Events at SCI-Arc are always free and open to the public 

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Los Angeles, CA (January 23, 2020) ­– SCI-Arc is pleased to continue its commitment to maintaining a robust platform for interdisciplinary thinkers with its spring 2020 series of public events. The SCI-Arc public lectures coming this spring introduce speakers from a broad cross-section of cultural practices, including artist Lauren Halsey, architect and educator Eva Franch i Gilabert, scholar and critic Charles L. Davis II, and writer and architect Andrés Jaque.  

The public lecture series is complemented by several exhibitions, including Anna Niemark’s Rude forms among us, and Post Persona by David Eskenazi held in conjunction with the A Queer Query symposium, as well as the launch of books by both Hernán Díaz Alonso and Elena Manferdini. The SCI-Arc Cinema Series has now partnered with LACMA to feature a diverse selection of films including Pleasantville with Academy Award winning production designer Jeannine Oppewall as the special guest, and The New Bauhaus with director Alyssa Nahmias.  

SCI-Arc’s annual Spring Show exhibition, highlighting the most compelling student projects of the year, will open to the public on May 2.  

Admission to SCI-Arc-hosted public events and exhibitions is always free and open to the public.  

Visit https://sciarc.edu/events/ for more information about upcoming lectures. All events begin at 7pm unless otherwise noted. Lectures take place in the W. M. Keck Lecture Hall and are broadcast on SCI-Arc’s Facebook page. Gallery opening receptions are held in the SCI-Arc Gallery and Kappe Library Gallery spaces.  

LECTURES + BOOK LAUNCHES + CINEMA SERIES  

February 4, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall 

Donnie Darko (2001) with guests James Duval, costar, and Richard Kelly, director

Conversation with Richard Kelly, James Duval, and Michael Stock at 7pm followed by the film screening  

In Donnie Darko a troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a man in a large rabbit suit who manipulates him to commit a series of crimes, after he narrowly escapes a bizarre accident.  

Richard Kelly is an American film director and writer, known for writing and directing the cult classic Donnie Darko in 2001. James Edward Duval is an American actor, who is known for his roles in the Gregg Araki trilogy—Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere—in addition to Frank in Donnie Darko, Blank in May, Miguel in Independence Day and Singh in Go.  

The SCI-Arc Cinema Series is a collaboration with The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).  

February 12, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Minsuk Cho: Challenged Grounds  

Minsuk Cho founded the Seoul-based firm Mass Studies in 2003. He has been committed to the discourse of architecture through sociocultural and urban research, and mostly built works, which have been recognized globally. Representative works include the Pixel House, Missing Matrix, Bundle Matrix, Shanghai Expo 2010: Korea Pavilion, Daum Space.1, Tea Stone/Innisfree, Southcape, Dome-ino, and the Daejeon University Dormitory. Current in-progress projects include the new Seoul Cinematheque (Montage 4:5), the Danginri Cultural Space (Danginri Podium and Promenade), and the Yang-dong District Main Street (Sowol Forest), as well as the recently selected design for the Yeonhui Public Housing Complex. Active beyond his practice, he co-curated the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale, and was the commissioner and cocurator of the Korean Pavilion for the 14th International Architecture Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, which was awarded the Gold Lion for Best National Participation. In late 2014, PLATEAU Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, held their first ever architecture exhibition, highlighting his works in a solo exhibition titled Before/After: Mass Studies Does Architecture. Cho is an active lecturer and speaker at symposiums worldwide.  

The recent challenges confronted by Minsuk Cho and his practice Mass Studies arrive through the many external forces and urban ecologies at play—mainly that of culture and nature. Whether within the political, environmental, or social context of the city, its history and future, independent and symbiotic approaches and the crossing of stimuli become the impetus of the various architectural approaches for a series of projects currently in progress. The diverse ‘grounds’ being examined range in scale, use, and context.  

February 19, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Victoria Sambunaris: A Taxonomy of a Landscape  

Based in NYC, each year, Victoria Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey traversing the American landscape. Equipped with a 5x7 inch field camera, film, a video camera and research material, she crosses the country alone tenting on top of her car for several months per year. Her large-scale photographs document the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological and industrial interventions. Sambunaris received her MFA from Yale University in 1999. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and abroad. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. In 2011 a twelve-year survey of her work was exhibited at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY and travelled throughout the US. Her work is held in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Lannan Foundation, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art.  Radius Books Published her first monograph Taxonomy of a Landscape. Sambunaris is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery in NY.  

