Spread across two campuses—a building at UCLA’s main campus and the offshoot IDEAS campus where the M.Arch II SUPRASTUDIOs are held—the two-day affair allows students to display their work for their peers, professors, and visitors. It also involves end-of-the-year reviews, symposiums, project installations, academic awards, and a closing party replete with tacos and music spun by UCLA Professor Mark Mack, aka DJ Orange. Studios this year were led by Greg Lynn, Heather Roberge, Neil Denari, Jimenez Lai, Andrew Kovacs, and others. Neil Denari, who has been serving as Interim Chair while teaching a studio as well, showed us around and explained some of the work coming out of the various studios. The field of exploration was wide, and the narratives, intentions, and deliverables differed greatly from studio to studio.

One of the primary courses for UCLA is the M.Arch I first-year Techcore Design Studio. Titled “Section and Elevation,” this year’s work essentially comprised an in-depth precedent analysis and a development of its iteration/reinterpretation with a focus on the envelope. As an exploration of material fabrications, large detailed models were scattered across the room—many of iconic, recognizable buildings such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Headquarters. As the students are required to work in teams, the first-year studio also places a lot of importance on introducing collaborative working models.

One of the new additions to the general format was the use of video presentations, which, in general, had a notable presence during student reviews. As lecturer Steven Christensen explained, the required 8-minute voiceovers describing one’s research were implemented so that first-year students could avoid some of the pitfalls of oral presentation. While the use of film in many ways raises the bar for being able to clearly explain one’s ideas, this presentational experiment (which I am told will likely continue on) spares good work from being tarnished by stressful, on-the-spot recitations.

In the adjacent space hung large, colorful, boards from Neil Denari’s Aperiodic City studio. Many of the studios this year focused on hypothetical projects in and around Los Angeles, and Denari had his studio take on the recently closed Santa Monica airport as its project-site. The students were asked to address LA’s density issues while navigating the complex political tensions of private versus public land. Using aperiodic grids, the projects integrated low-rise housing into the city’s hopes for a destination park by including playful designs for temporary event pavilions.

Another course that explored the Los Angeles area was an undergraduate class taught by Jimenez Lai. Titled “Vernon City Hall Complex: House(s) for the Mayor,” the course had the students design a fictional city—housed in one building—for the largely industrial-zoned city of Vernon. With a focus on story-telling, the work had strong touches of Lai’s influence in the use of color, playful shapes, and humor. The noticeably shared language of visual representation, nevertheless, did not appear to obstruct individuality, diversity in form, and narrative.

Greg Lynn’s course “Typologies of Fulfillment” focused on technologies of mobility, of both goods and people. Learning from the Amazon Fulfillment Center, students proposed various ways of adjusting the customer experience to the current state of technology and its rapidly evolving market through the development of dynamic spaces. Given a site across from the historic Farmer’s Market on Fairfax, students designed drive-through factories, shopping experiences that utilized conveyer-belts, automated warehouses, and so forth. Unsurprising for a course taught by Greg Lynn, the presentations were accompanied with impressive animations of the projects in motion.

A similarly program-oriented studio was led by Heather Roberge. Participants were tasked with designing a theater with an emphasis on optical devices and various forms of visuality. Learning from the ways in which rapidly-developing technology has expanded the meaning of field of view (FOV)—360 cameras, google street view, first person shooter video games, etc.—the students were challenged to transform the user’s typical visual engagement with a building. The proposed theater complexes largely focused on the interior and construction of unique scenes and views.

A studio led by Jason Payne worked on designing a new Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) building. The syllabus suggested a rejection of contextualism by establishing a new language characterized by alienesque rock-like forms. As with other studios, the influence of the instructor was heavily apparent in the students work, begging the question: do all the so-called ‘ambivalent objects’ essentially belong to Jason Payne? In any case, the plans and images intrigue, and the projects undoubtedly accentuate the typically-ignored municipal infrastructure through their bold and perhaps sometimes directly symbolic appearance.  

For second-year M.Arch I students, their design studio—instructed by Gabriel Fries-Briggs, Karel Klein, and Roger Sherman—focused on the fire station, allowing students to explore architectural issues, expressed and realized, in a public building. Ironically, the course seemed to produce some of the greatest formal variety of all the studios despite the assignment having the largest amount of constraints. Unfortunately, and in perhaps typical fashion, this studio’s jurors ended up straying far from the students’ work and into abstract conversations around questions of authenticity and appropriation in the age of Google SketchUp and standard rendered elements.

The long (and sweaty) day concluded with a party on IDEAS’ campus. Tacos were eaten, drinks were had and awards given. IDEAS houses the four M.Arch II SUPRASTUDIOs, led this year by Craig Hodgetts, Mark Mack, Thom Mayne, and Guvenc Ozel. Mayne’s course focused on POD designs that utilized hydroponics to address issues of food equity, while Ozel’s students explored robotic fabrication at the intersection of virtual and augmented reality. Hodgett’s course explored Gridlock through investigating new transportation systems like the Hyperloop, even building full-scale prototypes. Mack’s students used architectonics to enhance the open-ended potential of ‘performance.’ In sum, walking around IDEAS felt like a mini VR-convention replete with robots and VR goggles.

All together, Rumble was fun and engaging—if party to the same traps that seem to dominate studio crits more broadly. Some of the work bore too heavily the imprints of the instructors’ logic and aesthetic, but others exhibited flexibility and individuality. Jury conversations strayed from the subject at hand, likely to the detriment of students in need of real criticism. But, ultimately, the strength of this year’s crop of student work showed—in particular, in its diversity. Some projects were heavy on production; others, on speculation. No single aesthetic seemed to dominate. If anything, experimentation was the primary connective thread. In short, enabled in part by the openness of UCLA’s year-end symposiums format and the dynamism of its structure, Rumble was an expansive display of the variety of work that the UCLA is producing.