I am pleased that the SCI-Arc Board of Trustees at its quarterly meeting [on Wednesday, September 10] approved the contract with Hernan Diaz Alonso as the next Director of SCI-Arc. Hernan will assume this role beginning September 2015. — Jerry Neuman, Chair, SCI-Arc Board of Trustees
Hernan Diaz Alonso's appointment had been percolating since the beginning of the summer, when SCI-Arc's search committee first recommended him for the position after also considering professor Wes Jones. Diaz Alonso will take up the directorship at a pivotal point in SCI-Arc's history in relation to the city of Los Angeles, succeeding Eric Owen Moss' thirteen-year service which solidified the school's position in the now rapidly-developing Arts District of downtown LA.
Aside from serving academic and administrative roles at SCI-Arc since 2001, Diaz Alonso is also principal of LA-based Xefirotarch, a multidisciplinary practice that won MoMA PS1's Young Architects Program in 2005. He will also serve as Yale University's Eero Saarinen Professor of Architectural Design in Spring 2015.
Before Diaz Alonso's role was made public, we spoke with him for our Deans List series, focusing on his plans for managing SCI-Arc's evolution in the midst of a rapidly changing Los Angeles. Here are a few teasers from our upcoming interview feature:
The following is the complete public press release from SCI-Arc:
LOS ANGELES, CA (September 18, 2014) – The Board of Trustees of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) last week appointed Hernan Diaz Alonso, architect and educator, as the Los Angeles architecture school’s new Director beginning September 2015.
Diaz Alonso will succeed architect Eric Owen Moss, SCI-Arc director since 2002, whose term concludes next year. The new appointment was announced by Jerold B. Neuman, chairman of the SCI-Arc Board of Trustees. “It is my honor to announce that the Board of Trustees has finalized its search for the next Director of SCI-Arc, and after over a decade of extraordinary service by Eric Owen Moss, we are placing SCI-Arc’s future in the amazing mind, heart and hands of Hernan Diaz Alonso,” said Neuman. “We are committed to maintaining the trajectory of the school and, in the coming year, will be reaching out to alumni and supporters around the world, celebrating the great work that has been done by the current administration and providing the best possible platform from which Hernan can continue to move SCI-Arc forward and, in fact, accelerate its momentum.”
“SCI-Arc’s task, in perpetuity, is to go where we haven’t been, and report on what we find,” said SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss. “Hernan Diaz Alonso is the perfect architect to continue this expedition.”
A faculty member at SCI-Arc since 2001, Diaz Alonso has served in several leadership roles including Coordinator of the Graduate Thesis program from 2007-2010, and Graduate Programs Chair from 2010 until the present. He has been widely credited with spearheading the transition of SCI-Arc to digital technologies, playing a key role in shaping SCI-Arc’s graduate curriculum in recent years.
“SCI-Arc is a unique institution and I feel fortunate for being able to call it home for the past 13 years,” said Diaz Alonso in an address to faculty, students and alumni. “Our school is an ambitious institute, and I share this ambition to showcase to the world the many different ways in which architecture and design can change it.”
While serving as Graduate Programs Chair, Hernan Diaz Alonso worked tirelessly alongside SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss, Academic Affairs Director Hsinming Fung and Undergraduate Programs Chair John Enright to successfully oversee a school recognized worldwide for its research and exploratory tradition. Together, they guided SCI-Arc in establishing a global standard for architecture education in the 21st century, ensuring a clear vision for the school and a solid reputation among peer institutions.
In parallel to his role at SCI-Arc, Hernan Diaz Alonso is Principal of the Los Angeles-based architecture office Xefirotarch. His multidisciplinary practice is praised for work at the intersection of design, animation, interactive environments and radical exploration of architecture. Over the course of his career as an architect and educator, Diaz Alonso has earned accolades for his leadership and innovation, as well as his ability to build partnerships among varied constituencies. In 2005, he was the winner of MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program (YAP) competition, and in 2012 he received the “Educator of the Year” Award from the American Institute of Architects. Most recently, he won the 2013 AR+D Award for Emerging Architecture and a 2013 Progressive Architecture Award for his design of the Thyssen Bornamiza Pavilion/Museum in Patagonia, Argentina.