February 17, 6pm in the Kappe Library

The Surreal Visions of Hernán Díaz Alonso/HDA-X Book Launch  

Join us for the Los Angeles launch of The Surreal Visions of Hernán Díaz Alonso. Written by Hernán Díaz Alonso with a forward by John Hoke, III, the book showcases more than 80 projects from HDA-X in eye-popping images challenging the limits of human imagination. A spectacular survey of Díaz Alonso’s cutting-edge designs, including chairs, tableware, and lamps, this stunning volume includes plans for such architectural projects as a library in Helsinki, a promenade and park in Barcelona, a theater in Bogotá, and a museum in Budapest. Throughout, an interview with Díaz Alonso, reproduced in nine parts, illuminates his creative process. The book also includes essays by designer and architectural theorist Joe Day, designers and SCI-Arc faculty Marcelyn Gow and Florence Pita, Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at UCSD Benjamin H. Bratton, and lead designer at HDA-X Rachael McCall. Díaz Alonso is director SCI-Arc and founding principal of HDA-X, both based in Los Angeles. John Hoke, III (Foreword) is Chief Design Officer at Nike, and is a permanent design fellow at Pennsylvania State University, a member of the board of directors at Herman Miller, advisor to Piaggio Fast Forward, and a trustee at Pacific Northwest College of Art. He has also served as a trustee of the Cooper Hewitt and was a designer at Michael Graves Architecture and Design in Princeton, New Jersey. The Surreal Visions of Hernán Díaz Alonso is published by Thames & Hudson.  

February 21, 1pm in Classroom 160

Jennifer Chen: Faculty Talk  

Jennifer Chen is an architect and designer working across buildings, installation, film, and performance. As a project leader for a number of the world’s leading architectural practices, she has delivered a range of speculative and built works from the small scale to the monumental. Across her eight years of experience with Heatherwick studio Chen has lead the celebrated Coal Drops Yard, a £90m redevelopment in London’s King's Cross, the Pacific Place commercial complex in Hong Kong as well as the intricate canopy over the Victoria and Albert Museum’s main entrance, and a collection experimental handcrafted structures. In parallel to her work in commercial practice Chen also designs for stage and screen, developing various works from a collection of flying drone characters for the Channel 4 science fiction film In the Robot Skies and the sellout drone orchestra performance Loop 60hz at the Barbican Theatre in London, to the textile design for the 3D film Planet City and the camouflage costumes for the laser scanned film Where the City Can’t See, a commission for AND Festival and the Chicago Architecture Biennale. Chen’s work has been published internationally and exhibited at galleries such as Tate Modern, Barcelona’s CCCB, and the EYE Institute in Amsterdam. She regularly gives public lectures on her work at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Design Werktag in Munich, and is a guest critic at universities in Australia, USA, and UK. She has run award-winning academic design studios at institutions such as the Bartlett School of Architecture, SCI Arc, Leeds School of Architecture, and the University of Queensland. Chen now develops her diverse project interests as a freelance designer, art director, and producer in Los Angeles.    

March 3, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Pleasantville (1998) With guest Jeannine Oppewall, production designer

Conversation with Jeannine Oppewall and Michael Stock at 7pm followed by the film screening  

In Pleasantville two 1990s teenage siblings find themselves in a 1950s sitcom, where their influence begins to profoundly change that complacent world. Academy Award winner Jeannine Oppewall is known for her work on L.A. Confidential (1997), Pleasantville (1998) and Catch Me If You Can (2002).  

The SCI-Arc Cinema Series is a collaboration with The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).  

March 4, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Eva Franch i Gilabert: Lecture  

Eva Franch i Gilabert is an architect, curator, educator, and lecturer of experimental forms of art and architectural practice. She specializes in the making of alternative architecture histories and futures. In August 2018 she became Director of the Architectural Association in London. Franch has taught at the Cooper Union School of Architecture, Columbia University GSAPP, the IUAV University of Venice, SUNY Buffalo, and Rice University School of Architecture.  She has lectured internationally on art, architecture, and the importance of alternative practices in the construction and understanding of public life at educational and cultural institutions. From 2010 to 2018 Franch served as the Chief Curator and Executive Director of Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. In 2014 she was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale with the project OfficeUS, an experimental think tank for architecture practice. Franch has received numerous awards and fellowships, and her work has been exhibited internationally. Recent publications by Franch include Agenda (Lars Muller, 2014), Atlas (Lars Muller, 2015), and Manual (Lars Muller, 2017)  as part of OfficeUS.  

