Cal Poly Pomona Architecture Undergraduate Senior Projects Book 2021

CPP ARC

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EDITED BY KATRIN TERSTEGEN, SARAH LORENZEN, EMMA PRICE, MICHAEL FOX, ANDRI LUESCHER, WENDY GILMARTIN SPECIAL THANKS FOR THE SUPPORT AND ASSITANCE IN THE MAKING OF THIS BOOK GOES TO THE CAL POLY SENIOR SUDENTS OF 2020 COPYRIGHT 2021 CALIFORNIA STATE POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY, POMONA, COLLEGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN, DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY INDIVIDUAL PAPER OR DIGITAL AUTHORS WHO ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR CONTENT. NO PART OF THIS WORK COVERED BY THE COPYRIGHT MAY BE REPRODUCED OR USED IN ANY FORM BY ANY MEANS GRAPHIC, ELECTRONIC, OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING RECORDING, TAPING, OR INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS WITHOUT PRIOR PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNER. DESIGN: WENDY GILMARTIN

UNDERGRADUATE

SENIOR PROJECTS

2021 undergraduate program senior projects department of architecture college of environmental design california state polytechnic university pomona

Over two semesters students in the senior project studio were asked to grapple with a variety of disciplinary concerns: program, typology, building components, context, construction methods, and representation, assessing the potential of each to frame a design problem. The first semester was essentially focused on gathering enough information to establish the conceptual design.

Students looked at various means of articulating a narrative around a problem statement and establishing an architectural strategy to address this narrative. Each investigation including case studies, built onto the next, forcing students to contend with a complex array of issues as they established their individual formal / tectonic strategies. Most students also had the freedom to select their own site and develop their own program. Students were then asked to evaluate various constraints for each lot they studied including zoning regulations (FAR, setbacks, and allowable use), demographic make-up of the area, and environmental conditions.

In the second semester students built upon the conceptual designs they developed in the fall. This included a series of lectures by the faculty to foster a number of sequentially detailed responses to various issues including: site constraints through massing, a detailed response into realistic codes and regulations including parking and life safety issues, envelope and thermal enclosure considerations, as well as issues of structural and MEP design. As they finalized their schematic designs they also looked at various approaches to materiality and detailing.

This realistic approach to design is a very intentional capstone sequence built upon the learn-by-doing philosophy of CPP. It is intended to make students think critically about design issues in the larger sense as articulated through architecture. The design theory and methods are used to demonstrate a clear understanding of the impacts of the design that they have proposed through a highly developed building proposal. That said, each of the five studio sections took a slightly different approach to both site and program with varying degrees of provided constraints as well as approaches to the key inquiries or foci within the studio.

Sarah Lorenzen’s studio focused on the design of mixed-use housing projects. The site is the Skid Row section of downtown Los Angeles, an area known for the large number of homeless people that occupy its streets, but also one that has manufacturing, public services, and arts spaces. The conceptual focus is on hybrids (such as twins, chimeras, mongrels, and amalgams).

Emma Price’s studio focused on spaces of hospitality, retail, and entertainment in the Chinatown neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles. Collectively the projects look at strategies to add density and vitality to a historically lowrise neighborhood, drawing on the cultural richness and specific typologies of the area and wrestling with issues of gentrification, historical preservation, and the changing nature of how people travel, shop, and go out.

Michael Fox’s studio focused on mixed use projects in the rapidly developing South Park area of downtown LA. The designs were developed within the context of architectural environments that are becoming so inextricably tied to our technological living trends that they define each other in a corresponding manner. How architectural design integrates and reconciles the digital in our contemporary context is viewed as reciprocal innovation. Students explored the envelope as an integral part of the building responding to the contextual urban, architectural, environmental, and human conditions.

Wendy Gilmartin’s studio focused on “making spaces.” These are buildings that offer flexibility and hybridity in their formal DNA, containing manufacturing and industrial work: bottling plants, labs, artists studios, transit hubs, greenhouses, athletic facilities, and also adaptive reuse of such former facilities into cultural institutions and other mixed programs. These types of buildings are located near transportation corridors, natural resources, network infrastructures, and in proximities accessible to worker/labor populations. As such, they straddle multiple contexts and acts as connectors. The conceptual focus addresses the building as a connector and the nature of flexible space in a dynamically changing site south of the arts district and north of Vernon along the LA River.

Katrin Terstegen’s studio focused on cultural buildings and includes programs where culture may be consumed or produced. ‘Culture’ may be understood as forms of art and intellectual achievements but also in a broader sense, where it is the product of a continuous exchange of ideas. As such, the public component of the projects and the concept of the ‘third space’ are highlighted as well as the way a building can serve the public beyond its official program – as a public ‘living room’ outside the home. The site of the studio is the Toy District in downtown Los Angeles – a neighborhood with a small scale and intimate urban fabric that has a large population of homeless people. This condition will confront students with the tension of appropriateness to context and the quest for a language that meets the symbolic and representative character of a public building.

Andri Luescher’s studio focused on public service buildings, such as libraries, community and recreation centers and fire stations. The site of the studio is along 5th street between San Pedro and Central, in the heart of Skid Row. The projects deal with issues of boundaries between street and building and how structure informs the spatial experience and qualities of the built environment.

Section Sarah Lorenzen: Sarah Lorenzen, AIA is a tenured Professor at Cal Poly Pomona and principal at TOLO Architecture. She has been at Cal Poly Pomona since 2005, serving as chair of the department from 2013-2017. Between 2007 and 2020 she served as director of the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences, a house museum in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood, where she developed cultural and artistic programs and oversaw the restoration of the site. Sarah grew up in Mexico City and moved to the United States to attend college. She did her undergraduate work at Smith College and at the Atlanta College of Art (BFA in Drawing, 1992), and received her first Master of Architecture degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1997 and a second Masters in Metropolitan Research and Design from SCI-Arc in 2004. In 2011, Sarah spent a yearlong sabbatical in the theory department at TU Delft in the Netherlands. Prior to joining academia, she worked as a project architect at various architecture firms in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Atlanta.

Nooks & Crannies Food Retail Within Low-Income Housing

Airene Dizon, Manila Philippines

In this project, I examine the concept of informality and its relationship to the spatial qualities of nooks and crannies found within the urban fabric. I am fascinated by how informal food vendors in urban centers of the Philippines and other developing countries, appear within the homes and surrounding crevices of residential neighborhoods. At first glance, the reappropriations of these dwellings and the areas in between, may seem disorderly, but as we take a closer look, their diverse personalities and social dynamics begin to emerge.

My project takes a positive position on informality as an agent of self-cultivation and community-building. This form of informality similarly exists in Los Angeles through its street vendors and hole-in-the-wall restaurants. These small businesses speak to the informal culture of the city. Food vendors in LA also occupy the nooks and crannies of the urban fabric in unexpected ways, offering Angelenos a way to uncover the character of the city. The formal language of my project takes inspiration from the informal accumulations that allow for serendipity and chance encounters. As the most prominent device of my project, the use of nooks and crannies showcases how informal food retail can co-exist with housing.

