Los Angeles is a city shaped by spectacle—defined by its car-centric infrastructure and an urban language that thrives on instant attention and sensory overload. In a landscape built for speed and surface, the future city dweller—the hopeful pedestrian, the carless student—finds little space to pause, reflect, or simply be.
This thesis proposes a network of sensorial refuges dispersed throughout the city: spaces of retreat embedded within the chaos, architecturally defined by the vernacular materials of Los Angeles—the everyday objects and surfaces that quietly shape its urban fabric.
Reimagining the billboard—a symbol of LA’s visual excess—as a new urban beacon, these interventions offer moments of quiet introspection amid the noise. Anchoring this network, a central hub located on Melrose functions as an “urban cloister,” inviting passersby to step out of the overstimulated flow and into a space of calm, attention, and human-scale experience.