March 9, 6pm in the Kappe Library  

Portraits and Landscapes by Elena Manferdini Book Launch

Published by Beijing University of Technology  

This monograph collects the work created by Atelier Manferdini during the last six years of design activity. The projects are not organized in chronological order, but are subdivided into two large families of explorations, Landscapes and Portraits. The titles of the two volumes allude to two distinct picture plane orientations: horizontal and vertical. In art and descriptive geometry, one refers to the picture plane as an abstract plane located between the eye and the object of interest. This book is a collection of work that creatively reinvents our way of looking and being in the world.  

Elena Manferdini, principal and owner of Atelier Manferdini, has over fifteen years of professional experience in architecture, art, design, and education. The office has completed projects in the US, Europe, and Asia. In 2019 Elena Manferdini received the 2019 ICON Award, which is a prize that recognizes iconic women who have made an indelible mark on Los Angeles, culture, and society in general through their work, character, and creative leadership. She is the Graduate Programs Chair at SCI-Arc.  

March 11, 7pm in W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Jenny Lin: Above Sea/Underground: Cross-Cultural Currents in and around Global Shanghai  

Jenny Lin is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California. She received her MA and PhD in Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and BA in Architectural Studies and Italian Studies from Brown University. Lin’s research explores modern and contemporary art and design vis-à-vis urbanization, globalization, and decolonization. She recently published her first book, Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture and the fashioning of global Shanghai. Her additional writings on varied topics (e.g., Italian-Chinese fashion exchanges, Fluxus cooperatives in SoHo, queer video art, Silicon Valley) have appeared in, among others, Art Margins, Shanghai Culture, Frieze, Flash Art, Aesthetics of Gentrification, Fandom as Methodology, Participatory Urbanisms, and Cities of Light. Lin’s research and curatorial work have been supported by numerous fellowships and awards, including from the UC Pacific Rim Research Program, US Department of Education, and Communication Arts journal.  

This talk presents research from Lin’s recently published book, Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai (Manchester University Press, 2019), which explores contemporary art, architecture, fashion, and film created in and about Shanghai, long known as mainland China’s most cosmopolitan metropolis. Lin examines key projects, such as the cultural complex Xintiandi and installations by Cai Guo-Qiang and Liu Jianhua, which engage, construct, and/or critique Shanghai’s mythical “East-meets-West” status and reemerging position as an international financial and cultural capital. Lin’s analyses, informed by years of in-situ research, move beyond the hype surrounding contemporary art’s global turn to reveal historically rooted, site-specific creative pressures, transnational conflicts, and sociopolitical tensions accompanying Shanghai’s explosive transitions from semi-colonialism to Maoist socialism to late capitalism. Lin further traces the fraught resonances of Shanghai’s hybrid styles around the world, considering the geopolitical stakes of cross-cultural art and design.  

March 13-16, in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

After the Single-Family Home: Extended Living Groups and Collective Housing: Symposium

Schedule of events to follow  

On March 13, policymakers, architects, sociologists and other experts come together at SCI-Arc in round table discussions for the student body, and open to the public. The following two days will be dedicated to students working in small groups, visiting recommended sites for their projects and meeting residents of various cohousing in the city. The results of the Charrette will be put into an exhibition curated by students on March 16 at SCI-Arc.  

The low-density residential character and the related sense of property and self-sufficiency that have historically defined Los Angeles are no longer enough to satisfy the shifting demographics and exaggerated economic realities of the city today. With only twenty percent of today’s households being nuclear families, single-family home typology does not reflect the needs of an aging population and shrinking middle class, as well as more fluid family structures. There is a void in visions of collective living not as a temporary solution, but as a permanent and desirable condition. New forms and formats of housing that do not consist of separated identical units can be more attuned to the needs of multigenerational families, single parents, elderly people, formerly homeless, and people with disabilities. We set out to design spaces with varying degrees of isolation and openness, of public life and privacy, for a wide range of tenants.  

