A Tricky Move

Most academic institutions would cringe at the idea of having to redefine their identity overnight. But the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc)--which has become one of the country’s most offbeat and inventive architecture schools since its inception 25 years ago--soon will have no other option.

Although SCI-Arc moved to its current location at 5454 Beethoven St. in Mar Vista a mere six years ago, the school recently has launched an intense search for a new home in the face of unexpected escalating rent increases. If it does not move within the next two years, according to school officials, SCI-Arc will eventually be forced to implement significant tuition hikes or face dropping critical academic programs. Those problems are compounded by the fact that the school’s revenues are 98% tuition-generated, a figure that is almost unheard of among major academic institutions.

SCI-Arc’s impending move has launched an intense internal debate about the school’s ultimate mission. The faculty is currently considering three possible sites: 33 acres of former naval housing in San Pedro, a strip of land along the northern edge of Los Angeles International Airport and a still-undetermined downtown location. And each choice, in a sense, represents a competing ideological stance within the architectural profession. Should architectural study continue its obsession with the dense metropolis or turn its gaze toward the sprawling urban megalopolis? Should an architecture school be an intellectual sanctuary for theoretical debate or a laboratory for studying the urban landscape?

So far, SCI-Arc officials are undecided. But the decision touches on a long-standing crisis in architectural education in this country. As architecture has struggled to escape its imageas a marginal profession, architecture schools have traditionally been places where the profession’s most radical thinkers have been able to retreat during times of economic stagnation, working out theoretical proposals as they wait for the next building boom. But that isolation from the problems of the real world has fed an architectural community that often mistakes flamboyant forms for radical thought, one that is often reluctant to investigate deeper social realities.

SCI-Arc now has an opportunity to change all that. By choosing to move closer to the inner city, the school could recast itself as a public forum for re-imagining Los Angeles’ urban landscape--a landscape that includes the Latino and immigrant enclaves that are already shifting the city’s center eastward. Imagine, for example, an architecture school where urban policies and various theoretical visions of the future metropolis are not only conceived but publicly debated? That would do much to bring urban theorists closer to the political forces that actually shape the city. More important, it could serve to raise the level of the current debate about the fate of the city’s urban center.

Of the three proposals, San Pedro so far is the only one that comes with a well-conceived financial plan. In April, the San Pedro Area Reuse Committee recommended that city planners turn over for free 138 units of housing to SCI-Arc on two separate sites. The development deal is part of a larger package that would transform the former naval housing site into a vast academic enclave and would include a UCLA medical facility and off-campus housing for Loyola Marymount College. If SCI-Arc accepts the deal, it could move there within the next two years.

Yet the San Pedro setting is the Southern California landscape at its most surreal. The existing units--banal, 800-square-foot bungalows set in groups of three or four--are strung out along a series of cul-de-sacs on a hillside overlooking the massive tanks of an oil refinery. (The streets still bear the names of naval warships: USS New Jersey, USS Missouri and so on.) To the east is an endless carpet of suburban subdivisions.

For an architecture school, the site’s biggest asset is its scale. Over time, SCI-Arc could essentially build an entire new campus there, and it is easy to imagine a series of architecture competitions that would allow the school to rethink itself as a physical plant. The location’s biggest drawback, however, is its detachment from a vibrant communal hub: The sleepy town center is a 10-minute drive away, the port just beyond. The task here, for SCI-Arc, would be to overcome that aura of suburban isolation.

There is none of that sleepiness at the Lincoln Boulevard site. Jumbo jets. Airport hangars. Massive runways. The allure is the type of machine imagery more in tune with the current architectural imagination (“boys with toys,” as one female faculty member put it). And despite its location alongside a low-rise apartment complex and the nearby Otis College of Art, the idea here would be to link the school into the region’s growing, generic global culture. One can imagine the school as a sort of global outpost, with architects and scholars stopping off for lectures as they await the next flight to Asia. Think of it as one-stop-shopping architecture: the airport as the main node of the city of tomorrow, the epicenter of a global network of urban visionaries.

As an image, it works. Yet neither of these proposed sites has the potential of actually influencing the shape of Los Angeles’ urban fabric. To do that, the school would have to engage the region’s cultural and ethnic landscape more aggressively. And of the proposals now under discussion, moving the school to the fringes of downtown Los Angeles is the only one that offers that possibility.

Myriad possible sites in and around downtown have already been suggested. SCI-Arc’s former dean, Michael Rotondi, recently approached a developer about a 200,000-square-foot former car showroom at the corner of Hope Street and Olympic Boulevard in South Park, on downtown’s southern edge. Museum of Contemporary Art director Richard Koshalek, on the other hand, has suggested that the school could be the final piece in the growing cultural corridor that runs along Grand Avenue. And urban critic Mike Davis, who teaches at SCI-Arc, once suggested the former Lincoln Heights jail--located in an industrial district on the edge of the L.A. River and within minutes of Glendale and Echo Park, as well as downtown--as an ideal home for the radical institution, an idea that has been timidly revived by some of the faculty.

Some among SCI-Arc’s faculty see the effort to lure SCI-Arc into the heart of the inner city as an obvious ploy to use students as shock troops for renewed revitalization efforts. Yet the move has two undeniable advantages. It would place SCI-Arc smack at the center of a vibrant ethnic mix that will soon redefine Los Angeles’ urban landscape. And by rubbing up against downtown’s other cultural and political institutions, the school could conceivably become an aggressive agent for altering how we imagine our city’s urban future. Imagine an architecture school that functions as a forum for debate about the fate of the city, one that extends its tentacles into the city’s various ethnic enclaves and presses for a more public debate about urban and architectural issues. It is an experiment that no architecture school has seriously tried before.

Location alone, of course, will not guarantee open, thoughtful debate about the city’s future--something that still remains stubbornly outside the realm of the public imagination. Critic Davis, for example, suggests that a larger consortium of design schools could begin working with inner-city children, establishing a series of magnet programs to lure minorities and working-class children into the design field. (Architecture remains one of the most segregated of the professions.)

SCI-Arc’s economic circumstances mean that the school’s choices, in the end, may be limited. With no endowment and a paltry scholarship program, the school must address its financial prospects first. Yet the fact remains that SCI-Arc is one of Los Angeles’ most valuable--and under-exploited--cultural institutions. SCI-Arc should have the courage to dream big before leaping at the first opportunity. And L.A. should consider taking a more active role in determining how an architecture school whose primary mission is the study of the urban condition could help in the revitalization of a sprawling cityscape. It’s a fantasy worth investigating.