sci-arc would be my choice without question

I graduated from UF undergrad, and can tell you that they have been putting a lot into their graduate program.  UF is definitely worth considering.  Our undergrads get in to all of the top programs across the board and for the past several years they have been focusing hard on bringing the graduate program up to par with the rest of them.  I can't speak for Sci-Arc, but can say there are surely some questions to be raised.  I won't pretend, however, to know it all.

UF has a variety of professors and ideologies as well as design approaches.  There are also great study abroad opportunities.

I am not so versed on Sci-Arc, but did not apply there for a number of reasons. One being the grimy location in downtown L.A.  Another being the uber-digital, overly conceptual design reputation they have.  I could be wrong.  Someone else could give a better, more informed opinion of Sci-Arc, and of that I am sure.

Sci-Arc: LA, teachers: Wiscombe, Testa, Alonso, et al

UF - Gainesville, some decent professors...

go to Sci-Arc

Nice to know that a $175k degree is not much of a concern. No need to even do your own research. Get the butler to do it!

@eagle9:

SCI-Arc is not in a "grimy location" downtown.  It is in the arts district/little Tokyo which is really hip, urban and artsy.  Tons of bars and restaurants, swanky and holes in the wall for poor students or the rich and fabulous.  Plus tons of great lofts, loads of designers/architecture offices.  You may think that it's grimy, but it really is not at all.  That's the thing about LA though to consider, you can have a really cool neighborhood just blocks away from the worst neighborhood in the city, Skid Row.

I think it's obvious which you should choose though palynn, SCI-Arc. 

I wouldn't consider Wiscombe or Alonso to be reasons to attend Sci-Arch.   They seem more interested in created disciples than students.   Your education at Sci-Arch will be a lot more specific to your particular professors interests than at UF.  I think this approach has a lot of benefits for people coming in without an Architectural background as it ensures that you learn how to design.  The result is a lower level of diversity among student works.  UF will have a high level of diversity but a lot more boring projects.

Sci-Arch has great energy.  I visit the school multiple times a year.  You are pretty much guaranteed to come out of the school with a specific set of tools that can get you some pretty exciting jobs, especially outside of architecture.

I don't know much about UF but I am pretty sure that it will better prepare you to become a practicing architect.  This is not necessarily a complement to the program.  You may find that you are bored to tears with there pedagogy.   It seems less of a question of who has the better program but what type of designer do you want to be?

I would choose Sci-Arch without a second thought btw

For $175K, both these schools suck. You want a film degree, go to NYU!

Sci-Arc= third rate film school masquerading as an architecture program.

burningman your the archinect's village idiot

fade, if you read burningman's comments in a Queens, NY accent, they become infinitively more charming.

Wow rusty, that really worked

Beyond just the differences in the architectural departments.... SCI-Arch is just architecture.  UF would offer the whole range of university benefits - friends in other study disciplines, sports and recreation, etc...

Also consider where you want to live after school and what type of work you want to do.  If you want to be a conceptual designer and live in LA, then maybe SCI-Arch.  If you want to be a practicing architect and live somewhere else, maybe UF.

"........Before coming to SCI-Arc, I served for five years as Admissions Director at the American Film Institute...."

-JJ Jackman, Admissions Director of Sci-Arc

Awww, you don't like my Jackson Heights accent, maybe the accent of someone from a North Carolina (above)  village sounds better.

Third rate film school. I'd recommend NYU's film school instead of Sci-Arc.

i'm so glad others are finally calling this guy (girl?) out on his BS--so sick of going to every thread and seeing his anti-art, anti-intellectual, anti-education crap.

it really bugs me to think that people genuinely seeking advice on these threads might actually listen to him...

i always wonder--why do people who think this way move to new york??  burningman defends new urbanism and seems to hate absolutely everything about nyc---so why the hell is he here? 

of course there is the obvious possibility that he's a native new yorker (most of them, believe it or not, would agree with him).  the difference is that they move to lovely LI or NJ at the first opportunity....

