USC Architecture Xpo
The project seeks to understand what is ‘purposefulness’ in architecture, purely from a formal standpoint. How every angle, puncture or extrusion one makes, voluntarily responds to the local and urban conditions of the site, the program and the circulation.
The principle of this project is “plug-in systems”. It’s a specific form of purposeful attachment relationship in which one purposeful element is shaped or sports a modification to mate with another. SPIN aims to discover a more interesting way connecting and occupying the zone between land and ocean. It aims to create land that moves with the wave and is resilient in the face of flooding. At the same time, to allow city to expand to the ocean. Its modularity allows it to form small neighborhoods on the water, provides both living and entertainment functions. People here can experience the change and transition of different modules, from horizontal to vertical.
By study on computation Architectural Abstraction, the process is to seek the possibility of architectural form and space by digital modeling methods, enlarging personal categories of architectural morphology and methodology. Like what Daniel wrote in his book, “these drawings helped me identify new ideas for exploration and reinforced my idea that architecture could go far beyond the conventions most people took for granted.”
To achieve sustainable cities in the future, we as designers should pay more attention to the needs of the voiceless, repressed, and marginalized.
Following this goal, this project is imagining Portman’s Bonaventure in 2076 as a safe space for Los Angeles’s long lost children and nature.
Downtown Los Angeles in 1976 was highly defined by a profit and innovation driven environment. One way the Bonaventure responded was to assume a physical embodiment of the city’s progressive intentions. This response revealed a rejective attitude towards nature.
The city of Los Angeles in 2076 will be defined by economic growth, but also extreme effects of climate change and, as a result, the accelerated loss of plant and animal species.
One way my re-design for the Bonaventure will respond will be to facilitate the life of nature by serving as a memorial that also grows, protects and preserves nature. This response reveals a sense of nostalgia towards connecting to nature and an overall longing, from the city, to preserve memory over time.
People can turn around and stop their negative effects on the planet; it is a matter of changing peoples’ habits and usual lifestyles. The best way to do this is to design and build something that accomplishes this goal. Therefore, there may be a new type of space observed in contemporary sustainable building – a transition space forming a soft edge between the building, its interiors and the city. Bonaventure as the epitome or replication of Los Angeles, it will be redesigned to an agriculture center for the city.
In 2076, increasing commercial constructions will occupy the downtown area and obscure the light of other valuable things. The new Bonaventure could assume the responsibility to preserve and introduce the unique things about the city. This is a museum as a city to invoke people’s memory. Public spaces linking different themes bring back random encounters and offer more options to explore the city.
To understand the future of downtown Los Angeles, this thesis analyzes the role of work within the context of the Bonaventure hotel. In a reimagining of the building 56 years into the future, the question of social relations in the building shifts from a dichotomy between server and served, to a more harmonious relationship between people who each own a share of the whole. Ultimately, this project grapples with the question of how architecture can break down the capital-centered boundary between what is a “service” function and what is a “served” function in order to simply facilitate life.
In 2076, extreme weather conditions and infertile soil will require cities like Los Angeles to become self-sustaining. As nature transforms and rages on, we will rely on advanced, sustainable technology to protect our way of life. A network of buildings will make up an interior city which will be connected by a secondary, underground sub-street. Each district will have several main public hubs which act as a shelter from severe weather, and will be redesigned to indicate them as connections to the sub-street. The Bonaventure Hotel was designed in 1976 like a city within a city, a retreat from the outside world, and is the ideal building to transform into one of these hot spots. As the agricultural hub for Downtown LA, the building features a variety of program which are seamlessly interconnected through a form generated by the translation of curves from plan to section, representing continuity, unification, and visibility.
In this thesis, language happens as a by-product of the figure and ground caught in this visual interaction, where the architecture is trying to seek out and understand its ground. What that does is create a visual tension between them where the architecture has an internal logic or cognition of its own interaction.
So it becomes less about the figure and ground and more about the behavior of this figure/ground interacting, or we can say it is less about the object and more about its objectness.
In this thesis, language is not seen as a means for a building to convey its identity but rather language is seen for its expressive qualities that allows an architecture to be self-referential to its type.