Brief background/experiences
Ryan Lovett, 07/03/1986
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA


Educational:

B.A. Architectural Studies with High Honors, 2008
CED, UC Berkeley

Honorable Mention, Intersections: Grand Councourse Beyond 100 International Ideas Competition, 2009

First Place, A New Infrastructure: Innovative Transit Solutions for Los Angeles, International Ideas Competiton, 2009


Alpha Rho Chi, 2008
CED, UC Berkeley

CED Professional Promise Award, 2008
CED, UC Berkeley


Professional:

I've worked at a variety of architectural firms in Los Angeles and San Francisco over the past few years including, Eric Owen Moss Architects, The Jerde Partnership, McCall Design Group, and most recently as an intern at ZellnerPlus this last summer.

I was mostly responsible for schematic design, advanced visualization/rendering, and physical model constrction.

Why you chose your school/program
GSAPP stood out to over my other top choice, MIT, mainly because of the intensity of the current students and professors (which seemed to create a competitive and vigorous environment that I crave)

While it's always diffilcult to judge a place simply by an open house or browsing the school's websites, I felt that the two schools had very different attitudes towards cultivating future top architecture professionals. Ultimately either choice is a leap of faith and I couldn't go wrong either way.

That said, MIT's architecture department is housed in a very large beautiful building with very clean large studios which were so quiet you could hear the wind blowing through the long hallways. This sense of being in a big empty building was corroborated by the number of students in the program. Apparently there are less than 25 students or so in each year of the program (up from 12/year a a few years ago), which when you think about the fact that the average studio size was less than 10, makes the experience very intimate, but in some ways potentially limiting if one big facet of graduate school is networking. That said the students and professors were very impressive.

On the contrary to MIT's size, Columbia seemed to be teeming with activity. Avery Hall, while often being criticized for its age and small size, seemed to really be alive. One of the best ways I can describe the two schools is that they are microcosms of the cities in which in each one resides. MIT as Cambridge and GSAPP as Manhattan.

Another major difference was the flexibility of the curriculum. MIT's 3.5 year program included a thesis in the final semester while Columbia's is 3 years without a thesis. Im not sure whether or not a thesis is a good thing, thats could be reserved for another debate, but the lack of one suggests that the final 1.5 years at GSAPP can be designed in any way...so if a student feels compelled to come out of grad school with an extraordinary knowledge of one topic, they can.

I get a sense that the student body at Columbia has extremely diverse interests, and graduates end up starting their own practices very quickly out of school.

Architecture interests
My interests have been evolving slowly as our economy has stumbled and now is poised to once again grow...hopefully more sustainably this time around.

I enjoy exploring and questioning the relationship between infrastructure and architecture, specifically how infrastructure projects can become more than just engineering problems, so we can begin to frame them in a socioeconomic context as well, hopefully discovering new building typologies and exciting new types of urbanism in the wake of so many environmental challenges excaerbated by global warming.

I fantasize about the capacity for architecture/architects to shape the everyday and mundane rather than becoming pawns in a developer driven luxury highrise building market that seems to consume so much of many distinguished architects time.

I would like for architects to to reclaim a bigger stake in the building process...taking back responsibilities from developers and contractors, and thus pursue a new partnership with policy makers, community activists, and other stakeholders to overcome negative preconceptions about densifying suburban areas along with crumbling infrastructures across the country.

Other interests
i love food (cooking, finding great new places to eat), photography ( I have a Canon 5Dmkii, its a beast of a camera) and being like a situationist in my new city, Manhattan...