The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) began in a confrontation with authority. In 1972, when Ray Kappe was demoted from his role as Department of Architecture chair at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, faculty recognized a deeper problem: a system unwilling to reflect or respond.
Their response? A protest that blurred the line between satire and strategy. Students printed high-contrast images of Kappe’s face, propelled down the building at night, and plastered the dean’s office windows. At the same time, they were strategizing — holding regular meetings in Kappe’s office.
“Why don’t we just start a new school?” said Thom Mayne. It was, as he later admitted, “the craziest, most insane thing in the world.” But it was also possible — precisely because the founders were naive enough to believe in reinvention and determined enough to make it real.
By April 1972, the founding Department Chair (Ray Kappe, with faculty Thom Mayne, Jim Stafford, Glen Small, Ahde Lahti, Bill Simonian, and Shelly Kappe) leased a 20,000-square-foot industrial building in Santa Monica. By September, SCI-Arc welcomed its first cohort of 50 to 60 students — many of whom had followed the founders from Cal Poly. They painted the walls, planted trees, built their own cubicles, and helped design the curriculum.
“Everybody agreed that we had to make it work,” said Bill Simonian. It was a school built, quite literally, by students.
Pedagogy in action
SCI-Arc’s curriculum was never dictated from above, either. It was emergent — constructed through dialogue, critique, and experimentation. Students even co-authored it.
The physical environment reflected this. As John Souza describes, the prototype floors for early workspaces were constructed from glued scaffold planks — then weighted down with a Volkswagen to test their stability. Other structures used rhombic dodecahedrons, an early experiment in geometry, space, and autonomy.
For some, it was both an experimental lab and a home. “If you were a student at the new school, you had to be very adventurous and nomadic, meaning, they all lived in the school 24/7,” explains Lahti. “Three or four of us literally lived at the school. That was my mailing address.”
A pioneering commitment to public engagement
Shortly after SCI-Arc opened its doors, Shelly Kappe launched the Design Forum, a public lecture program aimed at “making more people aware of architecture.” The school collaborated with a video collective in exchange for use of their equipment, creating one of the earliest video archives of architectural discourse. “Every single architect that we could coax to come to lecture –– they came,” said Mayne. “Everyone wanted to talk at SCI-Arc.”
The posters advertising these events were hand-drawn, radical in tone, and widely circulated. Pearl Brickman described receiving one and realizing, “Oh, it says it’s going to be accredited and not just a little fly-by-night thing. So, I got more interested.”
Brickman recalls being one of just five women among 60 men at the time of enrollment. Within four years, that number had increased dramatically. “By the time I graduated, there must have been 25 or 30 women,” she says.
Out with the old
SCI-Arc relocated several times — from Santa Monica to Marina del Rey, to Beethoven Street, and finally to downtown Los Angeles. Each move was both logistical and symbolic. “Moving to the Arts District was a big deal, and a bold move,” said Kevin McMahon, who’s worked at the school since 1987. “It was the right thing to do.”
The shifting geography of the school mirrored its belief in transformation. “This place is a chameleon,” said International Advisor Lisa Russo, who joined in 1986. “Just when you’re getting comfortable, you’ve got to get comfortable in a different way.”
This is why the architect, in SCI-Arc’s conception, is a connector: a synthesizer of form, systems, politics, science, and culture. Across physical installations, speculative fiction, urban reuse, and artificial intelligence, students’ thesis work reaffirms this.
“People come from all over the world to see thesis reviews at SCI-Arc. They want to see what the future of architecture holds. And the secret is — that’s why we come too.”
Erik Ghenoiu, History + Theory Coordinator
Aesthetics beyond blueprints
Thesis at SCI-Arc no longer takes the form of final buildings, but manifests instead as fragments, full-scale prototypes, books, narratives, and research-based prompts. David Eskenazi, from the Design Studio and Visual Studies faculty, refers to this as the rise of the “complete incomplete thesis” — an approach that values deliberation over decisiveness.
“Students now present fragments of processes, anecdotes, inspirations, and various final versions all at once,” Eskenazi explains. “The matter in front of us isn’t a delayed projection. It’s already a tangible reality.”
Between ruin and reuse
A growing number of SCI-Arc students are responding to the environmental and ethical crisis of construction. Rather than focusing on new builds, they’re investigating the architectural afterlife of cities — brownfields, abandoned lots, and derelict industrial zones.
“Students are increasingly interested in underused and abandoned structures,” says Zeina Koreitem, who teaches in Design Studio and Visual Studies. “They experimented with materials by casting infills and imprints of existing structures.”
These projects are deliberate provocations: What does it mean to leave a footprint? How can architecture reduce harm by withdrawing rather than building? How can form respond to decay rather than erase it?
New tools, new territories
In SCI-Arc’s graduate programs, AI, gaming, and generative design are tools for producing radical new narratives — often interrogating the assumptions baked into software, systems, and simulation.
“Graduate thesis is a place where emerging designers reshape our technological narratives,” says design faculty, Damjan Jovanovic. “Projects bridge virtual and physical landscapes and pose provocative questions about responsibility, innovation, ethical engagement, and the power of imagination.”
Indeed, students construct speculative worlds, manipulate time and space, and construct agency within algorithmic systems. The work is part design, part media theory, part ethics. In this context, video games become models of urbanism, AI becomes a collaborator, and virtual spaces are mined for their cultural and emotional complexity.
Narrative as form
What emerges from many thesis projects is a renewed attention to storytelling. “Students proposed cultural scripts and visualized them through representations unlike anything we’ve seen before,” says Jackilin Hah Bloom, Graduate Thesis Coordinator.
Their work ranges from “earthly urban speculations” to “quirky orbital fables”. But whether grounded or speculative, the underlying question is the same: How do we design meaning? What are the visual, material, and emotional qualities that make a space legible, memorable, or even valuable?
Projects interrogate how value is assigned to digital objects — through physics, rendering, and user interaction. Increasingly, thesis students work obsessively at the boundary of digital and analog, producing intricate objects and installations that extend visual fiction into physical reality.
Between the local and the global
While thesis projects are highly individual, many students weave personal histories and cultural identity into their work. The local, the diasporic, the ancestral — all find form in contemporary technique.
“They want to be current and timely,” says Anna Neimark, Visual Studies Coordinator. “But they also want to identify with their culture of origin. They pay attention to context and to the timelessness of form.”
Degrees that unlock the complete experience
SCI-Arc’s entire academic catalog is rooted in experimentation, critical inquiry, and real-world impact. Its undergraduate program, the B.Arch (Bachelor of Architecture), is a five-year NAAB-accredited degree that immerses students in studio culture from day one. The school’s graduate offerings include a three-year M.Arch 1 for those entering architecture from other disciplines and a two-year M.Arch 2 for students with prior architectural studies.
Challenge the boundaries of architecture at SCI-Arc.
