Building Creative Tension : Education: The Southern California Institute of Architecture restructures itself--a little--as the acclaimed nonconformist college edges toward the mainstream.

Traditionalists might be well advised to breathe deeply before visiting the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

The 23-year-old school occupies a gray two-story warehouse in a Marina del Rey industrial park. The interior resembles a commune of unfinished and unkempt artists’ lofts. Don’t expect to find room numbers on many doors; in fact, don’t expect many doors.

What goes on there has its offbeat side too. In recent years, SCI-Arc (pronounced sigh-ark ) students were assigned to build Naugahyde furniture inspired by Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion. Teachers spent two semesters delving into the construction and politics of California prisons. The school sponsored a lecture called “Queer Space” about the effect of sexuality on architecture.

Yet from that scruffy warehouse, SCI-Arc has garnered a strong international reputation as a fount of avant-garde design and experimental education. Its graduate program was ranked 13th in the nation in a magazine poll of architecture education last year--topped mainly by Ivy League institutions and second only to UC Berkeley among California architecture schools.

“If you hear about it on a superficial level, that it’s in a warehouse somewhere and run on a shoestring, the whole thing sounds a little bit wacky, of course,” said Mono Schwarz, a SCI-Arc graduate student who edits a campus newsletter called Form. “But when you go there and see what the students are doing and the quality of the teaching . . . I think there are very few people who would end up criticizing it.”

SCI-Arc offers its 191 undergraduates and 243 graduate students chic design lessons and gritty urban concerns in an unusual mixture that helps define Los Angeles as an incubator of style trends.

Yet traditionalists from USC, UCLA and the Cal Polys sneer that SCI-Arc doesn’t prepare students well enough for the business of architecture or for ensuring that walls stand up in earthquakes.

“I find recent graduates are virtually unemployable because they get so much emphasis on theory, not on function,” said one well-connected Los Angeles architect who asked not to be identified.

Joseph Bilello, the director of education programs at the American Institute of Architects in Washington, disagreed, praising SCI-Arc as being highly innovative. “Where other programs might have more of a pragmatic approach, pragmatism is not one of the hallmarks of this program. But being pragmatic isn’t always the best preparation,” he said. Besides, he added, traditional construction courses are required and graduates learn more basics during internships.

That tension between pragmatism and creative freedom is on the minds of many SCI-Arc students, teachers, administrators and alumni these days. Founded in a rebellion against mainstream education, the school is seeking Establishment recognition in the sober accreditation that most larger colleges have.

As a result of steps taken to win that accreditation, some faculty and alumni worry that this icon of California hip might become too straight. Others say that, after the giddy architecture boom in 1980s Los Angeles ended in social, natural and economic disasters, the school has to embrace a new realism.

“In many senses, SCI-Arc has become more conventional,” said Margaret Crawford, who heads SCI-Arc’s architectural history and theory program. “I don’t see that as a bad thing necessarily. This has always been the main debate at SCI-Arc: Where is the line between being too conventional and being an outlaw school?”

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Until recently, the school didn’t pay much attention to alumni relations, financial endowments or internal bureaucracies. Insiders suggest that the freewheeling atmosphere contributed to disputes between a former administrator and female employees who charged him with sexual harassment. In the last two years or so, SCI-Arc has tightened up administration, wiped out its deficit and begun a fund-raising arm to boost its puny financial aid endowment and expand its shockingly small library.

On the education side, classes are tackling more real-life urban problems. There even are rumblings about traditional grades replacing the credit/no credit system.

Conventionality, of course, is relative.

SCI-Arc has no faculty tenure, no dormitories, no sports except a basketball net in the parking lot, and not much social life except a Halloween ball, for which students create extravagant monsters.

Three years ago the school moved into the leased warehouse on Beethoven Street, doubling the space it had at its original Santa Monica home. Inside, drawing boards are everywhere, carpets are dirty and plastic tarps sometimes serve as room dividers. The largest lecture hall has large delivery bay doors that still roll up. Studio workrooms seem to be furnished from yard sales in nearby Venice, where many students live.

A plush campus it’s not. And students seem to love it that way. Powered by caffeine, they often hang out in the studios until 2 a.m. or pull all-nighters over their sketches.

SCI-Arc’s soul, many say, is the wood shop that extends on sunny days into the parking lot. Unlike UC and Ivy League schools, SCI-Arc requires a great deal of hands-on model-making, carpentry and metalworking. The “object-making” classes built the Elvis-inspired furniture three years ago. In January, a collection of 25 student projects--custom-designed bicycles--were sent to New York for an exhibition at Grand Central Terminal.

On a recent day, shop master Randall Wilson was showing students how to brush lye wash onto the miniature Stickley-style chairs they had built of white oak. Undergraduate Alden Cusick finds such work strongly linked to an architecture career. “You really learn a lot of lessons, patience, and that things go together slowly,” he said while brushing his chair. “The more time you take, the better the product.”

Students also built a wooden hut, resembling a child’s playhouse, where Michael Rotondi, SCI-Arc’s director since 1987, holds weekly rap sessions. A high-profile Los Angeles architect, Rotondi sprinkles conversations about the school with references to Zen Buddhism and Renaissance history.

He attributed recent SCI-Arc changes to a natural maturing process, along with attempts to connect more with post-riot, post-earthquake Los Angeles.

