2020 Paul Helmle Fellow: Lawrence Scarpa, FAIA

April 3, 2020

Introduction Program About Paul Helmle

The Department of Architecture is pleased to announce that Lawrence Scarpa, FAIA, Principal at Brooks + Scarpa Architects, as the 2020 Paul Helmle Fellow. Scarpa is internationally recognized for his leadership in sustainable design and his creative use of conventional materials in unique and unexpected ways.

Scarpa has received more than 200 major design awards including 21 National AIA Awards, Architect Magazine’s HIVE 50 Innovator Award, National AIA Collaborative Achievement Award, AIA Los Angeles Chapter Gold Medal, Architect Magazine’s Top 50 Architecture Firms (ranked 2nd, 4th and 9th respectively), AIA California Council Lifetime Achievement Award, Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, Record Houses, Record Interiors, Rudy Bruner Prize, six AIA COTE “Top Ten Green Building” Awards and was a finalist for the World Habitat Award, one of ten firms selected worldwide.

Scarpa's work has been exhibited internationally including the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. He has been Featured in NEWSWEEK and appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 2009 Interior Design Magazine honored him with their Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2010, his firm Brooks + Scarpa was awarded the National and State of California Architecture Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects. Diverse City book cover

Scarpa is currently on the faculty at the University of Southern California and has taught and lectured at the university level for more than two decades. Some of those institutions include Harvard University, UCLA, SCI-arc, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Florida, University of Michigan, University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley. He is a co-founder of the A+D Museum, Los Angeles, Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute and Livable Places, Inc.; a nonprofit development and public policy organization dedicated to building mixed-use housing and to help develop more sustainable and livable communities.

Lawrence Scarpa: 2020 Proceedings

'Inspiring Generations of Students'

Professor Emeritus Paul Helmle (April 27, 1936 - Dec. 3, 2015) taught design studios in the Architecture Department for many years. Hundreds of students had their work looked at, questioned, discussed, encouraged and made better by Paul. He helped them to understand what they were doing, or trying to do, and laid the foundations upon which they would build careers. His constant probing for the best his students had to offer helped them in ways that were not restricted to architecture.

Paul’s own education was firmly founded at the University of Illinois in the 1950s and polished by the graduate school at Princeton. He worked in a small, unsung office in Illinois while he was an undergraduate, and a large, storied one in Connecticut after graduate school. He was hired out of Princeton by Eero Sarrinen, whose office was at the time the most desirable in the country for young, talented graduates. He left the Saarinen, later Roche and Dinkeloo, office to teach at Yale, then started his own practice, and ultimately accepted the offer of a position teaching at Cal Poly Pomona.

Paul’s work as an architect was individual and distinctive, combining the modernist rigor and historical exposure of his education with his own unique aesthetic. His outgoing personality and openness to other people’s viewpoints gave his work and his relationship with his clients deep personal dimensions. These same qualities helped him to sail unscathed through sometimes difficult waters as a member and chair of the architecture faculty. And they inspired generations of students to value his guidance and to enjoy his ebullient and charismatic personality. He was admired and loved by those privileged to work with and to study with him, and it is most fitting that his name should live on in this generous gift from one of his grateful and affectionate students. — Nicholas Pyle