Category: ARCH 793AB: Practicing Time: The Architecture of the LA 2028 Olympics

Incorporating spatial and temporal dimensions into architectural design has transformative potential. It offers new perspectives on how our built environment can enhance our existence. This thesis project explores the potential of the Los Angeles International Airport as a transit point in time and space during the 2028 Olympic Games. It proposes an Olympic Park which connects existing and new terminals – this park allows events from multiple timelines and personal trajectories to generate a dynamic experience for its users. The design not only provides a better experience during travel the airport, but allows its users to contemplate more advanced notions of time and space, history and geography.

In today’s world, the boundaries between reality and virtuality are blurring, with many people spending significant time in virtual spaces for work and leisure. This raises a critical question: how can we facilitate the transition from virtual to real environments, and vice versa? My project addresses this issue by drawing inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Mirror,” which explores the connection between real and virtual worlds through the metaphor of a mirror, a spatial-temporal heterotopia or space of otherness. To explore this condition, I have designed a media center for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. After the Games, it will become a community production space, media library, and exhibition hall. The aim of my design is to allow users to experience the interconnection between reality and virtuality by creating a dynamic space that will attract a broad audience (both real and virtual) and encourage interaction across both worlds.

The vanishing culture of Los Angeles due to rapid urbanization threatens its rich heritage and diversity, erasing traditions and impacting social cohesion. Showcasing LA’s cultural tapestry at the 2028 Olympics is crucial for fostering inclusivity and unity. The proposed avant-garde parametric structure reflects the city’s commitment to inclusivity, serving as a dynamic canvas embodying its diverse identity. It transcends aesthetics, symbolizing innovation and cultural exchange. As a narrative of unity amid diversity, it orchestrates a global symphony, highlighting the transformative power of architecture in fostering connections across cultures. In its adaptability, it becomes a testament to the city’s vibrant spirit on the world stage.

The thesis project proposes a new Olympic Park over the Santa Monica Blue Bus service yard, located at the terminus of Los Angeles 10 freeway and the METRO Gold Line. In this project, I aim to develop an architecture of the “middle landscape”, a zone common to the American landscape situated between transportation infrastructure, industrial zones and residential housing. By integrating nature back into the urban environment through a new green corridor and connecting broken routes for bike and pedestrian mobility through new dynamic pathways, the project provided opportunities for recreation and relaxation for urban residents and visitors.

During the 2028 Olympics, the site will serve as an important ending point for the marathon, providing a rejuvenating rest area for athletes and space for spectators to witness the medal ceremony. Post-Olympic, this park will provide a focal point for social gatherings, a diverse set of athletic activities, improving the mobility of the city’s citizens for years to come.

The Olympics often experience severe “white elephant” phenomena due to surplus venue equipment and inadequate post-Olympic planning, leading to underutilized infrastructure and wasted resources. In this thesis project, I aim to create a green, eco-friendly architectural space coexisting with sports facilities, offering diverse pop-up shops for global visitors during the 2028 Olympics on a brownfield site located in the Arts District of Los Angeles. My project addresses soil pollution, aiming to mitigate post-Olympic wastefulness. Through phytoremediation, my proposed structure will restore contaminated soil and construct vertical forests. Utilizing lightweight steel structure, the project is intentionally versatile, allowing for future reconfiguration and reusability. During the Olympics, Los Angeles will attract tourists to visit, and post-game, the site will continue to host popular sports like tennis, squash, and beach volleyball and community focused programming giving back to the Arts District community beyond the event.

A city’s economic, social, and cultural activities create contact zones where different groups collaborate, compete, and negotiate. The physical layout of cities can facilitate contact or deter it. Although Los Angeles is very diverse, it presents a unique phenomenon in which multiple communities are divided by invisible barriers creating disparities in resources, opportunities, and quality of life. One of the most extreme barriers in LA, occurs between Skid Row and the Arts District. In my thesis project, I reimagine this contact zone as an inhabitable Third Space where individuals are invited to negotiate their cultural and social identities. As a type of beast fable, it creates a landscape of the displaced – a pet sanctuary, to a non-profit research headquarters, to a museum. In this new third space, through making everyone displaced, a new social order can emerge.

Both the 1932 and 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles were tremendous commercial successes; the events elevated the Games from being solely an athletic competition to that of a global spectacle. Corporate branding and sponsorship have now become an integral part of the architecture of each Olympic Games, deeply informing stadium design and spectator experience. In this thesis project, I explore the marriage between architecture and image, building and billboard in the design of the Olympic beach volleyball stadium in Santa Monica for the upcoming 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. In this project, I explore the architectural consequences of “owning time,” a strategy shared by host countries for the Olympics and corporate advertisers in order to captivate audiences and build up excitement for each event, whether experienced in person or on the screen.

Case Study 29: Olympic Village aims to address current and future housing shortages in Los Angeles through leveraging the ideals of prefabrication. Historically, Los Angeles has contributed two important precedents to address mass housing in a time of economic need: both the first Olympic village immediately following the Great Depressions and the Case Study Program immediately following World War II. My thesis project builds on these important milestones unique to Los Angeles, by creating a new Olympic Village for the 2028 Summer Games. Following the festivities, the units will be relocated to become either ADU units for individuals in low-income neighborhoods or mid-size co-living units on small lots owned by the City.

Ideally, if properly conceived, the Olympics can promote positive infrastructure improvement in the host city, affecting the transportation system, housing facilities, and engaging the public spaces. My thesis proposal aims to create an adaptive architecture for various uses after the Olympics, contributing to the long-term development of Los Angeles after the 2028 Summer Games. Designing with a sense of time and adaptability ensures that architecture remains functional and sustainable for generations. In my project, I propose to use the development of practice archery facilities along the Los Angeles River. This project will amplify natural habitat restoration planned for the South Gate Community and provide new youth programming for the next generation of Los Angeles.

In the near-distant future shaped by environmental collapse and societal fragmentation, the 110 Freeway in Downtown Los Angeles is a “junkspace,” the discarded fragments of an infrastructural monument. A vehicle corridor-turned-self-made-promenade, the 110 remains a convergence of people from all walks of life, passing through Downtown Los Angeles en route to their daily activities. Ad-hoc landscape projects, a promenade dotted with housing, and a queer bathhouse emerge to support the daily life of weary pedestrians.
Through this transformation of infrastructure, we can imagine a new condition, bound not by the emptiness and rigid binaries of modernism, but by a boundaryless and self-conditional set of negotiations.