USC School of Architecture

Today, Jennifer Bonner discussed her latest book, Blank: Speculations on CLT as well as her current architectural work. Jennifer is founder and director of MALL, a creative practice for art and architecture. MALL stands for Mass Architectural Loopty Loops or Maximum Arches with Limited Liability, an acronym with built-in flexibility. By engaging with “ordinary architecture,” such as gable roofs and everyday materials, Bonner playfully reimagines architecture in her field. Read More here: https://buff.ly/miTfNu0 #USCArch #USCArchitecture #USCArchitectureLecture

Small Lots, Big Impacts Design Competition! Students and faculty at USC are invited to join cityLAB and LA Mayor Karen Bass, by participating in the Small Lots, Big Impacts design competition! On small vacant lots dotting the city, we ask designers to imagine the next generation of compact LA starter homes, post-fire, as the first step to actually building housing on several of the thousands of sites the city owns. On the website https://buff.ly/jX3E7uf you’ll find the competition brief, the prototypical sites, the goals, guidelines, registration form, and a recorded introduction-webinar. Registration Deadline: April 7 Competition Submission Deadline: May 4

Graduate Projects 2025 Exhibition is on view now from March 24 - April 4 at USC Architecture! Graduate Projects is an exhibition showcasing student work across USC Architecture’s graduate programs. Featuring projects from students and recent alumni in Architecture, Advanced Architectural Research Studies, Building Science, Heritage Conservation, and Landscape Architecture + Urbanism, the exhibition highlights how emerging designers, researchers, and thinkers are shaping the future of the built environment. Through inquiries into spatial justice, climate resilience, digital fabrication, material experimentation, urban regeneration, and cultural storytelling, Graduate Projects presents a cross-section of design research as diverse as Los Angeles itself. From performative building technologies to speculative city-making, from preserving underrepresented histories to reimagining landscapes in the face of ecological crisis, these works exemplify the school’s commitment to design as a transformative force. By showcasing these explorations, the exhibition offers insight into the methodologies, provocations, and aspirations of a new generation—one redefining architecture’s role in our collective future. The exhibition features a range of media, including drawings, images, digital works, artifacts, and critical positions that leverage design, technology, and research to engage with pressing social, cultural, technological, and environmental issues shaping the built environment. Graduate Programs: M.Arch, M.AARS, MBS, MHC, MLA + U Open to the public from March 24 to April 4, 2025 CURATOR Ryan Tyler Martinez EXHIBITION TEAM Anna Camodeca Jae Bin Lee Anjing Tang Joseph Wan

Spots are filling up quickly! Reserve yours now and be part of the conversation shaping the future of housing and climate solutions! RSVP HERE: https://lnkd.in/gTbTJhdr

Last week, eight students in the second year of the Bachelor of Science in Architecture + Inventive Technologies program (BSA+IT) traveled with faculty members Julia Sulzer and R. Scott Mitchell to the Bay Area for an experiential city trek to complement their studies. The goal of this trip was to engage students outside of the classroom by providing immersive opportunities to interact with and learn about innovative building materials, product design, 3d imaging, fabrication, construction technologies, and creative people and companies working in one of the most vibrant and dynamic cities for design in the United States. Highlights of the trip included a visit to Urban Machine in Happy Canyon where they were encouraged to “think differently about lumber waste”, visits to the Autodesk Technology Center and Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus, a walking tour of Bayfront Park with alumnus founder of Surfacedesign James Lord ’90, and a visit to the garage studio of furniture designer alumnus Gerard Furbershaw ’74. The trip was generously funded by the support of Thomas Kamei ’12. #USCArchitecture #USCBSA+IT #USCArchitectureStudents #Innovation #SiliconValley #ArchitectureMeetsTech #TrojansInTheBayArea

ARCH-505B Graduate Architecture Design students recently took a weekend desert road trip to the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Museum, Joshua Tree National Park, and Palm Springs for a dose of art, architecture, and nature ?? The trip was organized around a site visit to the Oasis of Mara for their current studio design project “On, Above, and Below: Architecture and the Ground.” The trip will help students develop spatial concepts for a National Park Visitors Center, focusing on the relationships between the building, ground, environment, and the connections between interior space and exterior form. Special thanks to John Baker, architect and trustee of the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Museum for a private tour, Ranger Christian Delich for the talk and Q&A at the Oasis of Mara and leading the 3-mile hike through Wonderland of Rocks, and Prof. Jasmine Benyamin for sharing her insights on Ronald Rael’s Desert X installation “Adobe Oasis.” The studio is the second one in the six-semester +3 graduate program sequence and co-taught by Amanda Ortland and Gary Paige. #USCArch #USCArchitecture