March 18, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Charles L. Davis II: American Architecture is a Settler Colonial Project: Locating the Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style   

Charles L. Davis II is a designer, architectural historian and cultural critic at the School of Architecture and Planning at SUNY Buffalo, where he teaches design studios and courses in history & theory. He received a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Arch from SUNY Buffalo. His academic research examines the racial discourses of the modern architectural style debates and its long-term effects on the cultural biases of contemporary practice. His book manuscript, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style (2019) traces the historical integrations of race and style theory in paradigms of “architectural organicism,” or strategies of design that personified buildings to mirror the essential characteristics of the populations they served. He is also co-editor of the forthcoming book Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, which challenges designers to “write race back into architectural history.” This research has been supported by grants from the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Davis also manages the academic blog “Race and Architecture” and the experimental design practice Studio DaSP (Design as Social Praxis), which expands the ways architecture serves as a tool for mediating social needs. His work has been exhibited at galleries in New York State and North Carolina.  

In the past, architectural historians have been quick to interpret American architectural movements through the lens of an inclusive liberalism that embraces people of all colors, nationalities and religious creeds. Yet few have examined these architectures from the other perspective, namely in terms of how they promoted exclusion by materializing the white nativist tendencies of American democracy by privileging the political values, social mores and cultural practices of white elites. This presentation examines the influence of settler colonial politics on the historical formation of American architecture through the work of two canonical architects: the Irish-American Louis Sullivan and the Welsh-American Frank Lloyd Wright. Each architect based their vision of American architecture on a romantic portrait of life in the Midwest prairie, the supposed heartland of America. While the prairie was spatially defined by the wide-open spaces and an abundance of resources each architect valued, it was also the site of a tragic social struggle between white settlers and non-white natives competing for land, resources and cultural representation. Davis argues that Sullivan and Wright’s visions for American architecture reifies a racially exclusive conception of the body politic that continues to introduce cultural bias in architectural discourses today. This reading invites a reassessment of the long-term effects of modern architecture's racial biases, including the perceived cultural pedigree of contemporary architecture culture.     

March 21, 10am – 4pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

A Queer Query: Symposium

An event on queer culture and architecture today.  

Queer theory’s thirty-odd years in architecture pushed to sever ties with received ideas of mastery by othering the architectural canon. We’ve seen architects construct performances, reject drawing in favor of images, reconfigure urban domesticity, and replace individualized manifestos with calls for coming together. Our references have evolved, our ranks have diversified, and our attention has moved to structures underpinning the field. Various influences contribute to these changes and it's fair to say that today architecture is a diffuse association of material practices without a shared canon. The field is foggier and perhaps queerer. Even so, a queer posture lays outside heteronormative norms and conventions and it would be difficult to call architecture’s economic and political structures as other. How do queer architects work in and out of these structures? How does architecture contribute to the queer city and imagery? A Queer Query invites a panel of architects and theorists to come together to outline the contemporary role that architecture plays in queer culture today, and vice versa.  Following the discussion, a performance event will feature artists focusing on the connection of queer imagery to urban culture.  

March 23, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Andrés Jaque: Superpowers of Scale  

Andrés Jaque is an architect, writer, and curator internationally known as one of the initiators of interscalar and transmedium approaches to urban and territorial studies. His work explores architecture as the entanglement of life, bodies, technologies, and environments. He holds a PhD from UPM and has been a Heinrich Tessenow Stipendiat (Alfred Toepfer Stiftung FVS) and Graham Foundation grantee. He is the founder of the Office for Political Innovation, a New York/Madrid-based agency working at the intersection of research, critical environmental practices, and design. The office is the author of awarded projects including Plasencia Clergy House, Cosmo MoMA PS1, Escaravox, the Thyssen-Bornmisza Ocean Space, Reggio School, House in Never Never Land, and the Transvector for Lafayette Anticipations.  

