The architectural environment of downtown Los Angeles is both highly ordered and rigid. Through formal expressions like the stack, these stiff exteriors project a conventionally inflexible experience. Similarly, the labor force in the United States is expressing a desire to fight equally rigid and inflexible conditions in their workplaces, as seen in the recent widespread unionization drives.
As a challenge to established rigidity and order, this thesis looks to the domestic to explore two conditions of architectural interiors; softness and mess. By externalizing these conditions, LA can begin to express the messy, accidental, misshapen, and soft.
Much like Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures, everyday objects that typify the softness and mess of interiors are scaled to the size of city blocks. The heap of laundry, the reigning soft mess of the interior, provides a formal logic through a rejection of the stack typology. This new form, is utilized to transform liminal pockets of parking in DTLA into public space that are available for garment worker organization and public leisure activities.
Advisor: Cody Miner
This archive will act as a safe space, a shelter, an exhibition space, a community meeting place, a research base, and a reliquary for the stories and histories of immigrants, as well as their influences on and contributions to Los Angeles culture. The archive collection will include oral histories, ephemera, artworks, objects, texts, and digital media. This Archive will primarily give support to immigrants, homeless people, and LGBTQ+ people through outreach programs, community events, meeting places/ safe spaces, transitory housing, and arts programming.
Initially, The Archive is derived from a rectangular bounding box, where extruded rectangles are assigned one of three identities: mass, void, or 3D grid. The grid becomes an interstitial space in its interior/exterior quality, visual permeability, physical permeability, and reading as mass/void. From different elevations, this building can appear very heavy and massive, while nearly disappearing from others. This statelessness and inability to express permanence relates to the experiences, emotional, and mental states of the primary users.
Poché is both engaged and challenged by The Archive, particularly in the grid system. The 3D grid is both a mass and a void, giving great visual permeability while restricting physical movement to a strict path. Materially, the steel grid is painted to match the concrete walls and floor, camouflaging it form some perspectives. In both plan and section, poché as fill is complicated by the varying wall thickness and overlaps with the grid. The grid could also be seen as a physical representation of a hatched poché.
There is also a much different experience for those inside the spaces in comparison to those outside. From further away, the grid seems impenetrable and almost cage-like, while up close, one can see the copper pathways carved through it. Both in program and form, this archive aims to create a gateway between MacArthur Park and Koreatown as well as between the LGBTQ+, immigrants, and homeless people it serves. The passageways from the street level into the park create connections and allow the building to be a part of casual users’ travel.
Through the redefining of courtyards, utilization of current technology, and rigid reliance on design logic The Dice House is a contemporary interpretation of the successes and innovations delivered by the Eames House 70 years ago.
The Dice house experiments with its steel façade system. Steel mesh layers create a gradient double envelope that disrupts the perception of scale, color, material, and opacity.
Much like the Eames House’s first floor, the whole of the Dice House operates on a pattern of circulation that pushes movement to the edges of the floorplan, leaving only the essential walls at the center of the plan. While the circulation of the Eames House is linear, the Dice House wraps the pattern in on itself, creating a “C” shape in plan.
The courtyards of the Eames House are reinterpreted as channels of transition and interaction between “separate” spaces in the Dice House. These new courtyards can be seen in the flexible program of the spaces between the live and work areas, double-height spaces, and in the “windows” between the kitchen and stairs, stairs and living room, and studio and kitchen on the first floor.
This project directly confronts and utilizes the paradoxes and inconsistencies inherent in the methods of representation in architectural drawing. By translating and manipulating the “same” objects back and forth as flat paper, 2D digital drawings, 3D physical models, 3D digital objects, and 2D digital renderings, what stays apparent is the operation of folding, and nearly nothing else.
This team-built design installation rethinks concrete structures by introducing fabric casting molds and robotics. Involving everything from welding to coding, this project draws on the modularity of cell structure and new architectural techniques. The temporary concrete pavilion reactivates a public walkway as a celebration of design innovation.
Team Members: Joseph Sarafian, Jojo Crowley, Rosario Reyes, Tamires Nassar, Nayeli Gaytan, Victor Hernandez
A guerilla approach to emergency housing, this project utilized FrameCAD technology and community involvement to design and build a mobile shelter. The constraints were financial and practical, with a focus on quality of life. Our recipient, Diana, needed a safe place to sleep that fit a twin mattress, but the entire structure had to be lightweight and mobile enough to be maneuvered through doorways and down sidewalks, all for under $500.
Created in collaboration with Orange Coast College and made possible through the generosity of Studio One Eleven and Perkins Eastman Dougherty.
This exhibition presents eighteen artworks selected to explore how artists expand their disciplines through the use of unexpected materials and content. Spanning from 18th century painting to downloadable drawing, including media ranging from tree bark to porcelain, these works expand conceptions of what art can be and what it can do. Despite being created all over the globe across 300 years, these pieces are connected in their ability to push the boundaries of art making. Viewing these artworks together encourages us to look for unexpected connections and reconsider the potential of art.
In Collaboration with the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies School of Arts and Cultures 2016 Art Curatorship Masters Students. Photo Credit to Creative Digital Minds
This collection of photographs reinterprets found objects and discovered spaces as opportunities to explore. The architectural qualities of passageways allow the viewer to imagine themselves as any size or shape, traversing a real or imagined landscape.