Beginning today, a mixed group of fifteen SCI-Arc grads and undergrads led by faculty member John Bohn have embarked in a 13-week onsite design studio in Tokyo, Japan. Participants will be spending the summer working under the guidance of both SCI-Arc design faculty and Japanese faculty from leading institutions such as University of Tokyo, Kyoto Seika University, Keio University, and Hosei University.

Tokyo Study-Abroad, Summer 2011

A highlight of this summer’s studio is the exclusive involvement of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corporation, who will provide access and training to use environmental disaster simulation software to stage building simulations from coast to city, to neighborhood and street, to building and slice of a building. In addition, ARUP Japan will provide students with hands-on engineering and technical support as they work on completing their projects.

A new addition to the Japan studio curriculum is a 2-week workshop involving students from SCI-Arc and three Tokyo-based schools—Hosei University, University of Tokyo and Keio University. The event will bring together students from the four schools to create dynamic design teams that will work on completing a joint project to be announced at the start of the workshop. On Friday, May 18, Japan Studio participants will also attend SCI-Arc’s Tokyo Alumni & Friends Cocktail Party organized by alumnus Kiyokazu Arai (M.Arch '83) of ARAI Architects.

Starting this year, SCI-Arc has partnered with Hosei University to offer studio facilities and housing on Hosei’s Tokyo campus.

For more information on SCI-Arc’s study-abroad programs, click HERE.

SCI-Arc Trustee Thom Mayne of the firm Morphosis has been selected to design the first academic building for Cornell University’s high-tech graduate school campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

"After 500 years of conventional campus planning from Oxford to Palo Alto to Tsinghua, very much looking forward to the Roosevelt Island reappraisal," says SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss. "Right project for the right architect at the right time," adds Moss.

Mayne’s 150,000-square-foot building, expected to cost about $150 million, is part of a campus that will be developed over two decades. Cornell’s new campus will comprise more than two million square feet of building space at a cost of over $2 billion and will serve more than 2,000 students.

The building will get extra attention as the first part of an engineering and applied-science campus charged by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with spurring New York City’s high-tech sector.

Read more in The New York Times feature CornellNYC Chooses Its Architect.

Two projects by SCI-Arc students will be featured this year at the AIA│LA hosted 2x8 exhibition, opening June 5, 6-9pm at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles. New this year, the show will feature the design of SCI-Arc faculty member Matthew Gillis, winner of 2x8’s invited faculty competition to design the 2012 pavilion for the exhibition.

sPhysical│SCI-Arc Robot House│Vikar, Besler, Kosgoron, Tuksam│Peter Testa

Nominated by SCI-Arc this year are: BCAM Redux, a project developed by Zidan Zhao (B.Arch '12) in the Fall 2011 vertical studio taught by Tom Wiscombe, and sPhysical (shown here), a vertical studio group project developed in the SCI-Arc Robot House by Erin Besler (M.Arch ‘12), Eugene Kosgoron (ESTm ‘12), exchange student Siim Tuksam (FA ‘11) from the Vienna University of Applied Art, and Peter Vikar (ESTm '12). sPhysical was coordinated by faculty member Peter Testa, with teaching assistant Jonathon Stahl and Robot House fellows Brandon Kruysman and Jonathan Proto.

2x8 invites prominent architecture and design schools across California to submit exceptional student work for an annual exhibition recognizing emerging talent in architecture and design. Invited schools, including SCI-Arc, UCLA, UC Berkeley and USC among others, choose two student projects each that exemplify their core vision. Designs are then judged by a noteworthy panel of architects and designers who pick the winners of the AIA|LA AOC scholarship.

BCAM Redux/Tom Wiscombe Studio/Zidan Zhao (B.Arch '12)

SCI-Arc has been participating in 2x8 since 2005.

Themed 2x8: Taut, the exhibition will open with a reception and awards ceremony on June 5, 6-9pm to announce this year's winners of the AOC student scholarship. The show remains on view through June 30.

The A+D Museum is located at 6032 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Click HERE to download the event invitation.

SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss and Applied Studies Coordinator and design faculty Tom Wiscombe will participate in the 3rd Moscow Biennale in a group exhibition of work featuring some of the most prominent U.S. architects practicing today. Themed Identity, the third edition of the Moscow Biennale of Architecture will be held May 23-June 7.

The group exhibition also features work by Coop Himmelb(l)au, Peter Eisenman, Morphosis and Preston Scott Cohen.

Tom Wiscombe Studio

Young alumnus Michael Nesbit (B.Arch ’12) exhibited his undergraduate thesis project, Towards (Ph2)latness, in a group show hosted by Studio Sereno. On view May 5-20th, Protostellar: Survey of Los Angeles Student Art Work featured 16 artists from 9 schools.

For the past 14 months, Nesbit has conducted a series of exercises that have tested the cycle between technique and representation. His thesis project represents construction diagrams of the drawing. By placing emphasis on the drawing and not the object, Nesbit’s Towards (Ph2)latness re-inserts the role of judgment back into representation, allowing the drawing to produce something far greater than what it originally represented.

