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printSCIFI PROGRAM — 1 YEAR (3 TERM)
Southern California Institute for Future InitiativesPostgraduate program leading to a non-professional Master of Architecture degree, open to students with a Bachelors or professional degree in Architecture. This program requires attendance for the fall, spring and summer terms.
Jeffrey Inaba, Program Coordinator
Paul Nakazawa, Executive Program Coordinator
Program Description
The SCIFI program is organized to prepare graduates to successfully meet the challenges of leadership in urban politics, planning, architecture and other fields that influence the collective understanding of the built environment. SCIFI trains students to define the physical environment through ideas, policies, and plans. The program places a strong emphasis on communicating proposals through contemporary forms of digital media. The curriculum is geared to students who already have a professional degree in architecture or in an allied field such as urban design, landscape architecture—as well as to those interested in contributing to the concepts and to the physical reality of cities who are educated in other disciplines (such as law, film, geography, public policy, etc). The program places a high importance on the participation of those trained in wide range of fields other than architecture to contribute their knowledge, experience, and perspectives. The length of the SCIFI program is one year. Incoming students start the fall semester and are in residence for three (3) consecutive semesters.
SCIFI teaches students to frame the challenges of the urban realm. Instead of training students to implement already specified solutions for a city, SCIFI encourages graduates to become a central participant in the larger political context so that they may envision the space and future activities of cities. Students receive knowledge to pursue roles in which they define the goals of urban development. The program also provides specific instruction to explore the feasibility and cultural role of architecture in the built environment. Students learn strategy and communication skills to create opportunities to implement advanced architectural design in cities.
The curriculum integrates rigorous strategic thinking, spatial organization, visual design, and verbal communication. In the SCIFI studio courses, students develop proposals for urban districts, cities, regions, and/or countries with the purpose of influencing future values, cultural perspectives, policy goals, and design opportunities. After researching the economic, political, and cultural circumstances of a study site, students work in small teams to prepare a spatial intervention that generates insights about the current urban condition, and identifies ways to stimulate public activities and processes of urban development. Additionally, each project seeks to implement social and economic benefits to the study area’s stakeholders. The program places a strong emphasis on the development of communication skills so that students can convey their proposal’s aesthetic and technical aspects to a broad audience. To this end, students take seminars and workshops in advanced contemporary media to learn video, motion graphics, and digital modeling.
Travel during the program also offers students a unique educational opportunity to establish a tangible overview of the dynamics of international development. This world perspective drawn from experiences in different regions forms a real basis of urban development comparison that students can draw from when they go on to work as professionals. Travel study countries from 2004–2007 include, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Japan, South Korea, Italy, Sweden, and India.
Structure
The curriculum of instruction is based on the Project Method. It has been developed to give students the skills to collaborate, organize, and lead. The Project Method encourages students to work in a situation similar to the one they will encounter as advanced professionals. They face the decisions that project leaders must confront on large-scale commissions, such as processing conflicting data and contradictory client-group goals, prioritizing outcome results, and formulating convincing arguments about future urban scenarios.
Work in all courses is coordinated to contribute to the term’s project exercise. The studio and seminar courses introduce a coherent body of complementary background knowledge and technical skills for the student to create a comprehensive proposal for the project exercise. The studio course is the primary context for synthesizing research, design concepts, implementation strategies, and presentation techniques. In the support seminar courses, students receive technical instruction in media skills. The skills learned in the seminar course are applied directly to the development and presentation of project exercise proposals.
Under the Project Method every student works in a team of 2–3 persons. Working in teams allows students to experience the working structure necessary today to execute complex large commissions. The group structure aims to foster an intellectual hub in which students can question, assess, and brainstorm about creative urban approaches in an ongoing way throughout the duration of an exercise. The day-to-day group interactions serve as a hands-on experience to improve skills at organization, communication, cooperation, and leadership.
Faculty, Workshop Instructors, Guest Critics
SCIFI is committed to maintaining a high degree of faculty–student interaction. Acceptance to the program is competitive and the number of incoming students is limited. Each incoming class enjoys the highest level of access to and communication with primary faculty. The pedagogical structure aims to encourage an ongoing developmental dialogue over the course of the three-term program. Instruction in the program is organized to be progressive and developmental: the courses build upon the information and insights gained each term. Knowledge learned in one semester is transferred to the next and becomes the foundations for further exploration. As a result, each student benefits from the experience of improving skills through a progression of challenges of increasing complexity. This structure also enables each student to receive feedback on each one of their projects with faculty and peers familiar with the entire body of work the student has produced over the course of the year.
For information on applying to this program, please contact SCI-Arc’s admissions office or visit the news section of Future Initiatives.
Course Structure
The SCIFI program is a three-consecutive semester program that centers
on the studio experience. The studio course serves as the primary platform for learning and discussions. A unique aspect of the studio experience is that students travel to the city/country of study to meet with politicians, planners and architects to gain a fuller understanding of globalization's impact on urban development. Each semester, the studio is complemented by a series of workshops led by visiting architects, urban thinkers, economists, and media designers from the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
The SCIFI brochure is available for download by clicking the image below.
For a SCIFI t-shirt, please contact the admissions department.
