZING THE CHARACTER Marcelyn Gow

FLORENCIA PITA is the principal of FPmod, as well as a partner in Pita & Bloom, both based in Los Angeles. She graduated from the National University of Rosario, Argentina, School of Architecture, and was awarded the 2000 Fulbright-Fondo Nacional de las Artes Scholarship to pursue studies at Columbia University, where she graduated with a Masters Degree from the MSAAD Program. Pita is a finalist (as Pita & Bloom) in the 2014 PS1 YAP Program and has been the recipient of two Graham Foundation Grant Awards. Her work has been widely published in publications such as Log, Architectural Record, A+U, and Surface Magazine, and has been exhibited in numerous museums, galleries and biennials, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Artist Space, MAK Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, and the 2012 Venice Biennale. In 2013, the University of Michigan Museum of Art presented a collection of the work developed by Pita’s firm FPmod in a feature exhibition. Pita currently teaches undergraduate and graduate design studios at SCI-Arc, and is a Visual Studies instructor of advanced software, as well as an editor of SCI-Arc’s ONRAMP publication of student work. 1. UMMA Table, SCI-Arc Library Exhibition, 2014 2. UMMA Table and Cronopios, SCI-Arc Library Exhibition, 2014 3. Cronopios, Art Institute of Chicago, 2010 4. Maribor Housing Project, Pita & Bloom, 2012 5. Taichung City Cultural Center, Taiwan, Pita & Bloom, 2013

Now it happens that turtles are great speed enthusiasts, which is natural. The esperanzas know that and don’t bother about it. The famas know it and make fun of it. The cronopios know it, and each time they meet a turtle, they haul out a box of colored chalks, and on the rounded blackboard of the turtle’s shell they draw a swallow.1 – Julio Cortázar How to characterize the work of SCI-Arc faculty member Florencia Pita? The answer to this question could begin with the nuances of the word character itself, considering the difference between the character as a sign in a text, the character as a figure within a story and something that is endowed with character in the form of distinguishing features. Florencia Pita’s work as an educator at SCI-Arc and in her practice (FPmod and Pita & Bloom) engages these nuances wholeheartedly, producing a unique approach to contemporary architecture. Within the history of architecture the connection between literal and figurative character appears in the writings of Quatremère de Quincy as related to the ornamental and the legible aspects of the hieroglyph. Pita’s work situates this historical affiliation between the literal and figurative aspects of character within a current architectural agenda. Her designs possess distinctive character, elicited through techniques of vivid coloration in combination with accentuated formal features, and they evoke a series of ‘characters’ that appear to animate the work. This approach distinguishes the projects produced in Pita’s SCI-Arc studios and seminars as well as her professional work. At the final review for Pita’s “Visual Factory” seminar this spring, visitors encountered a large table filled with a vast array of architectural panels comprised of brightly colored resins, rubber, heat-formed plastics and various other non-conventional materials including a sugar composite. These meticulously formed architectural confections were situated within several large, bubble shaped vitrines. In the hands of the seminar students, images and patterns were transformed from the ephemerality of their two dimensional state into intricate configurations through techniques of embossing, extruding, lasercutting, milling and casting. Each of the samples produced by the students questioned the role of architectural ornamentation by allowing it to proliferate, drifting across and through the thickness of the panels. Pita is a unique character within the SCI-Arc faculty. She innovates on the traditional format of studios and seminars by staging her classes as a research and development platform that advances in tandem with her professional interests. “Visual Factory” is an example of this, alluding to the Pop art aesthetic purveyed by Andy Warhol’s Factory and the fact that the class worked as a laboratory, conducting research directly through design and fabrication. Pita organized the students into groups that developed specific topics related to the role of the image in respect to the architectural detail. The class investigated the production of new material effects by engaging the reproduction of images as details. In “Solid Veneer,” another of Pita’s visual studies seminars, students focused on translating color into a material property. Custom printed ceramic tiles acted as a threedimensional veneer, challenging the relationship between the surface and mass of the objects to which they were applied. The unlikely coupling between diverse qualities, as in “Solid Veneer,” is a recurring interest that drives much of Pita’s design work. Pita coined the term Brutalist Pop to describe the design agenda of a recent studio she taught at SCI-Arc that developed a unique fusion of Pop art aesthetics combined with a brutalist architectural sensibility. In her words, “Brutalist Pop embraces incongruousness and collage as an escape from congruity and

repetition.” A distinct emphasis was placed on designing buildings that exhibited strong contours and massing in combination with vibrant coloration. The encounter between fiction and architecture in Pita’s professional work centers on the role of character in architecture and provokes its audience to reflect on what forms legibility may take in contemporary architecture. Cronopios, the title of Pita’s 2010 installation at the Art Institute of Chicago, alludes to the naïve, unconventional and sensitive characters with lush imaginations that populate Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s short stories. The choice of the project title is not incidental as Pita’s work consistently engages literature. Her SCI-Arc Gallery installation (2006) Pulse: Tendril Formations was exhibited with an accompanying short story Cardiogram written by Bruna Mori that describes how the tendril named Pulse came into existence. The title of Pita’s Alice installation for the LAXART gallery (2007) is a direct reference to Lewis Carroll’s text Alice in Wonderland. The relationship between writing and architecture has a long history that originates with the Vitruvian distinction between the practical aspects of architectural knowledge and its discursive aspects. Pita’s work confounds this distinction by introducing alternate forms of legibility into the architectural lexicon. Cortázar’s book Cronopios and Famas is essentially a series of short literary vignettes where, through the eyes of the cronopios, seemingly prosaic events are transformed into fantastical accounts of alternate realities. Likewise Pita’s installation Cronopios: Drawing off Edge, is comprised of vignette drawings that transform a graphic two-dimensionality on the surface of a wall and conjure a profound sense of depth by extending off the surface of the drawing. The word vignette, a derivative of the French word for “little vine,” refers to the vinelike illustrations found in illuminated manuscripts and the title pages of books. A vignette also describes a drawing or photograph that includes shading at the edges of the image in order to eradicate a fixed border. The dual aspects of the vignette present themselves clearly in Pita’s installation. The sinuous lines that Pita draws would serve well as sumptuous variants of the painter William Hogarth’s serpentine line from his 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty. Here, they form vinelike tendrils that congeal into a more extensive whole. Cronopios produces the impression that the pages of an illuminated manuscript, saturated with bright colors, have been unfurled across the gallery wall. The technique of vignetting or ‘shading off of the edge’ appears in Pita’s work as an extreme flattening of the shadow cast by the delineated figures. This interpretation of shade jettisons the elusive gradients of shadow for the corporeality of blackness. In a recent exhibition of Cronopios in the SCI-Arc Library (2014) two of these vignettes were extracted from the larger drawing and reproduced on the library wall in an arrangement suggestive of the frontispiece of a large book across whose pages the characters delineated by the curves seem to drift effortlessly, sometimes breaching the painted datum or extruding themselves literally ‘off the edges’ of the drawing. FPmod’s recent exhibition in the SCI-Arc Library was suffused with character. Cronopios was installed on the wall adjacent to Pita’s UMMA Table. The table itself, like the table in the Visual Factory seminar, acts as a display environment housing nine bell-jar shaped vitrines that contain various objects designed by Pita including children’s cutlery sets, flower vases, and jewelry. The adjacency of the vitrines to Cronopios and the reappearance of distinctive features on objects of diverse scales create the impression of various characters that inhabit the pieces. For example, the effervescent bubble forms that appear on a piece of jewelry, the buhb ring, could plausibly belong to the family of

Balloon Frame, Pita & Bloom, 2014

rounded forms that articulate the extruded wall reliefs of Cronopios. The theme of effervescence continues in the ceramic tile patterns on the table’s horizontal surfaces, stippled with fields of small colorful dots that erupt to confront the more linear geometric patterns inlaid into the table’s surface. These clearly delineated curves appear as large scale puzzle-like joints that establish a part to whole logic within the table. The presence of the UMMA vitrines in proximity to Cronopios creates the impression that the cronopios have remarkably in some manner issued forth from the bell jars. The title UMMA suggests the name of a character, also rendered in vignette format. In this case, the vignette is instantiated as the extruded black inlay, a thickened cusped line that meanders through the mass of the table and ultimately drips downward to form the table legs that support the piece. The legs of the UMMA Table could be understood as colossal extrusions of hieroglyphics. The housing project for Maribor, Slovenia - city of culture 2012, designed by Florencia Pita and her partner in Pita & Bloom, Jackilin Hah Bloom, also embraces this hieroglyphic quality. The massing for a series of individual housing units is derived from permutations on five existing roof typologies found in the city of Maribor. The sampling and extrusion of these silhouettes into discrete figures produces a series of characters imbued with distinctive cusped features. In this case, the silhouettes of the buildings in combination with smaller scale articulation defining the entrance to each housing unit establish the character. The meeting of the cusped geometries produces subtle misalignments and gaps that open onto adjacent courtyards and public spaces between the buildings. The pattern for a ceramic tile roofscape is derived from geological satellite image of the existing Maribor landscape, where each tile represents one pixel in the image. This pixelated roofscape unifies the individual buildings as it simultaneously dissolves and undermines their legibility as distinct masses. The effect is countered by the row-house typology. The concatenation of the individual houses on a given street suggests the letters of an as yet untranslated alphabet. The idea of sampling introduced in the Maribor project is advanced in the context of a larger scale civic building in Pita & Bloom’s 2013 competition entry for the Taichung City Cultural Center in Taiwan. The Cultural Center is comprised of three primary programmatic components, the Taichung Public Library, 1

the Fine Arts Museum and an entryway to the Taichung Gateway Park. Reflecting the building’s primary role as an urban gateway, the form of the Cultural Center complex was derived using a series of historical arch typologies. The arch profiles are extruded and manipulated to produce a building mass that has a dual faciality. The center appears as a single entity from the street elevation and subsequently splits open to produce two semidetached masses, the library and museum, which are visible on the elevation seen from the park. The bifurcation of the character in this case corresponds to the programmatic bifurcation of the library and museum, coexisting within a single building mass. The delicate balancing act performed here between overall coherence and local incongruence, results in a nuanced building section that fluctuates continuously. In Balloon Frame, Pita & Bloom’s proposal for the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program 2014, a series of figures reminiscent of large parade balloons are designed to form passageways within the PS1 courtyard. The effect of buoyancy and inflation produced by the voluptuous figures inscribed in the space is provocatively challenged by their graphic planar quality. This results in a fascinating conflation of possible twodimensional and three-dimensional readings of the project. The thresholds guide visitors toward the entrance to the museum in addition to providing shade and seating. During the PS1 public events in the courtyard, they form a vivid backdrop. The title Balloon Frame refers to the balloon frame system of building construction that is, in essence, a skeletal form of an actual building. This calls to mind Quatremère de Quincy’s description of literal character as, “an incised mark reproducing a skeletal image of a physical object.”2 In Balloon Frame character is derived from the vibrant coloration and animated linework that is suggestive of disembodied graffiti that has drifted from its architectural host, the adjacent walls, to become the architecture itself. Florencia Pita’s work asks us to consider what it would mean to propose an architectural fact, or an architectural fiction. Just as Julio Cortázar’s cronopios enable us to inhabit alternate realities where the shell of the turtle becomes, quite fluidly, the tableau from which a swallow takes flight, the open book that Pita creates in her work becomes the tableau for multiple forms of legibility.

MARCELYN GOW is principal of servo los angeles. Gow received her Architecture degrees from the Architectural Association and Columbia University, as well as a Dr.Sc. from the ETH Zurich. Her doctoral dissertation Invisible Environment: Art, Architecture and a Systems Aesthetic explores the relationship between aesthetic research and technological innovation. Gow has lectured internationally and contributed to numerous journals including Perspecta, Via and AD. She is the coeditor of Material Beyond Materials and Onramp 4. Gow received a 2012 Grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Together with SCI-Arc, Gow was also the recipient of a 2012 Pasadena Art Alliance Award. She currently teaches graduate design studios and cultural studies seminars at SCI-Arc and has been a visiting professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Gow has also taught at UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design and the ETH in Zurich. ENDNOTES 1. Julio Cortázar, “Turtles and Cronopios,” in Cronopios and Famas, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: New Directions, 1969), 161. 2. Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 137.

