Company Profile
Southern California Institute of Architecture
Company Overview
SCI-Arc is a world-renowned center of innovation and one of the nation’s few independent architecture schools, offering undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate programs. We are dedicated to educating architects who will imagine and shape the future.
The school is located in a quarter-mile-long former freight depot in the Arts District of Los Angeles. It is distinguished by the vibrant atmosphere of its studios, which provide students with a uniquely inspiring environment in which to study architecture and design.
An integral part of the emerging cultural hub of a city with a tradition of architectural experimentation, SCI-Arc is devoted to finding radically new responses to the real needs and aspirations of today’s world.
We offer students a unique experience as they pursue their degrees. Our approximately 500 students and 80 faculty members—most of the latter practicing architects—work together in a fluid, nonhierarchical manner to rethink assumptions, create, explore, and test the limits of architecture.
Company History
SCI-Arc was founded in 1972 in Santa Monica by a group of faculty and students from the 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.