Spaces of Service Rehabilitation Center and Monastery

Antoinette Shapiro, San Jose CA

Imagine walking down the street in downtown LA. Sitting on the corner is a man in a crumpled-up coat, with a sign saying he’ll work for food, or “anything helps.” It’s an image we’re all familiar with. A large concentration of the chronically homeless population in Los Angeles has been pushed to Skid Row, making it a place stereotyped for its homelessness and drug addiction.

The goal of the project is to create a sanctuary that offers the homeless a place to heal. Formally the project invokes the idea of sanctuary by creating a likeness to a “village on a hill”. To do this the project developed as a collection of fragments rather than as a singular mass. The fragments represent the idea of individuals coming together to form a whole. The project adaptively reuses the ground floor of an existing warehouse as a soup kitchen and homeless shelter. This area will be left completely open, allowing Skid Row residents to populate the project organically. Above, a new structure serves as a rehab center, run by monks who also cater to those populating the shelter below.

The top portion of the project will house the monks and those in treatment.

A Public Living Room for Skid Row Public Library + Affordable Housing

Austin Richards, Oceanside CA

Everyone deserves access to public collective space as well as personal space to call home. Skid Row is a hostile and striated urban condition, defined by walls, blank facades, and fences. The only public space available, the streets and the sidewalks, are taken up by the catalog of characters that make up Skid Row’s close-knit community. This project is a mixeduse public library and affordable housing complex. The library serves as a public living room for the large community of Skid Row, extending the street and sidewalk through the building to a future park behind the building.

Conceptually, the project explores Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of smooth and striated space, discussed extensively in A Thousand Plateaus. In this publication, striated spaces are defined as fixed, sedentary, and emphasize global conditions, often distinguished via the use of rule-based repetition. Smooth spaces, on the other hand, are those defined as being loose, open, flexible, and emphasize local conditions, individuals and their differences or specific needs. This project explores how the use of striated and smooth spaces, on their own and in combination, can be used to produce an environment that serves the diverse demands of the community as both individuals and a collective.

1.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin Classics.

2.

Koolhaas, R., & Mau, B. (1998). S, M, L, XL. Monacelli Press.

3.

Homeless in Los Angeles County, Los Angeles Almanac 1998-2020.

ArtSpace LA Community Art Center + Affordable Live/Work Housing for Artists Ayda Abar, Raleigh NC

Art can often be found at the center of culture in Skid Row and the Arts District. Over the last decade the gentrification of these areas has displaced many artists, leaving them without a place to live and make art. This project aims to help the artists of Skid Row and the Arts District by building a community art center and affordable live/work housing for artists.

The project utilizes the concept of “neutral space” and the use of “the grid” as its framework. The potential of the grid is that on the one hand it can be used to define rationality and order, and as its mirror opposite, to challenge ordered systems and foster diversity. Within the arts space, the grid is used to make it open and expandable, while in the housing, the grid supports the idiosyncratic and compartmentalized qualities of the residents’ personal spaces.

Architect Stan Allen proposes that “a field condition” is any formal or spatial matrix that organizes diverse elements through repetition and seriality while still respecting identity of the individual unit. Similarly in this project, the grid is used as a neutral, organizing device that welcomes diversity by allowing artists to appropriate their own spaces as they see fit.

1.

Rosalind Krauss. “Grids,” October, Volume 9 (Summer 1979).

2.

Rem Koolhaas. “Delirious New York.” (New York, The Montacelli Press, 1994).

3.

Stan Allen, “From Object to Field: Field Conditions in Architecture and Urbanism,” in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation (London: Routledge, 2009).

Within the Frame Mixed Use Permanent Supportive Housing Complex

Carlos Villegas, Palos Verdes Estates CA

Los Angeles’ homeless, including those living in Skid Row, often face housed communities that are hostile to them. In Skid Row, even the buildings are designed to be unwelcoming with their windowless walls or immense gates and fences built right to the property line. What might the area feel like if rather than repel people away, the buildings acted as a comforting element in the urban environment? Can the form a building takes act as a rehabilitator for a homeless population that has been rejected for decades?

Addressing the needs of the community in shaping the character and form of a building can be seen as the most important factor in determining its sustainability. The aim of this project is to create a building that invites people in. At the front via a large public space that provides much needed public green space and along the edges via indentations in the façade that offer people spaces to sit in the shade. These architectural gestures are designed to be useful while also helping to shape the formal architectural language of the project. Most importantly, the project is designed to be welcoming rather than being dismissive of the homeless populations that it serves.

The Construction of Gender and Textile Housing and Fashion Design Trade School for Gender Non Confoming People Cassandra Santoyo, Sahuayo Mexico

Within Skid Row there are many people that are unhoused due to systemic racism and prejudice. Within this larger group is the marginalized community of Gender Non-Conforming people who face constant hardships and housing instability due to Transphobia and many other issues. Even given the many difficulties of living in this informal tent city, many Gender Non-Conforming people have found ways to create a sense of security and community in Skid Row within chosen family.

Trans people deserve a safe space where they can stay alive, express themselves, and explore their full potential. This project is programmed and designed so that Gender Non-Conforming people can find themselves within a discriminatory society that denies our humanity. The building provides housing beyond shelter to encourage both residents and visitors to engage with one another through shared experiences. While the fashion design school provides this community with a resource where they can learn the craft of garment designing and producing.

A catwalk activates the central courtyard of the project. Integrating these three programs together, Housing, School, and Catwalk, the project creates a safe haven that is freeing and welcoming for Trans creatives within Los Angeles.

Getting to ‘Nolli’ the City Extended Stay Hotel and Primary Care Center

Christa Frisco, Pomona CA

A building or structure in any setting should respond to the characteristics of the environment in which it is built. Upon first analysis, a city or a community can be understood as a vast network of public and private areas. In most cases, a building can be identified as a belonging to the private domain.

Contrary to this narrative, Giambasttista Nolli in his famous Nolli map, documented the loose boundary that exists between public and private areas beyond the building façade. His analysis enhanced our understanding of how buildings are connected to the surrounding urban environment, allowing the interior to be understood as a continuation of the street.

Taking this work a step further, this project focuses on how to transform the contextual urban components into interior elements of the building. Here the figure ground of skid row was taken and transformed into a sectional drawing that was used as a basis of the project. In this way the urban character of skid row was absorbed into the building. This accumulation of “stuff,” the people, culture, qualities, and components of skid row, was then translated formally and programmatically into the design for an Extended Stay Hotel and Primary Care Center.

Utopias, Heterotopias, Gardens, and Films Film School and Dorms for Cal State L.A.

Dalia Cruz, Whittier CA

The Project proposes an urban utopian environment forming a decentralized idealized society within a shared communal complex. This idealized community caters to creative artists that are interested in promoting social change through documentary film and media studies.

Utopia is a community or society with perfect qualities that is seen as desirable but that has no real site. In Architecture, utopia was often depicted as an ideal city restructured to solve urban and social crisis. These cities were visions of a total environment in which man would live in peace and harmony with others and with nature. Heterotopia is different to utopia in that it is a real place that creates order by juxtaposing and combining spaces through six principles as defined by Michel Foucault in early 1900. Two of Foucault’s principles are used in this project: Principle 3, creating a microcosm of the world made up of different types of spaces, and Principle 6 creating a space that is “other.”

The ideal community proposed for this project is a city like environment where students live in affordable student housing, and have space to work and study.

These programs are connected to a variety of idealized gardens and shared spaces.

