“Views of Planet City” is a hybrid documentary that captures the depth of a speculative exhibition envisioning a radically sustainable future. Filmed across two Los Angeles galleries as part of Getty’s PST ART initiative, the project brings together artists Liam Young, Jennifer Chen, John Cooper, Damjan Jovanovic, and Angelica Lorenzi in response to Young’s visionary worldbuilding project “Planet City” - a future in which all ten billion humans live in a single, hyper-dense city, allowing the rest of the Earth to rewild.

Through richly composed footage of the exhibition and in-depth interviews with the participating artists, along with exhibition organizer Namik Mackic, exhibition designer Adam Bandler of Oficina.la, and writer, filmmaker, and strategist Samantha Culp, the film reveals the conceptual, spatial, and ideological scaffolding of “Planet City.” The exhibition spans fiction and documentary, video games and models, textiles and performances, forming a planetary imaginary rooted not in speculative fantasy but in the ecological, technological, and cultural urgencies of the present.

“Views of Planet City” is not a story of climate change as a purely technical challenge, but as a cultural and political reckoning. It asks what kinds of collective imagination, systemic rethinking, and aesthetic strategies are needed to confront global warming at its most daunting scale. The film offers a counterimage to outdated environmental narratives, presenting a conceptual blueprint shaped by architecture, cinema, collaboration, and radical optimism.

This short documentary explores Maison de Cartes (House of Cards), a sculptural architectural installation by Gordon Kipping (M.Arch ’95), exhibited at the SCI-Arc Gallery. Responding to the climate crisis, Kipping re-imagines modernist modular construction through the use of mass timber, specifically cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glue-laminated (glulam) beams, as a renewable and low-carbon alternative to concrete and steel.

The film documents a seemingly fragile yet conceptually robust fragment that proposes a structural system of stacked CLT walls and slabs, supporting a universally accessible ramp. Augmented reality technology allows viewers to perceive the fragment as part of a larger architectural whole, hovering between physical and digital space.

To demonstrate its mutability, Maison de Cartes is taken through a geometric progression to become the Hocken House, a residential project currently under development by Gordon Kipping Architects in Toronto, Canada. The Maison de Cartes fragment is to have a second life and support another crisis. The mass timber fragment upon disassembly is reassembled into a cube which is redeployed to provide emergency transitional shelter on an encampment site of the un-housed.

SCI-Arc’s 2024 Spring Show transforms the campus into a series of immersive, monochromatic environments, where bold gestures and intricate details coexist in a heightened sensory experience. Featuring work from Undergraduate, Graduate, and Postgraduate design studios, as well as seminar projects across disciplines, 2024’s exhibition embraces the interplay of texture, color, and scale. Curated by Fiction and Entertainment faculty Alexey Marfin, the show invites visitors to navigate spaces that shift between striking visual statements and intimate material intricacies. Captured through the electric energy of its opening night, complete with a DJ and a dynamic crowd, this film offers an atmospheric journey into a world where architecture, storytelling, and sensory perception merge.

This visual poem reflects on themes of self-discovery, fragmentation, and duality. Using vivid visuals and reflective words, it examines the balance between being an observer and a participant within life’s complex maze. Each moment invites viewers to consider the layers of identity and the connections that shape our understanding of ourselves and the world.

“Intentionally Opaque” provides an in-depth look at the creative process of artists and designers William Virgil and Majeda Alhinai. The film explores the conceptual foundations of the exhibition, where puzzle pieces represent individuality and collective identity, and the labyrinth symbolizes mindfulness and self-reflection. Featuring insights from the creators, the film reveals the challenges of transitioning from digital design to physical fabrication, the integration of augmented reality, and the collaborative effort behind this immersive installation. “Intentionally Opaque” examines how art can uncover hidden struggles, foster self-awareness, and inspire connection.

