This post is brought to you by Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

Since its founding in 1972 as an independent school of architecture, SCI-Arc has developed a series of idiosyncrasies that have anecdotally permeated the broader architecture community. Prominent among these is hosting its cap and gown-less Graduation in the middle of September-- literally an hour after its last review of the academic year and a week after the first pin ups of the new school year. This means that September is the most dynamic time of the year at SCI-Arc as it concurrently welcomes in a new class of undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students and bids farewell to its latest generation of architects eager and ready to imagine and shape the future.

SCI-Arc’s 2017 graduation ceremony was held on Sunday, September 10 and featured a commencement address by architect Marion Weiss, cofounder of WEISS/MANFREDI and B.Arch Graduate Deborah Garcia ’17. 

A celebration of student achievement, the ceremony culminated with the awarding of the Blythe and Thom Mayne Undergraduate Thesis Prize to Connor Gravelle for his response to a design competition call for a museum of contemporary art in Lima, Peru that directly addressed the challenge of engaging contemporary architecture with existing historic architecture and the identity of buildings in dual contexts: both in an urban setting within a city, as well as to exhibition visitors in museum space. 

At the graduate level, SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso announced the dual awarding of the Gehry Prize for Best Graduate Thesis to Keith Marks and Jamies Kubiniec.

 Marks’s thesis project was motivated by the use of the image as a productive means of generating the architectural object and presented a new home constructed of the strange conditions, parts, and pieces that make up many residential housing in the local regions of Glendale, CA and the Boyle Heights neighborhood in East Los Angeles.

Kubiniec’s thesis reversed the principle of abstraction and produced a new form of representation from seemingly simple and dated 8Bit arcade game characters. By zooming into the details, Kubiniec found that the characters were lost and what emerged was an image with entirely new and infinitely scalable geometric qualities.

The first graduates of the SCI-Arc EDGE postgraduate programs were also recognized during the ceremony. Fiction and Entertainment graduate Samuel Pierce Myers was recognized for his final project, a short film depicting the strange implications of technology in contemporary life.

SCI-Arc begins the academic year represented in the annual DesignIntelligence rankings. The school placed #8 in Top Undergraduate Programs, #4 in Graduate Programs most admired by Deans and Chairs, and #5 in the Design Theory & Practice.

For the new academic year, SCI-Arc is launching a Cinema Series as part of the school’s initiative to bring breadth and the Liberal Arts to architectural education. The Series is also a way for the school to reach out and contribute to the intellectual and visual culture of the local community. The first Tuesday of each month, SCI-Arc will screen major motion pictures related to architecture, technology, and visual culture, with special live content at the front end. SCI-Arc Faculty and KXLU DJ M.C. Michael Stock will engage screenwriters, production designers, directors, as well as theorists and historians to contextualize the films and engender discussion. The kickoff film screening will be Stanley Kubrick’s The Shinning, hosted on October 3rd in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall at 7 pm with special guest Jan Harlan, Stanley Kubrick’s producer from 1975-1999.

The Cinema Series will be in addition to SCI-Arc’s public lectures series which introduce speakers from a broad cross-section of today’s most exciting architects, artists, philosophers and theorists including Oana Stanescu, Carme Pinós and Simon Critchley, among others. This fall, Fear and Wonder: An Expedition through the Landscapes of Fiction, a symposium curated by Liam Young, will join an ensemble of directors, concept artists, video game designers and storytellers for an expedition through an atlas of imaginary worlds, fictional cities and speculative geographies.

With its academic and public programs in full swing, SCI-Arc will host a school-wide Open House on Saturday, October 7th from 9 am-2 pm. Students and families looking for more information about the academic programs are welcome to attend. Please visit ww.sciarc.edu/openhouse for more details and to RSVP.