FLORENCIA PITA CHARACTERIZING THE CHARACTER Marcelyn Gow

Now it happens that turtles are great speed enthusiasts, which is natural. The esperanzas know that and don’t bother about it. The famas know it and make fun of it. The cronopios know it, and each time they meet a turtle, they haul out a box of colored chalks, and on the rounded blackboard of the turtle’s shell they draw a swallow.1 – Julio Cortázar How to characterize the work of SCI-Arc faculty member Florencia Pita? The answer to this question could begin with the nuances of the word character itself, considering the difference between the character as a sign in a text, the character as a figure within a story and something that is endowed with character in the form of distinguishing features. Florencia Pita’s work as an educator at SCI-Arc and in her practice (FPmod and Pita & Bloom) engages these nuances wholeheartedly, producing a unique approach to contemporary architecture. Within the history of architecture the connection between literal and figurative character appears in the writings of Quatremère de Quincy as related to the ornamental and the legible aspects of the hieroglyph. Pita’s work situates this historical affiliation between the literal and figurative aspects of character within a current architectural agenda. Her designs possess distinctive character, elicited through techniques of vivid coloration in combination with accentuated formal features, and they evoke a series of ‘characters’ that appear to animate the work. This approach distinguishes the projects produced in Pita’s SCI-Arc studios and seminars as well as her professional work. At the final review for Pita’s “Visual Factory” seminar this spring, visitors encountered a large table filled with a vast array of architectural panels comprised of brightly colored resins, rubber, heatformed plastics and various other non-conventional materials including a sugar composite. These meticulously formed architectural confections were situated within several large, bubble shaped vitrines. In the hands of the seminar students, images and patterns were transformed from the ephemerality of their two dimensional state into intricate configurations through techniques of embossing,2 extruding, lasercutting, milling and casting. Each of the samples produced by the students questioned the role of architectural ornamentation by allowing it to proliferate, drifting across and through the thickness of the panels. Pita is a unique character within the SCI-Arc faculty. She innovates on the traditional format of studios and seminars by staging her classes as a research and development platform that advances in tandem with her professional interests. “Visual Factory” is an example of this, alluding to the Pop art aesthetic purveyed by Andy Warhol’s Factory and the fact that the class worked as a laboratory, conducting research directly through design and fabrication. Pita organized the students into groups that developed specific topics related to the role of the image in respect to the architectural detail. The class investigated the production of new material effects by engaging the reproduction of images as details. In “Solid Veneer,” another of Pita’s visual studies seminars, students focused on translating color into a material property. Custom printed ceramic tiles acted as a three-dimensional veneer, challenging the relationship between the surface and mass of the objects to which they were applied. The unlikely coupling between diverse qualities, as in “Solid Veneer,” is a recurring interest that drives much of Pita’s design work. Pita coined the term Brutalist Pop to describe the design agenda of a recent studio she taught at SCI-Arc that developed a unique fusion of Pop art aesthetics combined with a brutalist architectural sensibility. In her words, “Brutalist Pop embraces incongruousness and collage as an escape from congruity and repetition.” A distinct emphasis was placed on designing buildings that exhibited strong contours 4

and massing in combination with vibrant coloration. The encounter between fiction and architecture in Pita’s professional work centers on the role of character in architecture and provokes its audience to reflect on what forms legibility may take in contemporary architecture. Cronopios, the title of Pita’s 2010 installation at the Art Institute of Chicago, alludes to the naïve, unconventional and sensitive characters with lush imaginations that populate Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s short stories. The choice of the project title is not incidental as Pita’s work consistently engages literature. Her SCI-Arc Gallery installation (2006) Pulse: Tendril Formations was exhibited with an accompanying short story Cardiogram written by Bruna Mori that describes how the tendril named Pulse came into existence. The title of Pita’s Alice installation for the LAXART gallery (2007) is a direct reference to Lewis Carroll’s text Alice in Wonderland. The relationship between writing and architecture has a long history that originates with the Vitruvian distinction between the practical aspects of architectural knowledge and its discursive aspects. Pita’s work confounds this distinction by introducing alternate forms of legibility into the architectural lexicon. Cortázar’s book Cronopios and Famas is essentially a series of short literary vignettes where, through the eyes of the cronopios, seemingly prosaic events are transformed into fantastical accounts of alternate realities. Likewise Pita’s installation Cronopios: Drawing off Edge, is comprised of vignette drawings that transform a graphic two-dimensionality on the surface of a wall and conjure a profound sense of depth by extending off the surface of the drawing. The word vignette, a derivative of the French word for “little vine,” refers to the vinelike illustrations found in illuminated manuscripts and the title pages of books. A vignette also describes a drawing or photograph that includes shading at the edges of the image in order to eradicate a fixed border. The dual aspects of the vignette present themselves clearly in Pita’s installation. The sinuous lines that Pita draws would serve well as sumptuous variants of the painter William Hogarth’s serpentine line from his 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty. Here, they form vinelike tendrils that congeal into a more extensive whole. 3 impression that the pages of an illuminatCronopios produces the ed manuscript, saturated with bright colors, have been unfurled across the gallery wall. The technique of vignetting or ‘shading off of the edge’ appears in Pita’s work as an extreme flattening of the shadow cast by the delineated figures. This interpretation of shade jettisons the elusive gradients of shadow for the corporeality of blackness. In a recent exhibition of Cronopios in the SCIArc Library (2014) two of these vignettes were extracted from the larger drawing and reproduced on the library wall in an arrangement suggestive of the frontispiece of a large book across whose pages the characters delineated by the curves seem to drift effortlessly, sometimes breaching the painted datum or extruding themselves literally ‘off the edges’ of the drawing. FPmod’s recent exhibition in the SCI-Arc Library was suffused with character. Cronopios was installed on the wall adjacent to Pita’s UMMA Table. The table itself, like the table in the Visual Factory seminar, acts as a display environment housing nine belljar shaped vitrines that contain various objects designed by Pita including children’s cutlery sets, flower vases, and jewelry. The adjacency of the vitrines to Cronopios and the reappearance of distinctive features on objects of diverse scales create the impression of various characters that inhabit the pieces. For example, the effervescent bubble forms that appear on a piece of jewelry, the buhb ring, could plausibly belong to the family of rounded forms that articulate the extruded wall reliefs of Cronopios. The theme of effervescence continues in the ceramic tile patterns on the table’s horizontal surfaces, stippled with fields of small colorful dots that erupt to confront the more linear geometric patterns inlaid

Balloon Frame, Pita & Bloom, 2014

into the table’s surface. These clearly delineated curves appear as large scale puzzle-like joints that establish a part to whole logic within the table. The presence of the UMMA vitrines in proximity to Cronopios creates the impression that the cronopios have remarkably in some manner issued forth from the bell jars. The title UMMA suggests the name of a character, also rendered in vignette format. In this case, the vignette is instantiated as the extruded black inlay, a thickened cusped line that meanders through the mass of the table and ultimately drips downward to form the table legs that support the piece. The legs of the UMMA Table could be understood as colossal extrusions of hieroglyphics. The housing project for Maribor, Slovenia - city of culture 2012, designed by Florencia Pita and her partner in Pita & Bloom, Jackilin Hah Bloom, also embraces this hieroglyphic quality. The massing for a series of individual housing units is derived from permutations on five existing roof typologies found in the city of Maribor. The sampling and extrusion of these silhouettes into discrete figures produces a series of characters imbued with distinctive cusped features. In this case, the silhouettes of the buildings in combination with smaller scale articulation defining the entrance to each housing unit establish the character. The meeting of the cusped geometries produces subtle misalignments and gaps that open onto adjacent courtyards and public spaces between the buildings. The pattern for a ceramic tile roofscape is derived from geological satellite image of the existing Maribor landscape, where each tile represents one pixel in the image. This pixelated roofscape unifies the individual buildings as it simultaneously dissolves and undermines their legibility as distinct masses. The effect is countered by the row-house typology. The concatenation of the individual houses on a given street suggests the letters of an as yet untranslated alphabet. The idea of sampling introduced in the Maribor project is advanced in the context of a larger scale civic building in Pita & Bloom’s 2013 competition entry for the Taichung City Cultural Center in Taiwan. The Cultural Center is comprised of three primary programmatic components, the Taichung Public Library, the Fine Arts Museum and an entryway to the Taichung Gateway Park. Reflecting the building’s primary role as an urban gateway, the form of the Cultural Center complex was derived using a series of historical arch typologies. The arch profiles are extruded and manipulated to produce a building mass that has a dual 1

faciality. The center appears as a single entity from the street elevation and subsequently splits open to produce two semi-detached masses, the library and museum, which are visible on the elevation seen from the park. The bifurcation of the character in this case corresponds to the programmatic bifurcation of the library and museum, coexisting within a single building mass. The delicate balancing act performed here between overall coherence and local incongruence, results in a nuanced building section that fluctuates continuously. In Balloon Frame, Pita & Bloom’s proposal for the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program 2014, a series of figures reminiscent of large parade balloons are designed to form passageways within the PS1 courtyard. The effect of buoyancy and inflation produced by the voluptuous figures inscribed in the space is provocatively challenged by their graphic planar quality. This results in a fascinating conflation of possible two-dimensional and threedimensional readings of the project. The thresholds guide visitors toward the entrance to the museum in addition to providing shade and seating. During the PS1 public events in the courtyard, they form a vivid backdrop. The title Balloon Frame refers to the balloon frame system of building construction that is, in essence, a skeletal form of an actual building. This calls to mind Quatremère de Quincy’s description of literal character as, “an incised mark reproducing a skeletal image of a physical object.”2 In Balloon Frame character is derived from the vibrant coloration and animated linework that is suggestive of disembodied graffiti that has drifted from its architectural host, the adjacent walls, to become the architecture itself. Florencia Pita’s work asks us to consider what it would mean to propose an architectural fact, or an architectural fiction. Just as Julio Cortázar’s cronopios enable us to inhabit alternate realities where the shell of the turtle becomes, quite fluidly, the tableau from which a swallow takes flight, the open book that Pita creates in her work becomes the tableau for multiple forms of legibility.

ENDNOTES 1. Julio Cortázar, “Turtles and Cronopios,” in Cronopios and Famas, trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: New Directions, 1969), 161. 2. Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 137.

FLORENCIA PITA CHARACTERIZING THE CHARACTER Marcelyn Gow

Now it happens that turtles are great speed enthusiasts, which is natural. The esperanzas know that and don’t bother about it. The famas know it and make fun of it. The cronopios know it, and each time they meet a turtle, they haul out a box of colored chalks, and on the rounded blackboard of the turtle’s shell they draw a swallow.1 – Julio Cortázar How to characterize the work of SCI-Arc faculty member Florencia Pita? The answer to this question could begin with the nuances of the word character itself, considering the difference between the character as a sign in a text, the character as a figure within a story and something that is endowed with character in the form of distinguishing features. Florencia Pita’s work as an educator at SCI-Arc and in her practice (FPmod and Pita & Bloom) engages these nuances wholeheartedly, producing a unique approach to contemporary architecture. Within the history of architecture the connection between literal and figurative character appears in the writings of Quatremère de Quincy as related to the ornamental and the legible aspects of the hieroglyph. Pita’s work situates this historical affiliation between the literal and figurative aspects of character within a current architectural agenda. Her designs possess distinctive character, elicited through techniques of vivid coloration in combination with accentuated formal features, and they evoke a series of ‘characters’ that appear to animate the work. This approach distinguishes the projects produced in Pita’s SCI-Arc studios and seminars as well as her professional work. At the final review for Pita’s “Visual Factory” seminar this spring, visitors encountered a large table filled with a vast array of architectural panels comprised of brightly colored resins, rubber, heatformed plastics and various other non-conventional materials including a sugar composite. These meticulously formed architectural confections were situated within several large, bubble shaped vitrines. In the hands of the seminar students, images and patterns were transformed from the ephemerality of their two dimensional state into intricate configurations through techniques of embossing, extruding, lasercutting, milling and casting. Each of the samples produced by the students questioned the role of architectural ornamentation by allowing it to proliferate, drifting across and through the thickness of the panels. Pita is a unique character within the SCI-Arc faculty. She innovates on the traditional format of studios and seminars by staging her classes as a research and development platform that advances in tandem with her professional interests. “Visual Factory” is an example of this, alluding to the Pop art aesthetic purveyed by Andy Warhol’s Factory and the fact that the class worked as a laboratory, conducting research directly through design and fabrication. Pita organized the students into groups that developed specific topics related to the role of the image in respect to the architectural detail. The class investigated the production of new material effects by engaging the reproduction of images as details. In “Solid Veneer,” another of Pita’s visual studies seminars, students focused on translating color into a material property. Custom printed ceramic tiles acted as a three-dimensional veneer, challenging the relationship between the surface and mass of the objects to which they were applied. The unlikely coupling between diverse qualities, as in “Solid Veneer,” is a recurring interest that drives much of Pita’s design work. Pita coined the term Brutalist Pop to describe the design agenda of a recent studio she taught at SCI-Arc that developed a unique fusion of Pop art aesthetics combined with a brutalist architectural sensibility. In her words, “Brutalist Pop embraces incongruousness and collage as an escape from congruity and repetition.” A distinct emphasis was placed on designing buildings that exhibited strong contours 5