“Crude Doubles: The Architectural Dialogue of David Eskenazi” explores the compelling SCI-Arc exhibition “A House-Bath Appearing Twice, Crudely”. This film captures David Eskenazi’s [Principal d.esk / SCI-Arc design studio and visual studies faculty] innovative approach to architectural duality, where two contrasting models—a traditional frame and panel assembly and a taped-together paper model—coexist. Through the lens of craft-like neglect and vulnerable sketches of likeness, the film delves into the themes of beauty versus ordinariness and responsibility versus indulgence, revealing the complex and multifaceted nature of architectural form. Narrated by Kai Daniels, this visual journey highlights Eskenazi’s belief that we can embody multiple identities and perspectives in our creative endeavors.

“SCI-Arc Night Live: Premiere Night” brings a fresh twist to architectural showcases. Inspired by 1970s and 80s variety shows like “Saturday Night Live,” this film features an exhibition curated by SCI-Arc faculty Soomeen Hahm that elucidates innovative student work with a creative flair. The show blends architectural models and multimedia installations with the energy of live performances and dynamic set designs, echoing the vibrant spirit of classic late-night shows. This unique fusion makes “SCI-Arc Night Live” an unforgettable experience in architecture.

“It is believed that the world was once on the brink of collapse, saved only by the forgotten creatures of the past…”

In a long distant future, after planetary scaled geoengineering systems delivered us from the sixth mass extinction, histories have turned into mythologies, planet surviving events have become new creation stories. Machines that once filled the air, sown the seeds, fertilized the ocean, and dimmed the sun have long since been decommissioned. Their memories faded, but their stories live on.

This exhibition collects the decayed data, tales passed down, and the artifacts that celebrated and revered these creatures. At this decisive moment of our time, their existence is a reminder of what future would not come to pass if today we turn a blind eye and cover our ears. They are relics of our future redemption. They are No Evil.

Lucy McRae’s exhibition FUTUREKIN is set in a post CRISPR world, where kids are brought to term and grown in complex, sensitive wombs in a lab. The speculation anticipates ‘future-kids’ develop unfamiliar, neurobiological quirks, through lack of touch and fetal programming that takes place in the womb. By virtue of women being separated from pregnancy, science and biotech take on the roles of invitro maternal and paternal surrogates. This far-future what if, replaces abortion and a plethora of other incomprehensible questions, with enormous, ethical unknowns.

Highlights from the 2022 SCI-Arc Selected Graduate Thesis Exhibition. The show featured award-winning Graduate Thesis projects in the SCI-Arc Gallery. Graduate Thesis represents the culmination of the Graduate curriculum at SCI-Arc. Projects in the exhibition included the Gehry Prize winning thesis by Sopie Akoury and Sue Hang Mun Choi + Si Ian Wong, as well as projects by Merit Graduate Thesis Prize winners Charlie Allen + John Siu Lun Chan, Chris Biao Cao, Yujia Fang, Shuang Feng + Tianze We, Betty Ziyin Gu + Joy Xin Yi Ma, Jiaxin Li, Kait Cartmell, Jordan Micham, Camille Khanh Linh Thai and Jure Žibret.

“Discovery” is an interactive art installation, produced by Damjan Jovanovic and Lidija Kljakovic, that aims to engage visitors with the potential of urban rooftop spaces in creating a more sustainable and livable city. The installation is based on a story about the Airborne Collective, a group of radical environmental hackers who seek to create a flourishing ecosystem on the rooftops of downtown LA.

SCI-Arc’s Spring Show 2022 entitled “The Land of Ahh’s” was presented to the public and surrounding community to showcase exceptional Undergraduate, Graduate, and Postgraduate studio projects, along with seminar work in the Visual Studies, Applied Studies, and History + Theory curricula. “The Land of Ahh’s” presents an investigation into the architectural and symbolic parallels that can be drawn between the studio desk at SCI-Arc as a laboratory for experimentation and free expression, and the juke joints popularized in the Jim Crow south by Black Americans, as a safe spaces to convene, create, and celebrate. Curated by SCI-Arc faculty Kordae Jatafa Henry, Jeremy Kamal Hartley, and Making+Meaning coordinator William Virgil, the 2022 Spring Show exhibition provokes—in conjunction with SCI-Arc’s 50th anniversary—both an acknowledgment that the world as we knew it is over, and that the told and untold stories of yesterday can propel us into an unknown, but ultimately liberated future ahead.

