THIRTY-TWO

For the diverse community of Leimert Park connected through music, my project provides a co-living model of housing for musicians, performance artists, and for all inhabitants who would like to be a part of such community. While the live performance restaurant, stand-up bar, recording studio, and the rooftop open-air theatre allow the inhabitants to produce their art and acquire income, the open plan residential experience, shared living spaces, and instrument rooms create the ideal community that learns and grows together. Reinterpreting the immediate context of curved edges, arch shapes, and rounded forms, I have taken these often functionless, aesthetic approach and transformed it into a three-dimensional strategy to create, frame, or to connect spaces. The curvature goes in and out of the borderlines in plan and thus creates open spaces and courtyards. Similarly, the housing conventions are re-ordered by breaking the idea of traditional pods and defined rooms. The conventional continuous floor plane is divided into three and each portion is raised 32 inches up (maximum height without handrails according to the building code.) Thus a wide, fee-plan and a “see-through” interior environment is created which adds to the spirit of the community and the co-living experience. With the 32-inch difference between levels inhabitants’ range of motion and view is extended throughout the housing perimeter. The only enclosed program (other than single bedrooms), bathrooms are floating objects that are not attached to the ceilings in order to avoid any interruption and preserve the free-plan quality and the sense of fluidity. The project challenges the traditional sense of defining space through partitions and breaks the sense of “room” with the slight shift of the levels in the vertical axis that allows for constant interaction amongst inhabitants. The housing model consists of 63 single bedrooms and cooking, dining, living, and producing music and art is among the shared activities. The influence of the diverse cultural identity of Leimert Park community is also visible through the richness in color, pattern, and textures throughout the design concept.