Southern California Institute of Architecture

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is a private, independent architecture school in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles, California, occupying the quarter-mile-long former Santa Fe Freight Depot. It was founded in 1972, originally as the New School, when department chair Ray Kappe and faculty including Thom Mayne, Jim Stafford, Glen Small, Ahde Lahti, Bill Simonian and Shelly Kappe broke away from the architecture department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, to build a college without walls. Regarded from its founding as institutionally and artistically avant-garde, SCI-Arc today enrolls about 600 students taught by roughly 80 faculty, many of them practicing architects, and remains one of the few independent architecture schools in the world.