Flex Housing: Adapting to Change Restaurant and Permanent Supportive Housing for Women Ilse Badillo, Hidalgo Mexico

This project examines the use of changeable and flexible spaces to make more with less. The housing component of the project expands on Skid Row Housing Trust’s model of providing permanent supportive housing that uses operable elements to maximize use within a small unit. The restaurant component is designed to be a multi-functional space with a movable partition system that allows it to be divided according to different uses.

Covid has taught me to design for a future that we do not yet know, for needs we do not yet have, and for technical possibilities we have yet to discover. The restaurant program is inspired by a non-profit organization called Farming Hope.

Its purpose is to provide hope to women who have experienced homelessness through employment in the kitchen. Restaurants have significant temporal variation in space usage; During weekends they may be over capacity while being empty on weekdays. In this design the dining space of the restaurant can change according to the community’s needs. This also offers a means to address the financial hit a restaurant takes when it is not open. The small housing units are designed “murphy bed” style, holding a bed, table, and storage that can be unfolded.

A Sequence of Lively Events Mixed-Use Building: Low-Income Housing + Recreational Center Ivan Panaligan, Manila Philippines

The title is a word play for the sectional emphasis I placed when designing this building. So then, what does it mean to design in section? The architect Adolf Loos called this emphasis on the section “Raumplan” organizing his buildings vertically so that different sized areas had different heights. His elevation subtly hinted at the uneven stacking of program volumes. As in Loos’ work, this project takes advantage of the different scales and heights of the program components to maximize the sectional relationships between building uses.

The project is a programmatic arrangement of interlocking housing units and large activity spaces. This series of engaging moments places a sequence in the varieties of interior scale, as well as the idea of a viewing box - being able to see through different spaces as people engage. Within this interlock are voids that serve as the social spaces for both the residents and the “sports” community.

Through the arrangement of housing and recreational areas of the building, the project reveals its sectional quality as well as the building’s community functions.

INSPIRE Live-Work Affordable Housing

Ivanna Alonzo, Mexicali Baja California Mexico

INSPIRE is a live-work housing project which provides creative individuals an affordable space to live and work in a collaborative environment. As a small business owner myself, I often struggle to live comfortably in my apartment and run my businesses because I do not have enough space. I own an Etsy jewelry store, an online clothing store, and a photo studio. Running a business from home can often be overwhelming because my living space is overtaken by shipping boxes, inventory, and materials all needed to help run my stores.

Based on my experience, INSPIRE is designed to have a large working space on the ground floor that will be flexible enough for residents to use based on their individual needs. The users this is designed for will have very different businesses with different space requirements. In addition, allowing people to work in a collaborative environment will allow them to share resources which will help their businesses thrive. A showroom on the ground floor can be used to showcase the residents’ products. Here they will connect with the public and give them the an outlet to market their small businesses.

The Experiential Quality of Light and Space Multifamily Housing Tower and Dance Studio

Jasmin Yao, Fountain Valley CA

Where we live, particularly during our childhood, shapes who we are.

These spaces, both indoor and outdoor, greatly affect our memories of joy and moments of struggle that make up life. Much of the multi-housing designed for families in Los Angeles does not adequately account for family dynamics nor has adequate space for outdoor activities.

This project explores how the more intangible qualities of space, such as its “atmosphere,” impact us not only visually but also experientially. The project proposes multi-family housing for different types of families and a dance studio, a place of movement and expression, that explore the factors that affect atmosphere. As light is a big component of atmosphere, the façade is composed of the layering of screens allowing a changing atmosphere by filtering light impacting space differently throughout the day. Change and growth are part of any family. This need for flexibility is implemented by means of movable walls within the unit to open or divide spaces. Lastly, a strong connection to the outdoors is incorporated through spaces to promote physical activities both in the housing units and dance studio. Together these spaces create a place that encourages its residents to have a variety of experiences.

Terracing and Gatherings Student Center and Affordable Student Housing

Jessica Mora, Anaheim CA

This project is a mixed-use building comprising of a student success center and affordable student housing. My vision for the project is to provide affordable and convenient living for students combined with a success center. The student success center will support university students and young adults of all ages living in skid row.

The design concept revolves around providing various, diverse social spaces for the students that will create an environment that feels safe place within the heart of skid row.

The building respects the patterns of the surrounding context with a well-designed and strong façade. Open space, natural sunlight, and ventilation are all important strategies that are incorporated in the design to encourage mental and emotional wellness, as well as sociability throughout the project. Collaboration and social gatherings spaces are a prominent part of the project with classrooms, parks, and patios. The spaces in the student success center will cater to both the students and the surrounding community to create a healthy and active social and gathering space at the heart of Skid Row.

Cohabitation Hub Mixed-Use Residential and Art Center

Katy Kadmous, Homs Syria

The idea for this project came from the growing resurgence in co-housing and other communal housing models in many large American cities, where housing affordability is a major issue. Co-Living does not have a specific architecture style but is a lifestyle choice. It is a modern form of shared housing for like-minded people to live, work, and get together. This way of living is not a new concept, yet each time interest in co-living or cohousing community arises, the motivation for it is likely new.

This is because social, economic, spiritual, and technological shifts significantly impact our lifestyle choices and ask us to constantly redefine our idea of “home”.

This co-living project is a manifestation of a renewed cultural movement towards resource sharing as a direct response to increased housing prices, diminished environmental resources, social isolation in the digital age, and the millennial viewpoint of valuing experiences over goods. Co-living can be an answer to the isolation that younger generations are facing. Co-living resists boundaries of home and work and offers the distribution of social gathering spaces that contribute to a sense of community. Co-living allows for residents to work and socialize as a group while having their own private spaces.

Building Blocks Affordable Housing and Child Development Center

Mark Anthony Romero, Palmdale CA

Originally populated by a transient community, Skid Row has grown into a place for long-time residents with a strong social fabric that supports extensive grassroots organizing efforts to strengthen the neighborhood.

However, the physical infrastructure does not appropriately support the equitable growth of the community, and the perceived negative narrative of Skid Row does not reflect its culture of resilience and innovation.

To tackle the urban housing affordability issue, this new housing development will be constructed of prefabricated modular units which can be efficiently stacked into a grid. This expressed, prominent grid acts as the structural and formal framework allowing for the arrangement of the modules and corridors within to create varied spaces. These interior spaces focus on integrating natural light, fresh air, and open areas in the context of a dense, urban community protype.

The mixed-use development also includes a child development center that will serve the residents of the housing above and, being across the street from the Para Los Niños campus, will double as an afterschool program for students in hopes of caring for and educating at-risk children of the community.

Interpose Veil Permanent Supportive Housing and Music Center

Miguel Lamas, Guadalajara Mexico

In contemporary architecture, to speak of the project of representation is to speak of the problematics of appearance. In an architectural surface, the facade becomes an interposed veil triggering a subjective relationship by distancing the viewer of the building from the space or forms within and isolating the viewer from the outside world. Additionally, there is a tension created between the viewer and the object by considering the architectural façade as a veiling membrane.

Through its surface a building declares both its autonomy and its participation in its surroundings. The autonomy of the surface presumes a distinction between the structural and non-structural elements of the building. This project explores the building surface not only as a matter of visual and material qualities but for the meaning it conveys. Despite the flatness and unornamented character of the facade, it does not relinquish its role in having the compositions of openings to “speak” or otherwise perform a social role.