In Nesbit’s own words: "Architecture is built on our ability to use representation as an effect for production… from sketch to model, from model to drawing, from drawing to building. Along the way we use judgment as an affect for guiding our creative process. Within our contemporary discipline, we have been given an extensive tool set that has pushed architecture forward, but due to instantaneous output of new techniques the process has eliminated many of our previous entry points. This thesis looks to bring back judgment."

Studio Sereno is located at 5015 Alhambra Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90032. Exhibition is open 10am to 6pm daily.

Co-curated by Peggy Zask and SCI-Arc faculty Dora Epstein Jones, "Breaking Conventions: Art and Architecture," was not intended to be a "SCI-Arc show," but certainly stands as a testament to the multidisciplinarity of the SCI-Arc community and its reach across the Los Angeles region.

Following a panel on drawing hosted at the national meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) this March, Epstein Jones began organizing "Breaking Conventions" as a gallery show of art by architects at the PS Zask Gallery in Palos Verdes, Calif.

The number of participants have since grown beyond the original panel members to include several current faculty at SCI-Arc including Andrew Atwood, Volkan Alkanoglu, Eric Kahn, Wes Jones and Elena Manferdini; former faculty members Jennifer Bonner, Bryan Cantley, Gary Paige and Lorcan O’Herlihy; and alumni Tm Gratkowski (M.Arch ‘96) and Christopher Mercier (M.Arch ‘91).

The show opens Saturday, May 5, 7-10 pm. Exhibition remains on view through June 24. The PS Zask Gallery is located at the Promenade on the Peninsula (550 Deep Valley Drive, Rolling Hills Estates).

Monday, April 16th was SCI-Arc's annual Spring Open House, one of two most popular annual student recruitment events hosted by the SCI-Arc Admission Office to introduce prospective students to the SCI-Arc community. Masters and Bachelors candidates, together with their families and other interested parties, heard presentations from SCI-Arc directors and faculty, financial aid, and current students. In addition, they were able to observe in-depth studio reviews during final reviews week.

This year, thanks to a panel of alumni volunteers, Open House attendees also had the opportunity to gain insight into the SCI-Arc experience from an alumni perspective. SCI-Arc alums Brian Pace (B.Arch ‘11), Lida Mahabadi (M.Arch ’11), Polly Osborne (M.Arch ’87), and Steven Purvis (M.Arch ’06) were on hand to give advice and help promote the school.

Kirstie Rothague, Director of Recruitment and Outreach welcomed the new addition of an alumni panel: "Alumni are an important part of the SCI-Arc community, especially since they enable employment and internship opportunities for our current students and graduates." To further strengthen alumni-student networks, SCI-Arc has brought on board Javier Cambron (B.Arch ‘12) to help lead recruitment and outreach efforts.

The Spring Open House was attended by more than 100 prospective students, including international prospects from Asia, Canada and Turkey.

LOS ANGELES, CA (April 18, 2012)—SCI-Arc today announced it has elected two new trustees to its ranks: SCI-Arc alumna Abigail (Abby) Scheuer (M.Arch ’93) and Los Angeles philanthropist and developer Abby Sher. "Two design visionaries, twin Abby's, one from the east, one from the west, will now meet on the SCI-Arc Board,” remarked SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss. "It is a double coup for architecture and culture in Los Angeles."

The 25-member SCI-Arc Board is chaired by land-use attorney Jerry Neuman, who stated “At the center of SCI-Arc are creativity and an enduring ability to challenge convention and change it for the better. Our two new trustees personify these core values, bringing an incredible amount of expertise, vision and leadership to the board and our school. We are pleased to welcome them to the SCI-Arc community.” The SCI-Arc Board includes noted individuals such as Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Ted Tanner, Kevin Ratner, Tom Gilmore and Rick Carter. The trustees unanimously elected Scheuer and Sher at their quarterly meeting held April 13 in Los Angeles.

Abigail (Abby) Scheuer received her Master of Architecture from SCI-Arc in 1993. While in school, she interned with architect Peter Eisenman and SCI-Arc founding faculty Ray Kappe. Upon returning to New York, Scheuer worked for the architecture firm Perkins Eastman, then at a boutique firm specializing in high-end residential projects. In 1997, she co-founded Atema Scheuer Design with fellow alumnus Ate Atema (M. Arch ‘93); their firm focused on commercial and residential projects. During this time, she was a member of the Women in Architecture and Housing Committees of the AIA NY chapter. With the birth of her daughter, Scheuer became a full time mother and focused on fundraising, advocacy and community outreach. She is on the board of KiDS of NYU Medical Center Foundation; on the advisory board and recently elected to the board of directors of the Jazz Foundation of America; is a member of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) New York Council, and of the Studio Partners Leadership of Studio in a School, which supports visual arts programming in NYC public schools; and co-founded Green Team in collaboration with NYC Partnerships for Parks and the Lower East Side Ecology Center. Scheuer has served on the SCI-Arc Alumni Council since 2010, recently co-hosting the Alumni and Friends New York event at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Alumni and Friends Los Angeles event at the L House in Culver City.

