USC Architecture Xpo
Design is limited to above ground thinking, neglecting the cyclic/networked nature of the soil, root systems, natural aquifers, and ecosystems. This neglect has lead to the many climate related issues we face today — especially within large cities like Los Angeles. How can we reintroduce these productive ecological services to operate within the confines of this urban space, while bringing attention back to these processes through design?
This project proposes an innovative, modular floating structure designed to mitigate the effects of sea level rise on coastal communities and ecosystems, utilizing recycled plastic waste and 3D printing technology for construction, while incorporating clean energy generation, sustainable aquaculture practices, marine conservation initiatives, and adaptable lifestyle modules to create a resilient, self-sustaining, and eco-friendly solution that addresses the challenges posed by climate change and sea level rise.
This project implements parametric design and visualization tools powered by artificial intelligence to assist with the ongoing master planning of mixed-use, affordable workforce housing in the Marinship District in Sausalito, California. This tool enhances the creative process, enables architects and policymakers to visualize the impacts of their decisions, increases opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, and facilitates a more inclusive, equitable, community-driven design process.
In architecture’s current stride toward an environmentally sustainable built future, the contemporary human-led top-down design approach is subject to exploitation and error, undermining the path to a truly sustainable future where the human environment replicates and thrives harmoniously with the natural environment as forefronted by many visionary architects such as Étienne-Louis Boullée. Such vision minimizes human involvement to designing basic guiding building elements such as frames and joists and maximizes natural material, such as crystals’ innate knowledge for the most efficient organization, growth, adaptation, and evolution schemes that have been time tested for billions of years, filling in the walls and floors of the building. By leveraging nature’s wisdom, both humans and the natural environment can strive to exist symbiotically in a coherently sustainable and evolving world.
Tenants from DTLA are spending 50% of their income to live in a city with a severe housing crisis, and having more luxury apartments under construction is not solving the issue. Unitique Living Apartment provides a system in which the tenants can decide the sizes, amenities, and unit usage at affordable prices(<30% of income). The system provides unique and under-budget living units for tenants from different professions, ages, and relationships. Every tenant at Unitique Living Apartment pays reasonable rent and fulfills their ideal living quality.
Current expectations for the modern suburb are marketed as beneficial by corporations, encouraging the use of new city planning techniques for denser housing. Lobbying for upzoning promises increased affordable housing for growing populations, equitable homeownership opportunities, and housing with a smaller carbon footprint, yet fails to mention the disruption in a community. This project consolidates current expectations for sustainable planning and criticism of the resulting socio-economically and environmentally unsustainable suburb from a resident’s perspective in an emerging tech city.
This Spring 2023 we will focus on discussing hidden infrastructures within our digital domesticity. Digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) and digital property require large amounts of land, resources, and data centers and infrastructures to store these “supplies”. There is a larger architectural and urban infrastructural challenge and urgency on how these various kinds of digital exchanges are mediated, to limit the detrimental use of our everyday resources. If our everyday objects are digital and no longer physical, how does our future of urban living challenge ecological questions? Image Credit: Wendy W Fok (2021) We will provoke and explore contemporary issues surrounding how Western and Eastern countries define the future of work and urban living. The research provokes interrogations of the post-COVID-19 digital era, pertaining to supply chains, data structures, urban strategies, construction, and civic planning for the cities of our future. An in-depth exploration of graphical mapping and cartography, and how data interacts with various open innovation models in digital property and real property will be key. As the world becomes a more circular economy of information (data), economic, political, and material exchange, this study would promote a larger awareness of the interconnected activities that impact the material (hard goods and soft goods) and technical exchange of trade for our built environment. Building materials in architecture are of significant impact to our world of construction. Trade and material exchange are key to understanding the impact that works in line with climate changes, and economic growth. This ongoing research is part of a larger investigation in how the contemporary and historic Silk Road structure was designed as a systemic network of power — one that proliferates the modern economies of trade and urban political dispersion of architectural exchanges, in hopes that the takeaways will inform larger discussions for our future generations.