This permanent supportive housing project for the homeless of skid row will be created in collaboration with the Urban Voices Project, a non-profit organization that creates supportive community spaces for music, that will offer vulnerable individuals a sense of purpose and improved their health.

Collection of “Courtyards” Senior Living and Wellness Center

Nataly Bakeeragha, Latakia Syria

This project is senior housing and wellness center located in Downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row. The central organizing idea for the project is the “courtyard.” The courtyard typology is used to tie the people and programs of this complex together by means of a series of centralized outdoor spaces.

A courtyard consists of an enclosed space bordered by buildings, landscapes, or walls that is open to the sky. It has been used for centuries in many disparate cultures as a core space for people to meet and to connect with nature. Courtyards break down the barriers between inside and out to promote indoor to outdoor living. They also provide a natural ventilation system to cool a building, particularly those located in dry, hot climates.

The open-air retreats found in this courtyard building provide a welcome space of respite in the dense, hectic and difficult urban setting that defines Skid Row. In the project, a series of multifunctional courtyards provide the seniors living in their small units a variety of recreation and entertainment activities to promote their mental and physical health.

The Wall, the Courtyard & the Gable Housing for Single Parents and Mental Health Clinic Sophia Le, San Jose CA

All of us face adversity and hardship. One of the biggest challenges in my life was adapting to the new family dynamic of living with a single parent. Single parents and their children have to overcome many difficulties to establish a new routine. Along the path to building new patterns, one of the greatest obstacles are mental health hurdles. My own experiences adjusting to living with a single parent and personal mental health issues was the motivating factor in developing the program for this project, which consists of housing for single parent led families with an adjoining mental health clinic.

The goal of this project is to create a safe space for its users. Formally, the building is organized into a plinth with two courtyard spaces for the mental health clinic and a bar of housing above. The ground-floor clinic and courtyards are separated from the street by a thick, inhabited “wall” so that users can receive treatment and socialize with individuals struggling with similar issues in an outdoor space free from external distractions.

The project also makes use of the iconography of the gable roof as a symbol of “home.” The use of the gable throughout the project amplifies the idea of safety. In the mental health clinic it is used spatially to define a variety of entry points in the enclosing wall. While in the housing portion of the project it used playfully to define the different functions and representations of a home.

Life In-Between Spaces Affordable Housing, Daycare Center, and Trade School Sung Jin Park, Seoul South Korea

We live our life in-between our greatest dreams and our day-to-day realities.

I believe that our exceptional moments of success are not where life’s greatest transformation happens, but it happens instead in those moments when we unintentional pause. This project explores the idea of the “inbetween” defined: as the space between two geometric shapes, as a place of transition, and as a gradation greys - between black and white. The program is a mixed-use of affordable housing, daycare and trade school serving the families at Skid Row, many of whom will need help rebuilding their lives.

I am interested in the potential for enjoyment that comes from human activities and interactions within in-between spaces – spaces with undefined programs such hallways, gaps, and “left-over” spaces. These spaces can be understood as a gradation of greys. They exist between solid and void, inside and outside, and pure circulation and program. These spatial experiences were created as a result in overlaps in the geometry of the plan. The resulting “in-between” spaces act as relief spaces for new types of interactions and activities. These threshold boundaries can be thought of as a third kind of space, one that is often ambiguous and temporal.

Section Emma Price: Emma Price is a licensed architect practicing in Los Angeles. She received her M.Arch from UCLA in 2015 and her BA in Architectural Studies from Brown University in 2009. In addition to teaching at Cal Poly Pomona since 2017, Emma is the founding principal of EP Architecture and a project architect at Taalman Architecture. Emma brings with her a background in art, research, and fabrication, as well as a deep interest in physical experience. Notable projects include exhibition design for the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC and a series of experimental retail spaces for fashion brand Eckhaus Latta. She previously taught at UCLA.

Positive Impact Tourism Public Market Hall and Boutique Hotel

Adrianna Alise Arambula, Pomona CA

The goal of this project is to establish a form of tourism that results in a positive impact on the local community and provides tourists with an immersive experience of the local culture. The Chinatown area of Los Angeles is one of the oldest cultural enclaves in the area and has a deeply rooted community. While tourism is necessary to bring jobs and economic opportunity to an area, it historically has also been known to bring gentrification and displacement of locals. According to the LA County Economic Development Corporation, the Los Angeles region welcomes nearly 50 million visitors a year who spend on average $18 billion in the economy. At the same time, the hospitality and tourism industry also serve Los Angeles’ 10 million residents and employs close to half a million residents of Los Angeles County. This project aims to bring these two communities which are sometimes at odds – Locals vs. Tourists – together through a symbiotic, mixed use program of public market hall and boutique hotel. It will serve as an exploration of the intersection of hospitality and community through the softening of hard lines between public space, private space, retail market, and community space.

Unity Hotel 人文旅社 Workshop studio and hotel

Alice Teng, Taipei Taiwan

This proposal aims to create a hotel that is truly tied to a sense of place, to create a better connection between the metro station and the Chinatown Central Plaza, and to reexamine the plaza courtyard typology that is common in the neighborhood for a taller building. The project is a workshop studio and hotel for both outside tourists and locals that can serve as a hub of cultural exchange between these two groups. The site is situated on North Broadway, only one block away from the Chinatown Metro Station. Although Chinatown has a muchacclaimed reputation, its values have been neglected by outside investors for decades. While recent developments in Chinatown may appear to preserve some of its culture by incorporating Chinese elements into its design, they are often merely “Disneyfied” versions of the neighborhoods they once were. To address these issues, this project integrates ideas that appeal to both outside tourists and locals while preserving the historical Chinese elements of the neighborhood such as the pedestrian alleys and public plazas. The hotel physically connects the Metro station to the Chinatown central plaza through a pedestrian pathway that cuts across the site. Additionally, the raised plaza at the heart of the project continues the Chinatown central plaza while allowing for views of the cityscape.

Cathay Bank Corporate Headquarters Live-Work Corporate Office

Crystal Piotrowski Lomeli, North Fork CA

This project seeks to reconnect Cathay Bank’s corporate functions with its historic roots by relocating the corporate offices to the site adjacent to the 1960’s Historic Cathay Bank building in downtown Chinatown.

Designing a corporate office amid the pandemic gave an opportunity to question what our experiences this year mean for the future of the office building. This project looks at the typical single-family subdivision and its relationship to a typical office building. Typically, each building is assigned a “lot” within a subdivision. Instead of consolidating the office into one large lot, the corporate office is broken up into smaller “lots” for each department. By doing this it is possible to retain one of the main benefits of working from home, removing the long commute while also increasing productivity by bringing co-workers back together in a central office.

Providing employees with housing as an employment benefit attempts to mitigate the gentrifying effect of new construction by not contributing to raising the residential costs in DTLA. This design is conscious of the potential future needs of residents by providing flexible spaces so the residential units can grow with an employee’s family needs, while ensuring there is an abundance of private and shared greenspace for healthy living in post-pandemic world.

In the Open Hotel with retail

Desiree Shadi, Los Angeles CA

As we have seen with current events, a space is most valuable when it can be both indoor and outdoor. An unexpected pandemic may come along and create new laws that only allow outdoor seating. In the climate of Southern California, there is no reason why we cannot push more of our building program outside.