and massing in combination with vibrant coloration. The encounter between fiction and architecture in Pita’s professional work centers on the role of character in architecture and provokes its audience to reflect on what forms legibility may take in contemporary architecture. Cronopios, the title of Pita’s 2010 installation at the Art Institute of Chicago, alludes to the naïve, unconventional and sensitive characters with lush imaginations that populate Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar’s short stories. The choice of the project title is not incidental as Pita’s work consistently engages literature. Her SCI-Arc Gallery installation (2006) Pulse: Tendril Formations was exhibited with an accompanying short story Cardiogram written by Bruna Mori that describes how the tendril named Pulse came into existence. The title of Pita’s Alice installation for the LAXART gallery (2007) is a direct reference to Lewis Carroll’s text Alice in Wonderland. The relationship between writing and architecture has a long history that originates with the Vitruvian distinction between the practical aspects of architectural knowledge and its discursive aspects. Pita’s work confounds this distinction by introducing alternate forms of legibility into the architectural lexicon. Cortázar’s book Cronopios and Famas is essentially a series of short literary vignettes where, through the eyes of the cronopios, seemingly prosaic events are transformed into fantastical accounts of alternate realities. Likewise Pita’s installation Cronopios: Drawing off Edge, is comprised of vignette drawings that transform a graphic two-dimensionality on the surface of a wall and conjure a profound sense of depth by extending off the surface of the drawing. The word vignette, a derivative of the French word for “little vine,” refers to the vinelike illustrations found in illuminated manuscripts and the title pages of books. A vignette also describes a drawing or photograph that includes shading at the edges of the image in order to eradicate a fixed border. The dual aspects of the vignette present themselves clearly in Pita’s installation. The sinuous lines that Pita draws would serve well as sumptuous variants of the painter William Hogarth’s serpentine line from his 1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty. Here, they form vinelike tendrils that congeal into a more extensive whole. Cronopios produces the impression that the pages of an illuminated manuscript, saturated with bright colors, have been unfurled across the gallery wall. The technique of vignetting or ‘shading off of the edge’ appears in Pita’s work as an extreme flattening of the shadow cast by the delineated figures. This interpretation of shade jettisons the elusive gradients of shadow for the corporeality of blackness. In a recent exhibition of Cronopios in the SCIArc Library (2014) two of these vignettes were extracted from the larger drawing and reproduced on the library wall in an arrangement suggestive of the frontispiece of a large book across whose pages the characters delineated by the curves seem to drift effortlessly, sometimes breaching the painted datum or extruding themselves literally ‘off the edges’ of the drawing. FPmod’s recent exhibition in the SCI-Arc Library was suffused with character. Cronopios was installed on the wall adjacent to Pita’s UMMA Table. The table itself, like the table in the Visual Factory seminar, acts as a display environment housing nine belljar shaped vitrines that contain various objects designed by Pita including children’s cutlery sets, flower vases, and jewelry. The adjacency of the vitrines to Cronopios and the reappearance of distinctive features on objects of diverse scales create the impression of various characters that inhabit the pieces. For example, the effervescent bubble forms that appear on a piece of jewelry, the buhb ring, could plausibly belong to the family of rounded forms that articulate the extruded wall reliefs of Cronopios. The theme of effervescence continues in the ceramic tile patterns on the table’s horizontal surfaces, stippled with fields of small colorful dots that erupt to confront the more linear geometric patterns inlaid

Balloon Frame, Pita & Bloom, 2014

DESIGNING DISCOURSE Todd Gannon

TODD GANNON is an architect, writer and curator based in Los Angeles. A graduate of The Ohio State University (BS Arch, M.Arch) and UCLA (PhD.), he taught at Ohio State, Otis College of Art and Design, and UCLA before joining the faculty at SCI-Arc in 2008, where he teaches history, theory, and design studio; serves as Graduate Thesis Research Advisor; and coordinates the Cultural Studies curriculum. Gannon has lectured at institutions across the United States and in Europe, and is a frequent conference participant and juror. He served on the board of directors of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, where he directed publication efforts from 2008-2010. His work has been recognized and supported by the Graham Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Institute of Architects, the Getty Foundation, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, The Ohio State University, and UCLA.

For full etymologies of these terms, see Robert K. Barnhart, ed., Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (New York: H.H. Wilson, 1988).

SCI-Arc has never conceived of itself as a repository of architectural history. SCI-Arc never conceived of itself as an archive. SCI-Arc remains solely an interrogator of the future. [Or does it?] – Eric Owen Moss SCI-Arc has never been known as a “theory” school. This is not to say that SCI-Arc is opposed to engaging historical, theoretical, or critical questions. It is simply to recognize that for most of its history, the school has made its primary disciplinary investments in terms of formal and material experimentation rather than discursive speculation. This position has afforded the school distinct advantages, particularly in recent decades. As architecture’s overheated rhetorical climate began to cool in the 1990s, attention began to shift from critical intellection toward technical (often digital) innovations on the one hand and various “matters of sensation” on the other. SCI-Arc faculty and students quickly chalked up significant achievements along both trajectories, with the school’s wellestablished “shoot first, ask questions later” attitude with respect to theoretical inquiry making it a particularly fertile incubator of innovative agendas. Questions that dominated conversations (and often debilitated progress) elsewhere, such as the continued efficacy of “critical” architecture or the relative merits of various “post-critical” positions, seemed somehow beside the point at SCI-Arc, where production had always trumped polemic. As critical culture slipped into a state of crisis in the opening years of the millennium, SCI-Arc leapt to the forefront of speculative architectural design. Today, things have changed. The digital novelties of the 1990s aren’t so new anymore and, frankly, twenty years of immersion in matters of sensation have left many of us with a bit of a hangover. Longstanding questions of innovation, novelty, and affective potency are now complicated by more difficult ones concerningquality,virtuosity,anddisciplinaryrelevance,andthecriticotheoretical jargon of our ancestors—uttered today more often as boilerplate pro forma than radical cri di coeur—just doesn’t seem up to the task of answering them. Though I firmly believe the language of criticism remains crucial, I’m convinced it cannot adequately address all aspects of contemporary practice. Nor can history, nor theory, even if all three remain essential to a fully functioning discursive toolbox. And if, as Graduate Chair Hernan Diaz Alonso suggests, contemporary architecture is moving away from single fixed paradigms toward the proliferation of multiple genres, then we should encourage a parallel proliferation of new discursive modes. Recently, SCI-Arc has devoted significant energy to doing just that. A crucial aspect of our endeavors is to see design and discourse not as “separate but equal,” as some contemporary theorists maintain, but rather to understand architectural objects and ideas—what Colin Rowe once called architecture’s “physiqueflesh” and “morale-word”—as intimately intertwined and equally subject to formal manipulation. In other words, at SCI-Arc, we don’t merely theorize or criticize design; we design the discourse. This obliges us to remain attentive to traditional modes of inquiry as we open other rhetorical avenues along which to advance nascent disciplinary trajectories. Such attitudes have been in place at SCI-Arc for some time. In 2003, Director of Academic Affairs Hsinming Fung (then chair of the Graduate Program), along with then-Undergraduate Chair Chris Genik, oversaw a significant curriculum overhaul aimed specifically at integrated thinking. Seminars were more closely coordinated with the studios’ technical and discursive ambitions

under three broad categories: “HardTech” (now Applied Studies), which addressed structures and applied building technologies, “SoftTech” (now Visual Studies) which focused on representation techniques and developing digital design software, and “HistoryTheory-Humanities” (now Cultural Studies), which encompassed remaining courses. A particularly successful example of this approach was a series of provocative studio-seminars taught by Hernan Diaz Alonso and Benjamin Bratton in the mid-’00s, which planted the seeds of a number of memorably speculative thesis projects in ensuing years. Initially an experiment at the verticalstudio level, the approach was soon adopted for the core M.Arch II studios and remains in place today.

…at SCI-Arc, we don’t merely theorize or criticize design; we design the discourse. In 2011, SCI-Arc launched the General Studies curriculum, coordinated by Dora Epstein Jones. The new program offers a wide range of instruction in the arts, sciences, and humanities and allows undergraduate students to complete the entirety of required courses on SCI-Arc’s campus. Claire Phillips’ recent GS elective course, “L.A. Literature,” and Russell Thomsen’s popular course on Japanese cinema are but two of a number of GS courses which contribute to our efforts to design architecture’s discourse by engaging related disciplines. Establishing the General Studies curriculum also made possible significant changes to the Cultural Studies curriculum. In years past, as its name implies, Cultural Studies provided instruction in extra- and inter-disciplinary topics in addition to explicitly architectural ones. With many of these areas now falling under the purview of General Studies, Cultural Studies focuses more emphatically on issues specific to the discipline. (These adjustments have made “Cultural Studies” something of a misnomer, but for now the name persists.) A number of new Cultural Studies faculty members are contributing to our discursive ambitions. In addition to long-time faculty including Marcelyn Gow, Dora Epstein Jones, Wes Jones, Peter Zellner, and me, Christoph Körner, principal of the L.A. firm Graft, Amit Wolf, a practicing architect who holds a Ph.D. from UCLA, and Eui-Sung Yi, a project manager with Morphosis, now lead seminars in the core curriculum. That so many CS faculty members maintain close ties to architectural practice (and studio instruction) is no accident, and reinforces our aim to closely integrate architectural discourse and design. In addition, noted theorist and critic Jeffrey Kipnis continues to maintain a strong presence at the school as a Distinguished Visiting Faculty member, directing significant attention to both the graduate and undergraduate thesis programs. Another ambition of the Cultural Studies curriculum has been to focus more emphatically on SCI-Arc’s specific contributions to the field. To this end, we have added a series of “modules” to core courses that allow faculty and students to examine past and present design agendas undertaken at SCI-Arc and to study how those agendas relate to broader historical and current concerns. In my Introduction to Contemporary Architecture seminar in the M.Arch I program, Hernan Diaz Alonso delivers a series of guest lectures on contemporary topics. A popular elective course, “SCIArc Now,” led last fall by new faculty member Bruno Juricic, delves into ongoing projects and research by current faculty and offers participating students an opportunity to study in-depth their

instructors’ individual design strategies and motivations. SCI-Arc also directs significant attention to contemporary discourse outside the classroom. Our lecture series continues to feature leading voices in the field, many of them speaking not as (or only as) architects but rather from alternative discursive positions. This past year we have hosted such diverse personalities as curator Barry Bergdoll, publishers Cynthia Davidson and Lars Müller, and historians and critics including Kenneth Frampton, Joan Ockman, and Sarah Whiting, while notable figures from outside the field, including the philosopher Graham Harman and the novelist Mark Z. Danielewski, have added significantly to the range of creative inquiry and experimentation. Over the last few years, Friday afternoon Faculty Talks have transformed in to a sequence of provocative discussions between faculty presenters and respondents including Dora Epstein Jones, Marcelyn Gow, and myself. As discourse production has increased both inside and outside the classroom, the school has devoted increased attention to documenting, archiving, exhibiting, and publishing its efforts. Since 1973, SCI-Arc has produced video recordings of its lecture series. Thanks to the generous support of the Getty Foundation, this expanding catalog of architectural ideas (currently over 1000 hours) has been available online as the SCI-Arc Media Archive (sma.sciarc.edu). Curated by Library Manager Kevin McMahon and Media Manager Reza Monahan, the archive has proven to be an important resource for historians and scholars. Last year, faculty member Andrew Zago, Ewan Branda of Woodbury University, and I used a suite of these archival lectures as the cornerstone of A Confederacy of Heretics, SCI-Arc’s contribution to Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., a series of exhibitions and related events sponsored by the Getty.

