"Trust yourself, trust your advisor, take breaks, and make things!" - Rebecca Fitzgerald presenting her SCI-Arc Grad Thesis project "I know it when I see it." Image © Katherine Guimapang

Pursuing a graduate degree in architecture can be a daunting task for any prospective student. Earning an M.Arch I degree requires that individuals undergo a "crash course" in architecture, for one. But before that can happen, they must also find the right institution, typically one that not only provides them with the support, tools, and resources they need to foster their sense of architectural exploration but that also helps nurture a critical disciplinary perspective.

To learn more about the journey of an M.Arch I student, Archinect spoke with recent Southern California Institute of Architecture's (SCI-Arc) graduate Rebecca Fitzgerald. Part reflection, part interview, we unpack the journey of an individual whose robust liberal arts background and passion for architecture's multifarious nature activated a desire to chart out her own architectural trajectory. Together, Rebecca and I discuss her academic journey, how research furthered her architectural thinking, and her interests in exploring digital and physical archival practices.

Along with her decision to enter the world of architecture, Fitzgerald sheds light on her decision to attend SCI-Arc. An institution recognized for its highly curated approach to merging design, technology, and experimentation, the school has become synonymous with eye-catching projects and is known for producing entrepreneurial students who know how to push the envelope in terms of concept and representation. Yet, beyond the production-quality content and experimental nature of the work that comes out of SCI-Arc, the school's M.Arch I program offers foundational techniques and a multi-dimensional focus that has produced design professionals who are impacting a many creative fields. According to Fitzgerald, at SCI-Arc, "design was not being treated as something wholly mysterious, but something that maybe required some instinct but also was fueled by deep engagement, practice, and collaboration."

What was your academic background before pursuing your M.Arch degree?

I studied literary theory and linguistics as an undergraduate at Reed College-- my thesis was on speech-act theory, but I ended up applying it at very different scales than are usually considered in the liberal arts. I realize now that what I was interested in was writing about language in terms of its materiality and its world-building capacities (much more architectural ideas than literary), and beyond its ability to signify.

What prompted you to pursue a career in architecture? What drew you to the profession?

I love the idea that you don’t get really good as an architect until you’re old -- that sounds strange, but a late peak is so appealing to me! Architects never seem to run out of fresh challenges or new obsessions. I also am really attracted to the medium-agnosticism of architecture. I always knew I wanted to keep writing, no matter what I did, so the idea that I can continue to evolve intellectually, and that I can investigate ideas through building, drawing, imaging, exhibitions, and writing all basically simultaneously really sold me on the field.

I love the idea that you don’t get really good as an architect until you’re old -- that sounds strange, but a late peak is so appealing to me!

Architects never seem to run out of fresh challenges or new obsessions. I also am really attracted to the medium-agnosticism of architecture.

At a more practical level, I got into architecture because I was working, doing research, writing, and creating some graphics/editorial design for an architecture firm, Office of Jonathan Tate, in New Orleans -- I was hired to work on a project for the Venice Biennale and then afterwards a publication that came out of the exhibition. After that publication was finished (it turned out to be a giant book, called “Wetland Urbanism”), we started working on another research project that we thought might have a building component. We ended up publishing a little book series, called the “Starter Home*” series, while at the same time designing and building single and multi-family houses based on some of the ideas we were developing in the books. The first house we finished was my first project as a designer! Walking through a building (even a tiny one, which it is) in physical space that I had lived in in digital space for months was the most surreal thing I’ve experienced.

For many students pursuing an M.Arch the application process is often a bit different. The hunt for the “right” school takes a different approach, I imagine. What was it about SCI-Arc that prompted you to say yes?

I had worked for a few firms by the time I was applying, so I had some idea of my interests and my abilities, but I didn’t feel like I had a comprehensive sense of the field or my own skillset. I wanted to come out of an M.Arch I program really confident and ready to participate in the discipline with a strong foundation, and with an idea of what kind of intellectual territory I wanted to stake out. I came to SCI-Arc’s graduate thesis reviews the year before I applied, and I was really struck by the consistent excellence of the work. Across the graduating classes, the projects were not only rigorously conceived but beautifully executed. I got the sense from the reviews, and later from talking to students and faculty, that students were really getting trained -- by which I mean design was not being treated as something wholly mysterious, but something that maybe required some instinct but also was fueled by deep engagement, practice, and collaboration.

