Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design Newsletter, Summer 2018
Co-Editor with Rob Berry
Graphic Design by Robyn Baker
Overheard at a recent L.A. architecture-world dinner party: “Schools are the new book. Everyone has to have one.”
Architecture education is up for review (again). The Summer 2018 issue of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design Newsletter, Re: Learning (in Los Angeles), takes on the tradition of challenging tradition in architecture education. It opens up institutional revolt—this season’s, last season’s, and next—to study.
Re: Learning (in Los Angeles) encourages reflection on the lessons of historic reboots in architecture education and tests the grounds of the newest schools of thought. It is looking for distinctions between longstanding and uniquely contemporary curricular dilemmas. It is a call to sift the ambitions and motivations underpinning trending breaks from the status quo for today’s real educational priorities. And, it asks for a contextualization of pedagogical concerns, a consideration of the substance and infrastructures of architecture education alike.
The Re: Learning (in Los Angeles) inquiry is consciously Los Angeles based. It sees an unprocessed story in the L.A. region’s history of bucking the architecture-academic system and in its propensity for inspiring the eternal rethink. It recognizes re-learning, the embrace of the unorthodox, irreverent, and permissive, as the L.A. way. Re: Learning stakes a claim for Los Angeles as provocateur of architecture education. Certainly, all curricular influences and inclinations, once stuck long enough in L.A.’s traffic arteries, transform under the city’s sun-drenched skies.