Spring 2019, Arch 205B – Studio One: Science Fiction California

Science Fiction is an unequivocally Californian phenomenon. Our culture is littered with imagined futures and imagined galaxies that are always actually California—and that represent the galaxy of identities contained within us. Sometimes this is clear, but it is always just below the surface, in the visual tropes, the natural, spatial, infrastructural and social phenomena of California that haunt us from the edge of the border, and the edge of the continent, to the edge between now and tomorrow. The one-year curriculum of Studio One in 2018-2019 focuses on the intersection of architecture, urbanism, ecology and science fiction, and the speculative possibilities of California’s future. The studio proposes a set of radical, accessible futures, tracing out the bending arc of history and engaging California’s history of values and ambitions—opportunity, ecology, and the endless rush to innovation. Guests and collaborators included, amongst others, novelists Kim Stanley Robinson, Nnedi Okorafor, and Robin Sloan, Wired editor Adam Rogers, prop-builder and MythBusters Adam Savage, and urbanist and critic Allison Arieff.