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How does SCI-Arc’s vitality contribute to the students and their work?
I think the vitality is manifested in that the people at SCI-Arc feel free to explore and push to the edges of the frontiers of architecture. This sense of exploration comes from the faculty and the whole aura of the school. Students feel free to organize their own thinking along various lines that they can develop with the help of the faculty. Certainly this spirit can be summed up as: if you think it, you can do it. This spirit comes out, I think, in people’s work and the way in which they treat the building as a site for exploring work. We don’t have rules that inhibit. There is not a lot of bureaucracy at SCI-Arc, so one is free to act spontaneously.
Looking back on the relatively short history of SCI-Arc, what do you think the school’s accomplishments have been in terms of architectural education?
The origin of the school was to create a more open atmosphere and to offer some alternatives to the oppressive structures that the university system was delivering at the time. In 1972 almost everything seemed oppressive! The interesting thing is the relationship between students and professors. Everything is more intimate, and things are more collaborative.
What are the strengths of having such a diverse faculty of not only architects, but industrial designers, scientists, artists, and critical thinkers? What does this give the students?
It gives them a lot of expertise in areas that we all need to know about. It allows students to go up to someone who knows how to talk about the related disciplines, and allows the architect to teach architecture. Here, disciplines do not become divided. Everyone teaching here is interested in architecture. There are no disciplinary ghettos. We like to make the connections all the way around. It allows everyone to take advantage of their special knowledge and to teach in a very strong way. Students are getting first-hand information and relating to people who have researched 20 to 30 years on a particular subject.
My goal is to make sure that the dialogue is strong, critically. None of us just takes up space and declares a domain and then doesn’t talk to anyone else. Having incredibly knowledgeable people helps students learn how to research in ways that architects often aren’t required to undertake. Our work includes being writer, critic, historian: we connect the dots. This is where SCI-Arc really does provide the university experience under one roof, in one house so to speak. This allows us to teach students to be agile intellectually, to be agile visually, and to also not make the ultimate mistake of becoming ultimately skilled in only one thing. SCI-Arc students are skilled in a generalist fashion with the focus on designing architectural space. We don’t have standard professors here, we have eccentric people who have the right spirit to teach here.
What are the challenges of teaching at SCI-Arc?
It’s a combination of tremendous patience and great rewards. The conviviality of our studio allows the teacher to feel more fulfilled. Anyone who does teach at SCI-Arc understands that fat salaries and cushy perks are not here. It is so clear that anyone who chooses to teach at SCI-Arc is here because they are interested in advancing the discourse of architecture. Everyone at the school is qualified, in theory, to go and make more money — to maybe have more power and responsibility — somewhere else. But people chose to stay or come to the school because of the atmosphere and students. In that sense it’s an unconscious feeling that we have about the place, and yet we don’t feel that we’re doing charity work. It’s a challenging school to enter into.
How has SCI-Arc contributed to the profession of architecture?
I think it has contributed more locally, certainly in Los Angeles. It has influenced the way in which certain people run offices as studios. It has influenced a more experimental attitude toward the use of materials. I think SCI-Arc has reinforced an important sense of craft. Its graduates have gone on to fabricating new types of materials, including concrete and steel work, and other artisan ventures that are related to building.
I think in the next phase, SCI-Arc is going to have a profound influence in the area of digital work. Through our computer laboratory and research, we are going to offer new ideas in terms of visualizing, modeling, and developing techniques of design. This will cause people in practice to learn about us, and perhaps operate in similar ways. I think the design process is going to change, and SCI-Arc is going to lead the way.
What have SCI-Arc’s accomplishments been in relationship to the City of Los Angeles and its community?
We try to think about it and exploit the fact that we are here in Los Angeles, and not in New York, San Francisco, or Paris. We think of the city as a laboratory. In the past six or seven years, the school has done a lot more work with the community. When SCI-Arc began, it was preoccupied with building its own community. Then in the 1980s, the school had other research projects that did not connect immediately with the local culture. But in the past seven years, through outreach programs, our students and graduates have been going out into the community with the spirit that “if you can think it, then you can do it.” While the school has been an amazing frontier for new ideas that do not yet have any application, it has always had a desire to interact with the culture in the city and to try to deal with reasonable ways of doing things. We want to continue to do this, but at the same time continue to make our projects very critical and useful. SCI-Arc is here to be a good big brother, but we are first in the business of educating people, and therefore we must be didactic and get something educational out of every project. As long as this educational process goes on, we’ll keep doing all we can in the community.
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