UCLA Architecture and Urban Design marks 60 years with ‘Core Samples’

For six decades, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design has helped reimagine the built environment of Los Angeles and the world, training generations of visionary designers, playing host leading thinkers and documenting the evolution of architectural thought. As the department marks a milestone anniversary, a new exhibition is opening AUD's archives to reveal how that history was made.

"Core Samples," which runs from March 12 through June 30, brings to light long-hidden work and media drawn from the vaults of AUD, a department within the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture. The materials demonstrate the range of ways design has been recorded, stored and preserved over the past 60 years, offering a rare, tactile view into the department's history.

Organized by AUD faculty members Samaa Elimam and Michael Osman, "Core Samples" asks fundamental questions about preservation and authorship: What is kept, and what is lost? How do institutions record their own histories? How can archival work be both aesthetic and scientific, objective yet reflective of human priorities? And how might current students and faculty connect to previous generations through these materials? By looking to the past, "Core Samples" invites dialogue about the future of the discipline.

"We have been interested in the different methods used by educators at UCLA to document and record their pedagogies. Each generation used tools at their disposal - some new, some old - and the students' work often reflected the technical capacity and limits of storage," said Osman. "That's why it's so exciting to have the archive move into a classroom for the rest of the academic year to help orient us in the present while looking at the past and projecting into the future."

'An archive of teaching and a teaching archive'

On display is an array of archival materials, including VHS tapes, faculty portraits, 35mm slides of student work, travel photographs, office drawings and posters.

Among those are posters for a late-1980s lecture series, including one announcing a public talk by groundbreaking architect Frank Gehry on June 11, 1987, and another the same year by John Julius Norwich, a historian of Venice, Italy - events that underscored how architectural thinking changed over time, with unexpected parallels to contemporary discourse.

The exhibition intentionally occupies a UCLA classroom typically used for seminars, Perloff Hall 1118. The space has been furnished with archival tools - bookcases, flat files, bankers boxes and folders - allowing materials once held in storage and hidden from view to be both presented and explored. The exhibition functions as both an archive of teaching and a teaching archive.

"We envision 'Core Samples' as a hands-on teaching collection that encourages collaboration and dialogue around our shared history, one that also happens to be a remarkable record of design in L.A. over the past 60 years," said Elimam. "We're inviting visitors to join us in rediscovering materials that tell us how people learned and taught in Perloff Hall, much like a family album. Our hope is that over the months it's installed, visitors will contribute to the exhibition and it becomes something we've all worked on together."

"Core Samples" is fully interactive, and visitors are invited to become researchers by watching recorded lectures, pulling large-format drawings from flat files and examining 35mm slides on lightboxes. Through this hands-on engagement, viewers can form their own impressions of daily life at AUD through time - how work was produced, documented, shared and saved.

Exhibition details:

March 12-June 30 (opening reception on March 12, 6-8 p.m.)
Perloff Hall 1118
UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
1317 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles 90095

UCLA Architecture and Urban Design celebrates 60 years

"Core Samples" is part of AUD's 60th anniversary programming, which will feature a series of publiceventsthrough June 26 honoring the contributions of students, faculty and collaborators.All events are free, open to the public and hosted at Perloff Hall.