Instigation and Experimentation: UCLA's Mariana Ibañez on Testing Novel Ideas, Bringing Together Perspectives, and Leading in Pedagogy
By Julia Gamolina
Mariana Ibañez is an Argentinian architect involved in practice, academia, and research. She is the Chair of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, Mariana taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University for over a decade and most recently at MIT.
Mariana is the co-founder and principal of the award-winning office Ibañez Kim, a genre-defiant practice that works with sensate materials, atmospheres, and new media to generate architecture, objects, and cities. Her research is in the disciplinary core of architecture and its growing periphery, with a focus on the relationship between technology, culture, and the environment.
She received her Bachelor of Architecture from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and a Master of Architecture and Urbanism from the Architectural Association in London. After graduating from the AA, Mariana joined the office of Zaha Hadid and relocated to the United States in 2007. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Mariana talks about building a career in academia as well as in experimental practices, and evolving pedagogy. She advises those just starting their careers to bring their inward reflections into their work.
JG: Tell me about your foundational years — where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?
MI: I was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While growing up there, I was also fortunate to be able to travel extensively. Somewhere in my teenage years, a general interest in the arts quickly became a fascination with architecture and the built environment around me, around all of us. I didn’t know any architects, and I had no architects in my family, but the subject captivated me.
I pursued a six-year Bachelor’s degree at La Universidad Buenos Aires, a school that follows the polytechnic education model. Then I attended the Architectural Association in London, specifically the Design Research Laboratory, and its context of radical experimentation. This immersed me in the alternating alignments and tensions between different forms of production and thought. These entanglements were long-standing disciplinary questions inflected by the spirit of continuously probing boundaries and deconstructing or disrupting those disciplines and ideally, creating new knowledge or pathways to knowledge along the way. That pull toward instigation and experimentation would become a thread throughout my career.
What did you learn about yourself in studying architecture?
I would say that my education helped me to think and work between scales. While Latin America is very interested in European traditions and creating our own territory within that canon, I shifted from what was local and precise, to a future-forward design sensibility and its relativity of values.
The AA was especially transformative for me; I was always personally interested in experimentation, the charged space between established knowledge and the things we don’t yet know. I continue to be interested in the exercise of shaping and re-shaping those disciplinary boundaries, with speculations from unexpected places like technology, pop culture and scholarship from allied fields.
Ibañez Kim’s Kashin, a 24”x24” interactive panel was commissioned for the Drawing Codes exhibition, exhibited at the Cooper Union and the UVA. Kashin is the name of the supernatural that guard Korean homes (家神). Courtesy of Mariana Ibañez.
Ibañez Kim’s Orpheus and Eurydice, an opera with Lembit Beecher that recreates the myth of the male gaze using soft robotics, valves, compressor plexiglass, a microprocessor, and LED. Courtesy of Mariana Ibañez.
Ibañez Kim’s installation design for “Drawing, Designing, Thinking: 150 Years of Teaching Architecture at MIT” (2018), a 3800-sf exhibition hosted at the MIT Museum. A series of chambers - Spaces of Pedagogy, Process, Interdisciplinarity, Research, and Futures - are connected by axial walkways as well as oblique views. These openings extend the work across themes. Courtesy of Mariana Ibañez.
How did you get your start in working in architecture? How about in the academy?
This may be unusual but I started working in architecture while studying in Buenos Aires and was teaching before I graduated. I very quickly realized that most of the architects that I admired were educators as well as practitioners, and I recognized that as a powerful model. I really see the shared domains of teaching, researching, and practicing as a form of wealth.
I worked for some remarkable architects in Buenos Aires and learned a lot about the realities of the profession. After I graduated from the AA, I had the opportunity to join Zaha Hadid Architects. As a site of practice, ZHA brought together all the dimensions of architecture that I was interested in. We dealt in and with reality, but with each project we were also testing novel ideas and strategies. Each project brought new expertise and modes of fabrication, the opportunity to work across scales, and new spaces of experimentation. Zaha became a close friend and mentor—- she continues to be an immense source of inspiration for me.
After I left Zaha’s office, I joined the faculty at Harvard GSD, and founded Ibañez Kim with my partner Simon Kim. This is a much longer story but I’ll leave that for another time. Simon and I both teach and maintain a practice dedicated to both design and research. Along the way, I had the chance to work with many brilliant architects who, as mentors, supporters, and colleagues, have had an enormous influence on my continued learning.
“I was always personally interested in experimentation, the charged space between established knowledge and the things we don’t yet know. I continue to be interested in the exercise of shaping and re-shaping those disciplinary boundaries, with speculations from unexpected places like technology, pop culture and scholarship from allied fields.”
Tell me how you got to UCLA, and your personal evolution in your time here.
I have always cared about pedagogy as a project. I started over twenty years ago, and after eleven years at Harvard and four years at MIT, the idea of taking on a leadership role in a completely new cultural and academic environment on the West Coast felt like a special opportunity.
What excites me about the Chair role is what I think is also its challenge — envisioning and advancing projects and goals for the department, while supporting individuals to have the space and resources to envision and advance their own. Los Angeles is really its own world, in a way. It’s both a frontier as well as an epicenter, and our department is its agent of change.
I continue to think about what an architectural education needs to do in shaping the future. At UCLA, I am bringing together threads and perspectives that I gained as a practitioner and as a professor in three continents, and in collaboration with a very diverse group of people and ideas. I believe pedagogy needs to always evolve, never stagnate, both as a response to current events and as a process of anticipating and imagining a future that is not yet known. I relish the opportunity to ponder education in this way: what has served us and our students reliably, and what changes or shifts might amplify their learning and growth.