Obviously, there are many ways to design, and little consensus about what architecture should be or do, even amongst members of the field itself (which I think can be a good thing!), but the idea that there was an academic environment where that kind of built-in disciplinary heterogeneity could be united by shared values -- beauty, obsession, craft, innovation, radical imagination -- seemed (seems) really special.

Did your liberal arts background help you make this decision?

I think any undergraduate background will help in one way or another in architecture school, it just depends on how well you can use your training to help you in what is a completely different pedagogical context. Any architecture program is going to be really different from any liberal arts program, if only because rather than communicating expertise through papers and exams, you’re basically always honing your live-performance skills at the same time as your design abilities. I’m lucky that a lot of the theory I studied as an undergrad overlaps with the theory that architects study -- we share a lot of the same thinkers. So, I always had that knowledge base to fall back on even as I was trying to catch up with the production skills and everything else that goes along with being in a design program.

I definitely had to learn to talk like an architect, especially for reviews. I was often told that I speak the way that I write --

What elements within your time pursuing an M.Arch did you find challenging? Was there a learning curve or major obstacles you had to overcome?

I definitely had to learn to talk like an architect, especially for reviews. I was often told that I speak the way that I write -- when you’re performing live, and a panel of jurors is trying to get a sense of your project quickly, there’s only so much that you should, or even need to say. I learned to organize my presentations around key words and ideas, and to let the visual material do most of the communicating.

What courses or which studios helped you find your voice in design and architectural thought?

I really loved the first vertical studio I took (first semester, third year) -- Elena Manferdini taught it, and we were working on an invited competition that had been organized by Dominique Perrault Architecture and the French government. The theme was “utopia,” which has a long, strange history in architectural thought and design. The whole studio was presented as a kind of thesis project -- Elena wanted us each to formulate a position and develop it through design and representation. So, it was challenging! And incredibly rewarding. 

Another favorite was a history-theory course taught by Marrikka Trotter and Sanford Kwinter -- besides the content of the class, which ended up being hugely influential to my thesis development, it was amazing to be exposed to the kind of intellectual relationship the two of them have. I was really inspired by the rigor, but also the joy, that they both use in even the most casual conversation about architecture.

What was your thesis? 

My thesis research book was called “I know it when I see it” -- I was looking at interactions between machine and human visualities, inspired by some design work I had been doing with image and 3d model-based generative neural networks (GAN), reading I was doing about philosophies of vision and learning, and ongoing conversations with my thesis advisor, Devyn Weiser. It became, over the course of the year, a project for a building that was a kind of hybrid archive-database, where logics of digital and physical artifact organization coexist and interact spatially. I was especially interested, when I was putting together precedents, in pre-digital architecture projects that try to model universal knowledge -- Corbusier’s Projet pour le Mundaneum is an example, considered a kind of digital environment precursor. These were projects where multiple systems of knowledge production and organization, from different times, authors, and ideologies, were forced to coexist -- where the idea of the “universal” becomes complicated, productively I think, by many voices.

A contemporary analog of this type of building (if it really is a type) is, I think, a freeport -- literally, a storage facility for precious goods and artifacts, but in effect a kind of archive guided by the aggregated influences of many actors, economies, politics, and material and technological concerns. A freeport’s collection isn’t so much authorless as it is authored by so many people and forces that it becomes difficult to separate one from another. So, I took the program of a freeport as a jumping off point. It became more like a fantasy of the future freeport -- more a research and design facility or a laboratory than just a place where things are kept and preserved. 

How do you see this thesis progressing into your career?

There were a few threads that I’ve picked up post-graduation, and developed for other formats -- some as essays, some as the beginnings of proposals, as parts of a syllabus or ways to frame a conversation with another architect or designer. I’m sure I’ll be sifting through all of the thoughts and avenues of inquiry that came up during the thesis process for a long time. 

...part of the thesis was about archives, the relationships between physical and digital archives and the productive contaminations of one to the other.

We tend to think of physical archives as discrete, linear, material, and contained, and digital archives as “everything” -- there’s this myth that I think operates at least implicitly that with digital archives, databases, and the internet, everything is available all of the time in a sort of flat, frictionless space.

