Southern California Institute of Architecture

SCI-Arc teaches architects to engage, speculate, and innovate, to take the lead in reimagining the limits of architecture.

Our students and faculty critically examine the rich possibilities of the built environment. From design and materials to culture and experience, SCI-Arc asks questions regarding new theoretical constructs and designed realities to constitute possible futures. We contribute an imaginative, rigorous, and forward-thinking approach to help shape the future of the architectural profession.

SCI-Arc is where architects become mad scientists. It is where art, science, and industry converge and new futures unfold. At SCI-Arc we forecast the migrations of culture. We stare down complex technologies and command them to do our bidding. We are agile and street smart. Where others drown in the complex flows of urban life, we thrive and choreograph its movements. We are prophets of beauty, broadcasters of ideas, and tellers of stories. We are builders, leaders, and dreamers.

SCI-Arc is a world-renowned center of innovation and one of the nation's few independent architecture school, 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 provides 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, non-hierarchical manner to re-think assumptions, create, explore and test the limits of architecture.

SCI-Arc’s undergraduate program is focused on both the discipline and the practice of architecture, offering design excellence and intellectual breadth through a liberal arts education. SCI-Arc’s graduate programs encourage an open-ended spirit of inquiry, actively responding to shifts in society, technology, and culture. SCI-Arc EDGE, Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture, offers four postgraduate one-year degree programs and a fellowship, all devoted to investigations of architecture’s twenty-first-century frontiers. Every summer, SCI-Arc organizes two independent programs—Making+Meaning and Design Immersion Days—open to anyone interested in the discipline of architecture.

SCI-Arc students have the opportunity to participate in study abroad and exchange intiatives with other institutes and universities around the world, as well as at SCI-Arc Satellites. The Tokyo Study Abroad Program introduces students to the architectural and cultural vibrancy of Japan’s capital city. SCI-Arc’s academic education is built on a series of performance criteria and learning objectives.

SCI-Arc is distinguished by its vibrant studios that provide students with a uniquely inspiring environment to study architecture. The studio culture, supported by a faculty of working architects, emphasizes professional excellence, unorthodox investigation, and material exploration.

Students interested in pursuing a career in architecture should become familiar with the many resources, opportunities, and programs offered by the institute. SCI-Arc’s diverse international student body comes from forty-eight different countries. Citizens from other countries are reviewed for admission on the same basis as citizens of the United States of America. In addition to federal student aid, there are state aid programs available. The passage of the California Dream Act of 2011 extended eligibility for certain types of institutional and state aid to students who meet AB540 criteria but are without a valid immigration status. SCI-Arc and the Office of Financial Aid are highly committed to the success of our Dream Act-eligible students, and are proud of those who have been selected to join our campus. Scholarships are awarded to entering undergraduate and graduate students, as well as continuing students, on the basis of merit and financial need.

Since it first opened in 1972, SCI-Arc has been relentlessly expanding and raising its ambitions. Now is not the time to ease off the gas pedal and relax. Rather, now is the time to accelerate. The scope of what SCI-Arc represents and offers to the world should keep multiplying. In our globalized era, design matters like never before, and we have the capacity to astonish the world by showing it all the different ways in which design can transform it.

SCI-Arc is an institute and not a university—that is one of our many unique strengths. We are not constrained by stubborn bureaucracy, and we are not preservationists of traditional forms of knowledge. We move rapidly into new territories, and we can be both inside and outside of the world. We entangle ourselves in complex ways, and we write our own rules of engagement and research. The ethical questions of architecture are poignant for an institute so dedicated to innovation. It isn’t hyperbole to posit that the very existence of architecture as a profession and as a way of thinking and knowing is at stake.

Architecture needs its own heroes, but more importantly the world needs architects to take on that position and to conjure images of what the future might become. We experiment and keep taking risks to remake the real.