Category: ARCH 501: Adventures in the Algorithmic Ordinary and/or Odd Operations on the Everyday

Scaling as a transformative operation evokes extraordinary potential for redefining the ordinary through reassessing the materials, structure, space, and function. Through scaling, this project aims to design an elementary school that uses the architecture itself as an educational tool to provide a constantly evolving experience of time and space. This project further explores the adaptation of a single-family housing block into an educational facility through custom reconstruction methods informed by the Montessori framework for each age group. By experimenting with the integration of classroom design and single-family housing typology, a living room could be transformed into a classroom, a library, a garden, etc. Across the project, students will experience a parallel educational universe of elementary school, fostering a learning atmosphere that is more cohesive, interactive, and engaging.

In today’s digitally-driven, media-obsessed world, photography pervades the everyday. Though purportedly portraying reality, even in the most commonplace photographs, perspectival distortion subverts imagery, making subjectivity inextricable from the medium. This thesis explores the power of photography as a design tool in architecture. The project looks to gas stations as a case study for liminal spaces within the urban fabric of Los Angeles, investigating information synthesis through a translation across mediums of representation. Manipulation techniques of hyperrealism and information reduction generate highly curated composites that are translated into physical models for radical design interventions, aiming to reimagine the future of gas stations in Los Angeles through world-making.

This thesis critiques the progressive loss of identity and growing uniformity in contemporary cities by reimagining the high-rise typology as pieces of cultural infrastructure rather than as merely high-density buildings. Drawing inspiration from Richard Artschwager and other late 20th-century artists who transformed the ordinary, this thesis applies these strategies to high-rise typology through a playful lens by treating the high-rise as an object. The result is an experiment that reinterprets culturally relevant everyday objects to produce a commentary playfully conveyed through an interactive toy. It simplifies the complex issue of urban homogenization, using the familiar format of a toy to demystify architectural discourse and address the blandness that pervades urban landscapes as a result of the high-rise typology.

My project explores the transformation of a home’s exterior using generic tiles, shifting it from a conventional catalog selection to an absurdly appealing material expression. By superimposing a new envelope onto existing structures, the project distorts viewers’ understanding, prompting a reevaluation of the familiar. Drawing on the camp aesthetic, which embraces the unconventional and celebrates the appeal of the unusual, the project elevates mundane materials to artful statements. Through this lens, the project challenges the notion of taste and beauty, inviting viewers to reconsider their preconceptions of design. This work embodies a playful exploration of how architectural elements can be reimagined to provoke thought and evoke a sense of whimsy in the built environment.

My thesis aims to propose a primary design scheme for Cruzada São Sebastião, as an application of a prototype living system that promotes the integration of work and domestic activities while prioritizing residents’ autonomy in spatial organization. Inspired by the organic growth and constant flux character of Favela homes, the design emphasizes adaptability and flexibility within a regular grid framework.

By incorporating elements of profit generation into residential spaces, the proposal addresses the evolving demands of urban housing, reflecting the dynamic nature of urban environments. Through this thesis, I seek to explore innovative solutions to revitalize the Cruzada São Sebastião complex, promoting social inclusion and sustainable urban living.

How could engaging with indeterminate space redefine urban identity?

Suspended between defined environments, thresholds are transitional spaces where the absence of prescribed production invites unstable and reflexive interpretations. Characterized both as a physical demarcation and a conceptual catalyst for action, a threshold is a zone of exchange that can be manipulated to disrupt the increasingly hypermobile and impersonal patterns of use that shape everyday life. Utilizing Los Angeles streets as case studies of interactions between paths of circulation and nodes of destination, this proposal subverts current LA urban planning guidances by advocating for an extension of threshold ambiguity to break ordered rhythms of consumption, production, and disposal and invite elements of time and transgression that constitute LA identity.

This thesis is based on the main premise that our city streets are dead and have become unhealthy, unnatural, and inhumane – residents prefer interior spaces like their homes, cars and complexes instead of using outdoor public spaces. This issue ultimately stems from the complete separation between our places of living, working, producing and consuming. Can we re-engage the community and solve these intertwined issues with one simple systematic approach by creating healthy, livable and inviting food production co-ops through the reuse of existing and underutilized warehouse blocks ? This revamping is achieved through minimal moves in opening up the beautiful and existing bow truss warehouses found throughout our city into living and breathing greenhouse production consumption and living spaces. The modular CLT system creates new semi-determinate volumes inside of the larger existing spaces.

Los Angeles is a city of private homesteads, each separated from the greater urban fabric by vast setbacks and restrictive, use-based zoning laws. What if we threw away this model and adopted a completely different form of urbanism within our existing built environment – one where the city consists of only two categories: public domestic fragments, and private indeterminate space? Under this model of ‘networked urbanism,’ these two categories of spaces are codependent on each other – public domestic fragments provide the utilitarian infrastructure for our daily functional needs, and private indeterminate space offers the blank canvas for whatever the user sees best fit, whether it be living space, retail, office, or something else entirely.

In America, architecture serves as a reflection of capitalistic society, where the reduction of structures to its essential elements often blurs the line between architecture vested with premeditated intention and that of mere functionality. The resultant buildings frequently adhere to conventional norms, conforming solely to meet minimum code standards and foregoing design nuances that are key to expressive architecture.

Los Angeles’ early twentieth-century single-family homes embody ordinary architecture, while offering potential for transformation through their ambiguity.

A transformation can be made to ordinary architecture by making incremental transformations through a series of algorithmic operations to its inherently mundane components and reimplementing with a purposeful intention. By introducing these incremental changes, the architecture becomes a dynamic force that preserves the existing identity of the city while subtly modifying it to embrace its evolving nature.

Warehouses and strip malls in Los Angeles carry qualities that are integral to the rich culture of the city. Their exterior and interior materials produce an inherent banality that creates potential for incrementality and reuse: a reuse of surfaces to create a new impermanent space that meets the needs of the city’s subcultures. Independent music venues, art galleries, and other experiential spaces find a place within the “ordinary,” providing an alternate reading through codifying the original surfaces of the buildings with light projections and ephemera. Through a series of various representation techniques, a new interpretation of these seemingly banal buildings is produced, examining the necessity of adaptability within design