Tag: Class of 2020

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

Hillside Los Angeles

Hillside Los Angeles is a critique on current building norms and laws that are limiting to the potential design solutions available in our modern world. While other industries, like the automotive and boating, progress in their technologies, development and architecture are hindered by outdated systems of construction and are limited to finding solutions to the least liable problems. One of these problems that need solving is the issue of building affordably on the hillside.

My thesis will argue against current building standards and attempt to expand development possibilities in Los Angeles that are currently being ignored.

Hillside Los Angeles is affordable housing concept that will revitalize the underutilized residential hillside through the use of FRPs and modular construction. Typical development practices are unable to accomplish effective mass housing on the hillside because the cost of construction and amount of liability is too high for these projects be economically feasible. In a world that is moving towards the self-automated vehicles and frequent public transit, a housing option on the hillside is an unconventional but innovative approach to a future of a dense and affordable Los Angeles.

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

Aquatics: New Typologies for Harbor Housing

A new concept on how to counter the growing housing crisis across the west coast of the United States. This project uses new age materials mixed with existing engineering concepts in order to create a new housing typology. It implements a system that can be replicated in all protected harbors.

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

The Frame: Private and Shared Spaces

This project is to provide an affordable housing around public transportation such as Metro and Bus stop, and this encourages the residents to use public transportation and allow them to approach the property. For the project, the building consists of six modules which are made of FRP materials and are fan-shaped models.These modules will be stacked up but these modules will be located in different locations and be shifted any directions randomly which create strong building facades and different flow and volume of each layers by the curve lines of the modules. Also, the each floor has shared balconies which provide opportunities to have relationships with their neighborhoods and the openings in the shared spaces between residential units will bring skylight into the courtyard and provide wide open-views. With this project, the housing crisis would be reduced and the residents would have more opportunities to have connections with communities and neighborhoods.

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

Houses in the Sky

Moving away from typical urban developments, the design provides affordable housing and infrastructure that can be used as a tool for directing residential and commercial growth within the urban fabric of Los Angeles.

Developing mixed-use buildings within a half mile of major metro stations, the transit-oriented design creates transit nodes with the existing metro system in promoting a pedestrian friendly environment.

Combining the methods of prefabricated modules with FRP composites used in the fabrication of airplanes, the technology allows for a creative way in mass producing affordable units.

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

Vertical Lots

Vertical Lots is about blank elevations on buildings built in the early 20th century in the Historic Core of Downtown Los Angeles. Using FRP as material, the project focuses on the sculptural and social connection through the activation of units in plan creating spaces that enhance social interaction, targeting transitioning homeless, millennial, married couples, and elderly people.

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

Strategic Stratification

At what is now 1st Street Bridge, Los Angles River is a divider between two major districts – Arts District and Boyle Heights. It is a divider because its artificially cemented riverbed is often minimally filled with water, but still barred off from public access. The 1st Street Bridge is a weak connector between the two districts that overlooks the LA River…

But what if the bridge integrates the LA River? What if it was more than an infrastructure for getting from point A to point B, but an experience in and of itself on the river? What if this “bridge” were a new landscape of pathways that are 3-Dimensional, refilling the artificial trench in a way that creates multiple layers of experience from top to bottom?

In the topic of form follows performance, this project is about using “strategic stratification” in form as a means to generate activity, so that the once empty riverbed may perform as a new space of interaction for uniting – rather than dividing – people and nature.

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

Spaces Between

Climate change is expected to significantly impact the LA region. Warmer average and extreme temperatures, increased precipitation extremes are expected to occur. A deeper understanding, smart planning, and ample financial and human resources will be needed to fully cope with these changes.

In a city of increasing inhospitable conditions, can a future architecture exist that utilizes climate extremes as a means to sustain both itself and the city it resides?

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: The Drawing, Computation, The Machine, and The Hand

Kinetic Spectacle

As technology advances, our daily lives continue to shift further toward the digital. Amidst an unprecedented pandemic, this shift has further exaggerated the way we communicate and interact with one another and the spaces around us. In the possibility that limited physical interaction and social distancing become the new ‘normal’, how can people be encouraged to gather and engage with one another and with the space? How can a space provide users with a transcendent spatial experience that can not be achieved virtually? A space that engages users with its programmatic activities, components, and one another, opens up a world of interactivity that has the ability to forge shared experiences and memories.

In response to this cultural shift, this thesis proposes the idea of the kinetic spectacle. A socially-interactive ‘machine’ that engages users into a collective energy that anticipates and encourages dynamic spatial transformations through human interaction, technology, and movement. Such a design will result in an immersive experience of active space that transcends users into an engaging realm of performance, exhibition, and spectacle, achievable only through the physical.

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: The Drawing, Computation, The Machine, and The Hand

Airspace Capsules

This thesis presents an urban landform architecture that combines vast, discontinuous space into a landscape for living. Buildings act as a geographical extension forming an urban landscape. Using vertical “land” to develop and “invade” existing structures, this thesis views the city as a supportive landscape for daily life.

Based on a growing population of digital nomads and increasing urban congestion, capsule housing is proposed as a solution to issues of the contemporary urban condition. Through the use of available free space above buildings in the city, capsule spaces provide various functional spaces to alleviate urban congestion. The capsule housing is composed of different types of modular units. Each module is stacked and connected according to its morphology. These connections vary in form and function, creating many places for community interaction. The space is diversified but still coherent. While providing residential space, it also creates a circulation of different types and directions.

The existing city becomes a landscape that allows life to grow in multiple directions by using the urban environment as a continuation of physical geography.

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ARCH 793B: Architecture Directed Design Research Gallery: The sense of purposefulness in Architecture

Reparative Architecture

Reparative tools are applied to the existing tower Torre de David located in Caracas, Venezuela. The incomplete tower intended for financial institutions has since been taken over by squatters. The new inhabitants have taken the initiative to begin converting the office building into a mixed used housing complex. However, the inhabitants have requested help from architects to provide them with a building made for living.

Reparative Architecture is an approach to building that is the antithesis of the prevalent Tabula Rasa approach. This approach begins with “bad” parts of the building being removed through Incision, the open wound is then closed up with a Scar, a Kinetic Scab is projected out filling the void in the building’s envelope, new spaces are then Injected into the building providing opportunities for new program.