Archinect - News

SCI Arc A Short Essay: Nightmare of the Sameness

2013-04-23T03:05:27-04:00

After visiting the old friends and teachers and I wandered into a section where they displayed the semester's work at SCI Arc's 40 th. anniversary party, my friend Eric Chavkin pointed out “you never have to worry about plagiarism here because they all look the same.” This was the alarming sameness likewise agreed by many we have talked to while walking the long corridor. The display of student projects had the image of a gift shop of sorts, vases, bowls or shoes on pedestals, colorful, beautifully fabricated but extremely hallow as architecture and repetitive in a school-wide scale. After the first few, you have seen them all look. My friend and I kept walking and hoping to see perhaps a different section but, really, only the instructors names stenciled above the pedestaled groupings were changed.

Overall, they reminded me the anatomical models of the cadavers in schools. Under the skin or sometimes inside out spaces were machine shaped and assumed, "if it works for ani...

ILLUSIONIST

2012-08-28T16:22:00-04:00

THE HYPE OF THE SCHOOL IS WAY DEEPER THAN WHAT I BRIEFLY EXPERIENCED LAST SEPTEMBER. WHAT I AM ABOUT TO SAY I HAVE MENTIONED TO ERIC, BUT NOT IN DETAIL. ERIC SHOWED NO INTEREST IN ME ELABORATING.

Another take on Sci Arc. This time from the horse's mouth... Glen Small was one of the original and visionary founders of the school. Particularly interesting first person up close and personal storytelling in which Eric Moss referred as "ILLUSIONIST". Excuse some of the name spellings.

Jennifer Gilman's "Liminal Drift"

2012-01-22T13:14:24-05:00

I am using drawing as a way of inhabiting the space. The drawings are created at 1:1 scale, the body occupying the building and the drawing simultaneously–responding to each unique spatial condition with its inherent residual cultural significance, aesthetic materiality, and phenomenological effect.

SCI ARC's newly designed Alumni Portal makes its debut with works from the past graduates of the school. “Liminal Drift” by Jennifer Gilman (M.Arch 2007) gets my attention for its beautiful nature and execution with a broom and colored sawdust.