But really, databases and data are just as subjective as any physical archive or artifact collection -- 

How does your thesis fit within the discipline of architecture? How does it challenge it?

There’s a lot of work being done in the discipline to explore different ways to approach our archives -- the images, documents, artifacts, and in some cases digital assets, that make up our collective knowledge base. This isn’t just an idea that architects are playing with, but designers, artists, and other cultural producers too. I think it’s exciting that we’re trying to figure out how to destabilize known narratives and re-make histories toward new ends -- it feels optimistic. We’re also in a moment of stock-taking, I think, where we’re far enough into digital culture that we can start to think past the physical/digital binary and toward the true relationship of the two, which may be much more fuzzy.

So, part of the thesis was about archives, the relationships between physical and digital archives and the productive contaminations of one to the other. We tend to think of physical archives as discrete, linear, material, and contained, and digital archives as “everything” -- there’s this myth that I think operates at least implicitly that with digital archives, databases, and the internet, everything is available all of the time in a sort of flat, frictionless space. But really, databases and data are just as subjective as any physical archive or artifact collection -- someone had to decide to collect whatever information and put it in a format that is platform/medium specific -- and in the collecting, storing, and disseminating the things that are being collected are altered and multiplied many times over. 

Digital space is designed to hold multiple subjectivities at once, not only in terms of the many archivists, each with their own agendas and ideas, that the internet can support, but also in terms of the layering of subjectivities, intelligences, ordering logics, and operational schema that come with navigating software environments. We become really attuned to this phenomenon in architecture school -- especially today, a lot of your energy is spent coordinating across software environments, and especially managing the many transformations that happen necessarily when you move from one program to another. Another idea I think the thesis brings up that is disciplinary has to do with workflows -- the idea that architects design documentation for future-possible buildings, but also we design our workflows -- we decide what we take as given, and how our techniques and instruments will bear consequences in our designs.

...architects design documentation for future-possible buildings, but also we design our workflows -- we decide what we take as given, and how our techniques and instruments will bear consequences in our designs.

What are your next steps academically? Professionally?

I’m working as a Project Designer at a firm in Los Angeles called Stayner Architects, where I was working part-time during school, and I’m gearing up to start taking my licensure exams. I’ve been teaching a course, with Devyn Weiser, at SCI-Arc, that uses models of curation -- narrative and algorithmic -- as a way to re-think museum architecture and its relationship to artifacts and modes of viewing. I’m working on an essay series with a few friends and colleagues, which has given me an opportunity to test out some longer-burn ideas in short, decisive bursts which has been really enjoyable. And I’m guest editing an issue of Off Topic, a publication that a few friends at SCI-Arc started in their first year in the M.Arch I program. It sounds like a lot, but I found during school that I work best when I have a few outlets at once...I think that might be a quality that a lot of people in the field have in common.

Any tips for students working through their thesis?

Trust yourself, trust your advisor, take breaks, and make things! Digitally modeling and/or thinking yourself in circles is an easy trap to fall into. Also, talk to your friends and peers. Marrikka [Trotter, History Theory Coordinator] told some of us that the best thing to do is swap projects when you’re really stuck -- none of us were brave enough to really trade places, but we were always in conversation with one another and not only was that helpful, but some of us have ended up working together on projects post-graduation that were born during those conversations.

Building design expertise is different in a lot of ways from building expertise in other fields -- be open to every studio brief! Each studio is not necessarily built on the same intellectual or pedagogical foundation as any other -- so, they’re designed to not only build knowledge and abilities, but also as shared investigations of foundational disciplinary questions, 

What is some advice you would give to students who are interested in pursuing an M.Arch?

Building design expertise is different in a lot of ways from building expertise in other fields -- be open to every studio brief! Each studio is not necessarily built on the same intellectual or pedagogical foundation as any other -- so, they’re designed to not only build knowledge and abilities, but also as shared investigations of foundational disciplinary questions, whether those questions have to do with form, technique, process or workflow, instruments and production, tectonics, or aesthetics. Sometimes a studio is as much an exercise in modeling a particular kind of expertise as it is an exercise in designing a building. 

If you could describe your M.Arch experience in three words what would they be?

Challenging, formative, and energizing.