From Chair Mariana Ibañez: Welcome Back, AUD!

Dear AUD Community,

Welcome back!

Today marks UCLA’s official start of the 2023-2024 academic year. I look forward to seeing each of you in Perloff Hall this week: our returning students, inspiring faculty colleagues, incredibly supportive staff, remarkable alumni–and, most of all, our newest community members and colleagues, those of you who are starting their AUD and UCLA journey. We have a lot to accomplish, to discover, and to look forward to together this year.

Summer offers the sort of space for imagination and big thinking–and, though summer in Los Angeles is something of a year-round affair, it’s the mindset of summer that I hope to carry forward into the coming weeks and months. As we think about the day-to-day details, I remind myself of the big-picture journey–the projects, the vision, the mission. With the new academic year, we have an opportunity to treat each day, each crit, each interaction, as part of that journey, each moment offering something for us to observe, to learn, or simply to enjoy.

While the mission of the Department represents us all as a group, it is also enacted by the accumulated effects of individual work and voices. This summer, as we planned for the academic year, many conversations focused on the duality of the individual and the collective: working together, learning together, living together–and designing and shaping the individual spaces, elements, and experiences of that collectivism. As individual designers and humans, we each contain multitudes, and we each shape multitudes. We train and study as individuals, but we make progress as a community–and, in turn, we shape communities and collectives through our work.

For each of you, an AUD education is a deeply personal journey, one enabled by our tight-knit scale. This is one of the best qualities of AUD. Yet, at the same time that we are a community of individuals, we are also an individual community: our department has such a profound and rich legacy, from which we draw inspiration and momentum; likewise, you each become part of that legacy, and we are always progressing forward as a community with the new knowledge and insights we create.

What does this look like at AUD? One of the interests is to bring elasticity to our curriculum, enabling and encouraging students from different programs and backgrounds to exchange energy and knowledge, here at Perloff as well as and with our UCLA Arts colleagues and throughout the university. This year, I am thrilled to share a project we are piloting to bring all of our students, faculty, and programming together under one roof. Our MSAUD cohort will be studying, designing, and dialoguing right alongside our BA, MArch, MA, and PhD students every day here at Perloff Hall.

As we deal with the practicalities and realities of this pilot effort, we are eager to see how this project influences the work across all our cohorts. What kind of ideas, tools, projects, and conversations emerge from these new interactions?

On that note, we have planned a Fall 2023 events program to convene our community around topics and questions where this type of layered, multi-disciplinary research and perspective can make tangible difference. From the impact of new technologies in design to environmental stewardship, we are bringing together incredible designers–including some members of our alumni community–to share their range of perspectives and knowledge on this complex set of conditions.

We will start the year's events series working together. As part of a long-term project titled “Architecture After the Green New Deal,” we are hosting an October 6 workshop that brings together faculty, students, and guests, followed by a November 3 & 4 conference expanding on this dialogue. I hope to see many of you at these and other events this term.

The week ahead is a celebration of you as individuals, and of us as a community. This Wednesday, alongside Orientation activities for our new students, we will gather with our incredible UCLA Arts community for the annual “The Opening,” which I hope is just the first of many opportunities for you to take inspiration from our UCLA Arts colleagues and friends. This Friday, we gather in Decafe to hear about the courses and studios on tap this quarter–each one a journey; collectively, a remarkable project.

And that is just the beginning; our year ahead is bound to be a special one.

I look forward to seeing all of you, and all the projects that will take shape in the weeks to come.

As always, with gratitude and optimism,

Mariana Ibañez
Chair and Associate Professor