Shortly after SCI-Arc opened its doors, Shelly Kappe launched the Design Forum, a public lecture program aimed at “making more people aware of architecture.” The school collaborated with a video collective in exchange for use of their equipment, creating one of the earliest video archives of architectural discourse. “Every single architect that we could coax to come to lecture –– they came,” said Mayne. “Everyone wanted to talk at SCI-Arc.”
The posters advertising these events were hand-drawn, radical in tone, and widely circulated. Pearl Brickman described receiving one and realizing, “Oh, it says it’s going to be accredited and not just a little fly-by-night thing. So, I got more interested.”
Brickman recalls being one of just five women among 60 men at the time of enrollment. Within four years, that number had increased dramatically. “By the time I graduated, there must have been 25 or 30 women,” she says.
