SCIFI

SCIFI participated in the 10th Architecture Biennial in Venice (Biennale di Venezia) organized by Ricky Burdett. We contributed photographs for the Los Angeles section for the main show in the Arsenale. Here’s the image that appeared in the New York Times accompanying the newpaper’s review of the biennial (photo by Manuel Silvestri/Polaris for The New York Times). In it, you see some of our photos.

We contributed images we shot that have to do with two kinds of subject matter:

1. The city as a production backdrop (like, on-the-street film shoots, simulated streetscapes, and news reporting).

2. The light infrastructure that helps to sustain the city as a low-density urban environment. For instance, while often temporary, valet parking helps to distribute cars over a larger area to reduce traffic build-up and parking lot jams.

Here are some of the shots:

The first SCIFI class graduated in September 2006. To celebrate the event, we put together an exhibition of the year’s work in SCI-Arc’s ‘Fishbowl’ space. Entitled, “SCIFI 1″ it documents the projects we did over the course of the first year, including work from the 3 studios (Palm Springs, California USA; Uruguay; the Korean pennisula), the one-week workshops (e.g., ‘Hyperion House’ - a full-scale house we built in 5-days; an installation for Doug Aitken’s Broken Screen LA opening), and competition entries, like our proposal for a ‘Vertical Garden‘ at the MAK Schindler House.

The Fall 2006 SCIFI studio and Jose Castillo’s class at Ibero-Americana Unversity in Mexico City participated in the Learning From Cities exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennial which opened 9 November. The exhibition involved architecture schools from all over the world including the AA, Berlage Institute, Cairo University, Royal College of Art (London), MIT, Tsinghua University, and Università IUAV di Venezia. Each school’s team made urban proposals for one of the world’s mega-cities.

The SCIFI and Ibero-Americana group created proposals for Mumbai that contemplated the city’s future population which in the not-too-distant future will exceed 30,000,000. Cities during the 20th century functioned on infrastructure that was conceived and built during the 19th century. We started the studio with the belief that mega-cities of the 21st century will need 22nd century infrastructure in order to accommodate urban areas of 30-40 million. We proposed alternative ‘philosophies’ of infrastructure. One project, for example, envisions a decentralized system for water collection and distribution.
Another group recognized that when a major city in a developing country experiences a massive natural disaster, like a severe flood, it sets back the economic and intellectual development of the entire country five to ten years. While developed countries have the resources to respond to such a disaster without jeopardizing the stability of the nation, poorer countries require years to re-build their financial and social foundations. As a preventive measure their scheme plans to destroy Mumbai’s low-lying slums in order to ’safeguard’ India’s future.

Here are some photos of the SCIFI projects installed in the Padiglione Italia in Venice.

Check out the video introduction to the Mumbai proposals by SCIFI’s Yi-han Cao.

SCIFI didn’t win an award for its contribution to the Learning From Cities exhibition. But we did get to hang out with a Golden Lion. This was care of Javier Sanchez of Higuera + Sanchez Architects of Mexico City who was awarded the 2006 Golden Lion for best urban project. Thanks for letting us celebrate the honor with you. Congratulations Javier!

This coming year’s Architecture Biennial in Rotterdam looks to draw important attention to the role architects play in shaping the city. Because the world’s large cities have become so populated, so complex as a social entity, and hence so difficult to comprehend, the biennial organizers believe that architects should try to describe the urban condition. Rather than resign to the view that the city is overly complex and can no longer be set into terms useful to explore, they say now is precisely the time for architects to try to define to a larger public just what is the evolving phenomenon of the city.

Observing that in architecture today there is a growing detachment from the subject of urbanism and a focus on the design of buildings as aesthetically complex objects, they propose that the field of architecture renew its commitment to design visions for the future of our cities.

“under the curatorship of the Berlage Institute, the third International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, POWER – Producing the Contemporary City, will … examine the various forces at work in ‘producing’ the twenty-first century city and the role architects and urbanists can play in this crucible of forces.
Never before have so many people lived in an urban setting: more than half of today’s world population, and by 2050 this will have reached the two-thirds mark. Meanwhile, the contemporary city has become the arena for complex and diverse forms of power and the far-reaching effects of globalization. This confronts us with questions more urgent than ever before, such as ‘Who and what “produces” the city? What forces guide its development? And who imagines the future of the city?’”

