Category: EXPO 2024 Courses

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

Instructor: Amy Murphy, PhD

Healing the Environment Over Time

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.

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

Instructor: Amy Murphy, PhD

Everybody Walks in LA: Transitioning the Harbor Freeway

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.

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

Instructor: Amy Murphy, PhD

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.

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ARCH 793AB: Practice Make Performance

Instructor: Lisa Little

Practice Make Performance

The advent of digital mass customization means many similar but different parts can now be produced as economically as a single repeated part. Aggregation of mass customized parts has rich potential including architectural qualities of open-endedness, blurriness, and the non-figural. But systems built of small parts combined together also afford specificity and precision through their scale and variability thus providing powerful potential in terms of performance.

With part-to-whole mass customization as the premise, students directed their research and thesis projects in one of several possible directions. The emerging body of work self-organized under the term ‘The Discrete’ offers options to explore social concerns and scale-in-place potential in a digital era. Critical computation challenges architects to use computational techniques to define new value systems for form generation. Alarming climate change poses another important area to deploy performative part-to-whole aggregated systems. Through additive design strategies and processes such as aggregation and 3d printing, students iteratively worked between research and making as a way to ‘practice the practice’, interrogating the small part with an emphasis on iteration as a means to excellence.

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ARCH 793AB: Cultural Practice

Instructor: Andy Ku

Cultural Practice

Photo by Genevieve Liu M.Arch '24

What is the hope of cultural engagement in the context of architecture? Does it embrace the need for connectivity with generative and expansive thinking to produce spatial possibilities? By instigating architectural practice as cultural participation, can it warrant diplomacy for determining the inherent disciplinary and cultural territory by reshaping the boundaries into a garden or estuary?

The studio observes social phenomena, historical development, and everyday life as collective cultural stewardship and advancement for making architecture. The course aims to generate ideas for spatial productions with cultural concerns, promoting conscientious design endeavors, resolutions, and identities. This approach makes cultural interest the foundation for design research and thesis, immersing the researcher in a vibrant, communal, and spiritual perspective to advance project discoveries.

The thesis is a practice for everyone to establish creative concerns toward cultural endeavor as a way of being. Culture often informs us of who we are and how we connect to our work with the potential to feed back into the world. Sometimes, cultural conditions are only as significant as our perceptions of them. When we cultivate our care and awareness, we expand our understanding of culture and the world. At the same rate, this act also has the potential to expand the scope of our work and the lives we live.

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ARCH 793AB: ADAPTIVE P/RE-USE

Instructor: Sascha Delz

ADAPTIVE P/RE-USE

Photo by Amir Bolourchizadech M.Arch '24

Beyond Property – Alternative Practices for Equitable & Sustainable City Housing

The Adaptive P/Re-use – Beyond Property studio is framed by two main sets of questions. First, under the notion of Adaptive P/Re-use, we explore how housing can be designed and build based on the concept of re-use, where recirculation and repurposing of materials, existing buildings, social structures, and environmental settings are a given necessity. And how can we conceive, design, and build housing based on the premise of pre-use, where future adaptation, transformation, reassembly, disassembly, as well as social and environmental change are an integral part of design considerations? Second, with the proposition of Beyond Property we investigate how alternative forms of property and ownership could give rise to a more inclusive, accessible, and sustainable way of housing delivery. How can we use ownership models inspired by collective, shared, indigenous, subscription-based, temporary, community-led, non-hierarchical, nomadic, squatter-friendly, extragenerational, participatory forms of property to inform our design proposals? To test and integrate the developed ideas, the studio’s main context of reference is Koreatown, Los Angeles’ densest populated neighborhood, which not only features a diversity of culture, people and typologies, but also of common challenges such as a lack of adequate and affordable housing, public spaces, and other urban services.

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ARCH 793AB: Tactical Techniques

Instructor: John Southern

Tactical Techniques: Operative Methods for Speculative Architecture and Conceptual Pragmatism 

Photo by Alanna Duncan Taylor M.Arch '24

In contrast to the discursive conversations prevalent in 20th-century academia, which focused on artistic practices and the global exchanges of post-war modernism, the concept of the citizen architect rejects the traditional service-centric model of architectural practice. While many offices adopting this model may operate at various scales, they share similar operative methods rooted in Tactical Techniques. These approaches, drawing from the ‘boots on the ground’ ethos embraced by both social workers and the military, encompass field exploration, data gathering, exploitation of contextual systems, and engagement within specific temporal and sociological networks. They address not only physical aspects such as sites and structures but also socio-political, psychological, and technological dimensions. By embracing a blend of speculation and conceptual pragmatism, designers employing tactical techniques navigate what writer William H. Gibson terms the ‘future present’ – a reality infused with technological foresight. This understanding keeps designers ahead by fostering situational awareness and anticipation of future developments.

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

Instructor: Amy Murphy, PhD

Practicing Time: The Architecture of the LA 2028 Olympics

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.

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ARCH 793AB: Construction, Abstracted

Instructor: Ryan Tyler Martinez

From the Impossibleness

According to Wikipedia, an impossible object is a type of optical illusion that consists of a two-dimensional figure which is instantly and naturally understood as representing a projection of a three-dimensional object but cannot exist as a solid object. 1 Inspired by “the impossible object”, this thesis aims to explore the collision between two-dimensional flat drawings and three-dimensional architectural space. When a three-dimensional building is presented as a two-dimensional drawing, we usually use a specific refraction method to restore it to three dimensions. Based on this representation of different dimensions, the thesis is interested in the relationship between flatness and solid, ambiguity and complexity, but most importantly, the possibility of architectural space and representation.

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ARCH 793AB: Construction, Abstracted

Instructor: Ryan Tyler Martinez

Clothes Make Character

Buildings have character. Whether perceived as familiar backdrops, quirky scenery, or tasteless eyesores, this personification intensifies our relationship with architecture. This perception of character can impose upon the practice of architecture, as in neighborhoods deemed to have historic character, where architecture of a different style is unwanted or even prohibited. Furthermore, these impressions are often created within a preconceived collective architectural imagination – the house one imagines has the character of a house. Today we are working in an architectural afterlife, everything new we build must sit within the context of what was built before. What role does human craft play in this future? Artist Do Ho Suh, while crafting sewn architectural sculptures from fabric, has compared clothing to architecture. Both are habitable spaces formed, in some way, around the human body. What might it mean for buildings to be like clothes? What might it mean to craft architecture in the way clothing is crafted, full of delight and identity? “Clothes Make Character” uses the tools of craft to produce a characterful architecture that allows us to form closer relationships with our living and working spaces.