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WSOA In-Flux

WSOA In-Flux

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WSOA In-Flux is a publishing platform for student work launched by Woodbury School of Architecture in 2020.




Woodbury School of Architecture is distinguished by its multiple locations at the heart of the Southern California creative industries: Los Angeles, Hollywood and San Diego. Together, these sites form a critical infrastructure for architectural investigations.

Our undergraduate and graduate programs prepare students to effect positive change in the built environment, to tackle theoretical debates, and to take on architecture and interior design as critical practices. We educate our students as entrepreneurs, citizen architects, and cultural builders equally committed to professional practice, theoretical discourse, social equity and to formal and technological inquiry.

Our faculty are architects, designers, academics and policy makers practicing in Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana. This internationally recognized and award-winning group works closely with students to teach the skills required to push the limits of practice.



Mission

Good design is a human right. Woodbury School of Architecture produces graduates who affirm the power of design to improve the built environment and the lives of others by addressing the pressing issues of our time. We transform our students into ethical, articulate and innovative design professionals prepared to lead in a world of accelerating technological change.


Vision

The future belongs to Woodbury. Woodbury School of Architecture creates an environment that empowers our students to impact the future of the profession through meaningful built work. We imagine a world in which there are no disciplinary rights or wrongs, where diverse and sometimes contradictory values collide to generate new ideas, design innovation, unexpected practices, and the means to expand the influence of our discipline.


Woodbury School of Architecture offers a welcoming environment for students to develop their own unique design voice.  We approach the design disciplines multi-dimensionally, teaching a range of pedagogies and design methodologies. Our students leave Woodbury with the confidence to engage in local and global discourse.

Through engaged faculty-student interaction, we transform our students into innovative professionals with a commitment to the power of good design. Our students and faculty share a commitment to sustainable practices, community outreach and civic engagement.

Our School of Architecture is among the first 14 accredited architectural programs to be accepted for participation in the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) Integrated Path to Architectural Licensure (IPAL) initiative. Successful students will have the opportunity to have an architectural license upon graduation.

We believe that our school is a role model for the direction in which the profession is heading – improving gender parity and ethnic diversity among its members, and reaffirming the importance of ethical conduct and social responsibility. Ours is a welcoming community for every race and orientation, and we resist acts of intolerance in favor of thoughtfulness, generosity and kindness. The economic, ethnic, and academic backgrounds of our students reflect Southern California itself. We are determined to provide a place for open debate, the respectful airing of differences, and for rich forms of expression and imagination.


Site running on Cargo. 




Housing+





Marcel Sanchez-Prieto’s Shed  Fall 2019 studio.


Housing+

In the fall of 2019, Woodbury School of Architecture launched Housing+ as a response to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s challenge to deans and chairs of schools of architecture to act on Southern California’s housing crisis. The results were rich and rewarding, demonstrating a profound desire within our community to address the pressing issues of our time. Our year-long program of lectures, exhibitions and studio inquiries resulted in new firm partnerships, an invitation to the United Nations headquarters in New York City, and a diverse array of student work from 1st year undergraduate through graduate thesis.

Our call had two goals: to empower our students to leverage design in service to the complex challenge of housing access and affordability, and to investigate the future of practice.



Jason Rebillot‘s The New American Dream Spring 2020 studio. Work by B.Arch students Leonardo Acevedo, Josue Alvarez, Raphael Capitulo, Jose Montano, Saul Santizo. The New American Dream (TNAD) was a studio collaboration between HDR and Woodbury University, which worked on a new urban development typology for Transit Oriented Communities (TOC's) in Los Angeles.


The Challenge

Southern California’s best-known architecture is unquestionably domestic: Morgan, Wright, Williams, Eames, Schindler, Neutra, Gehry, Lautner. Dingbats, craftsman bungalows, courtyard apartments, McMansions. Ours is a city of houses. For over 100 years, LA’s avant-garde housing projects have expanded aesthetic, cultural, and social norms through innovative approaches to construction, environmental systems, program organization, and suburban development in the face of headwinds such as redlining and shortsighted policies. In other words, designers leveraged the pressing issues of their time to rethink the physical expression and public domain of architecture. Paradoxically, in a region where over 80% of our cities are zoned R1, the scale of California’s housing crisis is striking. The shortage is estimated at 3-4 million housing units, with over 150,000 homeless, constituting a staggering quarter of the national total. It’s time for architects to do what we do best: work collaboratively to rethink California’s housing solutions.




Anthony Fontenot‘s Roofscape Urbanism Spring 2020 studio. Work by B.Arch Students Patrick Castro & Chris Madrid-Gramajo. In response to the lack of affordable housing and fresh organic food in the city of Los Angeles, students developed planning strategies and architectural proposals for a small urban village situated on a building rooftop in the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles.


