History
SCI-Arc was founded in 1972 in Santa Monica by a group of faculty and students from Department of Architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, who wanted to approach the subject from a more experimental perspective than traditional schools offered. Originally called the New School, SCI-Arc was based on the concept of a "college without walls" and it remains one of the few independent architecture schools in the world. Ray Kappe, who had founded the Pomona department, became the new school's first director, served in that position until 1987, and was awarded the AIA/ACSA Topaz Medal for excellence in architecture education in 1990.
Kappe was succeeded as director by Michael Rotondi, one of SCI-Arc's founding students. Neil Denari became director in 1997; Eric Owen Moss has been director since 2002. Although SCI-Arc was once unaccredited and its finances unstable—Moss joked, "We used to be considered one step ahead of the IRS, one step ahead of creditors"—the school is now fully accredited, and its finances improved to the point that SCI-Arc was able to pay $23.1 million to buy its campus building in 2011.
Read more about this topic: Southern California Institute Of Architecture
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of the prophets. He saw with an open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)