The Confederacy of Heretics catalog (SCI-Arc Press and Getty Publications, 2013) is just one volume on an expanding shelf of titles that showcases the array of approaches to designing discourse currently being advanced by SCI-Arc faculty. Who Says what Architecture Is? (SCI-Arc Press, 2007, 2013), the two volume collection of lecture introductions and other ruminations by Eric Owen Moss, demonstrates how pro forma introductory remarks can be transformed into significant interventions into ongoing disciplinary conversations. Joe Day’s recent study, Corrections and Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime (Routledge, 2013), offers an unconventional contribution to architectural history by laying bare the uncanny formal and ideological resonances between recent museum and prison designs. Et in Suburbia Ego: José Oubrerie’s Miller House (Wexner Center for the Arts, 2013), which I edited, examines a landmark achievement by one of Le Corbusier’s last living protégés through a series of essays that eschew critical distance in favor of a more intimate

narrative proximity. Ilaria Mazzoleni recently completed an impressive study of the intersection of biology and architecture with Architecture Follow Nature: Biomimetic Principles for Innovative Design (CRC Press, 2014) and Amit Wolf delivered a penetrating look at both the prehistory and future of robotics in architecture with Fabrication and Fabrication (SCI-Arc Press, 2014). Lebbeus Woods Is an Archetype (SCI-Arc Press, 2013) gathers together not only a stunning selection of the Woods’ drawings collected for an exhibition in the SCI-Arc Gallery last fall, but also documents an important 1998 interview given by the architect at SCI-Arc’s Vico Morcote campus in Switzerland. These poignant remarks, coupled with commentaries from Eric Owen Moss, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Dwayne Oyler, and Alexis Rochas, testify as much to the disciplinary function of personal reflection as they demonstrate SCI-Arc’s increasingly significant role as an archival repository. These titles represent just the tip of the iceberg. ONRAMP, SCI-Arc’s presentation of student projects and writing, released its fourth installment, edited by Ming Fung, Marcelyn Gow, and Florencia Pita. Framed by Gow’s provisional category, “Messthetics,” this issue complements a broad sampling of student work with critical inquiry from SCI-Arc faculty including Anna Neimark, Marcelo Spina, Peter Zellner, and many others. Faculty member Jonah Rowen edits the new architectural journal, Project, which released its third issue, featuring a text by SCI-Arc’s Tom Wiscombe, this spring. Dora Epstein Jones and new faculty member Bryony Roberts are currently preparing their guestedited issue of the journal Log, slated for release this summer. Florencia Pita and faculty member Elena Manferdini both recently released monographs of their own work that feature essays by noted architects and critics that delve deep into uncharted discursive territory. SCI-Arc also has been advancing architectural discourse beyond the printed page. For the 2013-14 academic year, the school welcomed its first “Design of Theory” Fellows, Benjamin Farnsworth and Stefano Passeri (both M.Arch ’13). In addition to pursuing individual research (which will be presented in public lectures this fall), the two have been teaching an elective seminar on the notion of contemporary genres and have recently relaunched Offramp, the print periodical SCI-Arc produced from 1988 to 2000, as an online resource. The first installment, “Best Coast,” includes contributions from Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, philosopher Graham Harman, and an array of SCI-Arc faculty and students. Have a look at www.offramp-la.com. In spite of these efforts, we’re not out to turn SCI-Arc into a “theory school.” Discourse Design is just one more mechanism we’re working on to increase the volume and efficacy of architectural inquiry at SCI-Arc and to equip our students to be leaders in discursive as well as formal and material speculation. Though we may peek over our shoulder a little more often than we used to, our focus remains the future.

NEWS

SHIGERU BAN, THE PEOPLE’S ARCHITECT, WINS PRITZKER ARCHITECTURE PRIZE “SCI-Arc was really the beginning of my whole entire career… my architecture has a big influence from [my] education [at] SCI-Arc.”– Shigeru Ban, 2005

1. Metal Shutter House, 2010, New York, USA. Photo by Michael Moran 2. Paper Partition System 4, 2011, Japan. Photo by Voluntary Architects’ Network 3. Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2010, France. Photo by Didier Boy de la Tour 4. Container Temporary Housing, 2011, Onagawa, Miyagi, Japan. Photo by Hiroyuki Hirai 5. Paper Concert Hall, 2011, L’Aquila, Italy. Photo by Didier Boy de la Tour 6. Paper Concert Hall, 2011, L’Aquila, Italy. Photo by Fabio Mantovani 7. Cardboard Cathedral, 2013, Christchurch, New Zealand. Photo by Stephen Goodenough

An international jury has selected SCI-Arc alum (1977-1980) and Japanese architect Shigeru Ban as the recipient of this year’s prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. Known for his wide spectrum of work ranging from private homes and cultural projects to lowbudget and often pro-bono humanitarian efforts and disaster relief work, Ban is widely recognized for his originality, creativity, and innovative use, and reuse, of materials. Before transferring to Cooper Union, Ban had been accepted to SCI-Arc by founding director Ray Kappe, who was greatly impressed with his interview and portfolio. Ban explains, “I found out SCI-Arc was a very exciting school, so I didn’t go to Cooper Union directly, that was too soon. I spent two and a half years at SCI-Arc…it was a great opportunity, studying both West and East, in two very unusual schools.” Today, many of Ban’s buildings and structures use simple, cost-efficient and local materials in extremely imaginative ways. He is known for his visionary use of paper in a range of different building types, from temporary shelters and pavilions made from paper tubes to a Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand. Since his work with the United Nations following the Rwanda crisis in 1994, Ban has been designing and building light-weight and temporary housing for victims in disaster areas. In 1995, he founded the non-profit Voluntary Architects’ Network (VAN), which has since built temporary structures and refugee shelters in India, China, Haiti, and Japan, among other countries. During a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Tom Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, spoke about Ban’s innovative use of

materials: “[Shigeru Ban] looks at the world differently. He looks at something, and while others may look and say ‘That’s garbage,’ he looks and says ‘How can I use that, what is its utility?’” Since starting his own practice in 1985, Ban has built a reputation as the ‘People’s Architect,’ whether for building shelters for the neediest and most vulnerable members of society, or designing homes for private clients. When asked about being awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Ban responded: “Receiving this prize is a great honor, and with it, I must be careful. I must continue to listen to the people I work for, in my private residential commissions and in my disaster relief work. I see this prize as encouragement for me to keep doing what I am doing—not to change what I am doing, but to grow.” In this sense, Ban is difficult to define. Much of his work is often categorized as temporary, but his philosophy on the permanence of all buildings sheds light onto his spirit as an architect. To Ban, each commission he receives, paid or unpaid, ‘temporary’ or ‘permanent,’ is treated with the same amount of dedication and passion. To him, the “strength of [a building’s] material has nothing to do with the strength [or durability] of the building.” Instead, it is a community’s respect for a building that will drive its permanence. As he has said, “The most needed thing in architecture today is love. That’s what makes a building permanent.” When asked what piece of advice he would give SCI-Arc students today, Ban responded that travel was essential. “You have to travel a lot to see wonderful architecture and wonderful landscapes,” he said. “It’s just like being a chef, unless you have eaten good food, you cannot cook good food. Unless you have seen great architecture, you cannot design great architecture. Travelling and visiting architecture is the most important part of education.” A closing lesson comes from Tom Pritzker’s announcement of the jury’s selection: “Innovation is not limited by building type and compassion is not limited by budget. Shigeru has made our world a better place.”

THE PSYCHOLOGIST Excerpts from Eric Owen Moss’ Introduction to Shigeru Ban lecture, SCI-Arc, November 21, 2005. Karl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, identified two personality prototypes: The extrovert and the introvert. The introvert bases his life entirely on the internal meanings he alone describes, while the extrovert’s frame of reference belongs entirely to the world outside himself. Jung might be surprised to find his analytical model of personalities applied to the contemporary discourse on architecture: Let’s identify the current internationalist paradigm as a global extrovert, and the insular, centuries-in-the-making traditions of Japan as the indigenous introvert. So Jung’s archetypal personality conflict could be imagined not as an exchange within a single individual, but as an intersection of two cultures. The architecture of Shigeru Ban, I think, belongs particularly to this tension between competing cultural prospects. [Ban’s] work suggests a[n] intricate and contradictory sensibility, one that might belong to the remarkable 7th century Taoist Ise Shrine. At Ise, a building is constructed on one of two adjacent sites and stands for twenty years. The contiguous site remains empty. After twenty years, the building is demolished and an identical structure is built on the adjacent site, and it, in turn,

stands for twenty years, and so on and so on. So the current structure at Ise is always both old and new; forever built, forever unbuilt, forever building; assembling and disassembling; enduring and ephemeral; temporary and permanent; specific and generic; tangible and abstract. Shigeru Ban is his own psychologist. As at Ise: Ban space, Ban shape, Ban material, Ban detail. Transform the dated extrovert/introvert dialectic and make Ban architecture a synthesis: Neither the international nor the indigenous allegiance, but a transcendent poetic voice which simultaneously invokes both Jung’s prototypes and belongs to neither.

NEWS

SCI-ARC FACULTY, ALUMNI, AND TRUSTEES HONORED WITH 2013 AIA LA AWARDS

Hernan Diaz Alonso’s TBA 21, an experimental pavilion in Patagonia

SCI-ARC DIRECTORS RECOGNIZED WITH 2014 PROGRESSIVE ARCHITECTURE AWARDS Architect Magazine’s 61st Annual Progressive Architecture Awards, announced in early March, recognized 10 architects for projects demonstrating a holistic approach to design, with an eye toward practical realization. The competition jury assessed more than 150 submissions, all designed by North American architects or scheduled to be built in North America. SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss, principal of Eric Owen Moss Architects, won a P/A Citation Award for his Albuquerque Rail Yards Master Plan to convert a 27.3-acre site just south of Downtown Albuquerque into a mixed-use development with office and cultural spaces, as well as retail, light commercial facilities and workforce housing. Graduate Programs Chair Hernan Diaz Alonso, principal of Xefirotarch, received a P/A Citation for his TBA 21 experimental pavilion in Patagonia, Argentina. Framed as a rejection of types and typology in favor of a broader “species” framework, the pavilion seems to be informed by bovinae, segments of its spheroid metalling units being draped in cowhide, while others appearing to be clad in slabs of beef. Jurors this year included SCI-Arc design faculty Marcelo Spina, co-principal of Los Angeles-based P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, Lise Anne Couture, managing partner of New York-based Asymptote, Nataly Gattegno, co-founder and managing partner of Future Cities Lab in San Francisco, and Sasa Radulovic, co-founder of 5468796 Architecture in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

The Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects has again recognized several SCI-Arc faculty, alumni and trustees with prominent awards conferred at the institute’s annual gala. SCI-Arc design faculty Elena Manferdini was honored with the institute’s prestigious 2013 Educator Award, which has been conferred in previous years to Graduate Programs Chair Hernan Diaz Alonso and to SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss. Next LA Awards for unbuilt work went to Craig Hodgetts and SCI-Arc Director of Academic Affairs Ming Fung, principals of Los Angeles based Hodgetts+Fung for Building Blocks, a modular classroom infrastructure designed for the Los Angeles Unified School District. Next LA Awards were also conferred to Angela Brooks (M.Arch ’91) and partner Lawrence Scarpa of Brooks + Scarpa for their Interfaith Chapel at University of North Florida, and to Iris Anna Regn (M.Arch ’94) and partner Tim Durfee for their L.A. Frame House. AIA’s Building Team of the Year award recognized the team behind the LAX: Tom Bradley International Terminal/CTA Renovation Phase 1, which included the AECOM team made of SCIArc alumni Carlos Madrid III (M.Arch ’95), project designer; Jed Zimmerman (B.Arch ’87), principal in charge; and Yan Wang (M.Arch ’06), design team member. Built work such as the St. Thomas the Apostle School designed by SCI-Arc Undergraduate Programs Chair John Enright and design faculty Margaret Griffin of Griffin Enright Architects received a 2013 AIA LA Design Award for excellence, along with two projects by Brooks + Scarpa, the Metalsa Center for Manufacturing Innovation and the CAM Museum of Art, the L House by alumni Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96) and Stephan Mundwiler (M.Arch ’95) of Lee + Mundwiler, and the Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery designed by alumnus Jeffrey Allsbrook (M.Arch ’95) and partner Silvia Kuhle of Standard. SCI-Arc trustee Thom Mayne received two Design Awards, one for the Perot Museum of Nature & Science in Dallas, and the second for designing LA’s biggest net-zero office for his very own Culver City-based practice, Morphosis. AIA LA’s 25-Year Award for 2013 went to SCI-Arc honorary trustee Frank Gehry for his design of the California Space Museum. The institute’s Community Contribution Award went to alumni Hadley Soutter Arnold (M.Arch ’97) and Peter Arnold (M.Arch ’94) for their Arid Lands Institute established at Woodbury University.