He has been awarded the Frederick Kiesler Prize, the Silver Lion for Best Project of the 14 Mostra Internazionale di Architettura della Biennale di Venezia, and the Dionisio Hernández Gil Prize for his intervention on historical enclaves. He is chief curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennial for 2020. In 2018 he cocurated Manifesta 12 in Palermo, The Planetary Garden Cultivating Coexistence, an inquiry into the ecological, technological, and political role Palermo plays as a site and actor of border violence and cross-pollination. His work IKEA Disobedients is the first architectural performance ever included in the MoMA Collection, and his work PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society is part of the permanent collection and exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited in international biennales including Venice, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Oslo, Gwanju, Santiago de Chile, and Lisbon; and he has developed projects with many of the most important cultural organizations around the world, including Victoria and Albert Museum, MAK Museum, Het Nieuwe Instituut, CA2M, London Design Museum, MoMA PS1, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, ZKM, Whitechapel Gallery, Cal Arts Contemporary Art Center, Columbia University, Princeton University, and Z33. Jaque is the director of Columbia University’s Advanced Architectural Design Program, a legendary architectural innovation lab that has helped shape the evolution of architecture in the last three decades. He previously taught at Princeton University and ETSAM. His publications include Superpowers of Scale (2019), Transmaterial Politics (2017), PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society (2013), Transmaterial/Calculable (2017), Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool (2013), Melnikov. Car-park for 1000 vehicles, (2004), and Everyday Politics (2011). The work of the Office has been published in both general and architectural media including A+U, Bauwelt, Domus, El Croquis, The Architectural Review, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, and El País.    

April 1, 7pm in the W.M. Keck Lecture Hall

Lauren Halsey: Lecture

 Lauren Halsey (b. 1987, Los Angeles, California) was born, raised, and currently works in Los Angeles. Her practice considers the relationship between architecture and community-building in urban centers and beyond. In her most ambitious project to date, Halsey has created a prototype for what she calls The Crenshaw District Hieroglyph Project, which, when completed, will be realized in a public space on Crenshaw Boulevard that formerly held an African bazaar, which she frequented as a child. Halsey received her BFA from California Institute of the Arts, in 2012, and MFA from Yale University, in 2014. She has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California (2016); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016); Recess, New York (2016); and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2015). She is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015), Alice Kimball English Travelling Fellowship (2013), and Beutner Family Award for Excellence in the Arts, California Institute of the Arts (2011). Halsey was an artist in residence at the Main Museum (2017), Studio Museum in Harlem (2014–15), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). She received the William H. Johnson Prize in 2017.   

EXHIBITIONS  

January 31 – March 15 in the SCI-Arc Gallery

Anna Neimark: Rude forms among us

Friday, January 31 at 7pm: Opening Reception    

In collaboration with the Natural History Museum in Toulouse, the exhi­bition Rude forms among us brings a small selection of nineteenth-century photographer Eugène Trutat’s photographs into focus. Two of his negative prints depict iconic sides of the dolmen as landscape scenes. But it would be more accurate to think of these photographs as portraits. Perhaps Trutat, who served as Director of the Museum between 1890–1900, would have agreed: the dolmen was a portrait of our place in natural history. It therefore fit both cat­egories in parallel; it was at once nature and history. If we take it to be a natural landmark, the stone stack suits the Tarn landscape, blending with its background. But as a prehistoric monument, it stands as an object apart, pushing into the foreground. In labeling his pictures, Tru­tat referred to the dolmen by her proper name, Vaour, marking “en profil” and “en face” in the margins. If these documents are portraits, they present a somewhat familiar creature striking a recognizably melancholy pose.  

In the gallery, beyond the photo­graphs, looms a large structure. Its cap­stone is similarly broken; its legs are also slightly set in. But this dolmen is blank and glossy. It is bigger, darker, greyer, quieter. If only for a moment, the fleeting present and the infinite past sync up. Here, without too many explanations, we happen upon a rude form that brings us to a time that is at some remove from our own. Its resolution is low, not high. Its joints are butted, not mitered. Its gaps are shimmed, not sculpted. It al­ludes to the architecture of forgotten narratives, eroded tectonics, and mud­dled grammar. The spaces formed with­in follow an ordinary plan. For now, the blocks are laid out as place holders, soon to be filled up with stuff: running water, electrical conduit, copper flash­ing, domestic appliances. Whether the megaliths enter our contemporary con­sciousness, or we move closer to the Stone Age, is not all that important. What is important is to feel a slight release from the present, to feel at ease and at home here and then.                 

