USC Architecture XpoInstructor: Hadrian Predock
New Vibes alludes to all things new, emergent, experimental, and deeply immersed in questions about what architecture currently is and how we define and form new ecologies of design and practice. Beyond the 10,000-pound gorilla in the room called AI, there are hints of a range of exciting—and at times deeply skeptical—sensibilities, ways of working, […]
There are voids that exist in our cities—the residual, liminal spaces of the terrain vague. It is within this neglected interstice that arises an opportunity: reclaiming architecture as a catalyst for revolution against a historically oppressive built environment. SUBVERSIVE is a framework for the informal and incremental growth of a cooperative artists' community beneath a […]
The digital & physical are seamless. Before popularization of this hybrid living, there was a community of digital pioneers who championed the internet's limitless nature. The contemporary recluse exists as their successor: socially withdrawn and enabled by technological advancements. The recluse transforms their domestic space into an escapist apparatus: a self-authored, sovereign enclosure that absorbs […]
Thesis Text: This project reimagines LA Union Station as a transit marketplace. Through an enmeshment of ordinary Los Angeles building types (car washes, strip malls, diners, ADUs, and storage buildings) with the existing station, ambiguous architecture emerges that is neither monument nor generic building, neither colonial nor vernacular. The result is a reimagined Union Station […]
A defunct retail container is reimagined as a site of controlled disassembly, where architecture emerges through the redistribution of its own components. The architect plans parties that choreograph interactions between new programs and existing systems. CMU walls, steel trusses, and HVAC components are extracted, misaligned, and reassembled into new spatial arrangements. The skeletal frame scaffolds […]
In their current interpretation, malls are known for the movement of users through retail structures, but the mall as a concept has existed as a form of play, a series of landscape typologies, and as forms of urban development and growth throughout history. In this iteration, the mall is reimagined as a legible figure of […]
Drawing on the material culture of Los Angeles's Latino communities, Candy Paint proposes a hybrid housing typology inspired by auto construction and lowrider aesthetics. Metal and auto-body shops occupy the ground level, with self-built apartment units above inhabited by the same tenants who work as mechanics below—collapsing the boundary between labor and domestic life. A […]
This project proposes the tower as a geostory, where architecture becomes a way of translating environmental forces, climate risk, and disaster into something visible and spatial. Instead of being just a symbolic object, the tower works as both an occupiable space and a piece of infrastructure that is able to detect, communicate, and respond to […]
The advent of the World Wide Web shifted the landscape of retail, replacing the vitality of physical space with the convenience of the "click-and-buy" relationship. In this age of high-speed consumerism, we cannot deny that the brick-and-mortar model needs to adapt. This project proposes a new supreme: a retail armature that prioritizes immersive experience over […]
50 years of destruction has left Beirut ravaged with architectural skeletons, forcing the surrounding community to live in and around ruins that act as reminders of a destructive time. As damaged architectural facades become part of everyday life in Beirut, framing streets and lives, the inside is completely lost to the public, closed off and […]