The Building Blocks system proposed by Hodgetts+Fung

NEWS

SCI-ARC FACULTY, ALUMNI, AND TRUSTEES HONORED WITH 2013 AIA LA AWARDS

Hernan Diaz Alonso’s TBA 21, an experimental pavilion in Patagonia

The Building Blocks system proposed by Hodgetts+Fung

NEWS

An international jury has selected SCI-Arc alum (1977-1980) and Japanese architect Shigeru Ban as the recipient of this year’s prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. Known for his wide spectrum of work ranging from private homes and cultural projects to lowbudget and often pro-bono humanitarian efforts and disaster relief work, Ban is widely recognized for his originality, creativity, and innovative use, and reuse, of materials. Before transferring to Cooper Union, Ban had been accepted to SCI-Arc by founding director Ray Kappe, who was greatly 6 impressed with his interview and portfolio. Ban explains, “I found out SCI-Arc was a very exciting school, so I didn’t go to Cooper Union directly, that was too soon. I spent two and a half years at SCI-Arc…it was a great opportunity, studying both West and East, in two very unusual schools.” Today, many of Ban’s buildings and structures use simple, cost-efficient and local materials in extremely imaginative ways. He is known for his visionary use of paper in a range of different building types, from temporary shelters and pavilions made from paper tubes to a Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand. Since his work with the United Nations following the Rwanda crisis in 1994, Ban has been designing and building light-weight and temporary housing for victims in disaster areas. In 1995, he founded the non-profit Voluntary Architects’ Network (VAN), which has since built temporary structures and refugee shelters in India, China, Haiti, and Japan, among other countries. During a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Tom Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, spoke about Ban’s innovative use of

NEWS

SCI-ARC FACULTY, ALUMNI, AND TRUSTEES HONORED WITH 2013 AIA LA AWARDS

Hernan Diaz Alonso’s TBA 21, an experimental pavilion in Patagonia

The Building Blocks system proposed by Hodgetts+Fung

NEWS

SCI-ARC MAGAZINE ISSUE OO8 Editor-in-Chief Hsinming Fung Contributing Writers Todd Gannon Marcelyn Gow Georgiana Masgras Eric Owen Moss Justine Smith Sarah Sullivan Johanna Vandemoortele Photography Javier Cambron Martin Genev, Gemini Connect Armeen Monahan Carolina Murcia Paul Perdomo Joshua White SCI-Arc Publications Project Manager Justine Smith Online Media and Public Relations Georgiana Masgras Graphic Designers Kate Merritt Alex Pines © 2014 SCI-Arc Publications

OFFICE OF DEVELOPMENT AND ALUMNI AFFAIRS Chief Advancement Officer Sarah Sullivan Associate Director of Annual Giving and Alumni Affairs Irene Mason Associate Director of Corporate, Foundation and Government Relations Allison Holton Assistant Director of Advancement Services Andrea Marshall Research Associate Johanna Vandermoortele

SCI-ARC FACULTY FEATURED IN NEW L.A. [TEN] BOOK Catapulted to fame by the international media in and around the 1980s, a loosely affiliated cadre of architects—the so-called L.A. Ten—emerged to define the future of Los Angeles architecture. Several of these architects, many of them closely affiliated to SCI-Arc, sat down for a series of oral history interviews with architect and historian Stephen Phillips and his students at the Cal Poly L.A. Metro Program. The result is a thrilling collection of interviews revealing deeply personal and moving stories and events about many of the formative conferences, exhibitions, pedagogical developments, and formal and material strategies of the avant-garde Los Angeles architecture community from the 1970s to the 1990s. L.A. [Ten]: Interviews on Los Angeles Architecture, 19701990s features architects Neil Denari, Frederick Fisher, Ming Fung, Craig Hodgetts, Coy Howard, Wes Jones, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Michael Rotondi, and former associates of the late Franklin Israel, who offer a casual, witty, and approachable retrospective on the characters, environment, and cultural history of L.A. architecture as they remember it. The book was also introduced at an event hosted in April at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. There, SCIArc Director Eric Owen Moss, founding trustee Thom Mayne, and faculty member Stephen Phillips joined Storefront’s Eva Franch in a conversation on the institutionalization of experimentation, cultural politics, and the power of taking risks—all topics addressed in-depth in the new L.A Ten book.

WISCOMBE ADVANCES IN STAGE II OF INTERNATIONAL DESIGN COMPETITION FOR THE PORT OF KINMEN, TAIWAN SCI-Arc design faculty Tom Wiscombe, principal of Los Angeles based Tom Wiscombe Architecture, was selected into the second phase of the international design competition for the Port of Kinmen Passenger Service Center in Taiwan. The $62 million, 45,000-square-feet project consists of a new multi-functional terminal facility and expansion for the Port of Kinmen, which serves as a transportation hub for travelers crossing the Taiwan Strait by sea. The port currently connects about 3.5 million travelers a year. Along with Tom Wiscombe Architecture, finalists include Josep Mias Gifre (Spain), Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects (USA), Junya Ishigami + Associates (Japan) and Miralles Tagliabue EMBT (Spain).

WILSHIRE BLVD. FIELD STUDY BY FACULTY FEATURED IN ARCHIZINES EXHIBIT SCI-Arc design faculty John Southern’s critical field survey, Wilshire Star Maps, is part of the Archizines touring exhibition, most recently on view at the University of Hong Kong’s Shanghai Study Centre. Archizines celebrates the resurgence of alternative and independent architectural publishing around the world, featuring architect, artist and student-edited publications providing new platforms for commentary, criticism and research into the spaces we inhabit and the practice of architecture. The two-part, limited-run publication produced by Southern and his LA-based office, Urban Operations, presents the latent formal and programmatic potential of the otherwise unnoticed skyscrapers along Wilshire Boulevard. Often described as L.A.’s main street, Wilshire represents a cross-section of both the cultural and economic components in the city, with Korean puppy-mills sharing floor space with high-priced Hollywood attorneys, many of whom are ensconced within the same nondescript office towers that make Wilshire easily identifiable from above. While Wilshire may be a flimsy stand-in for L.A.’s missing urban skyline, it represents a fertile breeding ground for future zoning mutations which will no doubt manifest themselves as Los Angeles densifies. Taking this into account, the Urban Operations-produced Star Maps, much like those used in the tourist industry to find the homes of Hollywood film stars, present a pliable fiction that exists in real time, offering up the potential for dreams to spring from an overtly banal reality which unfolds along Wilshire’s 17-mile traverse from Downtown to the Pacific. Both editions of the Wilshire Star Maps have been archived at the UCLA Fine Arts Library and the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

ANNA NEIMARK DISCUSSES KREMLIN FORM AT ACSA ANNUAL CONFERENCE

STEREOBOT CONNECTS ITS SIGNATURE JOINTS FOR COACHELLA’S #LIGHTWEAVER SCI-Arc design faculty Alexis Rochas, principal of Los Angeles based Stereobot, was at work this spring completing his new #Lightweaver art installation for the 2014 edition of the Coachella Valley Music & Art Festival. Described by Rochas as “the next generation of fusion between architectural study, interactive multimedia and structural systems,” #Lightweaver functioned as a 24hour kinetic sculpture, interplaying natural and artificial light against a curvilinear knotted frame. It towered 45-feet-high above the site of the festival, stretching 75 feet in diameter. During the day, its bold coloration was contrasted by complex shadow lines wrapping the structure and silhouetting intricate shade patterns on the ground. At night, it turned into a spatial canvas brought to life by light and a sound score providing a multimedia experience that challenged the comprehension of temporal and spatial dimensions. Moving beyond temporary pavilions, Rochas’ ambitious plans include incorporating Stereobot’s signature structural joint into a system that designers and engineers alike can make use of in building complex installations and structures. Earlier this year, he enlisted Andreas Froech, formerly of Machineous, to join his team as Chief of Operations, adding his solid expertise in robotic fabrication and skin systems to the mix. What brought the two together was a shared interest in the design, execution and fabrication of world class structures, coupled with a desire to advance space frame technology into the 21st century. Rochas first used the joint in 2010 when designing a largescale, site-specific installation commissioned by the SCI-Arc Gallery, whose mission is that of supporting and encouraging faculty to experiment with new fabrication materials. The joint’s unique structural capabilities allowed the architect to easily reassemble three separate structures through the entire six-week duration of the show. With Coachella coming to an end, Rochas and his team are just a short break away from starting work on their next big project, a large-scale installation for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

SCI-Arc design faculty Anna Neimark presented a paper at the 102nd ACSA Annual Meeting held April 10-12 in Miami Beach, Fla. Titled “Kremlin Form,” Neimark’s presentation discussed work done in a visual studies seminar under the same name offered at SCI-Arc in fall 2012. The problem Neimark posed to her class was the construction of a unifying drawing format for representing the site of the Moscow Kremlin through purely formal means. The resulting axonometric drawings were central to the seminar, offering a way to represent complex form in a singular unifying format. Students considered different types of isometric construction techniques, concentrating on the vertical axonometric projection that conflates the plan and elevation into one compositional plane. They took their inspiration from John Hejduk’s representational strategies of the Seven Texas Houses that utilize the nine-square grid, the Diamond Houses that rotate the grid 45 degrees, and the Wall Houses that crop and extrude those rotated objects.

SCI-ARC LEADERSHIP Director Eric Owen Moss Director of Academic Affairs Hsinming Fung Graduate Programs Chair Hernan Diaz Alonso Undergraduate Program Chair John Enright Chief Operating Officer Jamie Bennett BOARD OF TRUSTEES Chairman Jerold B. Neuman Vice-Chair Joe Day (M. Arch ’94) SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss Secretary Tom Gilmore

SCI-ARC TO HOST 2014 REGIONAL SESSION FOR MAYORS’ INSTITUTE ON CITY DESIGN Following a nationwide selection process, SCI-Arc was announced as a regional partner and host of one of three regional sessions presented this year by the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD). On November 12-14, the school will organize a design workshop where eight mayors from the West region will convene in a closeddoor session with a team of interdisciplinary design professionals to discuss design and development issues that each participating city is currently facing. The invited mayors will represent a diversity of cities and bring a wide variety of design issues to the table. The resource team, led by SCI-Arc faculty David Bergman and Heather Flood, will include members ranging from architects and planners to public policy specialists, developers, preservationists, lawyers, landscape architects, transportation planners, and housing experts, as well as practicing professionals and distinguished academics. Each mayor will present a design issue from his or her city to be analyzed by the other mayors and the design professionals, who will then propose design solutions to help solve the problem. A leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the American Architectural Foundation and the United States Conference of Mayors, the MICD-hosted regional sessions to be held in the fall are geared towards mid-to-small-sized cities. In addition to SCI-Arc, host institutions this year include Syracuse University School of Architecture and the Florida Center for Community Design and Research at the University of South Florida.

Treasurer Daniel Swartz Faculty Representative Andrew Zago Alumni Representative Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02) Student Representative Bridgette Marso (B.Arch ’15) Board Members at Large Richard Baptie Rick Carter Tim Disney William H. Fain, Jr. Anthony Ferguson Frank O. Gehry Russell L. Goings III Scott Hughes (M. Arch ’97) Thom Mayne Merry Norris Greg Otto Enrique Peñalosa Kevin Ratner Abigail Scheuer (M. Arch ’93) Nick Seierup (B. Arch ’79) Abby Sher Ted Tanner Honorary Members Elyse Grinstein Ray Kappe Ian Robertson Michael Rotondi (B. Arch ’75)

SCI-ARC ALUMNI COUNCIL 20132014 Tima Bell (M.Arch ’99) Elizabeth Gibb (M.Arch ’89), Luis Herrera (B.Arch ’01) Nerin Kadribegovic (M.Arch ’03) Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96), Chair Jennifer Marmon (M.Arch ’01) Santino Medina (M.Arch ’06) Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ’04) Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76) Johnny Ramirios (B.Arch ’05) Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09) Elissa Scrafano (M.Arch ’90) Poonam Sharma (M.Arch ’01) Scott Sullivan (M.Arch ’99) Joe Tarr (M.Arch ’08) Vlado Valkof (MRD ’04) Naia Waters (’99) Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02)r Kevin Wronske (B.Arch ’02) Regional Members Steven Morales Suarez (B.Arch ’04), Miami Michael Cook (M.Arch ’95), Mid-Atlantic Joshua Coggeshall (M.Arch ‘97), Midwest Abigail Scheuer (M.Arch ’93), New York Eric Cheong (M.Arch ’05), Pacific Northwest Julee Herdt (M.Arch ‘88), Rocky Mt. Chikara Inamura (B.Arch ’06), Japan Pia Schneider (M.Arch ’86), Europe Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo (M.Arch ’07), Mexico Joori Chun (B.Arch ’03), Korea Kaiming Lin (B.Arch ’12), China

