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There’s a new program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Situated in the south campus designed by Kevin Daly of Daly/Genik , the Media Design Practices program is a newly minted program that is an exciting new approach to design.

Why you may ask has the ArchDaily College Guide decided to examine a media program when its focus is architecture schools around the world? Simple. Because this is an innovative program that will impart new skills, enhance the ones you have, and help you find a job to boot. All of this can happen regardless of your undergraduate degree.

Read our full review after the break

One October morning in 2003, Lebbeus Woods shattered the sleepy air in Los Angeles with a swift and decisive re-deployment of his famed Foundation Cartier installation, The Fall. 1,400 steel rods were drilled into the polished concrete floors running SCI-Arc’s quarter mile. In a single night of cloaked activity, Woods and a gang of student volunteers made Maya, Rhino and all computer pyrotechnics, then all the rage, seem irrelevant with a forest of bent steel rods that seemed to react to the forces of the building…and seemingly appeared out of nowhere.

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Architecture school ideally combines practical, intellectual, and theoretical skills which center on the production of physical projects. The key is to find programs that are able to provide a judicious cross-section of disciplines to develop one’s critical and practical abilities. That is done either within the design program itself, or by providing access to other colleges and school campuses.

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Intervention in Human Rights has, until now, had very few models in the architecture profession. There are the non-profit organizations and NGO’s. They often focus on structures and spaces that have been decimated by natural disasters or military conflict. Then there is the Forensic Architecture approach which seeks to document exactly what people have undergone in those circumstances. Most architecture activists, however, fall into the first category, focusing on building or re-building.

While these models are very useful, they contain some inherent problems. One is that many of these organizations have predetermined agendas that dictate their intervention. Part of this is driven by the funding cycle: donors are not always inspired by the thought of funding a pig farm, but the idea of a new school designed by a famous architect makes an attractive selling point for new and continuing donors. Too often, however, that results in projects that are disconnected from the actual needs of local populations. Unneeded buildings are a waste of resources, time, money, and labor. 

Continue reading the school profile after the break

Not all is well with the global economy. Eurozone is in crisis, and East Asian market is stalling, and North America (read: the US) is see-sawing until after the election. Of course, this is not news to people in the architecture profession, where many firms are just beginning to recover from the last four years of belt-tightening lay-offs and restructuring.

Here in the United States the unemployment rate, though varying state-to-state, is still painfully high nationally at 7.8%. In California it was 10.6% back in August. Compressing further down to Los Angeles where I am, it’s 10%. According to a report from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce the unemployment rate for recent architecture graduates was 13.9%, the highest among other fields.

Continue reading The Indicator after the break

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