Southern California Institute

It's unlikely that residents of Mount Washington ever envisioned a metal-clad trapezoid sitting on this bend of Cazador Street, but the design - dubbed the Big and Small House by its architect, Simon Storey - is full of surprises. The home sits on a lot once considered unbuildable because of its steep grade and diminutive size - at 2,500 square feet, about half the typical L.A. lot. Inside, however, the 900-square-foot house feels large and airy despite those space constraints. Owners Joyce Campbell and Jon Behar met Storey a decade ago, when he was a graduate student at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and hired him to remodel their Mount Washington house.

It's unlikely that residents of Mount Washington ever envisioned a metal-clad trapezoid sitting on this bend of Cazador Street, but the design - dubbed the Big and Small House by its architect, Simon Storey - is full of surprises. The home sits on a lot once considered unbuildable because of its steep grade and diminutive size - at 2,500 square feet, about half the typical L.A. lot. Inside, however, the 900-square-foot house feels large and airy despite those space constraints. Owners Joyce Campbell and Jon Behar met Storey a decade ago, when he was a graduate student at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and hired him to remodel their Mount Washington house.

Raimund Abraham, an Austrian-born architect known for his powerfully enigmatic drawings and fierce idealism, and whose narrow, blade-like 2002 Austrian Cultural Forum building in New York is among the most forceful pieces of architecture built in the last decade, was killed early Thursday when the car he was driving collided in downtown Los Angeles with a Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus. He was 76. The accident, at 5th and Main streets, came...

Its creators call it CHIP — the Compact, Hyper-Insulated Prototype. But onlookers say the 733-square-foot house looks like a pillow or even a spacesuit because of its quilted exterior: Insulation is stretched around the frame rather than stuffed inside it. Despite those first impressions — or perhaps because of them — CHIP is turning heads on the National Mall in Washington D.C. this week along with 19 other competitors in the U.S. Department of...

Steven C. Fiano, a fifth-year architecture student at Cal Poly Pomona, has been awarded the second annual $1,000 William Z. Landworth Memorial Scholarship by the associates of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Two other scholarships of $500 each went to Barbara Anne Bestor, a graduate student at Southern California Institute of Architecture, and Pablo Maida, a Fourth-year student at Woodbury University.

Ball-Nogues: An article last Sunday about architects Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues stated that the duo would be installing an 18-inch suspension project inside L.A.'s Centinela Area Building and Safety Permit Office. The project is 18 feet in size. In addition, a reference to their work on a three-story plastic form at this year's Coachella festival should have included the fact that the project was done in collaboration with students at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Two summer programs are being offered by the Southern California Institute of Architecture for professionals and the public. The Professional Development Program focuses on contemporary issues in architecture and urban design, real estate development, presentation techniques and related subjects. It offers day and evening courses or weekend workshops starting Monday through Aug. 31. The school will again offer Making and Meaning, an intensive five-week course for those contemplating a career in architecture.

As a young architect and former Frank Gehry employee, I take exception to Nicolai Ouroussoff's assertion that during the early '90s, "Unlike the East Coast scene . . . there was no clear theoretical center here" ("Basic Instinct," April 6). Most of the architects he mentions--including Buresh, Lubowicki, Mayne, Moss and Rotondi--were teaching at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, better known as SCI-Arc. As a graduate student at London's Architectural Assn. in 1990, all I heard about was the Los Angeles scene and SCI-Arc.

Frank Gehry was on the panel. So was Thom Mayne. And fellow architects Eric Owen Moss, Peter Cook, Hernan Diaz Alonso and Greg Lynn. The subject was the "troubled relationship" between architecture and beauty. The setting, on a warm recent evening, was an outdoor pavilion in the main parking lot at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where Moss is director. The impresario, moderator and ego-wrangler was architect Yael Reisner, Cook's wife and the author of a new book of interviews with architects on beauty.

"In Southern California," the architect Charles Moore wrote in 1984, "the part that is planted is very likely to be more sophisticated than the part that is built. " If that's the case — and I'd say it has been in nearly every phase of the region's design history — how to explain the fact that Los Angeles architects have for so long been much better known, locally and around the world, than their counterparts in landscape architecture? Why have our best gardens tended to be even more susceptible to neglect or demolition than our best houses, which are themselves infamously vulnerable?