SCIFI, together with Jeffrey Inaba’s firm INABA, were one of a dozen local teams that took part in the Vertical Garden competition sponsored by the MAK in Los Angeles, the Austrian art and architecture cultural center located in the Rudolph Schindler House (c. 1922). As a response to the new condominium development that has gone up next to the Schindler house, the MAK organized a competition to create a 35-foot high “vertical garden” in order to “resist” new development and to function as a friendly “mediator” between the condos and the 20th century modern architecture landmark.

One of the most conflicted things for an architect to do is to question a client’s goals since to question the benefits of a client’s wishes, or in this case a competition organizer’s, is a good way to shoot yourself in the foot. We took the view that development in the neighborhood was inevitable and that resisting it was neither realistic nor sympathetic to the process of urbanization in Los Angeles. In fact, it is interesting to see the consequences of the recent construction of multi-story, multi-unit residential buildings being built next to detached single-family homes. In turn, the remaining single-family homes are being renovated. The renovations follow two general design directions. One is to increase the building’s livable area by expanding to the maximum allowable zoning size (densification). The other is to build a barricade around the property with landscaping and walls to create an internal courtyard arrangement (“oasis-fication”). Rather than take one of the two directions, we proposed to open up the Schindler House to an even greater extent to this rapidly changing context.

The Schindler House is one of the oldest unaltered buildings to exhibit architecture in the US. It is older than the buildings of LACMA, MOCA, the Whitney, Walker, MOMA, Storefront, MAM, ICA, MCA, and SFMOMA. The SCIFI team recommended the MAK to take advantage of the structure’s authenticity and original coherence. Rather than to confront ‘the condo problem’ through a design competition for a new structure, the MAK has the opportunity to make its building’s existing historic, material qualities an even more overt experience of the Austrian center.

Soon the MAK will need to undergo repair. In place of a Vertical Garden we outlined a plan to exhibit the building while it is being restored. To show off modern architecture in the raw, we designed a proposal to display to the public the building as it is cared for, featuring the construction, materials, and the now anachronistic scale of this master work. A Gordon Matta-Clark gesture but to a different end: in this instance, to reverse the entropy of the institution through the conservation of its building. Temporarily opening up the building in this way would also offer a once-in-a-lifetime chance to appreciate Schindler’s composition of alternating indoor and outdoor ‘rooms’ retroactively through its reconstruction.
PS: We are still healing from the shot to our foot…

After the completion of the first year of the program, SCIFI graduates are working in architecture and creative offices throughout the world. Here are some of the places they are now:

Disney Imagineering
Office for Metropolitan Architecture
BIG

David Vegezzi, a really talented video director, taught the Introduction to Motion Graphics seminar this fall. Each person developed a series of video works in Final Cut Pro. Here’s one example.

Click here to view a video by Yi-han Cao.

“Nodule”

“Vertical Farm”

For the Fall 2006 term, the SCIFI studio made proposals to raise awareness about the impact environmental resources will have on the design of cities. When a ‘super power’ nation expands economically, building rapidly as grows, it consumes a great deal of natural resources while damaging the environment through the accompanying increase in pollution discharge. It occurred in the US during the mid-20th century. It is occurring now in China. It is about to occur in India. This expansion of powerful nation states is happening at successively larger scales and at a faster frequency. In the US, the country’s population at the time was 220 million. In China it is presently 1.2 billion. When India ‘modernizes,’ its population will exceed 1.4 billion. Approximately 40 years lapsed between the peaks of rapid industrialization in the US and China. Most likely only 10 years will lapse between China’s peak and India’s. In the view of many urban and environmental thinkers, the earth won’t be able to take it. It is unlikely that the planet can sustain natural resources consumption and pollution discharge at this scale and magnitude in such quick succession. Iron ore (the main ingredient in steel), oil, and fresh water are predicted to be in short supply as India nears the apotheosis of its period of globalization. Furthermore, India’s major cities will have over 25 million inhabitants: Mumbai, the country’s main commercial center will be home to a predicted 30 million.

Given the challenges posed by resource scarcities and really big urban areas, SCIFI came up with alternative concepts for urban infrastructure. Will ‘Mother Earth’ be able to cope if the philosophy of infrastructure used during the 20th century in Europe and the US is applied during the 21st century in China and India? SCIFI believes that new concepts of infrastructure need to be developed to accommodate the new requirements of cities. Taking into consideration the huge amount of time and cost to realize infrastructure projects and also considering their typical lifespan, that means designing today for the 22nd century.

To test out some ideas of future infrastructure, SCIFI developed projects for the collection, distribution, and use of water.