March is Women’s History Month. But for architectural historian and historic preservation consultant Sian Winship (BSBA ’84, MHP ’11), women’s history is a year-round focus. https://buff.ly/xb9FU3b Winship, who earned her Master of Heritage Conservation @uscmhc at the USC School of Architecture in 2011 and is an adjunct professor at USC, has helped lead the way in recognizing women’s contributions to the cultural and built history of California. Winship worked with the Historic Resources Group, one of the foremost preservation consulting firms, to create the women’s rights context, which laid the foundation for a new initiative — the Los Angeles Women’s Landmarks project (LAWL), recently launched by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the L.A. Conservancy. LAWL seeks to address the significant underrepresentation of women and their contributions to Los Angeles landmarks, pointing out on its website that “of the 1,300 places in Los Angeles designated as Historic-Cultural Monuments,?less than 3%?represent women’s history.” The project’s multi-year efforts involve “looking at both the existing City of Los Angeles Historic- Cultural Monuments (HCMs) to add diverse women’s history that was omitted, as well as sites of women’s achievement that should be designated as new HCMs.” This semester, USC Architecture students are at the forefront of those efforts to create a more gender-equitable landmark designation process as part of Winship’s ARCH 554 course, Heritage Conservation Practicum/Advanced Documentation: Preserving Women’s Heritage. By partnering on the LAWL project to amend City of Los Angeles HCM applications, they are effecting real-world change. “This is work that will make a difference,” Winship said. “One of the things that was discovered over the course of the last several months was just exactly how many city landmarks have excluded women’s history, and so this is a way of selecting 11 of those landmark applications and then writing women’s history back into the record.” Read the full story at buff.ly/xMJDMTV #LosAngelesWomen’sLandmarks #LAConservancy #NationalTrustforHistoricPreservation #USCArchitectureFaculty #USCArchitectureStudents

Congratulations to Yesenia Hernandez, a student in the Masters of Architecture +2 program, for being named a New Face of Tech by the 1,000 Dreams Fund! Hernandez received a scholarship from the award in order to support projects she had proposed, including the development of her thesis through digital fabrication, biomimetic studies, and adaptive reuse initiatives. The 1,000 Dreams Fund and HARMAN, a wholly owned subsidiary of Samsung, partner each year to help fund and support the dreams of talented young women in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math). Hernandez thanks Professor Sacha Delz and Professor Evelyn Tikkle for playing a crucial role in helping her win the scholarship. Read more about her achievement at buff.ly/xMJDMTV ? #USCArch #USCArchitecture #USCArchitectureAwards #USCArchitectureStudentWork

Frank Barkow spoke to USC Architecture students and faculty about the many facets of materials and experimentation and how it encourages new ways of changing spaces. In his insightful lecture, Barkow organized the many projects he had done into specific categories based on either formal means of production or what had shaped the project: experimental, casting, bundling, ultrastructural, topographical, and timber. From there, he broke down his design process from the task given all the way to the final product. Barkow is an educator, researcher and practicing architect educated at Montana State University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is a design and construction leader in the practice and heads up the research group. His pragmatic approach embraces design in a discursive way which allows the firm's work to respond to advancing knowledge and technology. Since 2016, Barkow has been a professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture and has previously taught for Cornell and the Harvard GSD. Thank you to Barkow for taking the time to speak to the USC Architecture community! #USCArch #USCArchitecture #USCArchitectureLecture

Housing 10X: A Platform to Accelerate Innovative Responses to the Housing and Climate Crises This symposium will explore the potential to accelerate and scale up the efforts of architects applying innovative high-productivity construction methods to deliver affordable housing while simultaneously addressing the need to ensure resilience in the face of the increased frequency and scale of climate-worsened disasters. Organized by the Chase L. Leavitt Graduate Building Science Program and the School of Architecture in partnership with the USC Dornsife College and the Sol Price School of Public Policy Los Angeles faces a critical shortage of housing units, a crisis made worse by the loss of over 12,000 structures due to devastating wildfires. Los Angeles already had the fewest number of homes per adult of any major U.S. City and construction of new housing units is notoriously slow, inefficient, and unaffordable to most Angelenos. The metropolitan region now comes to terms with an unprecedented recovery and rebuilding effort with a greater understanding of the risks and costs associated with conventional policies and practices governing buildings, infrastructures and urban landscapes. The objective of the symposium is to identify the barriers and facilitators to achieving a factor of ten (10x) improvement in housing affordability, construction speed, availability and resource efficiency over standard expectations. Participants will work to envision and map innovative approaches to rebuilding of fire-devastated areas and to increasing the availability of housing units across the region with renewed understanding of the need for resilient design and retrofit strategies at scales ranging from building details to community and regional plans. Speakers include a broad range of subject matter experts at the forefront of addressing these challenges. Learn more here: https://buff.ly/OPJzgND #USCArch #USCArchitecture #SolPriceSchoolofPublicPolicy #USCDornsifeCollege