I am attending SCI-Arc this fall.  I had nothing remotely film-like in my portfolio.  I never expressed any interest about wanting to do film in my statement of purpose.  I spoke to JJ multiple times during the application process and never got any impression from him or the school that it has anything to do with film-making.  It's an avant garde architecture school.  The technologies they are using are already being adopted by architecture firms in big cities and the are future of architecture everywhere.  The concepts being taught are meant to bring many disciplines together, this could include film, but primarily interiors, graphics, art, engineering and architecture.

I think burningman just likes to argue anything that anyone says and I find it comical.

Wow, Elinor, those are quite a few assumptions you've made.

Elinor will come on here and tell everyone to go after the most expensive Ivy League degree they can find, the more expensive and bigger name, always the better - because, well, she also went to an ivy league school and she made 65k with her ivy league degree and only made 45k with her B.Arch degree. So she comes on here and say it is worth it...

What she doesn't tell you is that she was well into her 30s when she graduated with the Ivy League degree, so 65k is worth it for her, but on every thread, she will tell people with no work experience to go ahead and get those expensive degree because that 22-25 year-old with an ivy league degree and no work experience will make 50% more than 45K - according to her... The sad thing is that many  people in their upper 20s make as much as she did when she came out of an ivy league school in her 30s. So she had to get an ivy league degree much later in life to do what most people can do without; and has spread this message on every thread.

NY: Never did I mention hating everything about NY. I like this city. I hate the hipsters and Grey Pouponers, which she can't seem to understand- but this must be her  version of "everything" in NY.... I said it is a  dump compared to London, and Elinor - someone who doesn't seem to know anything about London and can't make an argument either way, Elinor with her ivy league degree, can't stand the thought of anything being better than what she has.

As for New Urbanism, I can make an argument either way. The difference is that if we were to stand in front of the "white building" by Gehry on the West Side highway, Elinor's ivy league degree and everything she has learned will teach her to say "it's quite nice" while someone with a planning degree and an understanding of NU would say, it does absolutely nothing for the urban fabric and can make a coherent argument for why something works and why something doesn't.

Yeah elinor! Assplain your love affair with white Gehry buildings. :)

oh, I've heard it before, trust me, you don't want to hear the ass-plaination.

" I don't know what you're talking about, it's quite nice" ;)

Nothing says NYC like this quite nice building. Even this quite nice building looks like a plain square box compared to what they teach in Sci-Arc.

http://gsoa.dcp.ufl.edu

^just for reference for those that don't know much about the grad school at UF (I went for undergrad years ago)...

SCI-Arc and UF are so different, the question is more "what are you interested in doing" than anything else.

burningman seriously, enough already

you need a girlfriend/boyfriend/billygoat to love

im embarassed for you, youre more ignorant than any new urbanist

dont be such a self-righteous grandfather

that frank gehry building fronts onto a HIGHWAY.

if you cross that highway, there's a 60+ block-long LINEAR PARK.

on the HUDSON RIVER WATERFRONT.

to say it is an urbanistic failiure is pretty insane.  yep, they should have put some flower boxes and a conversation pit there between the front door and the passing cars. that would have been better.

shut the fuck up.

with highway

what do you want?  a little bread shop?  a cafe with little umbrellas? trees?  oh wait, there are trees...

ps--if i 'didn't tell' all those things then how do you know them?  did you guess?  you're a damned good guesser.

you may be interested in one other thing--i got my bArch at 26.  before that i was doing other, wonderful, fascinating, very artsy things...and for the first couple of years after. 

so go ahead and factor that in when you do your mathematical analysis of my earning power....

dear original poster--my sincere apologies for where this thread went......

don't worry about the original poster. They are busy crashing daddy's porsche tonight.

anyways, here's burningman's rejected entry for the project Gehry built:

that burningboy is a dearly misinformed 2nd year student im afraid.
i remember when he though daniel libeskind was patrick schumacher

he's effectively ending his career before its even begun, he's probably rusty's son.

Oh Elinor,

Ignorant comments and manners like you just demonstrated must be exemplary of what an ivy league architecture degree teaches these days, and I find it even more shocking you would make such ignorant comments because you live in NYC, and claimed to have been a professor.

