Spring Show 2023 “SCI-Arc Night Live” Utterly Entertains on Premiere Night

SCI-Arc’s annual Spring Show, aptly entitled “SCI-Arc Night Live: Premiere Night,” was held April 29, presenting a lively, buzzworthy evening crackling with entertainment, color, and humor with the purpose of showcasing students’ most remarkable work made throughout the academic year. With many aspiring architects, artists, filmmakers, designers in attendance, every project on view invited visitors to engage fully with the groundbreaking ideas and technical prowess with which SCI-Arc students have become synonymous.

The curator of the event itself, SCI-Arc design faculty Soomeen Hahm, shared, “It has been my honor, and I'm so excited and thrilled to have curated the exhibition with such fantastic work done by all of our students and faculty. I was really amazed by all the work produced this semester.”

Hosted by students Miho Asada (B.Arch ’23) and Mudita Pise (B.Arch ’23), the central guiding element of the event was live entertainment: comedy shows with faculty, taped segments like cooking tutorials, and competition performances between robots in SCI-Arc’s patented Robot House, to awe and delight attendees throughout the evening. Of the concept of the exhibition installation, Hahm explained, “We turned the SCI-Arc building into a huge TV show set, displaying our student work like a high street shop window. We wanted to express that architectural projects are fun, beautiful, and enjoyable,” adding that “architectural exhibition doesn't always have to be so serious and difficult.”

Drawing inspiration from the variety shows of the 1970s and 80s, such as "Saturday Night Live" and late-night talk shows known for their innovative use of sets and lighting, recorded segments, and live performances by cutting-edge musicians and comedians, “SCI-Arc Night Live” fulfilled its promise to be a Spring Show to remember. In organizing the event around an hour-long live comedy show, Hahm said, “I chose a comedy show as a format to communicate [the students’] talents with the general public and non-architecture community in an engaging and very fun way.”

Hernán Díaz Alonso commented on this year’s Spring Show presentation, expressing, “It looks like an interesting combination of low and high, revealing an interesting friction between some of the latest technology, artificial intelligence, alongside more traditional techniques. It's in that tension that I think is where the work is—which represents well the time we are in.”

“There is an energy too about everybody being back in person, to celebrate another year of their work, to have a little bit of fun,” Díaz Alonso continued.

“Architecture is supposed to be fun, but it's not fun all the time. It's a lot of work. Sometimes it's not funny or sometimes it's funny without trying to be. Ultimately, it’s important for the students and faculty to come together at the end of the year and honor the work and be reminded that this is what we're going do every day for the rest of our lives, so we should try to enjoy it while we can.”