In this film David Freeland and Brennan Buck, principals at FreelandBuck, discuss “Views from the Field,” their recent SCI-Arc Gallery exhibition which extends their research and design work on the history of architectural illusion in the context of contemporary visual culture and emerging flatbed printing technology. “Views from the Field” documents the spatial complexity of Walter Netsch’s late-twentieth-century architecture through the photographs of Orlando Cabanban. Taking inspiration from Cabanban’s photographic interest in capturing multiple subjects within each frame, the exhibition reconstructs the photographs as large three-dimensional image-objects. Each recomposes and transforms the space of Netsch’s interiors into a multitude of views and illusionary spaces. The architecturally-scaled objects are designed, detailed, and assembled from graphically-printed architectural materials.

Soomeen Hahm, Founder of SoomeenHahm Design Ltd, discusses her recent SCI-Arc Gallery Exhibition “2021: A Steam Odyssey.” The exhibition is conceptualized around the notion that making in AR reinvigorates traditional craftsmanship by augmenting hand and material skills with the precision and formal possibilities of digital modeling—occupying the territory between purely automated, exclusively robotically-driven fabrication and highly crafted processes requiring human labor. The centerpiece of the exhibition, designed in collaboration with Igor Pantic, is a structure built out of steam-bent hardwood using hand tools augmented with the precision of intelligent holographic guides. It explores alternative strategies for the fabrication of digitally designed architectural structures, utilizing cutting-edge, head-mounted devices (HMDs) to holographically assist workers in the manufacturing and assembly of highly varied components using traditional craft techniques. The exhibition piece itself, which is a full-scale section of a larger inhabitable space, represents a next step in the evolution of the SoomeenHahm Design’s ongoing research into complex timber structures, assembled with the assistance of AR. It builds on the methodology developed for the 2019 Tallinn Biennale Steampunk Pavilion (designed by Hahm, Pantic, Gwyllim Jahn, and Cameron Newnham), further expanding it in the realm of fully functional space.

Architecture has always been incomplete. Reliant on and completed by multiple subjects, perceptions and associations, it is time to expand what is integral to architecture. No More Room leverages the contemporary relationship between the rooms we inhabit and the images we consume to produce a sense of being in multiple spaces at once, a type of quantum superposition in architectural terms. It is a layered construction of volumetric relationships centered around a designed core sample. Geologic in nature, it represents a partial architecture embedded with information from many points of origin and melds their traits to find completeness in the round. It asks backgrounds and middle grounds to foreground spatial experiences. No More Room makes room for architecture as the territory between things.

Claude Parent’s (1923-2016) injunction to architects called them to “open the imaginary,” “dislodge the immobile,” “surf on the surface,” and “limit without closing.” In a life dedicated to provoking new alternatives to how life might be lived through drawing, Parent transformed the direction of architecture and influenced many of the most radical contemporary practitioners, from Thom Mayne to Jean Nouvel, to Zaha Hadid. 

Dolmens are prehistoric stone assemblies. At the end of the 19th century, Eugène Trutat, Director of the Museum of Natural History of Toulouse, took photographs of these megalithic structures in the French landscape. Inspired by the Dolmen de Vaour in Tarn, this exhibition imagines extending the elusive quality of rude forms into the modern-day Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU).

An inside look into artist Fabian Marcaccio’s “Paintants Lab” in the SCI-Arc Gallery. Marcaccio considers the “Paintants Lab” to be his dynamic structural atlas, a constellation about pictorial complexity.

