FUTURE RUINS



INFO


In 1830, Joseph Gandy depicted John Soane’s proposed design for the Bank of England as a ruin, submerged in a swampy London landscape. Rendered as a cutaway axonometric, this visualization resembled the grandeur of ancient Rome while conveying more than just an architectural proposition—it was a speculative narrative about time, decay, and the relationship between architecture and its environment.

This seminar invites students to reimagine an iconic building as a ruin embedded in a strange, speculative site. By displacing the building from its original location, setting, and time, students will reconstruct its planar and sectional relationships to adapt and negotiate with a new context. Through this process, architecture and its environment are treated as inseparable, complementary forces that together form a compelling representation of imagination and design.

Over the course of the seminar, students will:

  • Analyze and reconstruct a precedent building through 2D drawings and 3D modeling.
  • Relocate this building to a site in Downtown Los Angeles, adapting its spatial relationships to a new narrative.
  • Collaborate in pairs to develop a short animation that explores the story of the "Future Ruin" through cinematic techniques.

This seminar challenges students to merge technical precision with creative speculation, culminating in a visual experience that redefines the boundaries between architecture, time, and context.

︎︎︎ Modeling
︎︎︎ Siting and Embedding
︎︎︎ From Rhino to UE
︎︎︎ Material and Texture
︎︎︎ Camera and Lighting
︎︎︎ Post Production

Instructors

  1. Kordae Henry  22’-25’
  2. Jennifer Chen 21’-24’

TA’s

  1. AZ Hwang 25’
  2. Indi Kusuma 25’
  3. Oliver Hu 23’
  4. Fred Ge 23’
  5. Cole Masuno 22’




SCI-Arc



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.

Visual Studies III is the last of three VS seminars in the B.

Arch core sequence; VS I and VS II are pre-requisites for this class. This course looks at the relationship between building and site, focusing on landscape, atmosphere, and time as the critical elements of architectural thinking and visualization. Students will be introduced to animation, rendered with material qualities and informed by personal narratives. Tutorials will center on software used to create environments

and worlds, and projects will be showcased through carefully designed scenes, experienced in time. In parallel, students will finalize a portfolio of work from the first two years and submit a Gateway Portfolio at the end of the semester
 
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