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Executive Q&A Marvin Malecha, NewSchool of Architecture and Design

For Marvin Malecha, experience and education have always gone hand in hand.

As new president and chief academic officer of the NewSchool of Architecture and Design downtown, Malecha intends to keep it that way.

The NewSchool of Architecture and Design is a private school founded in 1980 with a current enrollment of nearly 500 students. It offers programs of study in architecture, construction management, product design, media design, game development and interior architecture and design.

Malecha’s journey with NewSchool started in the spring of 2010 when he was invited to give a keynote address at a school conference. Shortly after, he joined the NewSchool board of directors and has maintained a condo in San Diego ever since.

Malecha, now in his mid-60s, is no stranger to Southern California, having worked at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona for 18 years from 1976 to 1994, including as dean of the College of Environmental Design.

He was national president of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

As AIA president, Malecha said he realized that more than half of what architectural students learned in the classroom did not directly translate into what was practiced in the field. He wants to change that at the NewSchool with the Integrated Path to Architectural Licensure (IPAL) program which will be offered through the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards.

North Carolina State University, where he just spent 22 years as dean of the College of Design, and the NewSchool are among 13 programs working on this initiative to get students interning in the field and taking portions of the architectural exams while in school. While California does not allow students to take the exam until after completion of their accredited programs, NewSchool will test parts of this approach this fall.

The San Diego Business Journal recently sat down with Malecha to talk about his goals.

What changes in architectural
education drew you to NewSchool?

My whole career as an educator and as a practitioner has been this bridging between education and practice. Like I said, I personally worked my way through college working in design firms. So I’ve always had that one-foot-on-each-side-of-the-fence kind of thing. So this notion of what we call IPAL, Integrated Path to Architectural Licensure, of being able to be at an institution that was exploring that as a whole new way of preparing architects for practice, is something that appeals to me. That’s something I would like us to really be seen as leaders for.

I taught design thinking for over 20 years at NC State and so I intend to bring that here, as well, where we really focus on critical and creative thought, where we are educating people who will graduate from here in the design profession, but will really become known for their ability to think.

You called the John T. Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies one of the most significant things you worked on during your time as dean at Cal Poly Pomona. How will you incorporate that experience into NewSchool?

I really liked working with John, he’s a very bright man and … he was one of the godfathers in the United States on the subject (of sustainable practices).

Every material that went into that center had to be analyzed for how it was made and what were the environmental impacts of the materials that were being used there. We did an analysis even as the building was being designed of how many trees would be cut down to build that building. We were doing things that people just weren’t doing then.

You had to develop projects that would regenerate, that would give something more back then they’re taking. One of the focuses of the NewSchool is sustainability and regeneration. You don’t do a building in California now or anywhere in the world without having consideration of what the energy use is or what the impact of that building is.

How do you hope students will get involved in the community?

They have to be proactive. They have to see the world differently. For example, just kitty-corner from here, Quartyard Park, that began as a thesis project at our school and then the students found ways, through crowdsourced funding and through other ways, to get that done.

I think it’s a bit subversive. I think young people have this ability to be a bit subversive. They have the energy and the passion and the ‘we’re going to change the world’ mentality, and they just need to get out there and be that way. And we need to teach our students to be advocates and to be the change-the-world types and to know how to build constituencies and really be the instigators.

What kinds of projects do you want your students to be involved in downtown?

I want the school to be involved with local industry. We want to be seen as relevant to the community. What I’d like to see the students working on are the projects that mean something to the community. To be valued, you have to demonstrate why you’re valuable. To demonstrate why you’re valuable is to deal with the issues that are important to the people of San Diego.

What is your design philosophy?

It isn’t just designing buildings; it’s designing things, everything. The expression that ‘all design begins with the dance of life,’ that’s actually my sentence which was put on a building at North Carolina State University. So that’s it right there. That’s my personal philosophy; that it all begins with the dance of life.

What’s next for design in San Diego?

What I see here is an architectural design/product design community that is rapidly maturing … It’s a great time for me, and for any designer for that matter, to come to San Diego because I think we’re needed here. A really enlightened development community is needed here and that’s what I see as necessary into the future.

San Diego has the chance to be a leader in the whole discussion of innovation and creativity and design. It has this opportunity to be a place in the world where people actually talk about the vitality of San Diego… It’s an exciting moment. It really is. It’s a threshold moment.

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