Architect and educator, Ray Kappe FAIA, passed away yesterday. The renowned architect experienced lung failure due to many bouts with pneumonia in recent years.
Kappe founded the Department of Architecture at California Polytechnic State University of Pomona before leaving in 1972 to start what is today known as the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Along with his wife, Shelly Kappe, and other students and faculty, Kappe helped pioneer a new approach to architectural education. Today, SCI-Arc has thousands of graduates working and teaching across the globe and is considered one of the top architecture schools in the US.
A true master, Kappe's legacy follows those of early SoCal architects such as Schindler, Neutra, and FLW. The late Stephen Kanner, co-founder and former president of the Architecture + Design Museum in Los Angeles once said, "Ray's own home may be the greatest house in all of Southern California." Indeed, it undeniably echoes the canonical aesthetics of Southern California Modernism, an indisputable tour de force.
Later in life, Kappe began working with LivingHomes, exploring a more modular approach to design and construction. With a career spanning over 6 decades, Kappe's impact and influence will undoubtedly continue to ring strong in generations to come.
5 Comments
All of us are in that second picture.
"Kappe Houses are beautiful in that they visually take you to places without you physically moving an inch. The space doesn't stop. You can look but you won't see a line that doesn't depart, travel, connect or fly away into the canyons. He is daringly modern, moving you through the bottlenecks of organized compression before dropping you in his poetry of space, architectural construction, scale, light and experiment. Hello Ray, once more."
(quoting myself from an article.)
Sad day for our SCI Arc family...
"Slow salute to Ray Kappe. He and Bernard Zimmerman were my role models during my days at Cal Poly and beyond. I greatly admired the man,his work, and his professionalism. May you rest in eternal peace Sir.
I met Mr. Kappe once at his home. I had enrolled in an introductory arch class at Pasadena City College, the semester coinciding with a retrospective /open house tour of his work. When I spoke to him briefly, he said that the community college program was a great opportunity for people from diverse backgrounds who may not have otherwise had the opportunity to study architecture. He said in a sincere manner that was one of his hopes in starting SCI-Arc.
I'll miss Mr. Kappe a lot. I got to know him while I was the architect for the restoration of one of his houses here in LA. We had to make some sensitive material changes to the house, for pragmatic reasons, and we dialogued with Ray to develop strategies for that. He was so gracious and collaborative. He seemed almost surprised that our clients loved the house so much that they wanted to bring it back to life. He was a humble, talented man who was a key figure in molding the language of modernism to something that felt like it was fine-tuned to California. RIP, Ray.
Ray was an inspiration from my Cal Poly days. New to the profession I had just graduated from UC Irvine with a BA in Biology and was hungry to learn about architecture. Spending a year at Cal Poly to beef up my portfolio of projects I managed to get into UCLA March II program. SCIArc is your legacy to the world you will not see. Thanks for the push-start! RIP.
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