Thesis work by Andrea Velasco and Ana Antoni (Spring 2020). Image courtesy of SCI-Arc

Finding the right college for any high school student, let alone a program to pursue, is not an easy task. While students may be enthusiastic about specific professions, different institutions approach these professions with radically distinct teaching methods and emphases.  

Among the accredited programs in the Western USA, SCI-Arc stands out for the quality of student work and the cutting-edge skills its graduates bring to the workplace. I wanted to investigate what makes this "school for architectural thinking" different. What would a student applying to SCI-Arc leave with? With such an active student body and faculty, what else does the school offer that we don't already know about? Archinect wanted to learn more about what makes this school's undergraduate program so successful and hopefully shed light and add some clarity to what makes this highly sought after.

I connected with Undergraduate Program Chair Tom Wiscombe and History/Theory Coordinator Marrikka Trotter to gain more insight. During the conversation, they both discussed SCI-Arc's approach to preparing undergraduates to enter the industry. They broke down what an undergraduate education needs and how it should change and spoke about dissecting the "hardened castles protecting deep systemic problems" of architectural pedagogy. 

Besides its hyper-visual projects, a penchant for the digital realm, and polished student work, how does SCI-Arc currently approach architectural pedagogy? What do they hope for the future? Below they break down the program's goals and their own experiences in academia as former students, current instructors, and practitioners.

Too often B.Arch programs produce graduates with an inflexible skill-set, inadvertently setting them up for a treadmill career which requires them to spend enormous effort and resources to continuously update or adapt their technical knowledge and abilities. - Marrikka Trotter

Marrikka Trotter: Too often, B.Arch programs produce graduates with an inflexible skill-set, inadvertently setting them up for a treadmill career that requires them to spend enormous effort and resources to continuously update or adapt their technical knowledge and abilities. If your skills are your primary value in the marketplace, you must do this to remain valuable and relevant. It can be exhausting and demoralizing; like Alice in Wonderland, you find yourself running fast just to stay in the same place. How does SCI-Arc seek to educate differently, with an eye toward longer-term career sustainability, growth, and even happiness?  

You are right, there is still the sense that we need to produce “practice-ready” students, and that we exist to somehow feed the market and keep those Revit seats occupied. It’s time to think about what the role is today for architects-- it is not what the world thinks it is, and we should not be responding to what capital forces and the general public think anyway. - Tom Wiscombe

Tom Wiscombe: Yes, architectural undergraduate education needs to be torn down and rethought. You are right; there is still the sense that we need to produce “practice-ready” students and that we exist to somehow feed the market and keep those Revit seats occupied. It’s time to think about what the role is today for architects—we are not engineers, we are not decorators, and we are not just service providers. We are civic leaders. Architects today need to be able to address and convince huge groups of stakeholders, engineers, builders, users, and our peers that what we do matters and how the vision we are proposing creates a new reality larger than the project. They need to be able to present and defend their ideas in constantly changing forms of representation and rhetoric. Maybe, they need to fill the void in leadership we see so often in the urban realm and fight its creeping banality. 

...architectural undergraduate education needs to be torn down and rethought [...] It’s time to think about what the role is today for architects—we are not engineers, we are not decorators, and we are not just service providers. We are civic leaders. - Tom Wiscombe

SCI-Arc’s undergraduate program is really the opposite of a trade school- it is a civic space, and its students are citizens. We completely rebuilt our curriculum 5 years ago to re-focus it toward the humanities and away from applied learning, which is to say that we are preparing our students for the long game rather than short-term skill-building, which is always a millimeter away from obsolescence. I like that you connect this approach with happiness… happiness is directly tied to having an overview, valuing ethics and ideas over what’s right there in front of us, and committing to a life of curiosity and intellectual engagement.

I agree that the highest and best goal for an architectural education is a combination of creative wonder -- being open to and interested in the world and what it could be -- and hardcore commitment to a set of values and an area of expertise. 

MT: I agree that the highest and best goal for an architectural education is a combination of creative wonder -- being open to and interested in the world and what it could be -- and hardcore commitment to a set of values and an area of expertise. Expertise is different from skills in the sense that it’s a deep reservoir of knowledge that can be applied in any number of ways and with any number of different skills. It’s interesting that a humanities-based education, with its emphasis on critical thinking and imagination, is often seen as only appropriate for or available to the elite as if skill-focused degrees were more attainable or more practical. As someone from a lower socioeconomic bracket who earned a skills-based B.Arch myself, I know that being employable was one of my primary concerns. I’ve since become more and more convinced that such paths are self-limiting and actually serve to disenfranchise students from underrepresented backgrounds. Service professionals are, by definition, subject to those they serve. This limits their creative potential by restricting their reach to solving known and existing kinds of problems, which ultimately simply reinforces the status quo with its present-day hierarchies and inequities. I also believe that happiness and fulfillment are valuable and attainable goals. Architecture should be a joyous practice -- hard but joyous. Here the Liberal Arts curriculum at SCI-Arc is pretty radical: required classes in philosophy, art history, the history of science and mathematics, and rhetoric form part of the core curriculum. But there’s also an emphasis on the school as a whole as a public, civic space. How is this achieved?

