SCI-Arc’s EDGE MS Design Theory and Pedagogy Coordinator Marcelyn Gow reflects on the program’s approach to designing future pedagogies and discusses significant work produced by recent graduates from the Design Theory and Pedagogy program. SCI-Arc’s Master of Science in Design Theory and Pedagogy is a one-year program that prepares students for a new kind of hybrid career that has emerged in architecture: the architect-theorist-educator. The world is changing, and the formerly strict separation between architectural practice and academia is fading thanks to new research models at universities and new knowledge-based forms of practice. Yet despite the importance of this new role, academia has yet to produce a program to train talented young architects to occupy it; at traditional universities, there are separate programs to educate practitioners versus scholars. The MS in Design Theory and Pedagogy program occupies a space in between these two known models and targets specifically a hybrid career in academia. Utilizing SCI-Arc itself as a hands-on teaching laboratory, the long-term project of the program is to develop new design pedagogies and a new apparatus for the production of design theory.

Faculty in the program include Anthony Morey [Executive Director A+D Museum, Los Angeles], Michael Osman [Director of PhD program, UCLA AUD], Matthew Shaw [Executive Editor The Architect’s Newspaper], Postgraduate Programs Chair David Ruy, Gary Fox [Cocurator of Bauhaus Beginnings at the Getty Research Institute], and program Coordinator Marcelyn Gow.