Archinect's Roundtable with SCI-Arc Program Chairs

I Am David Ruy and I'm the chair postgraduate programs with four MS degree postgraduate programs at SCI-Arc. I'm Kristy Balliet. I am the chair of the undergraduate programs along with Marcelyn Gow. I'm Marcelyn Gow and I'm an undergraduate programs chair at SCI-Arc. I work together with Kristy Balliet and we are responsible for the curriculum in our 5-year NAAB accredited Bachelor of Architecture degree as well as our new 4-year Bachelor of Science and design degree. My name is Elena Manferdini. I'm the graduate program chair at SCI-Arc.

We have fiction and entertainment, architectural technologies, design theory and pedagogy and synthetic Landscapes. These are specialized programs to build specialized knowledge and expertise. The undergraduate programs at SCI-Arc consist of a five-year Bachelor of architecture program so the five-year professional degree; and we also have a Bachelor of Science in design program. This is a degree for students who would like to pursue studies in virtual film making, the design of immersive data-driven environments and interactive games and simulation. The curriculum is rooted in fostering innovation in architecture through experimental design, advanced technologies, critical engagement with all the contemporary issues.

There's moments where I think it's really important that there's autonomy between the liberal arts program and their ability to dive into broader topics and make people kind of cultural citizens. And then there's moments where the studios again need to sort of maybe focus on foundational skills building up a vocabulary that can then be transferred to other courses. It is necessary to silo your expertise because you have to be good at it you can't be a diletant that informs of expertise you actually have to develop expertise. With that said I think there are other moments in the curriculum where things like vertical studios are incredibly important where content delivery isn't just going from faculty to student but really it's going from student to student. So a degree of siloing does have to happen but simultaneously you need to develop the ability to speak across disciplines. One expert needs to be able to collaborate with a different kind of expert. And I think there's a point in the curriculum in which they merge and I think that's of course bringing richness to the curriculum because I think it brings almost multidisciplinary approach to architecture because of the nature of the students being from other fields of design. As students progress through the curriculum and they begin to take on more responsibility in their projects and they can take elective seminars, or what we call the advanced level Studios, where they will be studying alongside students from other programs and I always find those collaborations extremely rich because then students are bringing their different forms of expertise, the different kind of research they've been doing comes to the table and there's a really rich dialogue between them. I think maybe the final thing I would say about that is that I think it's not just about the students being able to have flexibility to think about whether they're learning from peers or faculty but that faculty continue to allow themselves to be uncomfortable and I think at least what that means in the undergraduate program is that we really encourage and try to design the roster so that faculty are teaching sometimes in foundational courses and then you know in more advanced or thesis courses. What I think it's very important for faculty to be able to be part of the education of the students at different level. You would never want to be always teaching first year. You really want to see the growth of the students and have the satisfaction to see them grow into more mature projects.

When I hear the word AI in architecture I immediately think of collaboration rather than sort of trying to bracket them out I think embracing them but embracing them in a way that always situates the role of the human and the role of machine intelligence as a collaborative act. If you are in the field of knowledge production which is what we are as architects and university, I think the use of AI is inevitable I think the broader goal of university should not simply be to integrate these technologies but I think to imagine the entire learning experience, I think it will be a game changer, yes I do. So understanding that there are certain things that we can access maybe with a speed which we did not have before, certain kinds of research we can conduct, but always being aware that the AI will you know often bring things to the you know discussion that maybe we really need to think about like how much of this do we want to engage with and use? How use it and how is our own sort of voice or our own design sensibility being transformed through the use of these tools and so I think that awareness is so important, I think it will allow architects to analyze data, optimize design, enhance creativity with greater speed and probably efficiency. And I think we'll see also democratized skills the ones were reserved to select few. I think a new industry also will be expanding out of this. There are new jobs available out there is I think it's a great opportunity for people that go into a master degree to sharpen their skills because there's a great need for people that actually can interact with AI and can lead that revolution. I think it's actually going to expand quite a bit what architects will be asked to do and can do. Yeah, I guess it's optimism but a lot of skepticism too I have. You know as architects I think we tend to be a bit tool obsessed and there will be new tools, no doubt, there are and I think maybe there is some comfort in thinking that this might be nothing more than a new way to make a rendering but I think uh that's maybe a pretty narrow view on what this represents. I think the technological phenomena is much bigger in this ramification. With that I think it might be interesting to think about other possibilities for AI that might be outside of tool making so instead of words such as application, automation, efficiency or functionality, might we instead have conversations where we use words such as critic, advisor, teacher or companion, so that is less of a tool but maybe more of a kind of dark mirror through which we're gazing upon ourselves on the world so I think that's something to be explored. Definitely like the idea of beginning to think about AI as a companion and I think maybe um coming from the point of view of the undergraduate program one thing that I think really sets SCI-Arc apart is that we have been integrating artificial intelligence into our first year teaching for the Last 5 Years so that means that at the same moment that they are learning the foundational skills of critical thinking drawing modeling whether that be physical or digital Etc; they're also that tool has been on the table and in the discussion not as a sparkly thing or an advanced thing but more as these are things that are in the discussion in the discipline that you are entering in your first semester of architecture school you're learning language. You're learning vocabulary. You're using terms that you understood in one way, and now you're using them in different ways, and I think artificial intelligence is an interesting way to begin to have those students think more critically to speed them up and slow them down at the same time um and I think that at the beginning of a curriculum, I find that very fascinating.