In April, the Class of 1989 celebrated their 25th reunion. Director Eric Owen Moss spoke and introduced the alumni to several forward-thinking faculty at SCI-Arc, which he referred to as “the wave of the future.” 1. Alumni and former faculty members at the Class of 1989’s 25th reunion dinner (full list on page 17) Open Season, Spring 2014 2. Cheaseon Roh (M.Arch ’02) speaking with students at the Open Season workshop 3. Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76) and Al Mele, DLRP Group, talk with undergraduate students during the Open Season opening reception 4. Michael Folonis (B.Arch ’78), Laura Doss, Hsinming Fung, David Hertz (B. Arch ’83) at the Open Season opening reception On March 13, a group of SCI-Arc alumni and friends gathered for a cocktail party at NBBJ in downtown Seattle. 5. Craig Hess (B.Arch ’97), Cherry Lietz Snelling (M.Arch ’97), and Jill Rerucha (M.Arch ’96)

MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI COUNCIL

Dear Fellow Alumni, As chair of the Alumni Council, I am fortunate to spend time at SCI-Arc throughout the year and be involved with the alumni program. At the end of the semester, I am pleased to report on our activities this past year and share how you too can be engaged with our school. We started the 2013-14 academic year with alumni involvement in the search process for the next director of SCI-Arc, as requested by the Board of Trustees. This spring, the Alumni Council hosted Open Season, an annual career event where students exhibit work, and during a networking reception, have the opportunity to meet representatives from small practices and large firms who are interested in hiring from SCI-Arc. I was impressed that nearly 70 students chose to participate. To help students prepare for the event and their job searches in general, we held a workshop led by alumni who gave students direct feedback on their resumes and portfolios. The Council looks forward to offering more opportunities like this for alumni to volunteer their time and expertise to benefit today’s students, especially as they transition from their academic endeavors to working members of our professional community. At our March meeting, we invited Hernan Diaz Alonso and John Enright to talk with us about the undergraduate and graduate programs, and later John led us on a school tour. We had a discussion about how SCI-Arc recruits top students and how scholarship support plays a crucial role in forming a talented, diverse student body. We let Hernan and John know that as alumni we are here to help move the school forward. We can be ambassadors for the school in our professional and social networks, and we can contribute to SCIArc’s scholarship funds to help attract prospective students. Lastly, our activities focused on strengthening the alumni community by getting to know one another. The Council held a Pecha Kucha, which was a great way to show support for each other as we learned about our work and interests. In April, the Class of 1989 held a 25-year reunion at SCI-Arc, which brought together friends from around the world, some of whom had not seen each other since graduating. Faculty members and friends including Ray and Shelly Kappe, Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76), Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray, Michael Rotondi (B.Arch ’75) and Bill Simonian, joined the class to celebrate. This event was the first of many more 25th reunions. I hope you will join our efforts by being an active member of the SCI-Arc alumni community. Connect with alumni groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Share your projects on the Alumni Portal. Search for job candidates through SCI-Arc. Volunteer your office or home for a school event. Send in a Class Note. Make a gift to support future generations of architects at SCI-Arc. And, consider joining the Alumni Council. The options are infinite and diverse! Please contact me or Irene Mason, who joined SCI-Arc’s Office of Development and Alumni Affairs this spring, if you are interested in participating in events and activities like those above. We look forward to hearing from you and to seeing you in the near future. Cheers, Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96) Chair, 2013-14 Alumni Council Founder: lee+mundwiler

ALUMNI NEWS

ALUMNI PROVIDE INPUT FOR NEW DIRECTOR SEARCH Last fall it was announced that SCI-Arc was beginning the search for its next Director, as Eric Owen Moss’ term will end in August 2015. For the last 12 years, Eric has provided exceptional leadership and leaves the institution in a strengthened position academically, administratively and financially. The first step in the Director search process was to reach consensus about the skills and attributes required of the Director given the school’s current trajectory. The Board sought input from the school’s four main constituency groups—faculty, students, staff and alumni—concerning the professional experience and personal characteristics that will be important for the next Director. An Alumni Subcommittee of the Board, comprising Joe Day (M.Arch ’94), Abigail Scheuer (M.Arch ’93) and Dan Weinreber (M.Arch ’02), was created to solicit input and coordinate the responses from alumni. The Alumni Subcommittee organized meetings and open forums in Los Angeles and New York; they also developed an online survey that was distributed to all alumni for whom the school has an email on record. Through these means, the subcommittee gathered input from a wide and representative spectrum of the alumni community. The survey results, in particular, served as a clear, objective and digestible account of alumni input. Most alumni are now immersed in a much broader set of issues than those that they were concerned with during their academic years. Balancing financial pressures while building a set of experiences to shape a career or practice is challenging. While many alumni believe the current pedagogy should address these career challenges, the conversation led to fundamental questions of SCIArc’s potential, strengths and scope.

Alumni therefore felt the most important criteria for the new Director would be to have strong and clearly articulated positions, whatever they might be, for the following: • A compelling vision for SCI-Arc’s potential, especially concerning the school’s ability to question, push and lead the discipline of architectural design. • An understanding of the school’s strengths and how to wield those strengths so that the school can be a leader in design thinking and innovation. • A clear and unabashed position on SCI-Arc’s pedagogical scope, especially addressing whether the school should focus on the architectural “profession” in its current societal, cultural and economic context, or should challenge and broaden that definition. Furthermore, communicating these positions will be helpful to the new Director’s successful and productive engagement with the alumni. A clear position on these criteria—whatever they might be—will be well appreciated and thoughtfully received by the alumni community. This is an energizing moment for the entire SCI-Arc community and the alumni are grateful for the opportunity to engage in the process and look forward to welcoming a new Director.

6. Corina Peters (M.Arch ’04), host Steve McConnell (B.Arch ’84), and Catie Ten Broeck (M.Arch ’04) 7. Undergraduate Program Chair John Enright 8. Pacific Northwest Alumni and Friends Cocktail Party, NBBJ, Seattle On April 11, a group of 30 SCI-Arc alumni, parents, and friends gathered for a cocktail reception at Cafeina in the Wynwood District of Miami. 9. Jorge Morey and Daysi Morey, parents of Tony Morey (B.Arch ’14) with faculty member Anna Neimark 10. Margi Glavovic Nothard (M.Arch ’92) and Boris Cortes (B.Arch ’12) 11. Jörg Rügemer (M.Arch ’95), Vera Fernandez-Villegas (M.Arch ’08), Scott Gross (M.Arch ’01) 12. Salman Masmouei (B.Arch ’09), Chris Ulrich (M.Arch ’09), with Hsinming Fung, Director of Academic Affairs 13. “Escape Velocity” by Poetic Kinetics at Coachella, 2014

MAGIC BOX BECOMING A REALITY In March, SCI-Arc broke ground on a new state-of-the-art digital fabrication center, the Magic Box, which has been supported through generous commitments totaling $400,000 to date from SCI-Arc’s growing community of donors. At the forefront were Trustees Abby Sher and Scott Hughes (M.Arch ’97), who enthusiastically endorsed the project with lead gifts. “The Magic Box is a timely and important project for the school, and I’m delighted to support such an inspirational idea,” said Sher. Hughes, who was a student at the Marina campus, added, “Making is so much a part of the experience at SCI-Arc, and it’s exciting to see and be a part of the evolution of the ‘shop’ at SCI-Arc.” Major grants from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation and The Ahmanson Foundation have also provided critical support for the project. “SCI-Arc is extremely grateful to our supporters for making the school’s vision of the Magic Box possible,” said Sarah Sullivan, SCI-Arc’s Chief Advancement Officer. “Philanthropic support plays a vital role in helping SCI-Arc to push the boundaries of architectural education, and we’re honored to partner with such exceptional donors.” The new facility is the first major addition to the SCI-Arc campus since its purchase by the school in 2011. According to SCI-Arc director Eric Owen Moss, “We’re credible in an entirely

new venue, a fiscal investment venue. Owning our campus has strengthened our capacity to solicit and receive substantial capital investments, which in turn allows us to deliver a substantially enriched pedagogical world for students and faculty. SCI-Arc has undertaken a number of constructed additions since 2011—the Hispanic Steps, Café improvements, the Graduation Pavilion—but nothing quite so ambitious or educationally enduring.” The two-story, pre-fabricated steel structure will house the latest tools used for digital prototyping and fabrication, including various 3D printers and CNC machines. Along with the Robot House—SCI-Arc’s robotics laboratory that was launched in 2011—and the renovated analog shop, the Magic Box will be a vital component of the school’s RAD Center (an acronym for robotics, analog and digital), where students will be encouraged to interrogate the technologies and the materials they encounter with an experimental design strategy. According to Moss, the Magic Box “magic” is not the box itself, but the action inside. The 4,000-square-foot space is expected to be ready for students at the beginning of the 2014-15 academic year; a major renovation of the existing shop will take place in the fall, following the opening of the Magic Box. 3

SUPPORT THE MAGIC BOX SCI-Arc invites you to support the new state-of-the-art Magic Box by making a gift today. With lead gifts in place, we are now seeking support from the broader community–alumni, parents and friends. Naming opportunities will be available for key spaces throughout the Magic Box and a permanent Donor Wall will recognize all supporters of the project. The collective giving of the SCI-Arc community plays a vital role in making innovation and experimentation possible at the school and we hope you will consider being a part of this exciting project. For more information on how to support the Magic Box, please visit sciarc.edu/magicbox.html or contact Sarah Sullivan, SCI-Arc’s Chief Advancement Officer, at 213.356.5319 or sarah_sullivan@ sciarc.edu.

MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI COUNCIL

Dear Fellow Alumni, As chair of the Alumni Council, I am fortunate to spend time at SCI-Arc throughout the year and be involved with the alumni program. At the end of the semester, I am pleased to report on our activities this past year and share how you too can be engaged with our school. We started the 2013-14 academic year with alumni involvement in the search process for the next director of SCI-Arc, as requested by the Board of Trustees. This spring, the Alumni Council hosted Open Season, an annual 9 career event where students exhibit work, and during a networking reception, have the opportunity to meet representatives from small practices and large firms who are interested in hiring from SCI-Arc. I was impressed that nearly 70 students chose to participate. To help students prepare for the event and their job searches in general, we held a workshop led by alumni who gave students direct feedback on their resumes and portfolios. The Council looks forward to offering more opportunities like this for alumni to volunteer their time and expertise to benefit today’s students, especially as they transition from their academic endeavors to working members of our professional community. At our March meeting, we invited Hernan Diaz Alonso and John Enright to talk with us about the undergraduate and graduate programs, and later John led us on a school tour. We had a discussion about how SCI-Arc recruits top students and how scholarship support plays a crucial role in forming a talented, diverse student body. We let Hernan and John know that as alumni we are here to help move the school forward. We can be ambassadors for the school in our professional and social networks, and we can contribute to SCIArc’s scholarship funds to help attract prospective students. Lastly, our activities focused on strengthening the alumni community by getting to know one another. The Council held a Pecha Kucha, which was a 10 great way to show support for each other as we learned about our work and interests. In April, the Class of 1989 held a 25-year reunion at SCI-Arc, which 11 brought together friends from around the world, some of whom had not seen each other since graduating. Faculty members and friends including Ray and Shelly Kappe, Dean Nota (B.Arch ’76), Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray, Michael Rotondi (B.Arch ’75) and Bill Simonian, joined the class to celebrate. This event was the first of many more 25th reunions. I hope you will join our efforts by being an active member of the SCI-Arc alumni community. Connect with alumni groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Share your projects on the Alumni Portal. Search for job candidates through SCI-Arc. Volunteer your office or home for a school event. Send in a Class Note. Make a gift to support future generations of architects at SCI-Arc. And, consider joining the Alumni Council. The options are infinite and diverse! Please contact me or Irene Mason, who joined SCI-Arc’s Office of Development and Alumni Affairs this spring, if you are interested in participating in events and activities like those above. We look forward to hearing from you and to seeing you in the near future. Cheers, 12

Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96) Chair, 2013-14 Alumni Council Founder: lee+mundwiler

ALUMNI NEWS

MESSAGE FROM THE ALUMNI COUNCIL

On March 13, a group of SCI-Arc alumni and friends gathered for a cocktail party at NBBJ in downtown Seattle. 5. Craig Hess (B.Arch ’97), Cherry Lietz Snelling (M.Arch ’97), and Jill Rerucha (M.Arch ’96)

