New Miracles
On the occasion of UCLA’s Centennial, UCLA Arts is proud to launch 100 for 100—a collection of stories that celebrate the rich history of the arts at UCLA over the past century. Each monthly newsletter throughout the yearlong celebration will feature a new story that reflects on our past and imagines what’s possible for our future. We invite our community to explore these stories and contribute their own to the collection.
This month's contribution is by Dr. Dana Cuff, director, UCLA cityLAB & professor, UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design
When I arrived at UCLA to join the faculty of Architecture and Urban Design in 1993, architecture was in an extraordinary place vis-à-vis culture at large. The Guggenheim in Bilbao was underway, and would open four years later with a New York Times Magazine cover that announced Frank Gehry had produced “A Miracle in Bilbao.” Then Dean Richard Weinstein joined the profession’s swoon over the power of architecture and the attention from the glitterati. It was a work of groundbreaking, creative genius that was credited with regional economic development in the rusted industrial Basque Country. The ties of architecture to the city, with its economic, social, and political complexities, were not lost on Weinstein, an architecture-trained urban designer who cut his teeth in Mayor John Lindsay’s Manhattan. Meanwhile, the fresh terrain of digital technologies overtook the academy in 1994 with the advent of the paperless studio at Columbia, soon embraced at UCLA. Simultaneous with my arrival, the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning broke apart, the departments administratively divorcing in 1994. With the split, UCLA abandoned the theory that architecture should be united with planning to create an integrative architecture of the city. Instead, it was the Guggenheim-as-monument that gave architecture its grandest public stage, and there was a strong sense that individuals—particularly older white men—would be performing the miracles. As for me, I was stealthily nursing my second child between interviews with the faculty I hoped would hire me.