April 3 – May 31 in the SCI-Arc Gallery

The Architectural Beast. LA: Curated by Hernán Díaz Alonso and designed by M. Casey Rehm

Friday, April 3 at 7pm: Opening Reception  

In every process of evolution, there is a period of extreme contamination that lends the possibility for the trajectories of species to begin to mutate. In the last thirty years, design has experienced multiple paradigm shifts generated by an eruption of new methodologies. These were derived mainly from new technologies, but also from a series of cultural changes, each prompting a reorganization in the culture of design, architecture, and art, and violating an old order, rendering it historical, obsolete. Today, perhaps as never before, we share a technical language that flows from discipline to discipline, altering the paths of previously discrete branches of knowledge. Many practices—art, architecture, fashion, film, music—explore similar ambitions, ideas rippling across and among them. The notion of authorship itself is in flux. This exhibition acknowledges and propels this phenomenon. It seeks to carve a path through a jungle of aesthetic and conceptual similarities to provoke contamination. Through artificial intelligence, the work featured will be exposed to a perpetual state of transformation and mutation. The exhibition gathers a key set of practices, primarily from architecture, but also from art and fashion, to reveal facets of the strange beast that the tumultuous paradigm shifts of recent decades have left behind.    

May 2 – 24 throughout SCI-Arc

Spring Show: Curated by John Cooper

Saturday, May 2 at 7pm: Exhibition Opening with Main Event  

SCI-Arc's fourteenth annual Spring Show features work from all school programs, presented in thematic, visually and conceptually distinct sections. Undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate design studio projects as well as coursework from the Applied and Visual Studies seminars, will be exhibited school-wide. The exhibition is curated by SCI-Arc History + Theory faculty John Cooper.  

Cooper studied English at the University of Cambridge and Art History at the Courtauld Institute before being elected a Mellon Fellow at Yale where his doctoral dissertation The Dancing Image was awarded the Sylvia Ardyn Boone prize for the university's best dissertation on African history and culture. Cooper received an M.Arch from Princeton University and in 2018 worked for Diller Scofidio + Renfro on the Mile Long Opera on the High Line, New York. His research and teaching in the history and theory of architecture is rooted in the practice of fieldwork, the production of apparatuses, the representation of the unrepresentable, and investigating the radical potentialities of the metamorphoses of the body in space. As a Soane Fellow at the Sir John Soane's Museum in 2019, Cooper reconstructed the visual display apparatus of Sir John Soane's lectures on architecture delivered at the Royal Academy between 1809 and 1836. Cooper's latest work (forthcoming in RES, 2020) analyses the problem of the representation of the moving body in two dimensions in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century colonial visual culture in India, England, and the Caribbean.  

The exhibition is free and open to the public May 3-24, 2020. Visit sciarc.edu/mainevent to purchase tickets to Main Event for the Spring Show preview reception on May 2, 2020.    

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Public Programs  

Parking and admission are free. No reservations are required. Events are broadcast live online on SCI-Arc’s Facebook page.  

SCI-Arc Public Programs are subject to change beyond our control. For the most current information, please visit www.sciarc.edu/ or call 213-613-2200.  

Parking and Hours

The entrance to SCI-Arc's parking lot is at 350 Merrick Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013, between Traction Avenue and 4th Street in Los Angeles. The SCI-Arc Gallery is open daily from 10am–6pm; the Library Gallery is open daily from 12pm-6pm.  

About SCI-Arc  

Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is dedicated to educating architects who will imagine and shape the future. It is an independent, accredited degree-granting institution offering undergraduate and graduate programs in architecture. Located in a quarter-mile-long former freight depot in the Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles, the school is distinguished by its vibrant studio culture and emphasis on process. SCI-Arc’s approximately 500 students and 80 faculty members, most of whom are practicing architects, work together to reexamine assumptions, create, explore, and test the limits of architecture. SCI-Arc faculty and leadership have garnered more than 500 national and international design awards and recognitions, including Progressive Architecture awards, American Institute of Architects (AIA) awards, and the prestigious Jencks and Pritzker architecture prizes. In DesignIntelligence’s 2019 US survey, SCI-Arc ranked #2 in Design Technologies, #3 Most Hired From, and was top ten among the nation’s Most Admired Undergraduate Programs in Architecture. SCI-Arc is located at 960 E. 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013. www.sciarc.edu