SCI-Arc Launches Definitive Site for Original Films and Media Archive
SCI-Arc is thrilled to announce the launch of its brand new video streaming site SCI-Arc Channel. In continuing its commitment to furthering the discipline of architecture by maintaining a rigorous spirit of innovation, the web-based platform will function as an aggregate and publicly accessible home for SCI-Arc-produced films, as well as the SCI-Arc Media Archive which hosts over 1000 hours of video footage comprising public lectures, symposia, and events from across SCI-Arc’s nearly 50-year history.
SCI-Arc Channel productions have provided an online platform for the communication of ideas with a particular focus on the contemporary culture of Los Angeles, appealing to a broad audience of creative practitioners, cultural theorists, scholars, students, and enthusiasts alike. SCI-Arc Channel films previously published on SCI-Arc’s YouTube channel have included high-quality interviews and short documentaries on individuals across contemporary architecture, art, design, technology, and culture to highlight some of the most important and influential figures from various creative fields at work in their environments.
Produced by the school, films highlighting the ideas, work, and voices of cultural figures such as Thom Mayne, Barbara Imhof, Ferda Kolatan, Shirin Neshat, Gilles Retsin, and many others reflect global creative communities and industries through the lens of SCI-Arc. Expressing the aim of unpacking issues in architecture, art, design, and related fields, features on current events in Los Angeles, Los Angeles institutions, and more have been and will continue to be published weekly on SCI-Arc Channel—now alongside videos from the SCI-Arc Media Archive.
Launched online in 2012, the SCI-Arc Media Archive is a comprehensive, continuously-expanding resource with over 1000 hours of unedited video, featuring the world’s most significant architects, designers, and theorists—including 11 Pritzker Prize winners—from 1972 to today. Recognized internationally not only as a center for design innovation, but as a forum for debating new ideas in architecture, these films chronicle SCI-Arc’s active engagement with the community through its extensive public programs, lecture series, and symposia which started in 1974 and continues today. Support for the development and implementation of the Media Archive was provided by The Getty Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Subsequent to and in coordination with the launch of the site, SCI-Arc Channel will feature collections of videos, specially curated on a quarterly basis by distinguished guests such as SCI-Arc faculty and critic Mimi Zeiger (M.Arch '98) and architect Barbara Bestor (M.Arch '92), among others, as a way to deepen and expand connections between subject matter and viewership, and to communicate ideas about the past, current, and future states of architecture, art, and design
In addition to a video streaming platform providing access to high-quality, rare, and historic SCI-Arc films and videos, SCI-Arc Channel features search capabilities, curated collections, and series combining SCI-Arc-produced films alongside videos from the SCI-Arc Media Archive.
“In our desire and effort to reach a larger audience, we are happy to release SCI-Arc Channel as a platform for the interchange of ideas between architecture and other fields,” said SCI-Arc Director Hernán Díaz Alonso of the momentous launch. “For SCI-Arc and the world at large, we live in an era defined by the medium of image and the production of it, so to be part of that context is absolutely crucial for the distribution and exchange of knowledge.”
“Also, we are in Los Angeles,” continued Díaz Alonso, “so SCI-Arc’s active participation in the worlds of films and channels feels very apt.”
The first release alongside the launch of the Channel site will be the newest SCI-Arc film, William Friedkin: An Analysis of Film and Beyond.