L.A.'s renegade, nomadic architecture school is finally putting down roots. The Southern California Institute of Architecture, one of the top-rated schools in the country for design, bought itself a home in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday. SCI-Arc, as it is commonly known, paid $23.1 million for a highly unorthodox school building. SCI-Arc bought a century-old rail freight depot that is a quarter of a mile long and about 37 feet wide. The school has been a tenant in the building for 10 years, having failed in an earlier attempt to buy the property.

"In Southern California," the architect Charles Moore wrote in 1984, "the part that is planted is very likely to be more sophisticated than the part that is built. " If that's the case — and I'd say it has been in nearly every phase of the region's design history — how to explain the fact that Los Angeles architects have for so long been much better known, locally and around the world, than their counterparts in landscape architecture? Why have our best gardens tended to be even more susceptible to neglect or demolition than our best houses, which are themselves infamously vulnerable?

Visions are developing of what the proposed CleanTech Corridor might look like when it begins to emerge in downtown Los Angeles. The Southern California Institute of Architecture launched a competition that invited entrants to offer new ideas for the four-mile stretch of land next to the Los Angeles River. The school, known as SCI-Arc, last week announced more than $10,000 in prizes for the winners. The city-run Community Redevelopment Agency has also asked companies to submit proposals by Dec. 3 for revitalizing a 20-acre section of the corridor.

Frank Gehry was on the panel. So was Thom Mayne. And fellow architects Eric Owen Moss, Peter Cook, Hernan Diaz Alonso and Greg Lynn. The subject was the "troubled relationship" between architecture and beauty. The setting, on a warm recent evening, was an outdoor pavilion in the main parking lot at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where Moss is director. The impresario, moderator and ego-wrangler was architect Yael Reisner, Cook's wife and the author of a new book of interviews with architects on beauty.

A sculpted steel-and-glass home, designed with the curved lines of an ocean liner, sits on the Strand in Manhattan Beach, steps from the beach and an ocean view that extends from the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Malibu. The house, owned by Filmation co-founder Lou Scheimer, who co-created the cartoons "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" and "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe," was designed in 1988 by Ray Kappe, architect and co-founder of the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

Raimund Abraham, an Austrian-born architect known for his powerfully enigmatic drawings and fierce idealism, and whose narrow, blade-like 2002 Austrian Cultural Forum building in New York is among the most forceful pieces of architecture built in the last decade, was killed early Thursday when the car he was driving collided in downtown Los Angeles with a Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus. He was 76. The accident, at 5th and Main streets, came...

Re "Whatever Happened to the Architect Groupies?" (Jan. 2): The architects missed their opportunity to "penetrate the public consciousness" by not putting their show on TV during the '80s. The American Institute of Architects' awards should have been presented on TV with music, dancers and the envelope. Awards shown only in architectural magazines reached an audience limited to those who competed for the awards. The public was not educated to know that many stars and runners-up exist in the world of architecture and they are beautiful, eccentric, temperamental and sometimes sexy.

Two more loss-battered Southern California banks were shut down by regulators Friday and immediately sold to two of the largest financial institutions based in the region. Stung by defaults on tricky adjustable mortgages, 80-year-old First Federal Bank of California was closed by federal savings and loan regulators, with its 39 branches to reopen today as part of OneWest Bank. Pasadena-based OneWest, created early this year from the ashes of collapsed home lender IndyMac Bank, agreed to assume all of First Federal's deposits, so no customers will lose money, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

For an architect, designing a tourist attraction can be a thankless task. Almost by definition, your target audience is jet-lagged, searching for a place to have a cigarette, thinking about where to go for dinner, nursing a sunburn or a hangover (or both) or chasing a wayward toddler -- destined, in other words, to pay attention to everything but the architecture. Michael Rotondi and John Ash, lead architects of the new Hollywood branch of Madame Tussauds wax museum, which opened Aug. 1, understand the challenge of playing to that distracted crowd as well as anyone.