This building houses a mixed-use program of retail space and hotel, and aims to allow as many spaces as possible to operate as outdoor spaces when desired.

As technology advances, there are more ways to easily convert spaces, divide them into smaller rooms, or combine them for larger gathering spaces. The dynamic operability of the project will also translate into a high energy environment throughout the building. The retail portion will open up entirely to the street, drawing passerby into the project and allowing vendors to use the entry plaza as retail space. The hotel portion will continue the same dynamic concept.

Hotel residents can open their rooms up to their individual balconies, or use the adjacent shared balconies. Located in the heart of Chinatown, this building offers more green space and outdoor life to both locals and tourists visiting the area.

Social Module 6 Urban Visual & Performing Art Center

Donnie Estrada, San Diego CA

Social Module 6 is an urban visual art center with a performance art component.

Located in Chinatown within downtown Los Angeles, it is meant to serve both the local population and visiting tourists. The project reevaluates and addresses engagement with the arts and opportunities for communal experience in the wake of the pandemic. The primary objective of the design is to create innovative spaces that allow for a communal cultural experience while adhering to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention organization’s recommendations and planning for a post-COVID-19 world. A large-span structural system allows for a column-free space that can be opened entirely to the outside air and allows the architecture to become a canvas for theater, film projection, and visual art that is visible from the adjacent Metro line and by passersby. A six-foot modular grid is applied in plan to emphasize the social distancing concept, and a diaphanous facade promotes passive ventilation for health and wellness. In section there are varying datums and ways to engage the visual and performing arts viewing experience through the changing of positions/postures that extend beyond sitting in a chair.

The Square Hotel Hotel and Market hall

Jennifer Gonzalez, Salinas CA

With its rich history and dense commercial streets, Chinatown is home to many local shops and restaurants that emphasize the neighborhood’s identity. As one of Los Angeles’s most popular tourist attractions, Chinatown’s vibrant streets run busy with pedestrian circulation. As the tourism industry moves forward, it is essential that both environmental and social considerations be taken to develop a project in this evolving neighborhood.

The proposal for The Square Hotel combines a hotel and market hall. The project’s approach was guided by a focus on the building mass to reference the roof of a market hall. The market hall program will dominate the open ground floor and multi-story void at the center of the project, and the interior will house the hotel program. With an emphasis on permitting unobstructed pedestrian circulation, the market hall will also serve as a gathering place. The goal for the carved void is for it to become an active area through circulation and through the trade of goods, allowing vendors of the surrounding shops and neighborhoods to utilize this space.

The grand stair that provides access from the ground to the top floor activates the central space, allowing for differentiation of the building’s public and private areas.

Chinatown Vertical Plaza Shopping, Eating, and Entertainment Tower

John Peter O Acayan, Upland CA

As the city grows, so too does its density. Chinatown, Los Angeles is a historically low-rise neighborhood that has begun to see a rapid building boom of larger and taller buildings in the area. There are currently many plazas in the neighborhood that residents actively use as spaces to gather.

However, with all of the higher density buildings being built in the area, there is a possibility of losing these open spaces where the community can gather in an area that is already severely lacking in public spaces and parks.

This project looks to create a plaza for the community where they can shop, eat, and have fun. The site and current zoning does not allow for enough space to create a wide plaza, so the courtyard typology that many Chinatown plazas use is transformed into a vertical scheme. The tower is created by taking a U-shape typology, standing it up, and mirroring it. This allows for two large open spaces where people can gather for events. Between these two areas are smaller open spaces where people could hang out besides the larger areas. This project allows for the plaza typology to remain within the growing area of Chinatown.

The Chinatown Hostel Youth Hostel

Karla Vich, Fontana CA

A century ago, the youth hostel was invented in Germany as an inexpensive accommodation for young travelers and a space of cultural exchange and social interaction.

Even as the youth hostel spread throughout the world, it never truly established itself in the United States or in Los Angeles. Instead, young travelers visiting Los Angeles must search for accommodations in hotels and Airbnbs, which are more expensive and prevent travelers from immersing themselves in the city. As the number of young, solo travelers rises, there becomes a need for new accommodation types such as youth hostels.

The program of the project is a youth hostel in historic Chinatown for travelers ages 18 to 30 that brings a new typology of accommodation and younger travelers to the area.

In order to promote the cultural exchange and social interaction that typically occurs in hostels, the project seeks to eliminate purely circulatory spaces - specifically corridors - by merging the traditional circulatory spaces with social spaces throughout the hostel. Thus the experience becomes centered in these social spaces that take the form of a series of internal courtyards around which the program is organized. Vertical voids cut through the mass of the building allow light to these central spaces.

Mixed-Use Hotel and Residential Tower Commercial and Hotel + Residential Hybrid Building Katrina Gan Santos, Malolos Philippines

In the past, when people went on vacations, they would usually book a hotel since there was no other option when it came to temporary lodging.

However, with the emergence of Airbnb and hostels in recent years, new forms of temporary lodging have been made available. As such, a cultural change was inevitable as travelers were made aware of the advantages that these new lodgings offer. Now, instead of only looking at the room as the primary source of value when choosing an accommodation, travelers also looked for the experience they will be able to get outside of the room.

This project is a mixed-use building with commercial, hotel, and residential spaces. Instead of clearly dividing the programs and stacking them one top of the other, the architecture of the project is used to mix the programs, furthering the interaction and relationship between the spaces as well as the three group of building users: travelers, residents, and shoppers. Through this mixing, travelers are able to gain the experience they are craving as they interact with both residents of the building and locals from the surrounding neighborhood, and visitors are welcomed to the neighborhood without pushing out residents or businesses.

El Mercado Para Todos Vertical Market Hall

LuzMaria Ramirez, Las Vegas NV

The market hall typology is most often a one-story, open plan building with a large roof. Programmatically, a market hall is a good fit for Chinatown, but typologically this type of low-density structure does not make sense. This project examines a new vertical typology for the market hall program that caters to the residents of Chinatown and Los Angeles.

The project offers a performance space for music, dance performances, and other events to bring visitors in the neighborhood, in addition to the more typical elements of groceries, dining, and shopping. The stands inside the hall can support small business owners and food vendors. The challenge with a vertical market hall - getting people to go up - is mitigated through the use of escalators.

The experience is important in this project as it is an inward-looking project, and the vertical circulation becomes a central experiential driver. The project feels light, airy, open, and allows for peeks and large views that the community and visitors can enjoy while circulating through the building. The form conveys this with its shape, lighting, and materials by using perforated metal sheets as a translucent envelope that hints at the program and activities happening inside.

Freeway Cinema The Show Starts on the Freeway

Macay Clelland, Temecula CA

Located along the 110 freeway in Chinatown, Los Angeles, this project focuses on the promenade from the freeway to the street and up the building. The building’s circulation is exposed to the freeway through a transparent and translucent facade. This gives an anatomical view of the user’s movement through the project to drivers on the 110. Much like the projection of film onto the movie screen, the building’s activity is projected onto the long facade that faces the freeway.