Expertise is different from skills in the sense that it’s a deep reservoir of knowledge that can be applied in any number of ways, and with any number of different skills. - Marrikka Trotter

TW: Let me come back to that. First, I totally agree with you about the way architectural education can be self-limiting. Architecture schools can be hardened castles protecting deep systemic problems as you describe. One of those problems that is not often discussed is that academia can become a space where fear and loss run deep under the surface. I want to call this out because I think that as teachers, we need to try to avoid imprinting students with our own demons. We need to be good parents in a way. We all feel fear and loss sometimes, but when it becomes systemic, and a school’s faculty withdraws from practice, I think we have to be aware of the consequences to our kids. The fact that SCI-Arc design studio faculty is made up of practicing architects is important- to have a practice is ultimately an act of optimism and courage, especially in these times. 

So, to your question: our Liberal Arts curriculum is much more than a set of courses, although that is, of course, its core. It is an idea that architecture is the product of both its own disciplinary expertise and its outward-oriented social relevance in various contexts. To study architecture without studying its allied fields in the humanities, particularly in undergraduate education, would be to deprive students of the ability to revel in the messiness of it all: the way that architecture borrows from the world but also pulls back from the world. The way we teach the Liberal Arts is therefore not “interdisciplinary” per se-- in the sense of stirring everything together into a weak amalgam of non-expertise, which I cannot abide-- but rather a lot of experts side-by-side, teaching what they know, laying out a kind of menagerie of content for our students. Our students have to put it all back together, in their own way and with differential importance, which is maybe a good definition of a creative act. 

To study architecture without studying its allied fields in the humanities, particularly in an undergraduate education, would be to deprive students of the ability to revel in the messiness of it all: the way that architecture borrows from the world but also pulls back from the world. - Tom Wiscombe

We add more spice to the menu by bringing in experts from outside the school through our Public Lecture series, Liberal Arts Masterclasses, SCI-Arc Cinema Series, Symposia, and what we call Basecamp-- where all undergrads come together in a round-table format to discuss the ideas of our time with invited guests. I’m really proud that we have been able to bring in such voices as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek, art theorist Michael Fried, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, art theorist Sianne Ngai, eco-philosopher Timothy Morton, race and modernism scholar Charles Davis II, and Stanley Kubrick’s Producer for the last 30 years of his life, Jan Harlan. And of course, a crucial figure in all of this is Graham Harman, our Liberal Arts Coordinator and recently ranked #18 in The Best Schools ranking of the world’s most important living philosophers. His conversation with Zizek was one of the most highly attended events in SCI-Arc’s history- I remember people flew in for that one.

One event we held a few weeks ago set the bar for the kinds of things that could and should be happening inside architecture schools. This was the Basecamp conversation between Tom Nichols and Molly Jong-Fast, both writers for the Atlantic and senior advisors to the Lincoln Project. They spoke about the strange case of the 2020 election in real-time and gave incredible insight into what was going on behind the scenes. Putting all of these intellectual beings together in our halls is my definition of a civic space-- a space of diversity and freedom of ideas apart from the hardened, uninformed ideologies all around us today.

Often those of us in higher education get bogged down in the transactional logistics of giving and receiving content as if education were primarily a matter of learning certain routines or canons. As the head of history and theory at SCI-Arc, I’m committed to a different set of priorities. 

MT: Yes, I was there for the Nichols/Jong-Fast exchange -- more of a high-level repartee, really -- and it was an exhilarating event. These kinds of experiences go way beyond delivering content to model forms of intensity and engagement that make life worth living fully. Often those of us in higher education get bogged down in the transactional logistics of giving and receiving content as if education were primarily a matter of learning certain routines or canons. As the head of history and theory at SCI-Arc, I’m committed to a different set of priorities. Undergraduates in our history and theory courses at SCI-Arc are challenged to see, investigate, and think rigorously and taught to value their own insights and ideation alongside a respect for the achievements of others, where earned. I want them to understand how various types of knowledge and consensus are formed relative to architecture so that they know how to change the field they are entering when their time comes. An analogy might be the difference between learning how to build cars and merely being taught how to drive. We also prioritize new and diverse scholarship at SCI-Arc, which as an independent institute rather than a department within a larger university, is both more nimble and less protective of existing norms. I see this as a significant strength when all cultural disciplines are reckoning with the need for racial and socio-economic justice and empowerment.

One of architecture’s superpowers is its ability to realize extraordinary things in the midst of ordinary, even banal, circumstances. If we give up this superpower, we lose a great deal of our ethical currency in the world. - Marrikka Trotter

SCI-Arc is also uniquely committed to aesthetics and form. There’s a fairly shallow line of thinking prevalent today that sees such a commitment as aloof or out of touch, as though social justice and beauty were opposed. What this reasoning fails to take into account is the degree to which ethics and aesthetics are linked. The Greeks had an expression for this: kalokagathia, or “the good and the beautiful.” If ethics are how we decide we should act, given what we know of the world, then aesthetics tell us how our world could be. As philosophers have long recognized, we actually use the same faculty of judgment to gauge both kinds of value. One of architecture’s superpowers is its ability to realize extraordinary things in the midst of ordinary, even banal, circumstances. If we give up this superpower, we lose a great deal of our ethical currency in the world. 

I’m willing to bet that the important architectural things of our time will be those that engage these new contexts. It’s exciting to see our students showing leadership in this regard. I’m proud of them and excited to see what they do next. - Tom Wiscombe

TW: We are living in a time of ecological crisis, political unrest, and alternative facts, and architects need to act. However, I think we need to be careful about becoming dilettante social theorists or scientists and instead work on these issues as only architects can-- through the production of concrete, aesthetic things. Things that make us stop in our tracks, creep up on us, or give us pause to think about our place in the world. I’m willing to bet that the important architectural things of our time will be those that engage these new contexts. It’s exciting to see our students showing leadership in this regard. I’m proud of them and excited to see what they do next.