Our Community

It is particularly appropriate for Woodbury School of Architecture to address Housing. Many in our community - faculty and alumni - are on the cutting-edge of designing and inventing new housing typologies: Linda Taalman, Mark Lahmon, Barbara Bestor, Ted Smith, Hector Perez, Germane Barnes, Catherine Herbst, Marcel Sanchez-Prieto, Mark Hershman, to name just a few.
We cannot imagine a better focus for our students, most of whom, will go on to design housing in their careers. For too many of our students, housing insecurity hits close to home. This initiative empowers our students by giving them the tools to become citizen-architect leaders.




Garfield Lofts, Courtesy of Sin Hei (Bart) Kwok (Woodbury MRED Program)


Partners
In order to provide our students with tangible examples of architect-led housing solutions, we hosted two symposia. Our fall ‘Frontier Housing’ symposium at Gensler LA, was moderated by Rob Jernigan and Roger Sherman, and featured six designers working on the ‘frontiers’ of technological and geographical territories. ‘S, M, L, XL Housing’, our spring symposium, brought together Dana Cuff, Christopher Hawthorne, Barbara Bestor, Michael Maltzan, and Madeleine Brand, to interrogate Southern California housing at multiple scales.

Housing+ also brought us new partners. Our Agency for Civic Engagement, led by Jeanine Centuori, partnered with the National Health Foundation and NBBJon a 60-bed Recuperative Care Facility for Homeless in Pico Union. The architecture/engineering firm HDR, together with LA Metro, is sponsoring a studio led by Dr. Jason Rebillot, to develop proposals for transit-oriented development along the West Santa Ana Branch line. Gensler LA and Miguel Santana of Fairplex, are sponsoring a seminar and studio to transform LA County Fairgrounds into a ‘Housing Expo’. Taught by Chair Heather Flood and faculty Scrap Marshall, students designing a modular unit to be exhibited at the LA County Fair. Abode Communities, the non-profit social enterprise committed to affordable housing, sponsored our final exhibition. 

Demonstrating the relevance of our initiative, Dean Wahlroos-Ritter was invited to present our Housing+ initiative at the United Nations Headquarters in NY, as part of the 58th session of the Commission for Social Development to describe how the academy can participate in solutions for affordable housing and homelessness.




47,547 Homes. Ixtapaluca, Mexico, Courtesy Livia Corona Benjamin


Future of Practice
Implicit in our Housing+ initiative is a critique of our discipline. Many in our design professions have remained notoriously absent from the discussion, claiming that architecture cannot solve the housing crisis. ‘Housing’ is considered by many a socioeconomic product divorced from design. We disagree. We believe that housing is a critical architectural question and a basic human right.

That we have turned our backs on housing is simply evidence that we have turned our backs on broader pressures facing the profession. Housing+ challenges our faculty and students to identify new opportunities, new modes of design activity, new value systems, new procurement models, new clients operating in ways that we might not yet recognize, new models of project financing, and the implementation of technology that offers not only a new means to an aesthetic end but entirely new aesthetic value systems.

The outcomes of Housing+ - varied, inventive, joyful - demonstrate the power that architects and designers have to address the vital issues of our time.



Housing+ is a year-long program of lectures, exhibitions and studio inquiries focused on a topic that is of particular relevance to Woodbury School of Architecture. The school brings together students, faculty, administrators and community partners to address the topic of housing in the 2019-20 academic year. Implicit in this call for new models of housing is a call for new models of practice.


Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter, FAIA


Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter is an architect, educator, and design consultant specializing in the building envelope and the experimental architectural use of glass. Currently Dean of the School of Architecture at Woodbury University, she has taught at Yale, Cornell, the Bartlett, and SCI-Arc. She is also Director of WUHO, the Woodbury University Hollywood gallery, a venue for experimental installations, public lectures and workshops. She currently serves on the LA Forum Board of Advisors.
The work of her collaborative office, WROAD, navigates transdisciplinary territory in the diverse type and scale of projects. She has collaborated on multiple award-winning projects including as façade consultant on Bloom with DoSu Architects, the Portland Aerial Tramway with AGPS, the Centre Pompidou exhibition, Continuities of the Incomplete, with Morphosis, and as project architect for the Corning Museum of Glass with Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects.

Named AIA Fellow in 2018, Ingalill is recipient of AIA California Council 2016 Educator Award, was honored with the AIA|LA 2018 Presidential Educator of the Year Award, and recognized by DesignIntelligence as one of the nation’s Most Admired Educators in architecture and design.