First, the Westside “Highway” south of 56th st hasn’t been a highway since the 1970s. Virtually every street from the city grid extends into it, with stop lights almost every block. Technically, it’s a boulevard, albeit a shitty one. The FDR Drive by comparison IS a highway.

Second,  Gehry’s white building does have the benefit of Chelsea Piers, some small galleries, markets, a couple ritzy hotels, and the later transformation of the High Line nearby.  It was a sad missed opportunity to do something great there; e.g the Embarcadero. But it’s Gehry, what is anyone to expect but the rejection of the city. White frosting all around the building to keep everything internalized - as expected. You like white frosting Elinor?

Also, to call urbanism and planning just the sprinkling of trees is an insult to all of NYC where you live in; and just plain ignorant. I pity anyone who you had to teach.

I'm sure even Louis Kunt and grumpy old man rusty would have more fun in Chelsea since they seem to be so fond of one another.

Couldn't help but noticed Elinor and Rusty both posted here on a Saturday night. Don't you have friends or a life?

Hey Rusty, since you seem to not have a job and are always on here, why not call up Elinor and take her to your castle?

cause saturday nights are always about going out, you are a stupid kid burningboy

So many grumpy people on here, I think more people here need to get out on a Saturday night for some chica-chica-pow-pow:)

this forum would be better place without you non-architects burningboy

Haha, "non-architect"

more assumptions; are you sure you're not Elinor.

....and back to topic....(thanks for the morning laugh guys!)

UF - great school, overall, Gainesville is a ton of fun (I went to UF for undergrad, a while back now, only making broad assumptions about their grad program)

Pros - teachers that actually care about you and your career

          - broad education possibilities

          - undergrad is one of the best in the country, diverse and strong, you'll have exposure to a ton of great student work (which is more valuable than any professor)

Cons - it is Gainesville, so while fun, there isn't much long term or ways to branch out (although I am sure they organize traveling studios, like the Vicenza program, which is just an amazing experience)

Sci-Arc

Pros - "respected" school, and what that means will be determined by where you go to work later on, could be good, could be not great

         - while I personally don't care for LA one bit (as a UCLA grad), there is an insane abundance of things to look at and learn from

Cons - lack of diversity, simply by it's isolation 

It's a coin toss, really.  I'd look at where you want to be 10 years from now.  If LA is it, then go there, if it'll be NY then less point in going to Ca.  

Money - if money truly is no object then you probably dont' care or need any "practical" experience and will probably want to work (for nothing) at some stararchitect's office.  If that's the case, then I'd head LA.  

nyc is a functional, urban, pedestrian-friendly city.  fitting that the NU crowd can't recognize the real thing and tries to fill a working city with corporatized, sanitized, pseudo-urban 'mixed-use developments' that are really open-air shopping malls filled with chain stores, tourist restaurants and privatized recreation areas with faux gas lamps....

have you been to battery park city or the south street seaport lately? probably not, because they're lame, failing, 80s-era approximations of what an upscale, urban center might look like.  bo-ring.

calling west st. a boulevard is wishful thinking.  when was the last time you took a stroll down the sidewalks??  try looking it up on wikipedia--you'll find it under 'west side highway'.

and--hudson river park works because it's just that--a park.  no sunglass hut, no jamba juice, no friendship-bracelet-selling pushcart vendors.  leave it alone.  if you're in chelsea and want a walkable commercial strip, it's just a block or two to 9th or 10th aves...

so...am i going out with rusty, or do i have to compete for his attentions??  moot point either way, since i'm married.  but--we can always double-date.  :)

It's hard to fuck up a medium sized building in NYC. That said, Gehry's buildings have always had a weakness when it comes to ground floor plane. It's like they would rather be chilling out in a suburban parking lot somewhere.

elinor, double date it is! Burningboy's mom is totally game. Oh, and b-boy, momma says for you to play nice with other kids in the sandbox or no camp-gazebo-workshop for you this summer!

burningboy,

i actually somewhat agree on the Gehry building, Its a strange area of new york to be in, maybe one day the ground floor will be shopping and DPZ will put some paving on the street and you can then cream yourself, but  not until IAC is replaced with your cookie dough tower. Remember son, architecture and urbanization can be different things.

