When students of the Southern California Institute of Architecture embark on their education as architects and delve into projects exploring what that means, they begin a journey into the unknown. This book is a way for you to join them on at least part of the trip. Onramp, No. 3, is a collection of work by graduate and undergraduate students done in classes, studios, and workshops. As you explore the work in this book, you will find that there are many roads taken at SCI-Arc. But none the usual route.

Hsinming Fung, AIA (SCI-Arc Director of Academic Affairs

Principal, Hodgetts+Fung Design and Architecture

www.hplusf.com)

co-founder and director of design for the internationally renowned firm Hodgetts+Fung Design and Architecture. Fung became SCI-Arc's Director of Academic Affairs in 2010, after having served the previous eight years as the school's director of graduate programs.

Since the founding of Hodgetts+Fung (together with Craig Hodgetts) in 1984, Ming Fung has been engaged in the execution of all of the firm's projects, including a new acoustical shell for the Hollywood Bowl; Yamano - a 29-story, mixed-use tower in Tokyo; the Towell Library at UCLA; and most recently, the Donna-Rio Bravo Land Port of Entry in Texas, and the Menlo-Atherton Performing Arts Center. The firm has established a reputation for high-caliber exhibit design through such works as the Library of Congress/Ira Gershwin Gallery at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the landmark exhibitions Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses and The Work of Charles & Ray Eames.

The work of Hodgetts+Fung has received numerous awards and citations, including the Fellowship Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, LA Winners Award, Founders Award from the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Design, the Gold Medal from the AIA/LA, the AIACC Firm of the Year Award, and most recently, the GSA Design Excellence Award. Fung's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She served as a Presidential Appointee to the National Endowment for the Arts Council in 2001 and was the recipient of the Arts Rome Prize Advance Fellowship in 1991.

A demonstrated leader in academia, Ming Fung has taught at Yale University as the Eero Saarinen Professor in 1995 and 2000, at Ohio State University as Herbert Baumer Professor in 1996, and at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, for 16 years. Since 2002, Fung has been director of graduate programs at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where she has initiated two new post-graduate programs, SCIFI and MediaSCAPES. In addition, she currently serves on the executive board for the AIA/Los Angeles, the visiting committee for the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and as a national peer for General Services Administration.

Florencia Pita (SCI-Arc Design Faculty, fpmod

www.fpmod.com

Los Angeles)

Florencia Pita's firm, fpmod, is a collaborative practice with an incisive fixation on contemporaneity, that thrives on the mannerist use of digital technology. As new modes of design and production are more involved with new technologies, the firm focuses on the underlying mechanisms of overlaying forms.

Florencia Pita graduated in Architecture from the National University of Rosario, School of Architecture in 1998. In 1999, she was awarded the Fulbright-Fondo Nacional de las Artes scholarship to pursue studies at Columbia University, where she received her MSAAD in 2001.

Pita, in collaboration with Hernan Diaz Alonso, won first prize in the 2001 Metro Design Plaza International Competition for Lexington, Kentucky. She received an honorable mention in the 1998 Landscape Housing competition in Segovia, Spain and second prize in the Competition of Ideas CORDIC.

Her work has been published in Log 3, Nexus, Arquine, Abstract, Clarin Arquitectura and Diario Uno. In 2002, Pita participated in the World Trade Center Site Design Competition as a member of United Architects. As a member of Greg Lynn FORM she was project architect in charge of the Ark of the World project in Costa Rica. Pita has also worked as project designer in the offices of Peter Eisenman, and at Asymptote in New York.