Winka Dubbeldam Named SCI-Arc Director and CEO
The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) has announced that Dutch architect and educator Winka Dubbeldam has been appointed the next director and chief executive officer of SCI-Arc, a role she will assume in September.
Winka Dubbeldam burst onto the international architecture scene about 25 years ago with the design and realization of 497 GW, an 11-story cascading glass addition to a brick warehouse in New York's Hudson Square neighborhood. With its parametric design and undulating glass panes, the project exhibited a penchant for digital design and tectonic innovation on the part of Dubbeldam and her aptly named studio, Archi-Tectonics. With that focus playing out this century in numerous projects in and beyond NYC, Dubbeldman is a natural fit for SCI-Arc, which was founded in 1972 by a group of architects wanting to approach architectural education “from a more experimental perspective than traditional schools offered at the time.”
Accordingly, Dubbeldam said these words in yesterday's announcement of her appointment as SCI-Arc CEO/Director: “SCI-Arc has long been a beacon for radical experimentation, and I am honored to join a community that continuously redefines what architecture can be. I look forward to building on the school’s legacy of innovation and fostering new opportunities for students and faculty to engage with the future of design.”
Integral to Dubbeldam's new appointment is her more than twenty years of teaching at the University of Pennsylvania's Stuart Weitzman School of Design in Philadelphia. She joined the school in 2003 and served as department chair from 2013 to 2023. Additionally, Dubbeldam has been head of the Advanced Research & Innovation Lab (ARI) at Penn, which she launched, and she has served as External Examiner at the Architectural Association and Bartlett School of Architecture, both in London.
Archi-Tectonics has offices in New York, Amsterdam, and Hangzhou. The last, the capital of China's Zhejiang province, hosted the 19th Asian Games in the fall of 2023 (delayed one year due to Covid-19), and it was Archi-Tectonics that handled the master plan as well as the design of sports venues that would continue to be used after the Games ended. Archi-Tectonics' competition-winning design incorporated seven buildings into an eco-landscape, in which the two main sports venues were connected by a “commercial canyon” integrated into the landscape. The 2023 Asian Games was one of the projects thoroughly documented in Dubbeldam's fourth monograph, Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Things, released by Actar in 2021. Later this year, Park Books will publish her fifth monograph, Monsters and Mutants.
Dubbeldam will succeed Hernán Díaz Alonso, who has served as SCI-Arc CEO/Director since 2015. He said this upon the announcement of Dubbeldam's appointment: “SCI-Arc has always been about looking forward—challenging conventions, taking risks, and imagining new futures for architecture. I’m excited for this next chapter, and I know the school is in excellent hands with Winka. She’s been a longtime friend of SCI-Arc, and her vision, creativity, and global perspective align deeply with the spirit of this place. That spirit has never been about any one person—it’s about the ideas we build together.”
Notably, with Ray Kappe (1972–1987), Michael Rotondi (1987–1997), Neil Denari (1997–2002), and Eric Owen Moss (2002–2015) preceding Hernán Díaz Alonso, Winka Dubbeldam will be the first SCI-Arc director not rooted or based in Southern California at the time of their appointment, as well as the first woman to helm the famed architecture school.