The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc)’s board of trustees announced Hernan Diaz Alonso, who won the AIA “Educator of the Year” Award winner in 2012, will be the next director of SCI-Arc starting in the next academic year. Alonso has served as a faculty member since 2001 in multiple roles such as coordinator of the graduate thesis program and graduate programs chair. His most notable contribution to SCI-Arc is integrating digital technologies into the school’s graduate curriculum.
Along with his leadership at SCI-Arc, Alonso is principal of the Los Angeles-based firm Xefirotarch, known for producing grotesque and sometimes unsettling work that challenges responses to environment. Additionally, Alonzo has been named winner of the 2005 MoMa PS1’s Young Architects Program (YAP), the AR+D Award for Emerging Architecture and an honorable mention in the 2013 P/A Awards.
“SCI-Arc’s task, in perpetuity, is to go where we haven’t been, and report on what we find,” Eric Owen Moss, FAIA, the current director of SCI-Arc, said in the institution’s press release. “Hernan Diaz Alonso is the perfect architect to continue this expedition.”