Nodule, (a project by Chiedu Chijindu, Yi-han Cao, Derrick Davis, Kyong Il Ming, and Mark Lavin), proposes a de-centralized ecology. Instead of a plan that is organized around a central supply source with radiating distribution arms, they created a system more suitable to the future mega-cities in the developing world: one that could function over a vast amount of land area, provide service to tens of millions of people, while reducing the risk of system-wide failure which centralized water systems are prone to. Their ‘poly-structure’ collects and distributes water by a system of independent and redundant nodes that are placed throughout urbanized areas. Click here to view their video.

The project by Ghurmukh Bhasin, David Gonzalez, Juan Portuese, and Sernhong Yu responds to India’s looming water scarcity problem by confronting the economic sector that uses the most water. Nearly half of the country’s fresh water supply goes to agriculture. They apply the current methods of ‘vertical farming’ to achieve lower levels of water consumption and greater agricultural yields.

The premiere issue of Alibi is now available! It appears as a special insert in issue 10 of Volume Magazine. Alibi 1 is dedicated to exploring, Rocinha, a ‘Five-Star Favela’ in Rio de Janeiro. Alibi 1 was produced by SCIFI’s Jeffrey Inaba, Laurel Broughton and Kyla Farrell.

Everyone Needs an Alibi
You’re on a 2-day, 3-night visit to another continent. You give a presentation to a prospective client. You meet with possible consultants. There are long discussions, traffic jams, quick meals and jet lag in interiors you’ve never been in but already know. There is only half a day left. Suddenly, there’s a change in schedule. An appointment has been postponed, leaving open a couple hours before the meeting marathon resumes. You should be preparing for the next presentation but this is your only chance to get out—to see something more. You need an Alibi…

So you tell your boss, ‘I don’t feel so hot. It must be something I ate. I should go back to the hotel and lie down. I can catch up with you later.’ Once you part ways, you duck out of the central business district’s protective layer. At which point you think to yourself, ‘Where do I go? What is there to see?’ With Alibi you’ll always find what you’re looking for.

Alibi is your guide to getting the most out of a new place when you’re only there for a quick trip, or if you just want to explore the city in a more meaningful way. It provides information on the inner workings of a metropolis. Each installation will feature a neighborhood off the beaten path, a place you’ve probably never considered visiting, or simply did not know about. It will have everything you need to know to get there, so you can get lost in the moment once you arrive.

From time to time, Alibi will appear as a special insert in Volume. It will introduce you to an overlooked district in a major metropolitan area of the world. It is a key to see the city. It is an overview of the processes, people, and history of a locale which provides a framework to tell the built forest from the trees. Instead of taking every little thing as a sign of overwhelming squalor and chaos, you will be able to appreciate the activity that is the life of the city. The Alibi experience is a hiatus from the first world air-conditioned protocol: it’s your ‘personal-day’ to step back and step down streets to encounter events that make up the script of urban life today. Alibi describes the way people get around, adapt to geography, socialize, communicate, and build. It details tasks like negotiating a lack of infrastructure, be it trying to send a message, find water, or make life a little more enjoyable. It’s your resource to discover a faraway region, and a reminder to embrace that time and place as an agit-haiku to unlock your baggage, and to interact with a contemporary city.

Welcome to Alibi. A great afternoon is worth the lie.

Here’s an image from Doug Aitken’s installation, Sleepwalkers, which recently opened in New York. Sleepwalkers is a good example of a new kind of urbanism project: it is designed for the scale of the city, its subject matter is about the city, and it was realized with the ends of being part of the experience of the city. It’s ambition is not to ’solve a problem,’ or to design for rapid growth - or any of the other stock “raisons d’etre” of urban planning. Instead, it’s a low impact work that is relatively low cost and realizable which introduces new content into the urban realm. As a discipline, we think that urban design can learn from work like Aitken’s, which can be adopted as a way to contribute to a public sensitivity and set of values about the development of cities.
Aitken, a LA-based artist who has led two SCIFI workshops, projected numerous videos on the sides of MOMA’s complex. Sleepwalkers was sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and Creative Time.

Click here for more info, view trailers, etc.

For many on the outside, Sweden is the perfect country. There is great effort to promote ‘fairness’ (five government bureaucracies are dedicated to ombudsmanship); public services such as health and education are excellent; other countries such as Uruguay emulate its social policies; and despite its location on the periphery, Sweden functions exceedingly well in the global economy. As we soon learned in our SCIFI workshop with the Royal University College of Fine Arts post-graduate architecture program, it is in fact pretty close to perfect. Evenso, it could be better, and Sweden serves as an ideal example of how a relatively small, highly developed nation can use its resources to contribute to overall global development. So SCIFI and the KKH conducted a one-week workshop in Stockholm with Christian Bandi and Michael Dudley to developed several country plan proposals.

