USC Architecture Xpo
Play is the tool to dedicate the process from psychic space (abstract space) to concrete space. As a player, I am questioning what the city should offer us using the form of infrastructure and I propose new infrastructures that are happening alongside the street system by redefining the streets as joints.
This thesis is driven by an investigation into the liminal spatial conditions of the Salish Sea, a dis-placed place suspended from ordinary time. Four folies mark this inland sea, acting as thresholds for negotiating intimacy and anonymity, the intangible boundaries between public and private, man’s built world and the natural: a gradient to be occupied. These ‘liminal’ spaces act as a rejection to the contemporary crisis over setting boundaries and placing punctuation, supporting the recognition that man’s incorporeal being is in a constant state of in-betweeness. ‘Coming into space’ is not separate of ‘coming into being’.
Life at every moment throws a bridge between the unconnectness of things, and stands inside or outside the door through which it will lead from its separate existence into the world, or from the world into its separate existence.
The Pyramid Fields is an exercise aimed at producing a design alternative for additions done to masterpiece of architecture in order to preserve the architects original vision, and elaborate on the narrative of the original building.
Based on 3 different kinds of studies, this thesis project proposes the repurpose and transformation of the single story strip mall near LA Metro stops into communal transit oriented housing.
Developing community centered mixed-use projects on the inefficient and under-utilised commercial land can become a model for strip malls throughout Los Angeles.
The existing structure will become the commercial plinth, while housing for between 50-100 people is stacked on top made of lightweight and incredibly strong FRP material.
Togetherness and sharing are at the center of this design; while privacy can be found at various levels throughout the project as well. Providing a safe and healthy place for everyone to live.
Bewilderment is an architecture thesis project exploring the idea of performers as audience and audience as performers. Utilizing architecture strategies, the thesis create scenarios where sensational elements such as smell, light, sound, movement can leak to adjacent space, thus, bringing the performance aspect with them. The project looks at the characteristic of spectator vs. spectated, voyeurism vs. performance and reimagines the architecture for the next generation of nightlife entertainment.
There has been an explosion of van dwellers in both our major cities and rural areas and evidence shows that these communities will continue this growing trend. They have been forced into existence by a variety of factors but generally, the inability to afford a traditional form of housing. As these clusters continue to increase, interventions will need to take place to accommodate their needs. If these precautions are not fully realized, cities will be forced to rapidly designate last-minute settlements. My thesis project seeks to take a proactive approach by developing meaningful architecture for these communities.
The project explores essential graphic elements in an architectural drawing. The combination of architectural drawing and graphics yields new methods of reading the drawings. The drawings illustrate the concept, introduce the design techniques and demonstrate the programs. More importantly, the reading of the drawing echos the experience of the building. The paired drawing shows the repetition of the same graphic configuration and reveals different aspects that each drawing intends to focus on. The intention behind the invention of the DUO is to make emphasis through repetition, and to make dialogues between the pairs.
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.
We all know that a city is built in the minds of its residents. Similar to society, a city constitutes something intangible, a bundle of inconceivably complex social relations, mediated by a shared idea. In their two drawing series LA To Be Done and LA Recalculated, the British architecture duo Smout Allen recognize the value of Los Angeles as urban scale laboratory.
I propose a conceptual cut of the city discarding everything between latitude 33.8 to 34.0. This causes the upscale residential neighborhood Bel Air to be adjacent to the industrial Pacific port district Long Beach. My resulting site is a 300ftx300ft hybrid of mountains and sea, of the spoils of globalizations and its imposing implementation, and of a reclusive ultra-elite and an exposed working class torn between their occupation in trade and their desire to use some of their fireworks on their trading partners.
Like Los Angeles, my thesis is a composite of disparate communities, united by the shared idea of a city. I construct an architectural-urban metaphor—a compressed conglomerate consisting of parts of Long Beach and Bel Air: Long Air, or L.A.
For my thesis, I created a new building typology for a plausible near-future time period, using the plug-in systems theorized in Archigram’s Plug-In City. I did this by highlighting the plug-in connection, instead of obscuring it; highlighting the plug-in connection at three different scales – that of the initial plug-in to the structural core building, the plug-in unit to another plug-in unit, and the plug-in unit to the interior plug-in unit; and by maintaining the original ethos of plug-in architecture — mobility, changeability, and indeterminacy. I did this through developing my own theory of “plug-in-ability” which dictated the design in terms of purposefulness and the derived meaningfulness which is understood from the intrinsic purposefulness of the design.