Diaz Alonso’s architectural designs have been featured in exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale, London Architecture Biennale, and Archilab in Orleans, France, as well as displayed in featured exhibitions in leading architecture museums such as the New York MoMA, SFMOMA, Art Institute of Chicago and the MAK Centre, Vienna. The work has also been widely published in magazines, periodicals and multiple books, including the “Excessive” monograph of Xefirotarch. The office is currently working on a new monograph to be published by Thames and Hudson. Diaz Alonso’s work is also part of the permanent collections of the FRAC Center, SFMOMA, New York MoMA, the Thyssen Bornamiza Collection, the MAK Museum, Vienna, and Art Institute of Chicago.
A gifted educator, Diaz Alonso has been acknowledged throughout the years with prestigious appointments such as Yale University’s Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professorship of Architectural Design in 2010, Visiting Design Studio Faculty at the GSAPP at Columbia University 2004-2010, an ongoing appointment as architectural design professor in the Urban Strategies Postgraduate Program at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and as Distinguished Faculty Member at SCI-Arc. In spring 2015, he will serve as Yale University’s Eero Saarinen Professor of Architectural Design.
14 Comments
Hahhahahhahaha
His style is very different from my own, but he is exactly the kind of person that should be leading design schools. Design schools should be places that encourage radical ideas that upend the status quo.
"Design schools should be places that encourage radical ideas that upend the status quo."
Yeah, becasue the students who come there to learn are steeped in the status quo and if you can't actually change the status quo, why not indoctrinate students. They should be taught how to design for people first. Without that, they just end up faking it.
BTW, what is the status quo you feel needs to be upended and how exactly should student's be trained to do so? This is romantic nostalgia for the early modernist period when the academies of Europe where stuck in historical pastiche mode, which incidentally produced the cities these students will spend a lovely semester abroad, should they be so lucky.
Thayer,
Yes, students do bring with them many assumptions based on their narrow experience of the status quo. Sometimes its observations about their home growing up, or the buildings they know in their hometown, or home improvement and Extreme Home tv programs they've watched or from playing Sim City.
"They should be taught how to design for people first."
First, that already happens.
Second, its much more complicated than that. If you ask a student to design a chair "for people first", they will first search their memory bank for a chair they like. Getting that student to challenge those assumptions and think through and challenge the logic, function, history and aesthetics of the standard chair is not indoctrination.
Did you have a bad experience with an architecture or design school? You seem aggrieved.
I hope Hernan puts this on every now and then. That would make SCI Arc fully relevant.
Orhan I thought he was until I took a second look at the photo. He is a pretty intense guy who when we met him as a class did pretty cool work and his no bull shit bullshit was quite entertaining. Given what I know about Sci-Arc he seems to be the right choice..................Status qou? There is no Status qou anymore and thats the status qou, welcome to the 21st century. Post all the shit that trended once. Thayer-D you ask too much of the cult leaders, the indoctrinators of anti whatever.
davvid,
Most great teachers work with the innate passions of a student, understanding that any great work of art must have feeling to give it life, regardless of technical finesse. It's not that they might love a gaudy Pimp my Crib, but that they are simply jazzed about designing/building that's worth cultivating. Just ask any musician worth their salt and they could elaborate.
I had both good and bad experiences at school, but the bad ones consisted of professors more interested in their own battles than teaching a student to think for themselves. I can't agree that some time watching HGTV or playing sim-city is "the status quo" however that works in your mind. I've found most students struggle with simple plan, section, elevation coordination, so having a foot hold in spatial thinking, by any means, is a plus. Remember that many an early modernist began with an academic education, so this status quo is hardly cast in stone, or pre-cast.
"and his no bull shit bullshit was quite entertaining." awsome!
well since you asked Thayer-D as I'm desperately avoiding a translation of complex legal language into laymen's terms...NYC Department of Buildings damn you!
_____
Eight years or so ago a bunch of graduate students like myself, architects looking to hit the reset button after working a bit, and a bunch of Chinese students embarked on a trip to Los Angeles. We were going to go to China, but given the large portion of Chinese students in our class we went to LA for high-end prototyping car design.
I'd been to LA once before trying to hook-up with a young actress. At the time I remember driving around for a few hours and asking "Where the hell is there something worth seeing around here?". We drove up to Santa Barbara....Marina Del Rey was nice and so was that outdoor Italian restaurant where you broke into song singing 'That's Amore' like every five minutes...everybody was somebody, I nearly slit my wrist.