The facade also becomes a thickened skin around the cinema, housing the building’s circulation and egress. Egress stairs spiral around the main program components in the core of the building. The users begin at ground level entry and continue up to the second level via escalator, elevator or stair. The second level consists of the cinema lobby, the premiere screening room, and a small portion of retail. The cinema users may continue up to the second and third screening rooms on level four via a private escalator. The non-cinema users may continue up the continuous path of circulation forming an atrium along the facade up to the third retail level, and the fourth and fifth restaurant levels.

Martini on Aisle 7 Grocery Store and Speakeasies

Mara Carcamo. Pomona CA

A google search of G&G Market or Ai Hoa Market, long time Chinatown grocery stores, will result in “permanently closed.” Locals were saddened by the recent closure of their last local grocery store. These stores provided the elderly and locals a place to walk and obtain their daily grocery store needs and provided them with a variety of ethnic products not found elsewhere. There was a sentimental connection the community and local business owners had with these grocery stores. Some of the reasons these stores had to close were because of increasing rents, lack of parking, and gentrification. This project brings back a program that is lacking in the community while providing an alternate form of revenue and economic relief.

This project is a multi-level grocery store with speakeasies as an entertainment element. Co-tenants will work together to allow the grocery store to function by day and the speakeasies to function at night. This project focuses on transformation and change from day and night and over time. Circulation through the building and use of fenestrations and shutters changes over the course of 24 hours, and the façade of the building transforms over the years. Function, materiality, and program all transform in this project and show that change is inevitable, but one can adapt to it.

Farm-to-Table Vertical Farm and Market Hall

Marco Lopez, San Diego CA

Cities and food are innately linked. Cities rely on the processing, trade, consumption, and enjoyment of food for their survival. Despite this inherent relationship, the actual growing of food remains excluded from cities. A spatial connection between the two is more relevant than ever, with exponential growth of population in major urban cities and the large carbon footprint created by shipping produce internationally to these urban centers.

To that challenge, the project interlaces an indoor farm element and a market hall to collapse the idea of farm-to-table into one building. This requires two transitions: first, from a two to a three-dimensional agricultural approach, and second, a change from a linear and extractive system to a circular and living ecosystem. The project interrelates the areas of production, consumption, and technical systems to tighten the full of optimization of space, resources, and labor. It explores the advance of verticality to reduce emissions, pollution, and waste, while elevating the experience of the end-user through a healthier diet and greater understanding of processes of production.

Located in the neighborhood of Chinatown LA, this proposal aligns with the longstanding identity of the place - full of specialized grocery stores, markets, and dynamic restaurants - and aims to revamp the value of people, culture, and land.

Urban Assembly Vertical Factory with Retail, Office, and Production Michael Loussinian, Pasadena CA

This project investigates vertical production spaces within the context of the urban environment. With the aid of advanced technology, urban factory spaces can operate with lower costs and reduced emissions while establishing a symbiotic relationship with the community and economic surroundings.

The factory utilizes a top down manufacturing process for three different tenants. Three individual glass elevators transfer goods between floors, creating a vertical assembly line. Extensive glazing is deliberately employed to remove the barrier of visibility between the public and the typically invisible processes of production. By connecting consumers to production, the building strengthens both community and factory infrastructure.

Raw material (wood) is transformed as it moves down the building into one of three items: skateboards, guitars, or furniture, to be sold in the retail space below or shipped to the ordering customer. The production of local goods results directly in reduced lead times while boosting the sales of a locally owned companies.

The public spaces below are left open and flexible to be used for skateboarding, performance, and design conventions to establish a public connection to the city and its residents. Along with production and retail, the building would house office spaces for design and management, staff spaces for break and leisure, and additional back of house spaces for building maintenance and functionality.

Chengdu Opera Tea House + Hotel

Mizuki Takahashi, Shiga Japan

The proposed project is the historic preservation of Plum Tree Inn, an existing twostory building at 913 North Broadway. The original programs of the existing building were a Szechuan cuisine restaurant and a hotel, now closed, and the facade of the existing building features large-scale tile art depicting traditional Chinese tales.

This project aims to preserve Plum Tree Inn as a dine-in Chengdu-style Opera Theater while adding a hotel vertically to densify the low-rise neighborhood and bring new life to the historic area. It will function as a place of social interaction for the locals as the original Plum Tree Inn did, while attracting more tourists into Chinatown LA. The massing of the addition is differentiated from the existing building by the recess created between the old and new. The addition stays compatible with the low-rise neighborhood by breaking down the scale of the new mass. The structural grid for the hotel tower is misaligned with that of the existing building to allow for non-interference of the two. The facade of the hotel portion is inspired by the existing tile art mural on the facade and the tile culture of Chinatown LA. The atrium of the hotel reflects the push-pull of the facade and brings in natural light.

A Center for the Community A Resource Center/ Community Center

Nayeli Giron, North Hollywood CA

A Center for the Community is designed to help its neighboring businesses and the existing population of Los Angeles’ Chinatown. As a resource center, the building will cater to the community by addressing their top concerns: jobs, public safety, and housing. Workshops will allow residents to learn a variety of skills, such as renters’ rights and strategies to help local markets grow their businesses, especially those at risk of being pushed out as new wealthier businesses move in. Furthermore, it will serve as a cultural center to uplift Chinatown’s voices and rid them of the feeling of displacement that the community continues to face. A community garden will address one of the city’s greatest issues: pollution. Chinatown is one of the most polluted areas of the city, as it is closed in by three freeways and is one of the busiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles with some of the fewest greenspaces. Providing a rooftop garden will help provide clean air for a portion of the neighborhood.

Chinatown faces many issues, and the neighborhood needs a program that will help its community and allow them the opportunity to learn and grow, which is why the project will include offices for counseling, workshops, and community kitchens.

The Catalyst Hotel Mixed-use hotel and low-income housing

Reed Canova, Ridgewood NJ

Seeking to address the shortage and unaffordability of housing in the Los Angeles area and the issue of homelessness that plagues the veteran population specifically, the project looks to establish a business model that utilizes preexisting government assistance programs, federal and state tax incentives, and mortgage assistance programs to create a profitable mixed-use development that also mitigates the suffering of those in need. The hospitality component, comprised of fifty-six guestrooms, will be exploited as the economic catalyst to subsidize the fifteen units of on-site affordable housing. These two programmatic elements seek to establish a symbiotic relationship that enhances the communal experience of both guests and residents alike while furthering the personal economic development of the residents through the acquisition of their units via a lease-to-purchase agreement and by providing an opportunity for employment if needed or desired. Additionally, the hotel provides dedicated facilities for case managers, support and recovery groups, and life skills training to all homeless veterans. The project is not proposing a solution to the issue of homelessness, rather it is aiming to develop a model for cooperation between various parties. If successful, this model can be extrapolated, modified, and implemented for other subgroups of individuals who are suffering from chronic homelessness or from psychological and substance abuse issues.

Interface Chinatown Public Recreation Center

Wiley Quinn Brouillette, Petaluma CA

Transarchitecture is the loosely defined practice overlapping the physical Real World and a Virtual Real. John Johnston’s stance in The Allure of Machinic Life provides the perspective that such intersections can be “understood not simply to simulate life but to realize it.” While this thesis is not a study of transarchitecture, understanding relevance is epistemic to the narrative. That is, this is not a project of transarchitecture but one that aims to dissect the alluring nature of responsiveness in architecture between the phenomenal and the physiological as a driver for realizing the nature of the architecture.