Gehry does have 'urban' buildings, but talking about those would render your cosmetic visions irrelevant, luckily most people here can see that

Machado and Silvetti would have tried to tie into the urban fabric, but thats just the way THEY some things. Dont they teach at an ivy-league school somewhere?hmm.. been reading too much suburban nation again eh?

Interesting how you go from SCI-arc hate to gehry. I will say SCI-Arc is a great school, and they will catch heat for being radical. Fortunately, that means they dont have to  listen to people like you. Didnt Zumthor teach at Sci-Arc? doesnt a guy from sci-arc teach at UMiami now? hmm.. what going on here?

-Wasnt Palladio a stone-cutter?

-Didnt Coop Himmelblau set a truss on fire?

-Didnt Tony Vidler speak of architectures hybridized by other fields

-Leon Krier doesnt have an office

-Didnt philip johnson study architecture at 40

-Wasnt Scofidio doing art installations in the 80s (funny duany doesnt like the high-line)

-could it be that burningboy is a narrow-minded agent of nothing

this world of architecture is actually a big place, a big place for a burningboy

BUT WAIT NO, lets plop some seaside on there and im sure you'll be off deepthroating duany again, you non-architect you

An ivy league degree and still hasn't taking planning 101. Amazing to me that a "highway" with stop lights at virtually every block can be classified as a highway. I didn't say it was a pedestrian friendly boulevard with Grey Poupon sold at the corner. No grey poupon, no boulevard?

I'm not here to defend DPZ or Duany, funny how all of the sudden a planning degree becomes classified as NU. If anything, I spent more time ripping him apart studying planning than supporting him, but as I see the direction architecture schools are headed, I have to wonder when designing Rhino spaceships was architecture......oh, by the way, NYC does have street lamps if you haven't walked around lately, as well as some Jamba Juices, pseudo mixed use and TOURISTS -more so than anywhere in the US. In fact most of the people in Manhattan during the daytime do not live in the city. It would suck without tourists, but I'm okay if all the hipsters just drowned themselves in the Hudson.

Yes, battery Park sucks, but not as much as the Gehry's white building. On that subject, when the hell did Gehry ever do an urban building...please inform, I'm don't have stubborn grey poupon stains and can be converted to some degree. 

To say architecture is separate from urbanism/planning is a sad fantasy they must be teaching at Sci-Arc, where I'm sure everyone who graduates from there is now a star. Go script some rhino models and place it anywhere, but spare me the bs. 

Elinor, Rusty is old school. I'm new school, double dating isn't for me but after you and Rusty are done with your date, call me, I'm sure he'd be down for a three-some;) 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_State_Route_9A

FYI mr. planner--not all highways are limited-access expressways:

What's a hipster? Quantify their sociological attributes without attributing a specific style of dress or costuming ritual to the term 'hipster.'

I'll give you $10 if you can. Also, don't cite that shit Adbusters article either.

Twenty dollars if you can work in Norman Mailer's The White Negro into a meaningful and fresh perspective in your executive-summary definition of a hispter— I'll even go as high as $40 if you can make a casual well-executed mention of Willa Cather's Sapphira and the slave girl into your soon-to-be-informed narrative.

And I'll even bulk this up to $50 if you also make at least three references from The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class by David R. Roediger. Lastly, I'll go as high as $100 if you include a serious meditation on the work of literary critics regarding the creation and implementation of the "Sambo" negro stereotype in late 19th-century or early 20th-century int American culture.

James, what you doing my man? This thread was already sufficiently derailed. No need for additional effort.  Oh, and where'd you get all this cash? Catch an alligator? 

Adequately defining a hipster = $100.00

Sounding like a hipster by using a pedantic display of lesser known literary sources = priceless

".......The surface streets that the Elevated Highway had run atop of—West Street, 11th Avenue and 12th Avenue—became an extension of NY 9A at some point between 1985 and 1995.[41][42] In early 1996, construction began on a project to convert this section of NY 9A into the West Side Highway, a six-lane urban boulevard with a parkway-style median and decorative lightposts......"

taken from your own wiki link... It's a "boulevard," not Las Ramblas, but the West Side "highway."  I also highlighted "decorative lightposts" for you because you seem to think lightposts don't exist here.