Cara Lee (M.Arch ’96) Chair, 2013-14 Alumni Council Founder: lee+mundwiler 13

ALUMNI NEWS

OPEN SEASON SPRING 2014 Open Season Workshop Presenters: Rick Gooding (B.Arch ’84), Chu + Gooding Architects Parini Mehta (M.Arch ’06), LBL Architecture Paras Nanavati (B.Arch ’04), PNC Studios Johnny Ramirios (B.Arch ’05), Buro Happold Cheaseon Roh (M.Arch ’02), RTKL Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09), M-Rad Vlado Valko (M.DesR ’04), Design Initiatives Open Season Participating Firms: AECOM Dax Design Dean Nota Architect DLR Group Gensler Heydey Partnership IT HOUSE, Inc. KGM Architectural Lighting Lee+Mundwiler Masa Studio M-Rad Michael W. Folonis Architects NBBJ New Theme Perkins+Will Perkowitz+Ruth Architects PNC Studios Shubin+ Donaldson Architects, Inc. Skimore, Owings & Merrill, LLP Studio of Environmental Architecture Windrich Group Zapf Architectural Renderings

ALUMNI NEWS

SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART FEATURES FACULTY, ALUMNI IN GROUP EXHIBITION

The New Painterly, Nan Yen Chen and Hao Wu

STUDENTS AND RECENT GRADS EXHIBIT IN AIA/LA 2X8: EVOLVE SHOW SCI-Arc undergraduates Eduardo Bellosta (B.Arch ’15) and Ryan McGriff (B.Arch ’15), and graduate alumni Nan Yen Chen (M.Arch ’13) and Hao Wu (M.Arch ’13), were selected to exhibit their work in the 2014 edition of 2x8, a highly anticipated annual exhibition of student work hosted by AIA Los Angeles. Themed 2x8: Evolved, the exhibition was on view April 11 through May 11 at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles, showcasing student projects from SCI-Arc, Art Center College of Design, California College of the Arts, USC and UCLA, among other schools. The New Painterly, a project designed by Chen and Wu in a studio led by design faculty Elena Manferdini, engages painterly effect techniques of chiaroscuro and tenebrism into architectural space. The project explores various ways texture and fake shadows can be used to challenge the perception of a building’s volume, geometry and openings. The two students proposed their design for a new Performance Arts Center located in the theatre district of Los Angeles near Disney Concert Hall. Bellosta and McGriff’s design proposal for a new Emerging Art Museum for the city of San Francisco, takes into account the environmental systems affecting the aspect and performance of the museum. The two undergraduate students developed a performative envelope that takes advantage of the exterior and interior qualities of the museum, addressing environmental conditions through a hyper articulated skin which allows air, light and water to add productive efficiencies throughout the year.

A recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara highlighted today’s expanded definition of architectural practice. It welcomed six prominent Los Angeles-based architecture practices—all led by SCI-Arc faculty or alumni—to present original designs rooted in architecture as well as in related fields. Dubbed Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity, the exhibition considered the next generation of Los Angeles makers, thinkers, and teachers, whose work is traversing myriad related fields—visual arts, theory, design and fashion—from an architectural perspective. The exhibition’s spirit of inclusivity owed to a particular set of extant conditions particular to Los Angeles, including a recession-driven dearth of building projects, new digital technologies, growing ecological concerns, and a renegade spirit of experimentation unburdened by the weight of tradition. The exhibition showcased work by SCI-Arc design faculty Ramiro Diaz-Granados (B.Arch ’96) of Amorphis LA, Elena Manferdini of Atelier Manferdini, along with designs by alumni Benjamin Ball (B.Arch ’03) and Gaston Nogues (B.Arch ’94) of Ball-Nogues Studio, Catherine Johnson (M.Arch ’05) and Rebecca Rudolph (M.Arch ’00) of Design Bitches, and Miles Kemp (M.Arch ’06) of Variate Labs. The exhibition was co-organized by MCASB Executive Director and Chief Curator Mikki Garcia and Visiting Curator and SCI-Arc alumna Brigitte Kouo (M.Arch ’10).

ALUMNI, FACULTY CELEBRATE LA ARCHITECTURE ON THE ROAD Los Angeles is a city developed around and defined by houses rather than large architectural monuments. The singular residential unit is an elastic object, having long nurtured experimental pursuits and critical inquiry. In November, the organizers of On the Road, a yearlong series of architecture, art and design programs in Los Angeles, invited a group of artists and designers— including several SCI-Arc faculty and alumni—to each select a house located west of downtown Los Angeles, to engage with and respond to through the medium of drawing. These drawings were then reproduced in standard 4”x6” postcards and placed inside each house’s mailbox on the morning of November 17. A publicly distributed map highlighting the locations of these homes acted as an invitation for visitors to navigate the various sites and collect the postcards. Visitors were invited to move at will between some or all of the sites, pulling postcards from the various mailboxes and curating their own collection—simultaneously engaging both the physical and representational object of the house. SCI-Arc design faculty Heather Flood (M.Arch ’04), and alumni Heather Peterson (M.Arch ’04), Mark Ericson (M.Arch ’06), and Wendy Gilmartin (M+M ’02) participated in the event, which culminated in a discussion about contemporary modes of communication within architectural production.

SCI-ARC ROBOT HOUSE DEMO ON VIEW AT ROB | ARCH 2014

THE COACHELLA ASTRONAUT: SUPER-SCALE IN THE SOUTHLAND

As more and more architecture schools around the world are “arming” themselves with robots, the 2014 edition of Rob | Arch, hosted by the Association for Robots in Architecture between May 14-18th at the University of Michigan, provided robotics instructors with an open platform for introducing their latest projects. The SCI-Arc Robot House team’s demo of a live updating program involved two Stäubli TX60L industrial robots which were set up in the Liberty Annex faculty research space at University of Michigan through the entire duration of the conference. Visitors were invited to interact with the robots and modify their path in real time. Designed and programmed by SCI-Arc Robot House coordinator Jake Newsum, robotics researcher Curime Batliner (ESTm ’11) and graduate student Nikita Troufanov (ESTm ’14), the demo used Grasshopper to program and manipulate the two robots. The general public also had an opportunity to observe the robots in action during the conference’s closing ceremony. Also at the event, Newsum in collaboration with Ammar Kalo of the University of Michigan presented their research into robotic incremental sheet metal forming as a method for prototyping parametric architectural skins. A paper documenting their work is included in the Rob | Arch 2014 publication produced by University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture, Robotic Fabrication in Architecture, Art & Design 2014 (Springer, 2014). Troufanov joined the team representing SCI-Arc at Rob | Arch 2014 courtesy of a special grant presented by conference organizers in partnership with ABB Robotics. As part of the selection process, he submitted a chapter from his Anisotropic Formations proto-architectural project developed at SCI-Arc last fall, which mixes robotics with vector-based 3D printing.

The musical performances at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio this spring were not the only experiences that were larger than life to its 90,000 daily visitors. The art collective Poetic Kinetics, which includes SCI-Arc alum Nick Kinney (M.Arch ’10) as well as Kristy Velasco (B.Arch ’13) and Richard Nam (2011), was selected again to design an installation for the vast festival grounds, known for its creative and often iconic large-scale projects and sculptures. Last year, Poetic Kinetics erected a 30 foot snail which slid between festivalgoers during the two-weekend event. This year, Kinney was the lead designer for “Escape Velocity” a giant 60-foot-tall interactive and animatronic astronaut which made its way around the festival. Along with Patrick Shearn, president at Poetic Kinetics, Kinney and the team worked tirelessly for months to turn their idea into an impressive reality. In describing the process, Kinney writes “…I had had experience fabricating complex objects at SCI-Arc, [and] the Astronaut was no different.” The process revolved around 3D modeling the Astronaut to work within the dimensions of a lift that would act as its structural skeleton and be disguised to transport it around Coachella. The massive feat was pulled off in a symphony of moving parts, from finalizing detailed drawings, to rigging trusses, to stitching together the fabric of the moving space traveler. The Astronaut’s visor even allowed festivalgoers to interact with the project by displaying their images on its LED screen. In an age of social media, the Coachella Astronaut quickly gained a following and became a consistent backdrop to countless photos and videos posted online. Even Big Boi, member of renowned hip hop duo Outkast, posted an image of “Escape Velocity” with the caption ‘1.5hrs to liftoff’ before their hugely anticipated headlining performance.

TAMPA-BASED ALUMNUS TAKES DESIGN TO NEW HEIGHTS SCI-Arc alumnus Ross-Alan Tisdale (M.Arch ’06) didn’t always dream of becoming an architect. Fueled by a lifelong passion to be an astronaut, he started college as a cadet in the U.S. Air Force Academy. While on hiatus from the Academy, he went to Yale University, where a series of architectural history classes he took with Prof. Vincent Scully sparked his interest in architecture. It was not long before he decided to switch to architecture as a fulltime interest and enroll in the university’s Bachelor of Architecture program. After graduating from Yale, Tisdale worked in the Albuquerque offices of Antoine Predock, FAIA and spent several years with an architectural and engineering firm in Boston. In 2003, his pursuit of architecture landed him in the Master of Architecture program at SCI-Arc, where his research and explorations focused on architecture that can look both forward and back. He also never gave up on his childhood dream. In turn, he transformed it into reality by marrying his architectural expertise with research into the exploratory field of space architecture— loosely defined as design to support human habitation outside the confines of planet Earth. Tisdale worked at the NASA Ames Research Center designing human habitation for the Moon, and had his work published in the first textbook on space architecture— Out of This World – The New Field of Space Architecture.

In 2012, Tisdale joined his wife and SCI-Arc alumna Jody Beck, AIA (M.Arch ’06), whom he met while at SCI-Arc, in heading a joint architecture practice, Traction Architecture, founded by Beck a couple of years prior. Based in Tampa, Fla., their architectural office focuses on both residential and commercial designs, and has recently received a Design Honor Award from AIA’s Tampa Bay Chapter. Traction’s work has been featured by Wall Street Journal and Sarasota Magazine, and their recently completed beachfront Seagrape House located on Anna Maria Island, Fla. has been awarded LEED Platinum certification. Earlier this year, the Seagrape residence won the Gold Medal in the Home of the Year competition hosted by Sarasota’s SQR Magazine, gracing the cover of the magazine’s March issue.

CLASS NOTES 1970s

Michael Folonis, FAIA (B.Arch ’78) received a 2013 AIA California Council award for the UCLA Outpatient Surgery and Medical Building in Santa Monica. His firm self-published two books, one on the UCLA Outpatient Center, and a second on the Kangde Center design competition for a 60-story mixed-use high-rise located in Chongqing, China. Folonis presented the UCLA Outpatient Center at the 2014 ACE Summit & Reverse Expo, as well as spoke at the 2013 AIA Los Angeles Small Firms Workshop hosted by ARUP. He was recently elected as the Los Angeles AIA California Council representative. Steven Lombardi’s (B.Arch ’79) Last Wave sculptures made out of recycled surfboards were on exhibit at ARTSD13 in Balboa Park and were featured by San Diego Magazine. Del Monte, a residential housing project in Ocean Beach, was featured among San Diego Home & Garden magazine’s Homes of the Year. His Osa Project in Costa Rica, slated to be finished this summer, features a water tower which will take 100% of its power from the sun and will cool off naturally.

1980s

David Hertz (B.Arch ’83) and S.E.A. Studio of Environmental Architecture organized the Bergamot Collaborative to compete for the new five-acre Bergamot Art Center in Santa Monica, Calif. At the time of publication, the team was shortlisted for the project. Their 70,000-sq. ft. AK Hotel in Venice continues to advance forward. The Hertz-designed Butterfly House in Venice will be included in Dwell’s 2014 Home Tour and will be featured in Dwell magazine. Morgan Conolly (M.Arch ’85)’s Napa Valley Gamble Family Vineyards, located south of Oakville, Calif., is now complete. Inspired by early buildings constructed during the California Gold Rush, the main building is a one-story, gable-roofed structure. The facility can produce 25,000 gallons of wine annually. Greg Maher (M.Arch ’85), currently senior designer at Alta Planning + Design in Los Angeles, presented on three panels at the California Trails and Greenways Conference in Palm Springs, Calif. He discussed his current project for a 13-mile “Park to Playa” inter-urban trail system stretching from Baldwin Hills to Playa del Rey, as well as introduced a Complete Streets Master Plan for the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians in Palm Springs. Tim Ankenman (M.Arch ’86), founder of Vancouver-based Ankenman Marchand Architects, completed another craft beer project, The Central City Brewery, a 65,000-sq. ft. combination brewery and distillery project. The firm is awaiting construction completion on Red Truck brewery, a 200,000-sq. ft. facility. These and other brewery projects were featured in the January edition of TAPS magazine. Michael Sanchez (B.Arch ’86) of Coastal Architects completed the Colonial House Apartments in Oxnard,

Calif. One of the first Platinum LEED mixed-use projects in Southern California, the 2-acre property includes commercial retail spaces and 44 apartment units. Beth Gibb (M.Arch ’89) is living back in Los Angeles, after spending more than two decades in Boston. She is working as an architect at the California Institute of Technology and exploring options for practicing architecture in Los Angeles. She is enjoying reconnecting with other SCI-Arc alumni in LA through the SCIArc Alumni Council.

