Tag: Class of 2020

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: Form Follows Performance

TANGENTIAL CONTINUUM

Can Intensive Gradients Replace Extensive Thresholds?

Tangential continuum is a design proposal for a new pedestrian bridge that replaces current 1st street bridge in Down Town Los Angeles. It will be a new community hub which connects two adjacent neighborhoods of Boyle Heights and Arts District. The project aims to eliminate the cultural and programmatic division of the two mentioned neighborhoods. Programmatically, the project is an amalgamation of the existing programs around the site in addition to the programs the two neighborhoods lack. Given the program of the proposed bridge, providing a high level of accessibility and connectivity both internally and externally is imperative to the projects’ success. Inspired by Fri Otto’s Multihalle in Mannheim, the project identifies building’s skin as an element that can potentially have a great impact in creating a fluid interior space as it replaces walls and doorways. It also uses gradient interior spaces as the typology that supports connectivity of the spaces the most. In order to achieve a gradient interior, a number of characteristics have been identified as the fundamentals of the gradient interior space.
1- Creating ambiguous spaces.
2- Providing opportunities to see through multiple spaces.
3- Creating light shafts to guide people inside of the building.
4- Articulated surfaces to emphasis movement directions.
5- Providing users with multiple path options to take as they move through the building.
6- Creating a continuous threshold space between different programmatic areas of the building.

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: Directed Design Research

The Sense of Boundary in Architecture

This project proposes to discuss the sense of boundary in architecture. A bounding box, is equally subdivided into smaller 9x9x9(m) cubes and then a new geometrical language (cones) is introduced into the design, limited by the boundaries of stacked cubes.

After that, a series of spaces of different functions like offices, storage rooms are located around cones. Tangible boundaries are set by having inner walls, defined the area of a certain space. Together with Intangible boundaries, people’s activity is confined in a certain area, sometimes without perceiving a tangible boundary.

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: Form Follows Performance

Stop & Smell the Roses: Architecture for Interaction

This project is an exploration into cultivating human interaction. In a response to the threat of gentrification in Boyle Heights, the proposed project would provide a space that supports Boyle Heights’ residents through social infrastructure- programs that support the well-being of a community, and are entirely dependent on human activity. By de-prioritizing money and time as a metric for efficiency, and replacing those measures with social interaction and perceived atmosphere of individual agency over space, the bridge acts as a catalyst for community through a tactile and transitory interface. Through a series of sliding, interlocking, and expanding pieces, the building presents a new series of spaces with each configuration made by the users.

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: Form Follows Performance

Ventus L.A

This project explores the potential of wind in generating spatial conditions and articulations within the realm of architectural design. The process of particle simulation was used to form, deform, craft, and sculpt the design in order to deviate, capture, and receive the wind based on the different needs of each space. The design follows the logics of automotive design; where air intakes become openings and apertures for the building to provide light, air, and views to the river in the site. This thesis project is a hybrid model between the automotive industry and architecture. This design is a speculation of human experience, where fluidity and seamlessness offer many ways of exploring a building and its context.

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: Directed Design Research

View and Vision of A Chinese Traditional Landscape Painting

A traditional Chinese landscape painting is an imagined world in which different scenes in different places, space and time can be displayed at the same time, and different people can see different images in the same painting according to each person’s different viewing process. Through the definition of view and vision, the lines on traditional Chinese landscape painting are extracted, and they are introduced into the three-dimensional space, forming an entity with the characteristics of painting lines. Considering the two features of the landscape painting segments, uniqueness as well as freedom from the limitation of painting frame, the building on the site is composed of overlapping segments, and through the transformation of “frame”, some sections become new facades, therefore new two-dimensional paintings are generated. At this point, these two-dimensional paintings are displayed at different positions, at different heights, sizes and angles, then we can explore how they talk to each other, and how they relate to the original painting before translation.

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: Future Traditions of Nature: Bonaventure 2076

The Archive Impulse & The Architecture of Time

The project considers architecture’s ability to react to time using space. It considers this through the lens of the human impulse to archive. We archive to understand our origins, our narratives, and to denote value. In a future with increasing demands on resources and attempts to mitigate them, the archive is place for objects of shared value. By balancing binaries (e.g. public versus private spaces, physical versus digital, preservation versus growth), the project considers the ability of architecture to represent the moment and how we relate to our environment.

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: Composite Figures

Porch City: A Guide to Designing Happier Communities

This thesis is a modular housing project built with Fiber Reinforced Polymers that critiques the current system of pre-fab housing in mobile home parks. The project encourages a shared style of living by not only providing co-living units, but also through the use of shared porches and outdoor spaces connecting the units. This challenges units to not act as single-family homes, but rather as communal and interconnected dwellings that embrace indoor/outdoor living.

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: Future Traditions of Nature: Bonaventure 2076

Future Functions

Redefining what waste is by inverting the demarcation of consumption and production. Having growing needs of future cities meet with resources already found and underutilized in those same cities. Taking the economies of scale that natural resource allocation provides for in urban environments and using that scale to create landscapes under new performative endeavor.

Taking the Bonaventure Hotel and using its it own unused resource production and turning it into the substrate for new growth.

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: Composite Figures

Housing the Informal

California’s Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) policy (permitting the existence of two Accessory Dwelling Units by right on any Single Family Home Zoned Property) provides a contextual opportunity to densify Los Angeles’ most ubiquitous site typology. However, the full potential of this policy is fragmented, due to property walls separating each neighbor’s backyard from one another. If an entire R-1 block was to consolidate their abutting 15′ Rear Yard Setback areas, a 30′ wide site can be formed to design a consolidated form of the ADU policy.Using Fiber-reinforced Polymers as a main building material, this thesis explores how this new density can catalyze the good in an existing suburban block, promoting new degrees of community and intimacy.

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: Form Follows Performance

Guerrilla Urbanism

Can architecture utilize the scale of our infrastructure as an activated space for temporal commercial activities? This architectural intervention of the 1st Street bridge aims to provide a vision for the future of an urban design paradigm shift within the dominant spatial order. Through the redesign of urban aesthetics and integrated adaptability of use within the structural module, the intervention fills a gap in the informal economy that our capitalistic real estate market does not accommodate for.