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

Architectural Alchemy | Longevity Through Movement

The elderly population in the U.S. is to double in the next twenty-five years. Our environments are ill-suited for aging. Additionally, negative perceptions of aging dominate popular culture, which is fixated on youthfulness. My thesis confronts this by proposing a neighborhood wellness hub model, initially funded as part of the 2028 Olympics architecture. The design of this hub intends to reverse the historical neglect of our aging population and embraces aging as a positive, socially inclusive experience. It does this by providing neighborhood services that help the elderly population to age in place, while helping the younger population to age well. Most specifically, my design leverages the idea of choreography to better accommodate the human body. It is my intent to use this thesis project to demonstrate how prioritizing health and longevity can yield tangible benefits for communities, mitigating the detrimental effects of neglecting these essential aspects of design.

From Mumford to Gideon, Moneo to Rossi, Tschumi to Virilio, scholars of architecture have long associated the evolution of cities with our evolving understanding of time. This thesis section will explore architecture as a practice rooted in and deeply informed by philosophies of time – historical time, technological time, ecological time, and human time. Through the design of temporary structures for the 2028 Olympics, students will be asked to take a stand on the structure’s more permanent impact on the Los Angeles community of the future.

The historical impact of the Olympics on the host cities is wide-ranging, from positive to negative. Thus, projects in this section may critique as much as they celebrate – suggesting, if designed correctly, the long-term impact of the 2028 Olympics in LA could be largely positive, creating catalytic development for the greater good of a particular community or they may suggest the impact to be catastrophic, producing a dystopian ruin, memorializing squandered opportunities which never came to full fruition.

Using a subset of typical programs associated with the Olympics – from sports facilities to housing to public bathrooms to bridges to pedestrian and bicycle pathways to entertainment zones to media centers to security apparatus – as their program, students are to arrive at a thesis concerning the future city. Students can decide to work at a large urban scale or a small human scale based on their interests.