SCI-Arc

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) has long been one of America's most vocally avant-garde schools, and recently it decamped from its warehouse facility on Los Angeles's Westside to a promising former freight depot just east of downtown, next to a nascent loft district. Designating and encouraging the next generation of Southern California figures beyond that of the well-known eminences Thom Mayne and Eric Owen Moss, SCI-Arc's then-director Neil Denari looked to his faculty to design the space. He selected Gary Paige, director of the undergraduate program at the time. The building, an industrial leftover in Los Angeles's sprawling rail-yard landscape, was a mixed blessing. The robust poured-in-place-concrete structure, built in 1906, came with Herculean transverse beams, generous volumes, and scores of large openings for former loading docks. (text by Joseph Giovannini from Architectural Record)