An augmentation is a quantitative or qualitative addition; inherently classifying all designed space as a form of augmentation in that it adds to the use or perception of space. In this sense, it may be more effective to describe designed space as designed boundary. This thesis puts to practice methods for interactive boundary design through defining means of augmenting space and how they are interpreted through sensory stimulation. The intent is to communicate ways architectural systems express augmentation by separating them from ulterior function through a series of contrasting moments in sensory engagement.

“I step in a box.”

Nay, “I step in an interface.”

Section Michael Fox: Michael Fox is a principal at FoxLin Architects. He is a registered architect, professor, researcher, author, and licensed contractor. He is the author of two books by Princeton Architectural Press including Interactive Architecture and IA: Adaptive World. He is the recently twice elected President of ACADIA (Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture) His practice, teaching and research are centered on interactive architecture with a secondary focus on architecture for outer space and has carried out several projects for NASA. Fox is the past founder and director of the Kinetic Design Group at MIT. Michael has lectured internationally on the subject matter of interactive, behavioral and kinetic architecture. He has been exhibited worldwide including the SFMOMA, the Venice Biennale, The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum among others. His work has been funded by NASA, the Annenberg Foundation, the National Space Grant Foundation, the Graham Foundation and others. Fox is a tenured Professor of Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona and a regular visiting professor at The Hong Polytechnic University.

The Shared Housing Network Connectedness within the Built Environment

Thomas Marino, Lake Ariel PA

As humans, we live most of our lives indoors, and as a result the built environment has major impact on our physical and mental as well as our capacities for social interaction. The focus of this project is to grow a housing network; supporting the idea of connecting people to people, cultures, communities and learning opportunities at both the global and local scale. The vision of this project is to increase the supply of diverse housing stock to meet the ever-growing demand where entrepreneurial opportunities, sustainability, social interactions intersect.

The concept promotes a minimalist lifestyle based on exploration, teachings, and social interactions. Common areas are be open to the public as a marketplace for those who live in the building to share, explore, teach, and learn about what others in the space have to offer. Communal garden areas and various greenspace areas are also interspersed into the building on all floors. This space designed to foster a living environment of constant discovery and diversity.

424 Center Dance School and Community Center

Lexi Yeldell

Downtown Los Angeles itself is a vast city that provides many epicenters from housing to entertainment to retail, yet the residents of downtown still need to travel outside of downtown for many the basic necessities of day-to-day life. With the 2019 pandemic COVID, a renewed awareness has come to the fore of time spent traveling to go to work, school, shopping, to get food etc. Los Angeles is the worst U.S. city for commuters with an estimate of 119 hours a year stuck in traffic on average. The premise of the project is to locate a strategic mix of essential and non-essential programs within the centralized location of a single building to cut down on necessary commutes for downtown residents.

The idea of everything one would need being in one main location creates a whole new sense of what could be defined as local. The project consolidates a mini-version of all that is needed into a ‘MicroCity Tower.’ This tower would have a daycare, offices, a community garden, housing, amenities, a grocery store for residents and the community, retail spaces, a hardware store, art studios, restaurants, entertainment such as a movie theater and a bowling alley, as well as outdoor public space for the community. By localizing the most essential daily tasks, more time could be spent on other things and with others rather than on travelling. The site for this tower is located right at the edge of the Fashion District and next to South Park and the entertainment centers of the Staples Center and L.A. Live.

The Datafication of the City Research Center & Data Tower

Cheyenne Capener, La Verne CA

South Park, Los Angeles is the expanding epicenter of modern mid/high rise construction and remains as frontier for the high-tech industry. The rise of urban density directly influences LA’s ability to respond to amplifying infrastructure issues of poverty, resource scarcity, health mobility, sustainability, and climate change. This project addresses how the South Park community can become a resilient and self-sustaining urban system that betters the lives of its residents.

Through Smart City Technology, this project aims to address impending urban issues by converging interdisciplinary fields together to collect, research, and communicate real time data and solutions for the residents of Los Angeles.

The project is focused on smart city technology tied to an urban innovation headquarters for Alphabet Inc. in downtown LA. The building has an explicit facade and circulation system that reflects honest transparent research for reimagining a thriving city. A mirrored and transparent building system communicates the mutual demonetization of the smart city system by illustrating the reciprocal relationship of privacy and the benefit of information. The foundation of this project is built upon the programmatic integration of the public/research center and data tower. Foremost, this project serves as a social infrastructure focusing on the public wellbeing to generate a productive, livable, resilient, and efficient city.

Netflix Studio and Cinema Film studio and theater tower

Emily To, El Monte CA

Films are a form of entertainment—resilient and ever evolving. Throughout the years, the way films are made and seen have changed; presently, there is a wave of digital content creation and consumption. For the film industry, this presents itself as an opportunity and a challenge. Any kind of film, from indie to Hollywood, can be viewed by the global audience and inspire others to produce one. However, with this wave, comes with its own set of challenges. One is the increase of demand and faster release schedules. Another is the vast spread of creators stationed around the world.

New, improved technologies have connected these people together, but impact the overall artistic vision and production timeline. This industry involves and requires a lot of different hands to work together in order visually convey the story. There is an infinite number of possibilities, where the industry can push the creation process and look of movies, however, the current set up within the industry needs to change to have different departments engage in direct collaboration with one another and create a dynamic relation along with the public.

Connecting Communities

Brandon Chai, Torrance CA

The LA Fashion District is a famously known hotspot for shopping, featuring over 2,000 small independently owned retail as well as wholesale businesses.

When the Covid pan- demic occurred in 2020, small retail businesses such as family owned stores and start up companies took a major toll with Covid restrictions and many began to lose their stores. Even though the pandemic is temporary, it will change the way people shop and creates a new problem for the future of small retail businesses. The popularity of Ecommerce brings an opportunity to shop online, while getting rid of the need to shop in person. As a result, many small retails would lose business because they simply do not have enough resources to switch to an online business. The project aims to give small retail stores the opportunity to survive and become successful.

The program of the building consists of housing units being supported by the retail below. The demand for connection within communities become more apparent during the quar- antine. Mixed use housing with retail creates an opportunity for retail to thrive by catering to residents that live within the building as well as outside visitors while residents can ben- efit by shopping locally to the stores below. The building strives to connect housing and retail to be mutually beneficial to both communities.

The Convenience of Covid A Drive-Thru Distribution Center

Angelica Gonzalez, California

Covid-19 has forever changed the way we live. For over a year of our lives, we kept a distance from others for wellbeing, wore a mask for safety, and stayed home to avoid possible infection. People in dense city areas like Los Angeles were particularly vulnerable; higher densities meant more people going to the same local grocery stores, medical offices, retail shops, restaurants, and other open activities that increased their possible exposure to Covid-19.

This project is a direct response to the effects of Covid-19. As such, one of the main design components of the building is a drivable road that cuts through the form and allows access to the program in the comfort and safety of a vehicle. The project proposed is a versatile distribution center with a drive thru component that caters to the changing needs of the community.

During the current health crisis, the building can take the program of a medical facility to facilitate a quick doctor visit, a pharmacy pickup, and even the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine. During holiday shopping season, the building can become a shopping center that specifically tailors to shoppers who want to make a quick buy, add items to a pickup order, or simply have a contactless pickup. The versatility of the project makes it easily adaptable to future uses.