Highlights from the 2020 SCI-Arc Selected Graduate Thesis Exhibition. The show features award winning Graduate Thesis projects from SCI-Arc. Graduate Thesis represents the culmination of the M.Arch curricula at SCI-Arc. The exhibition includes projects from the recipients of the SCI-Arc Gehry Prize [2020 Gehry League] Saleh Jamsheer, Zoe Małecki, Richard Mapes, Justine Poulin and Irvin Shaifa, as well as projects by Merit Graduate Thesis Prize winners Linzi Ai + Juicheng Hung, Christina Griggs, Wendy Guerrero, Sam Kaufman, Liu Qiao, Rish Ryusuke Saito, Robert Sipchen and Vincent Yung.

Highlights from the 2019 SCI-Arc Selected Graduate Thesis Exhibition. The show featured award winning Graduate Thesis projects in the SCI-Arc Gallery. Graduate Thesis represents the culmination of the Graduate curriculum at SCI-Arc.

SCI-Arc’s thirteenth annual Spring Show was presented to the public and surrounding community to showcase exceptional Undergraduate, Graduate, and Postgraduate studio projects, along with seminar work in the Visual Studies, Applied Studies, and History + Theory curricula.

A look inside Environment[al], a recent exhibition in the SCI-Arc Gallery, curated by Herwig Baumgartner and Marcelyn Gow. Environment[al] features the work of architects, designers and landscape architects including Izaskun Chinchilla [Izaskun Chinchilla Architects], Enric Ruiz Geli [Cloud 9], Carme Pinós [Estudio Carme Pinós], Wolf D. Prix [Coop Himmelb(l)au], Gilles Retsin, and Günther Vogt [Vogt Landschaftsarchitekten]. Environment[al] examines contemporary attitudes toward environment in a post-digital context.

Mira Henry (SCI-Arc Faculty, DID Coordinator) speaks with friend and colleague Victor Jones (Principal Fievre Jones) about her exhibition “Rough Coat” in the SCI-Arc Gallery. The conversation begins to unpack the aesthetic and social intentions of the piece as it relates to current forms of practice.

Highlights from the 2018 SCI-Arc Selected Graduate Thesis Exhibition.

SCI-Arc’s twelfth annual Spring Show was presented to the public and surrounding community to showcase exceptional Undergraduate, Graduate and Postgraduate studio projects, along with seminar work in the Visual Studies and Applied Studies curriculum.

Mark Foster Gage [Principal - Mark Foster Gage Architects / Assistant Dean - Yale School of Architecture] and Hernan Diaz Alonso [SCI-Arc Director / CEO] discuss the role of parafiction in architecture in the context of Gage’s SCI-Arc exhibition Geothermal Futures Lab.

Join Graduate Programs Chair Elena Manferdini and Graduate Thesis Coordinator Florencia Pita for an in-depth look at SCI-Arc’s Selected Graduate Thesis Exhibition 2017, a juried exhibition of exceptional thesis projects by 2017 graduates.

Curated and organized by Kristy Balliet and David Eskenazi, SCI-Arc’s eleventh annual Spring Show featured work from all school programs: Undergraduate, Graduate and Postgraduate design studio projects as well as coursework from the Applied and Visual Studies seminars

Graduate Programs Chair Elena Manferdini and Graduate Thesis Coordinator Florencia Pita give an in-depth look at SCI-Arc’s Selected Graduate Thesis Exhibition 2016, a juried exhibition of exceptional thesis projects by 2016 graduates.

A SCI-Arc Gallery installation that examines how in the presence of meaningless pictures we find the ever-present apophenia of the human being—the need to see meaning and relationships where none exist.

An exhibition walkthrough of José Oubrerie’s ‘The Chapel of the Mosquitoes’ at the SCI-Arc Kappe Library with José Oubrerie & Todd Gannon.

ARRAYS collects over three dozen maps and diagrams developed by Joe Day and his practice deegan-day design over the last two decades.

A look at the ‘Close-up’ exhibition in the SCI-Arc Gallery curated by Hernan Diaz Alonso and David Ruy and features work by Frank Gehry, Neil Denari, Thom Mayne and others.

An exhibition walkthrough of Maxi Spina’s THICK at SCI-Arc Gallery.