1990s

Angela Brooks (M.Arch ’91) and partner Larry Scarpa of Brooks+Scarpa were selected among the ten recipients of AIA’s Annual Housing Awards for their Cherokee Studios in Los Angeles. The two principals also received a 2013 AIA Next LA Award and a 2014 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. Thomas Stallman (M.Arch ’91) is an adjunct professor in the Interior Architecture Program at Woodbury University, where he is currently teaching Design Studio 2. He also teaches at the Art Institute of California and has two houses under construction in Los Angeles through his Studio Thomas Stallman. Barbara Bestor (M.Arch ’92) gave a TEDx talk that can be found on YouTube (“Sunshine and Smog”). She recently curated Deborah Sussman Loves Los Angeles, along with Catherine Gudis, Thomas Kracauer and Shannon Starkey. The show, held at Woodbury University’s WUHO Gallery, was written about internationally, including in Metropolis, Architectural Review and the Los Angeles Times. Also, Bestor Architecture won the best residential project of the year from California Home and Design magazine for their house in Toro Canyon, Calif. Monique Birault (M.Arch ’92) was appointed to the Los Angeles Construction Specifications Institute Board of Directors, where she serves as Program Chair and organizes lectures for their monthly meeting. Her jewelry line is now carried by Dustmuffin in Silver Lake. Elizabeth Martin-Malikian (M.Arch ’92) was awarded a cultural studies fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. Her research is entitled “Hedonistic Urbanism: The Beirut Postwar Experience.” Martin-Malikian is an associate professor at the Southern Polytechnic State University in metroAtlanta, where she received tenure in 2008. She has also been appointed as editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed Civil Engineering and Architecture Journal. Luis Manuel Herrera (M.Arch ’93) of OPEN Arquitectura in Veracruz, Mexico, recently completed the House 012 residence in Veracruz. Benjamin Ball (B.Arch ’03) and Gaston Nogues (B. Arch ’93) of Ball-Nogues Studio are in design development for their first permanent architecture commission, Confluence Park in San Antonio. The studio recently completed two public art installations, Stud Wall and Corner Glory, in West Hollywood, and two for the Veterans

Affairs Aquatic Center in Palo Alto. Other projects include public art commissions for a light rail station in Golden, Colo.; a new AAA-baseball stadium in El Paso; a science building at University of Central Washington; and Coleman Soccer Fields in San Jose. Lawrence O’Toole (M.Arch ’93) of Kauai-based LOT is currently working on an architectural guide for the City of Newport Beach, Calif. His experimental up-cycled foam pieces for LOT Modern Advanced Furniture were recently featured by online industrial design magazine Core77. O’Toole continues to promote design education on the Island of Kauai with his Design Essentials Workshops. Gulla Jonsdottir (B.Arch ’94) and her LA-based architectural design firm G+ Gulla Jonsdottir has completed her first project in Japan, a 15-floor restaurant located atop a train station. She is currently at work on projects in Macau, Bahamas, Cabo San Lucas and Iceland. Her latest project in Los Angeles is the design of Girasol restaurant, inspired by a large sunflower. Jonsdottir also launched a furniture collection, Gulla Luxury furnishings, collaborating with artist Billy Zane on one of her new table designs. Karen M’Closkey’s (B.Arch ’94) book Unearthed: the Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) received a John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, awarded by The Foundation for Landscape Studies for its significant contributions to the study and understanding of garden history and landscape studies. Jörg Rügemer (M.Arch ’95) received the 2014 ACSA Diversity Achievement Award and 2014 ACSA Collaborative Practice Award for the design of three summer cabins for the Girl Scouts of Utah, currently under construction in Provo Canyon, Utah. Together with his colleague Erin Carraher, he developed and designed the cabins around a collaborative outreach effort; the team included students of the University of Utah and members of the Girl Scouts. Konstantinos Labrinopoulos (M.Arch ’96) is principal and owner of KLaB.Architecture, whose project Placebo Pharmacy is featured in Architecture Now Vol. 9 by TASCHEN. This previous fall, Labrinopoulos was a guest professor at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design where the Chair of the Architecture Department is Yuval Yasky (M.Arch ’00). Ty Kelly (M.Arch ’97) with Spore Design, Inc. moved his portion of the practice to Livingston, Mont., where he recently designed and built his own house, a 680-sq. ft. modular unit made from two recycled shipping containers. The home is currently a finalist in Sunset Magazine’s “Small Space, Big Dreams” contest, in addition to being filmed by HGTV for their architectural series, “Extreme Homes.” Beth Holden (B.Arch ’98), principal of NEW THEME, was a guest speaker at the 2013 Women in Green Forum in Los Angeles. She is working on three historic projects in downtown LA: The Regent Theatre on Main Street, originally opened in 1914 as The

National Theatre; The Globe Theatre on Broadway, originally opened in 1913 by Oliver Morosco; and Le Petit Paris on Spring Street. Holden is also at work on residential projects, including a house in Malibu and one in the Hollywood Hills. She is in the early development stages of an 11,463-sq. ft. lot in Echo Park. Derek Sola (M.Arch ’98) has completed the MGM Resorts International Monte Carlo Resort Renovation in Las Vegas while working as a senior project architect at Marnell Architecture. The project entailed the revitalization of the casino entry along the Las Vegas Boulevard containing new entertainment and dining options. Sola has since transitioned to Gensler to oversee new project developments on the Las Vegas strip. Primitivo Suarez-Wolfe (B.Arch ’98) was awarded a 2014 residency at SOMA in Mexico City. He also recently completed a permanent public art project in San Francisco. It was selected as one of the top 50 public art projects in the country by Public Art Network for 2013. Suarez-Wolfe is a co-founder and core faculty member in architecture at The Critique Program, a new nonprofit postgraduate art, architecture and critical theory program.

2000s

Stephen Hegedus (B.Arch ’00) has been named an associate at David Baker Architects in San Francisco. He is the project architect for several of the firm’s highest profile, market-rate housing developments, with a combined total of over 900 units of urban infill housing with mixed use. In addition, Hegedus serves on the AIA San Francisco Housing Committee. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, artist Jennifer Kaufman, and their three-yearold son Daniel. Nico Marques (M.Arch ’00), principal of Photekt, had his architectural photography work showcased in publications including Business News Daily, the Venice Patch, Chicago Tribune, Archinect and MSN. Ron Culver, AIA (B.Arch ’04), architecture principal at Culver Architects Inc. (C/Arc), has designed and built more than 50 residential, multi-family, non-profit and commercial projects in the last eight years. Recent awards and publications include a featured article in Green Building & Design magazine and the “Architect of Change” award for his work supporting the Neighborhood Youth Association in Venice and Mar Vista. He has guest lectured at UCLA and USC. Florian Oettl’s (M.Arch ’05) AD&D architecture design & development, based in Dubai, recently broke ground on a 50,000-sq. ft. villa compound project. Designed for high-level expatriates, eleven units with private gardens share common gym and swimming pool facilities. Local, desert climate conditions and the relationship of private/public space were key drivers during the design process. Mo Ching Ying Lai (M.Arch ’06) and her team in UNStudio recently completed Hanjie Wanda Square, which opened its doors to the public

18 in fall 2013. The project features a full RGB media façade, the largest to date in China, and two glazed funnel structures, spanning from floor to ceiling and housing the shopping mall’s four panoramic elevators. It is UNStudio’s first finished project in China. Aaron Leppanen (M.Arch ’06) and Gabriela Anker, LEED AP (M.Arch ’06), co-founders of L+A arquitectos, won a national competition for La Universidad Regional Amazónica IKIAM in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The university will be designated for graduate and post-graduate education for the study of biodiversity, biology, ecological conservation, natural resources and prevention and mitigation of risks. The collaborative included A0 Estudios y del Hierro UA. L+A arquitectos also finished a 10,000- sq. ft. library renovation and addition at Colegio Alberto Einstein, a K-12 school in Quito, Ecuador. For both projects, the L+A arquitectos design team included Peter Matthews, NCARB + LEED AP (M.Arch ’06). Gordon Magnin’s (M.Arch ’06) work was published in Gestalten’s The Age of Collage, a book showcasing outstanding current artwork and artists. Magnin also completed an illustration for Glamour Italia and his work has been featured by Blaahg Magazine. Santino Medina (M.Arch ’06) of Gehry Technologies was promoted to senior project manager and has relocated to Shanghai to assist in integrating an overall BIM strategy for the upcoming Shanghai Disneyland Resort. Emily White (M.Arch ’06) and Lisa Little (M.Arch ’06) of Layer LA unveiled their Three Horned Beast installation at the Plummer Park in West Hollywood. Their powder-coated aluminum structure was previously on view for three years at The New Children’s Museum in San Diego. Carlos Hernandez (B.Arch ’08) and Barbara Leon (B.Arch ’08), co-founders of design collective HELEO, have recently completed the first construction phase of Cerveceria Insurgente, one of Baja California’s only craft breweries, located in Tijuana, B.C. Mexico. The project includes a production facility, restaurant, bar, tasting room and roof beer garden, and is slated to open to the public by winter 2014. Barbara Leon (B.Arch ’08), a project manager for Poon Design, has recently completed three residential developments in the Palm Springs and Coachella Valley for the Alta Verde Group. Featured by the Los Angeles Times, Poon Design and Alta Verde Group have been credited with bringing back truly modern tract housing, receiving top national design awards. Matthew Rosenberg (M.Arch ’09) of M-Rad submitted a design proposal for a new $320-million Cultural Precinct for the Gold Coast in Australia. He was invited to jury the 2014 Land Art Generator Initiative competition in Denmark and will speak at the American Society of Landscape Architects annual conference in Denver, Colo. in November. Rosenberg was recently

featured by publications including Fast Company, Civil Engineering Magazine, Phaidon, Gizmag, Swipelife, AIA Magazine, ABC Action News and Las Vegas Sun. Brett Grinkmeyer (M.Arch ’00) has opened his own firm BG-Arc in Austin, Texas. He recently completed La Casa residence, a single family home in an Austin suburb.

2010s

Tom Ames (SCIFI ’11) is working in San Francisco for RYS Architects, which specializes in hospitality design. Stephen Sun (B.Arch ’11) was accepted into Harvard’s Graduate School of Design M.Arch II program. He is currently working at aedis architects in San Jose, Calif., designing schools. In his spare time, he is helping teach a design build “studio” for seventh graders at The Hillbrook School. Carmelia Chiang (B.Arch ’12) showcased her work, Tangential Mode, at Artivism 2014. The project represents a continuation of Chiang’s thesis research focused on tangential space. Building on her thesis project, Off on a Tangent, Chiang indroduces a series of studies that examine the relationship of lines, surfaces, volumes and the implied boundaries. Rania Hoteit (M.Arch ’13) and Malek Idriss (M.Arch ’13) co-founded ID4A, a design practice based in San Francisco. Their research into creating pliable, reconfigurable 3D prints has been featured extensively by tech blogs including engineering.com, themethodcase.com and 3ders.org. Alex Phi (M.Arch ’13) is working as a designer at Gensler Los Angeles. His graduate thesis was featured by SuckerPunchDaily, SuperArchitects, Futures+Design and Taller al Cubo. Phi was selected to be exhibited in AIA’s 2014 Center for Emerging Professionals Annual Exhibition in Washington, D.C. at the AIA headquarters. He competed in eVoLo’s 2014 Skyscraper Competition and in Bustler’s DawnTown Design competition.

(Continued from page 13) Alumni and former faculty members at the Class of 1989’s 25th reunion dinner (from left to right) Front row: Barbara Ellis, Steve Suchman, Jackie Pimentel, Ray and Shelly Kappe, Connie Cohen, Ann Jones, Peter Borrego and his sons Second row: Geoff Kahn, Conway Beg, Kok Yang Ng, Beth Gibb, Vicky and Bill Simonian

Third row: Dean Nota and Linda Jo Russell-Nota, Neil McLean, Dana Swinsky, Neal Borsuk Back row: Hitoshi Abe, Robin Kremen, Michael Rotondi, April Greiman, Heather Kurze, Robert Mangurian, Mary-Ann Ray Guests not pictured: Chris Aykanian, Cara Lee, Stephan Mundwiler

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTURE 960 EAST 3RD ST. LOS ANGELES, CA 90013

Photograph by Armeen Monahan