Who is this guy James that has so much money laying around, and why the obsession with the hipsters and Sambos?

Oh, I seriously doubt it would be done— the odds are clearly in my favor because the response will more than likely be, "I don't need to understand your hippy-dippy liberal hipster bullshit!" In a similar stroke of citation, let's settle something regarding which school is better or what useless qualitative comparisons we can make.

Art cannot be taught.

James Elkins, E.C. Chadbourne Chair of art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, wrote an entire book on the subject. There are several reasons why art cannot be taught— most of which are cultural hang ups regarding idealizing the construct of value within a physical work.

Three issues are at play relevant to this discussion: art, since the Medieval period, has always made a serious effort to separate itself from and to marginalize craft; art education lacks a rigorous and strenuous attempt to divorce art itself from technique and  theory; and, finally, all art is referential meaning that an education in modern and avant-garde invalidates the modern and avant-garde aspects of contemporary art itself.

Art school (including architecture school) can only teach you technique and methodology. It is up to the artist or designer to use those tools to create what they believe to be art— there's only 4 real stipulations to art: nature must be improved upon; it should have a narrative, express an idea or an emotion; it must be referential; and it must be critical in composition.

UF and Sci-Arc really only teach tools— those tools might be literal [software] or metaphorical tools [theory]. But the idea that one school over the other manufactures more artists is absolute hogwash. In fact, it is more likely that you'll see more avant garde art come from UF than Sci-Arc.

If we consider the role of avant garde art to be cantankerous to the accepted established norms of the bourgeois du jour— the referential nature of art would make a place like Gainesville, Florida a playground for the stark nature of 'traditional' avant garde art forms.

In a school like Sci-Arc, the only avant garde art that could exist are permutations and variations of Thomas Kinkade.

Preach it brother

Damn J. James R., you've really caught the spirit tonight!  Look out burningman, someone else is on fire!

haha, everybody is burning tonight.

he's only reasserting my point, that is, they both suck. Artsy--this has been the direction that arch schools have been heading deeper and deeper into.  Figure out where you need to be and take the cheaper route.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om2wMyS2NEA

watch 0:23-0:55---professor and student.

the thought that I would have to work in an office with people who talk like scares me. Imagine if you were to sit down for a progress meeting and this comes out of the principal's mouth.

No burningboy, J.James remarks are perhaps alluding to the role of the institution, not the narrow-minded nothingness which Duany drilled into you.

I say with sarcasm: god forbid people imagine, speculate on new forms of architecture and then get together to talk about it. what a horrible idea. one objective isnt to teach art, but to have a place to talk about what approaches you as a student could take. To say that certain institutions, which adopt specific languages and ideologies produce the same amount of "artists" as any other is like saying that the bauhaus and beaux-arts had no real influence in architecture and art at all. That is why UF, while it is a great

school is different from SCI-Arc in the experimental domain of architecture.

I could care less about imagining a world where art did not inform architecture, because in the works that matter, the ones that we admire, there is always art. Even Duany calls architecture a civic art, in the lineage of Rossi.

But to point the finger at dreamers and tell them stop to stop dreaming, is like ending your own life.

L Kunt,

We (you and I) are in agreement to some extent, stop flipping my points around.

I dont have any problem with art and theory being taught in arch schools, it's just that seems to be all it is now.

There's just something missing in all this. What if a an anesthesiologist was taught only the theories of modern medicine and never learned how to become an MD. You can have all the dreams you want, but schools these days are telling you, for 5 years and 250K, that you can be the next super star. It's sad really, you come out after 8 years of school and don't know the difference between a highway and a boulevard, and start throwing criticisms at where others live without looking at where you live.

A"professional" architecture degree, collective individualism, is the mother of irony. I don't have a problem with artists, but artists who leave school and never apply it, and instead abandon it completely to make some $$$ doing something else; or  a "free-thinking" hipster who feels the need to live with every other "free-thinker,"  a bunch of anti-consumerists but wall street babies; you can't really have it both ways.