In one morning session Malmo’s mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, argues that urbanism matters, and that it is essential to the global agenda of any city government today.

In response to ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder” (not enough sun), Maria Appelros, Yi-han Cao, and Jesse Madrid propose a migration plan in which Swedes work more and play more. Here’s their idea…

“The big swap is a social policy proposal for Sweden based on the extreme seasonal climatic change in the arctic region. It encourages Swedish citizen to work longer during the extended daylight season when work efficiency is high, in exchange for reduced working time during the shorter daylight months. The ensuing winter population exodus triggers a seasonal
job vacancy and foreign workers enter the Swedish market and contribute to the country’s economy.”

It’s here. The SCIFI 2007 program booklet is now available. The 32-page publication describes SCIFI’s urban + media agenda. It explains how urgent it is for architects to address our conceptually unsustainable view of first and third world urban development. It profiles student proposals for architectural alternatives to urban design where the architect acts as policy strategist, urban planner, social thinker, and building designer. To read about these experimental approaches to architectural design, request a copy at admissions@sciarc.edu.

Check out some of our other publications, like,

Whatever Happened to LA?,

Rio,

Uruguay, and

Editing Uruguay.

You can receive a free copy of Whatever Happened to LA? by writing to admissions@sciarc.edu.

As I was leaving Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, a business acquaintance who had generously spent the last two days showing us this quickly growing city appeared unexpectedly at the airport with a request. He asked if I would carry a wrapped package to his associate in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s other major city. As an architect, what would have been a smart response in this situation?

Not accepting the package and saying ‘No’ would be offensive to our host, and would concede to a xenophobic paranoia of ‘tourist as victim’ in which one is asked unwittingly to be a mule in a drug trafficking operation. Saying ‘Yes’ without asking any questions would be stupid.

In the SCIFI program we emphasize the importance of visiting cities worldwide to witness emerging urban conditions to gain a global perspective of contemporary urbanism. By seeing a place firsthand it is possible to begin to understand a country’s overall economy, its political idiosyncrasies, the logic of its construction industry, and the architect’s role in them. And by seeing numerous cities in this way, the architect can accumulate a set of urban situations to reference in the future when working on proposals in a new context. In this sense, the architect is a mule. He/she is a border-crosser with goods (goods such as experiences that lead to greater credibility, designs to try elsewhere, newly acquired skills needed in another location, and so on).

Stupidly saying ‘Yes’ when seeing cities happens also to be a good way to learn how architects in different parts of the world run their businesses. In the case of our colleague in Astana, it turns out he does a lot of his in cash. The security screeners, a number of customs officers, and I discovered that I was being asked to carry a little over 10K USD to two of his mostly gold-toothed Central Asian friends.

Environmentalism
After 9/11 global capital investors sought to develop oil reserves beyond areas of conflict in the Middle East. With its untapped oil fields around the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan became the recipient of a high influx of foreign investment. While oil is and will be the centerpiece of the country’s economy for several generations to come, like Norway and other oil-rich nations, Kazakhstan is trying to avoid ‘Dutch Disease’ or the ill-planned depletion of oil reserves. For example, Kazakhstan’s central government is promoting alternative energy applications, such as solar technology. This emphasis on environmentalism has resulted in buildings that combine historical references with amazingly large disk-like tops of solar PV arrays.

Shenzhen on Speed
Astana is growing fast even by today’s Bubble City standards. Compared to Dubai, Moscow, or cities in Southern China, Astana’s ‘rush to market’ building boom can be characterized as ‘artificial’ and out-of-control. Building complexes are being constructed all across the empty steppe. It is like Shenzhen on speed.

Open Hand
At the top of the capital’s Independence Tower (a structure commemorating Kazakhstan’s autonomy from the Soviet Union, and yet somehow befittingly designed in the Soviet style of its time), there is an imprint of the current president’s right hand. The imprint lies in line with the new capital’s axis of administrative buildings and private-capital luxury housing. When dignitaries place their hand in the imprint, a giant gold and silver metal ball with flashing lights and a Central Asian pop sound track descends from the ceiling to call attention to the axial experience of this urban achievement. Like Le Corbusier, President Nursultan Nazarbayev has rendered the open hand a political symbol of the nation building process.

