Life Inside the College Without Walls

Life Inside the College Without Walls
The experimental aesthetic of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) sneaks out of its campus container and sprouts up around Downtown Los Angeles in a variety of ways.

The school's most recent gallery show, Suture, was an interactive electronic exhibit with the Chinatown art space Telic.

Its Community Outreach and Design Build Program has worked on a project in Skid Row and helped create an inflatable pavilion for a monthly arts market.

But in the same way that SCI-Arc ventures out of its former freight depot walls, the public can wander in.

The school's exhibits and lectures are free, and there's an open-door policy during the day.

With a visitor's badge from the north entrance reception desk, guests can amble through the studios and galleries, and witness the school's founding principle - a "college without walls" - in action.

There was a punchy energy at SCI-Arc last week, the kind that comes from students' sleep deprivation and deadlines.

More than 70 undergrad and graduate students were starting to install their thesis projects, which they've been working on for nearly a year.

The displays - which appear in paper, film, animation and model incarnations - will cover walls and rise up from concrete floors.

They're not versions of a single school or house, they're