USC Architecture XpoInstructor: Jimenez Lai
This thesis proposes the redefinition of mental asylums and rehabilitation facilities. With an approach not only towards the formal design but also the programmatic one, my thesis focuses on mimicking the outside world’s programmatic exploration manifesting as well in the formal representation of them. Helping patients develop new skills and develop pre existing interests preparing […]
Within the sphere of home versus shelter for those who are unhoused or experiencing homelessness in Southern California, more housing is not the only simple solution to a wicked problem. It is the architect’s duty to better the quality of life of a space through embracing temporality, breaking away from typical market rate housing design, […]
The Kafala system in Kuwait binds migrant workers’ legal status to their employers, creating conditions of dependency and exploitation. Reform efforts focused on integration often fail to address its deep structural inequalities. Integration is no longer the solution, or the desire. Perhaps the answer lies in the differentiation of migrant communities through the creation of […]
Several years after the departure of hometown favorites, the Oakland A’s and the Oakland Raiders, the residents of Oakland have decided to take back the coliseum and revitalize it through occupation. The once abandoned coliseum undergoes a transformation to its architectural type and becomes a self-sufficient city within a building. Residents have brought their commerce […]
A century in the future, the burgeoning spectacle of global society’s implosion culminates in a symptomatic death bloom: a celebration of life too late in the form of the 2125 World Expo. Located in the port-city made paradise of Corpus Christi, Texas, this expo reprises the Grand Ring of its century-old, Osakan predecessor. A massive […]
The Pen is Mightier reimagines the U.S.–Mexico border as more than a dividing line, it becomes a dynamic, inhabitable space. Grounded in the legal foundations of the U.S. 1862 map by Frederick von Egloffstein, the project interprets each 250’ x 250’ pixel as part of a 2.5 x 1.5 mile interior border grid. This politically […]
A Highrise of Parks reclaims the abandoned towers of Oceanwide Plaza in Downtown Los Angeles, transforming them into a vertical public park. Instead of building across the city, the park stacks upward—an inversion of the traditional horizontal greenway. A new supporting core is inserted to house both essential back-of-house infrastructure and public […]
“The Children of the Earth and Sun” is a speculative, regenerative farming community that critiques contemporary sustainability efforts through the lens of ritual and devotion. Set in fire-scarred Paradise, CA, the project reinforces bureaucratic sustainability goals within a hyper disciplined system rooted in closed-loop cycles of food, energy, and governance. Architecture becomes shelter, ceremony, infrastructure, […]
Architecture has long privileged the pedestrian, defining a normative body while excluding others. As cities face ecological and social transformation, this thesis asserts: the future is wheeled. Rooted in Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory, it centers users who glide, roll, and carve—extending their bodies through wheels. This vision takes form in a radical DMV-skatepark hybrid under […]
A building is a combination of planned and unplanned actions; it emerges from both intention and improvisation. This thesis proposes a structure that embrac- es the unplanned and informal dimensions of lived space within the context of formally designed architecture—a space where occupants actively shape their environments through use, modification, adaptation, and layering. In response […]