Similar to the workshop he led last year (where students built a full scale house mock-up in 5 days), Jens Hommert asked participants to think fast. The optimal but rare situation is for the architect to be asked to take due time to research, deliberate, reflect, experiment, in order to create an exceptional work. The least desirable situation is to have to work fast, to accelerate the design process. But working fast does not necessarily mean that a project will be compromised because no time is available to flush out ideas. On the contrary, Jens believes that working with a quick deadline can have inventive results by eliminating the static and hardened conventions of the design process (concept, schematic design, design development, etc.). Thinking fast also subverts the tendency to over-intellectualize a project, enabling the architect to explore solutions that are creative because of a sense of immediacy, improvisation, and surprise.

Based upon his own experiences of having to think fast (he was AMO’s creative designer for a majority of its commissions, exhibitions and installations up till 2004), he has developed an approach that acknowledges the demands of globalization for architects to design in an accelerated way. Whether its to design a competition entry in 4 weeks, a skyscraper in St. Petersburg in 3, or a master plan in Central Asia in 2, the architect does not necessarily have to abandon his/her commitment to ideas. It just requires inventing the final form and production process at the same time, and at very start. Here are shoe display designs the SCIFIs completed (working very fast) with Jens.

For the Spring term final project SCIFI’s Yi-han Cao, Jenille Amerman, and Jesse Madrid proposed that two countries on the global periphery join forces to ‘not develop’ Canada’s least desirable land area. Here’s why.

The proposals were presented as part of an end of year installation inspired by things Swedish.

SCIFI participated in a one-week workshop sponsored by SA, the Seoul Association of Architects. The design charrette included 50 invited designers and 150 students. SCIFI teamed up with Minsuk Cho of Mass Studies to propose a plan for a new district to occupy Seoul’s Han River.

At the river’s widest point, its banks are 1 kilometer apart, creating a cognitive gulf between the two halves of Korea’s capital. While there has been a collective obsession to ‘link’ the north and south sides, evident most recently in a citywide development plan, we recommended a different approach. Instead of bridging across river, we proposed to inhabit it, and to realize an urban district above the water.

Entitled, “Sustainability? Huh?” the proposal is a reaction against the regressive urban environments executed in the name of ecological sustainability. (Why do today’s ‘sustainable cities’ look like 1980s golf resorts?) Since less scrutiny is given to projects said to be sustainable, the SCIFI team adopted the term to propose interventions that otherwise would likely be unacceptable: sustainability was used as an excuse to develop a zone that in any other case would remain unexplored as an opportunity to invent new typologies and urban massing, and draw attention to the city’s eco-systems.

The third edition of the SCIFI T-shirt, designed by the SCIFI class of 2008, is here. The SCIFIs went to downtown LA shops and purchased a whole bunch of shirts (apparently ones with a silkscreen print on them are cheaper than the plain ones). You get twice the content on a single side.
To receive one, write to admissions@sciarc.edu, include in the subject heading, “I want a SCIFI T-shirt” and in the email indicate your mailing address, shirt size.

This past summer SCIFI went to Henderson, Kentucky to work with community leaders to develop an urban plan for the town’s waterfront. In the past, Henderson was a prosperous center of river trade, selling locally grown tobacco to buyers on points along the Ohio River. Today, like many small towns it is experiencing a decline in population as it local economic base diminishes. Younger people have been moving away to larger cities for better opportunities and as a result Henderson’s population is not only declining, but also aging.

Those who remain in Henderson are not part of a fragmented community but rather a collective committed to its redefinition. While the scene along Main Street is beautifully spare (urban building types along streets super wide - see photos), everywhere people are discussing development and programming ideas. A great example of harnessing this shared urban interest is the pet project of two local architects, Mark Bethel and Tim Skinner who have created, The Henderson Project, an ongoing series of sponsored workshops intended to formulate urban design and development initiatives.
SCIFI and Drura Parrish’s studio at the School of Architecture at the University of Kentucky were invited to design proposals along Henderson’s 4.5-mile waterfront which resulted in a ‘local’ way-finding system that extends to as far away as Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Memphis; the conversion of its power plant to an algae-based renewable energy hub, and a plan to develop the town into a wedding destination. (Through our research we discovered that the younger a person marries, the more often one marries.) In Kentucky, weddings are frequent…

SCIFIs Sam Gnatovich and Patrick Shields, and Henderson native / SCI-Arc alum Drura Parrish appeared on the ABC syndicate’s evening news to describe the project’s goals. SCIFI’s Jeffrey Inaba was interviewed on the local Fox channel news.

At the end of the week-long workshop, SCIFI and the University of Kentucky students presented their proposals to the community.