This is a topic that's very front of my thought I mean as somebody that's teaching in the synthetic landscapes program. I think about this every day. I take a more somewhat more radical position because in my position is our current concepts of mitigation pertaining to words such as sustainability, green aesthetics or LEED certification are wholly inadequate and are quite misleading and historically deeply problematic in their intentions. So I see our current ecological practices as kind of remnants of a reflexive modernism of the late 20th century and which I really think comes to a spectacular end during Covid and I think we're at the end of one historical period and at the beginning of another one we just don't know what it is yet and we're lacking in new concepts, new aesthetic regimes, new forms of imagining future. I think we need to develop some new concepts beyond sustainability, beyond the green. It's not such a safe set of concepts that we'll need and I think we're going to have to willing to be a lot more aggressive in rethinking some of these terms. It just means our conceptual apparatus and our language is inadequate right now, seems like something that should be worked on in higher education. I would agree, I think that we have been working in our our courses and with our students to shift away from the kind of assigning of terminology that would kind of blanket our understanding of like how things are going to become fixed or even mediated and I think that has for for years now been an understanding that the students have. I think things though that are really starting to take up traction I think here at the school or there's uh there's a few electives there's one on embodied carbon as a seminar elective that I think has been very impactful for our architects and them thinking about the weight and the implications of the design decisions that they make and understanding them in a larger sort of circular economy. Overall topics are, I would agree with David, that we don't have a class on sustainability that right we're they're getting interwoven into how we critically think about things. However, I think that there have been a few strategic elective seminars that are taken by graduate students and undergraduate students that I'm beginning to see have a huge impact on how students synthesize those with their design ideas. Well, one area I think in relation to climate change that I think is fundamental to consider is how we communicate about these issues because it's something that can seem so vast and very difficult as an individual to think how can I even if I change my personal practices how will that impact this larger situation we all find ourselves in and so I think that both within the field of architecture as well as communicating with the public at large it is very imperative that architects and designers develop tools for staging these conversations and for how do we convene and have a discussion there may not be a consensus there may be dissensus on this but how do we even uh sort of get into that space and I think something that we're doing what I'm very excited about in our Bachelor of Science and design program at SCI-Arc is looking at how we use storytelling and the production of narratives to sort of look at some of the possibilities for these existing Technologies and maybe things that are just nascent in their development right now but sort of propelling a future vision of like what would happen if we integrate this technology or this way of thinking about material reclamation how might that change the kinds of things we're designing and their relationship to the environment. I think students are going to become Architects quite soon you know you go to the graduate program and need two or three years you are actually faced with this issues and especially uh in Los Angeles I think we every year we see there is a fire season wild fires burning down um houses. So we're now offering for inst as a class that is uh addressing the impact of climate change in Los Angeles which I think is an incredible opportunity for the students to really change the tools. We're working in collaboration with other institutes in Los Angeles that already are working on these issues and the outcomes of this classes will go to the Architectural Venice Biennale in 2025 so I think there is I think a strong desire for SCI-Arc to connect to other level of expertise in the city and then there is also a big appetite to find solutions that are out there and architects to educate themselves.

We need to double down on our ability to visually and verbally communicate to one another at a time when the vocabulary is exponentially increasing that I think we have to use our skills and develop new skills as architects to be able to figuratively and literally keep people in the same room. I would say fostering the emergence of Global Citizens. I think um nowadays we teach and we learn in global classrooms it's not an issue of one institution's worth of another. I think there are many constituencies to the discussion and understanding that we're Global Citizens and we have a very diverse audience and I think leading a school means to try to align values and purpose within a curriculum. The authority of Institutions and our normal sources of information had broken down. I think a lot of it is more traceable to not our current political climate but the appearance of the internet and the mass distribution of communications. Either we just accept the fact that it's broken forever or we commit to reconstructing our epistemologies. I don't see myself how much longer we can go on thinking that everybody is equally right and equally wrong. It's important to reconstruct cosmology for the 21st century that is how do we make knowledge, how do we understand what a fact is. I think that's something we're going to have to develop. How is it that we come to know things? How do we maybe take a moment to slow down to reflect to really ask ourselves questions of you know what is it that, as educators, what would we like our students to know or what would is it that we would like them to know how to do how to really think critically as they graduate from our schools how well do we think we're doing in achieving this and you know how we could augment questions of what will I be able to do with how might think about this to approach this problem like really developing a dexterity for kind of problem-solving because we don't even know what that next set of problems is that's on the horizon so we can't always plan for that but if we develop a capacity to really think in a dextrous way we will be maybe prepared to begin to take on those challenges that we can't see today.

Architects are not just designers - they're generalist and they wear many hats: business people, entrepreneurs, technologists, inventors, philosophers, researchers, writers, artists, cultural agents, etc; and understand that is the nature of the profession of architecture and that will change. I would say staying curious, embrace opportunities and flexibility in learning. I think curiosity is so important that really gets us engaged in our world and as well as wonder the sense of wonder not always knowing how uh something works or what the factors behind that are but to actually approach that with a very sort of a sense of optimism I think this is so important. I would like to ask young people to resist Nostalgia because even if you want to you're not going to be able to go back and time only moves in one direction. Swim forward at all times. Definitely swim forward. Don't sink. You know, don't tread water. As you are developing your approach to design I would also take on the proactive stance of designing the career that you want to have within design.