Abby Sher grew up in Los Angeles in a house designed by mid-century modernist architect Douglas Honnold, and from an early age architecture has been an important influence in her life. Sher studied French Literature at UCLA, followed by a Masters degree in Liguistics. Later, while working as a Clinical Linguist at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, she authored the Diagnostics Specifications Manual (DSM) III category “Elective Mutism.” In the 1980s, Sher developed Edgemar on Main Street in Santa Monica. Under her guidance, the Edgemar Farms egg-processing plant was transformed into an inventive mixed-use center designed by SCI-Arc trustee Frank Gehry. Sher enjoys a wide range of interests that have found expression in a variety of diverse and imaginative projects. Her creative pursuits have included making an award-winning documentary film about the Pacific Northwestern woodsman and artist Dudley Carter (1891-1992); founding the Santa Monica Museum of Art as part of the development of Edgemar; performing the political performance art piece A Red Line Connects Us for six months in 2006, and writing an accompanying blog; and performing the Ramayana at REDCAT in 2010 with the CalArts Balinese gamelan group, Burat Wangi. Sher has served on the boards of several social justice, social service and homelessness organizations including Chrysalis, the Liberty Hill Foundation, the Westside Family Health Center, and The Shefa Fund. She is interested in contemporary "new music" and provided the lead gift and name for the CalArts outdoor music pavilion, The Wild Beast, designed by Hodgetts + Fung.

SCI-Arc faculty Herwig Baumgartner and Scott Uriu of BPlusU recently published their new monograph, B+U DesignPeak 12. Volume 12 in the Design Peak series is a comprehensive monograph on BPlusU's oeuvre and features a complete overview of the innovative architecture over the past 10 years of design duo Herwig Baumgartner and Scott Uriu.

Published by Equalbooks, the DesignPeak architectural monograph series documents the work of architecture and design offices such as Morphosis, Delugan Meissl, and Fuksas, among others. The monograph on BPlusU includes an introduction by architecture critic Stephen Phillips and articles about the firm.

B+U's work ranges from conceptual projects utilizing sound as a generator for geometry and space, urban utopias imagining what our cities will look like in the future, up to build work and projects that are currently in development. Among the designs featured here, are the Firestone Boulevard office building in Downey, California; the Taipei Performing Arts Center in Taiwan; the Tall Emblem Structure for Dubai, UAE; Villas for the Royal family in Al Ain, UAE; the Frank/Kim residence and the Cohen residence in Pasadena, California; Sound cloud and Sound City‐ urban intervention projects based on sound study's, Los Angeles, California ; Sunset Junction‐ a permanent installation in Silver Lake, California; Performing Arts Center in Iserlohn, Germany; NTCArt Museum for contemporary Art in New Taipei City, Taiwan; the Ott Winery in Feuersbrunn, Austria; and City Futura‐ a utopian urban proposal for the city of Milan, Italy that was featured at the 12th Venice Biennale in 2010.

B+U Design Peak 12 is available in hardcover format at Hennesey & Ingalls, Amazon, William Stout Architecture Books and the SCI-Arc Supply Store.

More about BPlusU >>

SCI-Arc faculty Stephen Phillips received an honorary mention in the 2011 Bruno Zevi Prize competition for his critical essay, Toward Research Practice: Frederick Kiesler’s Design-Correlation Laboratory. Currently the Residential Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Stephen Phillips investigates the methods and teaching of architectural design in an interdisciplinary environment, using intelligent explorations to explain how the laboratory, a space of convergence for historical, theoretical, technical and artistic investigations became, for Kiesler, the new paradigm of design-research.

With a view to developing and disseminating the teaching of Bruno Zevi and his method of critical and historical inquiry, the international competition held annually by the Bruno Zevi Foundation recognizes historical-critical essays offering an original analysis of an architectural work or theme, or an architect of the past or present.

Phillips teaches Modern and Contemporary Architecture History and Theory in the cultural studies department at SCI-Arc, and has received numerous honors, grants, and awards for his work including most recently residential fellowships from the Scholars Program at the Getty Research Institute and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a Graham Foundation Grant, a Canadian Center for Architecture Research Grant, an ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching Award, and an AIACCC Design Merit Award.

Phillips publishes and lectures on architecture, media, and technology internationally, which includes chapters and articles in Grey Room, ArcCA, Brownbook, Elemente, Thirty Four, Cold War Hothouses, Surrealism and Architecture, eVolo and a forthcoming article in the Getty Research Journal. He has taught History, Theory and Design at UCB, UCLA, SCI-Arc, CCA, Penn, and Princeton.

More about Stephen Phillips >>