So i was very surprised when we had to take an old elevator up 4-5 floors in what looked like an Urban building to get to Hernan's office at the time.
Hernan had been smoking cigars in the office prior to our arrival. There were 2 desks with 3 chairs or so. A few books on the tables, but otherwise minimal and very clean. He started telling us his story, how he was a film student in Argentina who discovered publications showing Zaha's works and others...so he got exited about architecture, because according to the 'status quo' this was not architecture he knew ;)
At the time of this meeting Hernan was teaching at Sci-Arc and Columbia. That's dedication, teaching at schools 3000 miles apart the same semester - same week.
Hernan then showed us some bad-ass animations he had done in Maya. He put a CD in a laptop. When is the last time you saw someone put a CD in a laptop?
One of the Chinese students asked him if he had done the animation himself. This is the same Chinese student who asked the lady at Greg Lynn's office how any of the work she was showing us made any money - I loved this guy.
Hernan said he had done the animation we just saw. He noted he had hired a new kid who he mentioned by name and was learning some new trick from him on some new animations he was doing. A cell phone exhibit or something...
We were impressed - He, unlike those douches who probably donate money to the schools to keep their teaching jobs, he did his own work. You know what I mean Thayer-D, unlike those douches who use very smart kids with low self-esteems who can teach themselves Maya in 5 minutes to fight their own fucked-up psychological battles!
Hernan showed us Blade (Wesley Snipes) blood splattering scenes on repeat as he discussed the animation and liquid. At the time I was getting into Particle Systems in 3dsMax - very cool shit. I had also just read Peter Eisenman's essay Blue Lines (or something), where Peter essentially says the only thing left was exploring the arabesque and grotesque....Hernan was doing it!
the NO BULLSHIT BULLSHIT moment occurred when Hernan started describing to us how the PS1 job happened. It was one of the stories where the guy telling you the story was still pretty much in disbelief - a lot of WTF but it happened - you know like we wanted to do this, so we went over to Ove Arup and they said we could do it, so we did it.
We all nearly lost our shit when he started telling us about the interviews with the jurors. He had done his homework on the jurors. Somehow in the interview conversations about his shiny Maya made forms a question was asked that essentially got this response from Hernan - I paraphrase from an 8 year old memory -
'Like 70' porn film set furniture, black epoxy, cum all over it.'
(accurate a story as I can remember)
I've now decided to have another beer instead of writing this long overdue email.
Cheers Hernan!
cheers, Olaf.
nice to see some love.
That's a nice story, thanks for sharing, what parts I understood. Sounds like knowing the latest computer program is key in Sci-Arch. I don't mean to rag on Maya and all those other programs, I work on computers also, but that's just not architecture. Special effects on a Wesley Snipes movie are cool and all, but what makes a story good is good writting, and for that, a good understanding of human nature and a knowledge of other great story tellers beats a computer program any day. Just don't expect those pushing products in black tee-shirts to let you in on that, not good for business, what not.
I hope that while they hop from one new, must have comp. program to another, that they are advancing their skills in architecture. Afterall, there are only 24 hours in a day, and the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west. As for our own evolution, it isn't quite as fast as our technological evolution, but when your young, it sure can feel that way. I wish him and all of Sci-Arch the best.
BTW, no bullshit bullshit is still bullshit, just marketed well. Glad you can tell the difference.
TD> Its SCI-ARC not Arch.
All you need to know is software.hmmm. I remember the day Eric Moss wanted to learn how to draw on 'the computer
'. One of those mac ll with the green screen. It was a little square house with a pitched roof. ..like a child would do with his first toy. Just remembering....
gyroscopic horizons. where does the sun set?
fuck off Thayer.
sorry eric, SCI-ARC. I agree with Ohran on the scarf choice, ditch the american flag thing and go with the palestinian look, yet being hispanic that might not go down too well, speaking as a hispanic who got a lot of attention after 9-11. Anyway, I thought that scarf on a mild day look was passe...then again, I think focusing on architecture rather than the tools used to draw it was the point. Probably should go out and buy SMX XL and XXL (revised American edition) and invest in tech stocks. We're all data nerds now!.
boy, you've got to chill on the hatred, it's not good for the creative process I've found. Amazing how heated some get at any criticism. Reminds me of fundamentalism.
Thayer: me no like what me no understand?
You lost all credibility as soon as you wrote "sci-arch"...ha!
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