“It was a mom-and-pop institution that’s growing up. An institution parallels human life cycles and now this is the equivalent of going into adulthood,” Rotondi said. He was among the original 75 students who followed SCI-Arc’s founder, Prof. Ray Kappe, in a celebrated secession from Cal Poly Pomona in 1972 to form an experimental school.

Against the odds, the school survived and now attracts a large contingent of students from the East Coast, Europe and Japan. (Foreign citizens make up more than a quarter of the student body.) A recent survey found that 68% of all alumni are licensed architects and that many others are designers in graphics, apparel, furniture and film.

Many were drawn to SCI-Arc by the names of star architects who teach there or are on its governing board, such as Frank Gehry, Eric Owen Moss, Thom Mayne, Craig Hodgetts, Rotondi and others. Those professors pioneered the quirky sculptural styles and use of industrial materials that evoke contemporary Los Angeles to the design world.

Yet in the past few years, classes taught by Crawford, radical Los Angeles historian Mike Davis (“City of Quartz”) and urban planner John Kaliski have returned Kappe’s original social awareness to a school that was becoming known for trendy design in the 1980s.

That shift was exemplified in classes this spring that designed a Latino-flavored market for a Long Beach site, a school for the blind in a converted Downtown depot and a Sunset Strip complex of theaters, shops and a gym. Davis has taken students on field trips to prisons in a seminar he labels “California Gulag” and led others in studying the troubled Oakwood section of Venice.

The down-to-earth emphasis, and a new concern for cost, were also evident in the recent “Less Is More” exhibition, showing photographs of alumni’s designs for home renovations and new offices that each cost less than $100,000 to build. The pitch was for modest jobs during a deep recession for the construction industry. Photos of bookshelves and kitchen cabinets --albeit stylish shelves--were proudly displayed at a school that had encouraged thinking about the cosmos, or at least a redesigned Los Angeles.

According to Rotondi, the school reflects the tougher economy and a new modesty about architecture’s possible effect on difficult urban problems. “You don’t have to be extravagant any more. You can do things that are socially responsible but that keep high aesthetic standards,” said the director.

Aaron Betsky, a former SCI-Arc teacher who is now a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, described it as a “guerrilla warfare” philosophy. “We all want to change the world, but now we try to remake the world block by block, street by street, not imposing a grand order,” he said.

Graduate students’ projects in January also showed more real-world focus than in the past, students say. Amid models of monumental timepieces and theaters dominated by giant robots were plans for factories, shopping malls and even suburban tract houses.

One of that show’s hits was student Emily Jagoda’s plan for improving mobile homes with canopies, rooftop patios and interior stairways. Gehry, the dean of Los Angeles avant-garde, examined Jagoda’s wooden models and recalled that students a generation ago wanted to save the world, not fix up a trailer park. Clearly, times have changed, he said.

Jagoda took that as a compliment. “Without, I hope, sounding too sickeningly sincere, I felt this was a real problem that could be helped by design rather than just making design prettier,” she said.

SCI-Arc’s education programs long have had accreditation from a national architecture group. That respect was reflected in the U.S News & World Report ranking of the 20 top graduate architecture programs last year, in which SCI-Arc was judged 13th. Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and Yale were on top; UC Berkeley was seventh and UCLA 16th. SCI-Arc was the only highly ranked school independent of a larger university and is among a handful of unaffiliated schools in the more than 100 architecture programs nationwide.

In February, SCI-Arc was host to examiners from the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges, an agency whose accreditation most colleges covet and SCI-Arc wants. With a focus well beyond architecture, the association judges candidates on issues that have not been SCI-Arc’s strong suit: administration, personnel, audits and the library. The association’s answer is crucial for federal financial aid and for continued approval by the architecture group.

Before the visit, SCI-Arc improved its bookkeeping, alumni relations, student recruiting, and faculty governance, and over a four-year period erased a $500,000 deficit. But the campus is still rebounding from a furor that Sci-ARC concedes was worsened by a lack of clear rules.

In 1992 and 1993, four women employees sued the school and a former administrator, Jeffrey Shapiro, alleging that he sexually harassed them or fired them for challenging the alleged harassment. The school and Shapiro denied the complaints. Three cases have been settled out of court or in arbitration under undisclosed terms; one case is pending. Shapiro’s contract was not renewed two years ago.

His replacement as daily administrator, Glen T. Winans, contends that SCI-Arc has settled on the right amount of bureaucracy. “I think SCI-Arc used to have too little, but many other institutions have too much,” he said.

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The association’s approval appears likely in June, although it may come tempered with criticism about SCI-Arc’s inadequate library, computer facilities and endowment, sources say. The $200,000 endowment produces only a few scholarships toward the $11,600 annual tuition charges students pay.

Limited financial aid--along with architecture’s image as a white man’s world--hurt recruitment of low-income and some minority students. Of the American students, 22% are Asian American, 7% are Latino and 2% are African American.

“That’s the obvious criticism of SCI-Arc. Why, in a place like Southern California, you can barely find a [SCI-Arc] student who is Latino or African American,” said Mike Davis. “The moral litmus test in the next few years is what we do about diversity.”

Meanwhile, SCI-Arc leaders are starting to think about the search for a new director when Rotondi’s term ends in two years. “If we can get a director who can raise $10 million, that would be great,” one staffer joked.

Rotondi said SCI-Arc must keep its open spirit and adapt to change.

“I think for years this place has been an index of everything else that goes on around it,” he said. “I would like to think we see the dawn an hour before other people.”