Our current faculty reflects a fascinating mix of designers that have been part of the AUD faculty or community for a very long time, and some who are very new to either Los Angeles, UCLA, or teaching. In this condition, I find it fascinating to imagine what the future of the department could be. In that sense, I want to leverage all the traditions and history of AUD, its figures, projects, ideas and ideals, and create a structure through which we can best respond to the challenges and concerns of our times through the expertise and agency of architecture and design.
Mariana Ibañez in dialogue with students and faculty during reviews at UCLA AUD. Courtesy of Mariana Ibañez.
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
At a personal level, I have faced the uncertainties that accompany the immigrant experience, and the challenges embedded in the field relative to diversity, equity, and representation. If you add motherhood, the challenges of starting and running a business, and the realities of academic life — my partner teaches in another state, and our practice is based in yet another state — simple logistics get complicated very quickly, never mind broader projects. Mentors and friends have been essential in figuring out how to navigate some of these challenges. In return, I try to offer a platform of support to the next generations of architects, who are facing struggles both unique and new, and longstanding.
The world is moving fast, crises are urgent and growing, and architecture can be slow. Too slow sometimes. I try to see our current and near-future moments through dual lenses: the need for urgency and immediacy, as well as considering the long history behind us, the long future ahead, with architecture entwining its entirety.
What have you learned in the last six months?
As Chair, I’ve learned so much about mentorship and collaboration, about getting in the ground level on specific challenges while also inspiring a community. And I know I have a lot more to learn, too.
As an architect, I’ve been working through the intricacies and differences in the ordinances of Los Angeles and Santa Monica. The office has also been researching the rich ecologies around us, from the La Brea tar pits, the active oil fields across the entire city, to the Ballona wetlands. This city is amazing.
Who are you admiring now and why?
I’m new to UCLA and Los Angeles and am spending time learning about this place and the people that make it special. To name a few, UCLA Arts colleagues like Catherine Opie and Rebeca Mendez have been comrades-in-arms. Sylvia Lavin’s insight as a former AUD chair has been generous and invaluable.
As I took on the role of Chair, I quickly began to learn the differences between the expectation and the reality of the work. There’s the vision and dream of architecture and its passions, and the groundwork of building its curriculum. I like what Farshid said in her interview about feet placed inside and outside reality. Some days it feels steady and measured, and some days it feels like a flamenco.
“If we want more diversity in architecture offices, in leadership, in policy making, in strategic planning, in how we conceive and shape our world, then we need to create and foster conditions for a broad population first to be interested in architecture, and then to believe in architecture as a force for equity.”
What is the impact you’d like to have in the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
As a department chair and academic, the first that comes to mind is to create new pathways and pipelines to get more people into architecture, to show students from every community that architecture is a noble and available role, and that it concerns so much more than buildings.
I think a lot about the saying “You meet doctors, you meet teachers, but you usually don’t meet architects.” It can be a silent role in many ways. But the work architects produce is fundamental. Real structural change — social, cultural, infrastructural, ecological — will occur only if we each and all are invested in the long-term commitment to transform the spaces in which architecture and design are learned, discussed, and produced.
As a measure of success as an architect, I’d like to continue to produce a body of work that addresses adaptive reuse, synthetic nature, human and non-human agency, and projective worlds where we maintain a collective planetary endeavor. The office has been placing emphasis on not only built work but exhibition prototypes that work with nonhuman interaction. This has also been done with collaborations for stage with choreographers, opera composers, and choirs. We like to call these prototypes ‘Architectural Homunculi’ as reminders that these are full-scale objects and not scale models.
As Ibañez Kim grows, we’d like to continue work in residential, cultural, and commercial projects but maintain connections with engineering and the performing arts. Whether we design a gallery or a stage for Orpheus and Eurydice, crafting the immediacy or visceral connection of our human senses to the world is the base condition. It’s far-reaching which makes it exciting.
Ibañez Kim’s Our Fathers, a large, curving figure that generates a room via self-intersections. Veneers of maple wood are stretched in Quake Lines over a frame that undulates as a ruled surface. Courtesy of Mariana Ibañez.
Ibañez Kim’s KaSa, a recently completed, two-story, single-family home in Toronto conceived as four interlocking characters around a central atrium. Each character contains a bedroom above and a ground floor programmatic element. Courtesy of Mariana Ibañez.
Inside Ibañez Kim’s KaSa, a recently completed, two-story, single-family home in Toronto conceived as four interlocking characters around a central atrium. Each character contains a bedroom above and a ground floor programmatic element. Courtesy of Mariana Ibañez.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
Don’t be too anxious about finding immediate success — don’t drain the potential of finding your own “entorno”. Focus on work that is meaningful and exciting to you, and not necessarily repeating the styles of the day. Chances are that inward reflection will make your work better, and in turn, inspire meaning and excitement in others.
For young women reading this, I would say that creating your space or establishing your value is important. Of course, the pressure to be more vocal, more present, in order to assert yourself can be tiring. And on top of this, once you do achieve a leadership role or some victory, being a women leader does seem to bring an intense level of scrutiny — a dynamic that some of my female colleagues at other institutions have discussed with me.
If we want more diversity in architecture offices, in leadership, in policy making, in strategic planning, in how we conceive and shape our world, then we need to create and foster conditions for a broad population first to be interested in architecture, and then to believe in architecture as a force for equity. So, part of our project today as educators is to inspire people that architecture can not only change the world, but that it can do so in ways that benefit and support rather than repress and constrain. As an educator, teaching and inspiring the next generation feels like a contribution to a better future. Architecture is a collective project, and good ideas come from all corners.