University Communications

“This — at UCLA — is where architecture is being shaped and directed.”

In her third year in the program, Loew is working toward a Ph.D. in critical studies of architectural culture. While she has ambitions of one day having her own architectural practice, she also aspires to teach.

“I’m much more interested in the discourse of architecture than in putting things up,” she says.

Loew, in fact, already teaches, holding one post as a teaching assistant at UCLA and another at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in downtown Los Angeles, where she offers instruction in subjects ranging from advanced decoration and ornamentation to thesis preparation. She also works part-time at an architectural firm in Santa Monica.

Working three jobs while attending school full-time isn’t ideal — “At someplace like Princeton or Yale I’d have my tuition paid and receive a stipend as well,” she says — but she’s willing to make the trade-off to be at UCLA. “I try to take jobs that I can think of as paid research, where what I’m learning on that job helps me prepare for my career.”

This April, Loew will travel to Rotterdam with a team of UCLA architecture students to participate in the first Dutch biennale of architecture, a competition in which each team will research and propose architectural solutions to the growing problems of urban mobility. Only nine universities throughout the world were invited to the biennale, with UCLA invited to represent the United States.

“I feel very fortunate and very privileged to be able to study here,” says Loew. “It’s a great place to test out my own ideas and have them be challenged and fortified.

“I love it. I’m on the edge of my seat all the time.”

— Judy Lin-Eftekhar

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