Showing posts with label SCI-Arc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SCI-Arc. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Beauty, extracted

In a comment on yesterday's post, I was asked to "lay off the SCI-Arc bashing."

The request came from VOITURE12
, who is evidently associated in some way with that Downtown hothouse of design speculation and self-gratification, and who reminds me that "some of us are actually decent human beings and [adding his or her intended emphasis] architects!"

In all fairness to VOITURE12
, I went back to the SCI-Arc website and took an extended look at all the images posted there under "Faculty Work." I was sure I could find something charming, delightful, amusing, pleasing to the eye, historically attuned, beautiful or even—could it be?—sublime to post here, and make myself look less a curmudgeon.

Of the 23 listed faculty members (of which one seems to be a collaborative and several seem to be visual artists rather than architects), only a small handful elected to submit photographs of
finished work, either because their snazzy computer-aided renderings and swoopy scale models are so much more engaging than their finished buildings . . . or, as I rather strongly suspect, there are no finished buildings to photograph.

Of the finished structures I
did manage to find photographs of, here's the cream of the crop (obviusly, the copyrights belong to whomever they belong):









But surely the prize find was this study in SCI-Arc's triumphant poetics of negation:



VOITURE12, I don't doubt that SCI-Arc students and faculty are decent human beings. In fact, I'll have a beer with you any time (majorhancock@gmail.com). But the work, alas, speaks for itself.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Here's to recidivism

Like many of you, I've been following the interminable construction of the two rival mansions on Sunset Boulevard between Alpine and Rexford in Beverly Hills. They built the Empire State Building in 13 months (also in a Depression). What gives?

In poking around about the westernmost of these behemoths, the Wehba house, I found this curious press release from SCI-Arc, Downtown L.A's (literally) cutting-edge architecture school:


The future Wehba residence, if he lives long enough.

If there are two words I never imagined seeing in the same sentence, it's "SCI-Arc" and "Versailles." SCI-Arc alums are better noted for their contributions to a makeshift architecture of last resort, like these two structures, by Jennifer Siegal and Armen Hogtanian, respectively:

Deconstructed double-wide, anyone?

"AIA citation."

The latter of these two, I was happy to discover, was slapped with an "AIA citation" . . . oh, wait, I guess that's good thing?

Although his work on Sunset Boulevard has far more in common with the American Beaux Arts tradition of McKim, Mead and White than it does with Versailles, Brian Biglin has returned to the real roots of architecture with the Wehba house.

And I notice from his bio, that he eschews any mention of his SCI-Arc past. Don't blame him much.