Archinect - News

On the Ground: UCLA's new IDEAS campus

2013-12-03T19:12:00-05:00

Archinect recently took a field trip to Playa Vista, a quiet community minutes from the ocean in west Los Angeles, to check out UCLA’s new satellite architecture campus, IDEAS. Entirely housed within a 13,000sqft airplane hangar, the campus is used by architecture students in the university’s SUPRASTUDIO program, a one-year MArch II that pairs students with industry and non-profit leaders to focus on an advanced research project. Since its first run in 2008, SUPRASTUDIO has tripled in size and offerings, now composed of 41 students working in studios led by Gehry Partners/Gehry Technologies, Greg Lynn, and Thom Mayne/The Now Institute.

A far cry from the hilly green labyrinth of UCLA’s Westwood campus, the IDEAS hangar formerly belonged to famed aviation magnate Howard Hughes, and now plays neighbor to Los Angeles’ YouTube Space (and nearby Google in Venice). The Playa Vista community is still very new, first developed in the early aughts as part of President Bill Clinton’s init...

UCLA Architecture and Urban Design partners with Hyperloop to study tube transit system

2013-10-31T09:00:00-04:00

This post is brought to you by UCLA Architecture and Urban Design:

JumpStartFund-backed Hyperloop will conduct research with UCLA SUPRASTUDIO

UCLA Architecture and Urban Design (A.UD) has announced it will partner with Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc., which is backed by JumpStartFund, for its 2014–15 master of architecture II program, known as SUPRASTUDIO.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is a newly created company that aims to bring to life entrepreneur Elon Musk's Hyperloop concept: a high-speed tube transit system that could whisk passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about 30 minutes. Engineers Marco Villa, former director of missions operations at SpaceX, and Patricia Galloway, the first female president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, will spearhead the development of Hyperloop. The project was created through JumpStartFund, a crowd-powered online incubator led by CEO Dirk Ahlborn and chief operating officer Paul Coleman, a UCLA p...

Hitoshi Abe to lecture at UCLA, November 1

2013-10-28T20:16:00-04:00

Hitoshi Abe, the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA and principal at Atelier Hitoshi Abe Sendai/Los Angeles, will lecture on the UCLA campus this Friday, November 1.

Atelier Hitoshi Abe is known for producing both structurally inventive and and spatially complex architecture, with offices in both Sendai, Japan and Los Angeles. Since winning first prize in the Miyagi Stadium competition in 1992, Dr. Hitoshi Abe has maintained an international practice alongside lecturing and publishing. He became Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA in 2007.

As A.UD Chair, Abe has developed programming to be more cross-cultural, technologically innovative, and critical, while also establishing the new M.Arch II program, SUPRASTUDIO.

Event details:

Where: Perloff Hall, Decafe, UCLA Campus

When: 6:30pm, Friday, November 1

Editor's Picks #291

2012-11-27T01:06:00-05:00

In the latest edition of the Showcase series, Archinect highlighted House in Moreira, by Phyd Arquitectura. The house has "Patios that enable continuity between different spaces of the house and interior/exterior which behave like a sun clock, alternating solid and diffuse light". Thayer-D questioned "What's with conceptual purity at the expense of function and maybe joy?" but Vile Child chimed in "seems SupraJoyful to me"

With the latest edition of the Showcase series, Archinect highlighted House in Moreira, by Phyd Arquitectura. The house has "Patios that enable continuity between different spaces of the house and interior/exterior which behave like a sun clock, alternating solid and diffuse light".

Thayer-D questioned "What's with conceptual purity at the expense of function and maybe joy?" but Vile Child chimed in "seems SupraJoyful to me. But I like form and space and mass and light and how the colors outside reflect on the white walls. Shit like that".

Plus, Jaakko van ‘t Spijker reported in from the first findings of a studio in the Harvard GSD program, dealing with ‘the Elements of Architecture’. Which were publicly presented in a packed Dependance at the Schieblock in Rotterdam on Friday night, November 16th. The feature led glass to comment "I find OMA creates some of today's most compelling architecture using standard off-the-shelf parts in unique and exhilarating ways.... Do...

UCLA Rumbles On

2011-06-09T18:41:00-04:00

I have seen a lot of final projects from different architectural schools this year but clearly UCLA has proven that the school holds a spcecial place in the academia. Shortly after participating in Thom Mayne and Karen Lohrmann advised SUPRASTUDIO reviews, I walked around and my snapshot sensibility has curated this slideshow for Archinect's world wide readers... Forgive me if I missed your project or studio since I was exhausted and could not find every room. Congratulations go to the students, faculty and the management for their contributions to architectural discourse. Watch for in depth presentation of SUPRASTUDIO coming soon in our features section.
Slideshow