Solace Data Park

Henry Chu, San Antonio TX

“Commensalism” is defined as an association between two organisms in which one benefits and the other derives neither benefit nor harm. The evolution of our species has thrived on the symbiotic relationship with biology. Humanity has had wavering relationships with nature over our existence, from parasitic, to mutualistic.

The next step in evolution is to develop ways to become more commensalistic with our technology and the relationships it fosters with respect to nature.

This project attempts to define public space as a forethought as opposed to an afterthought. The project explores the natural symbiotic relationships of humans, technology, and nature to further develop an engineered symbiotic relationship to better serve the future of relationship between technology and biology. The project is focused on the relationship between nature and a datacenter, and how the data center “photosynthesizes” data much like how plants with solar rays. In an anthropogenic view, we can incorporate datacenters as a global ecosystem. Through the concept of commensalism, the human less, self-sustaining building will provide biological necessities for the surrounding and propel the next generation to a more sustainable future.

The Lightbulb Mixed Use Office Tower

Jessica O’Brien, Sacramento CA

Working from home in 2020 became a necessity that has shifted the concept of work, leading to speculation about what the office landscape could be.

Due to the current reliance on remote work, it is not likely that we will forget about this experience altogether. According to a study done by CBRE, 67% of employees wanted a balance between working remote and at the office.

This newfound flexibility is what is known as the hybrid office and results in hot desking, collaboration spaces and unique working environments.

This project proposes an office that has more traditional office programming on the exterior volumes with activity-based collaboration spaces protruding and growing organically out of the traditional office. The traditional offices have meeting spaces, private offices, collaboration spaces, private desks, and balconies. The nontraditional programs are encased in an organic, triangulated form that features a central staircase to connect the floors physically and visually. Programmatically this would feature spaces to play with coworkers, like an arcade, and spaces to rest and contemplate, like a room with hammocks. This project aims to serve those that feel unmotivated due to working in the same environment and gives the user a variety of spaces/stimuli best suited for encouraging productivity and inspiration.

The Drive-In Micro Hotel & Electric Fleet

Joseph Doucette, El Segundo CA

Los Angeles is a microcosm of Americana. From the beaches of Malibu to the Hollywood hills, its rich history and diverse environments makes it an ideal travel destination for people from around the world to see the wealth of experiences California has to offer.

This city however is not without its faults. From its early days of existence, it has been carved and partitioned by its roads. Expanding outward in a not so rigid and defined grid, it creates an ecosystem that is ultimately still best traversed by the automobile.

Current metro capabilities do not do justice to the city at large, with merely six subway lines and less than ideal busing conditions turning away potential commuters. That is why my project is a micro-hotel that provides an electric vehicle for transportation for each unit within it. The hotel sits on the corner of Pico Boulevard and Flower Street placing it in the rapidly developing downtown portion of L.A, making it an ideal anchor point for visitors to diffuse into the city. The hotel also provides other modes of transportation such as bicycle and scooter rental to accommodate smaller travel distances.

Met Film School & YouTube Space

Joshua Merten, Visalia CA

Over the past two decades cell phone and video streaming technology has advanced significantly. The smart phone has turned anyone into a broadcaster, while video streaming sites grow in subscription. Streaming platforms will continue to consume a large piece of our collective attention while creators experience a growing need for film locations for content creation. Met Film School based in Europe has recognized this shift and has partnered with YouTube Space. South Broadway with its historical connection to film, is the ideal location for a vertical film school directed at serving a network of film students, YouTube creators, and novices, focused on making video content.

The building reflects the separation of curriculum at Met Film as well as the process of film making. Studies occur in classrooms, while theses occur in editing bays, sound stages, as well as unconventional film locations like hallways, amphitheaters, and the ground floor. The building is further vertically divided into multistory clusters that contain associated program based on the process of filmmaking.

Jean Cocteau, a filmmaker, and designer wrote that “A film is a petrified fountain of thoughts”. In this way the project’s internal open space embodies this idea in form as it connects minds, visually, and physically as they capture time.

The Extended Garden Hotel, Park, and Retail Building

Karla Camarena, Carson CA

Los Angeles is short on parks, ranking low on public green spaces, therefore I propose a project that will help enhance the opportunity for more green spaces. The Extended Garden located in South Park, Los Angeles, CA combines a hotel, retail space, outdoor stage and a public park. The main purpose of the Extended Garden is to promote interest in connection to green spaces in an engaging and playful way.

Organized in a tower like building where the retail spaces and park ramp up to the first two levels finishing the ramp into a public stage creating opportunities for social interaction. The upper levels are dedicated to the hotel. The Extended Garden creates accessibility to the public and interconnects dependencies between building and nature.

The site is uniquely situated on the corner of Pico Blvd. and Figueroa St. This is South Park, the area of downtown near L.A. Live and the Convention Center, which is home to some of the most ambitious projects in L.A. The buildings design invites the public inside the building where the entry to the ramp creates a continuation to the neighboring site placing a green connection to the Gilbert Lindsey Plaza.

Shared Space

Mark Martineau

In architectural terms, “space” is an expression of form, shape, and mass - a familiar part of the human experience. In another context, outside of our earth, or outer “space,” is empty, unknown, and limitless. Space, in all meanings of the word, should be accessible to everyone. No matter if it’s the bored billionaire, advancing government agency, ambitious garage startup, or stargazing child.

My project, Shared Space, aims to bridge the gap between space on earth and outer space by reinterpreting the obscure typology of a typical aerospace industry lab in a fusion of outer space drama and popular culture, exposing the shiny new technology to the entertainment capital of the world. A new space race is happening, fueled by billionaires and private companies who endeavor a future among the stars. Thousands of people worldwide are following space endeavors more than ever. Nothing unites humanity like the progression of our species.

With foundations in aerospace and entertainment, Los Angeles, both past, present, and now future, is ideal for Blue Origin to launch a new initiative. One part education, demonstration, and entertainment, the other part experimentation and development.

Two programmatic ideas, under one roof for one thing - to live among the stars.

Park + Housing

Marlene Gutierrez

The narrative of my project is based on the lack of green and outdoor space in downtown Los Angeles, specifically for residential high rise apartments. Suburban neighborhoods have the housing units that have a comfortable distance from their neighbors, and they’re surrounded by their own outdoor space with a connecting road running along.

I’m not making the argument that suburban living is better than downtown apartment living. Downtown living gives people access to views, different food, people, and culture with close proximity. My conceptual idea is taking the pros of suburban living and adding it to the pros of downtown living. I did that by subtracting from a tower that tapers towards the sun and allows more light into the units’ green spaces. The subtraction will create that separation from their neighbor and replace it with their private outdoor spaces.

The middle subtraction will act as a connecting road similar to the flat suburban neighborhoods. My site is located in Southpark, Los Angeles. It’s in the corner of Flower St and 12th St. It’s next to the Metro which runs along Flower St and is a few streets away from the Staples Center, which means the area around the site is very active and among interesting places and people.

Retail in an Online World Distribution and Experience Center

Quinn Madaus, Brown’s Valley CA

What place does brick and mortar shopping have in a world of online shopping?

This project is an exploration of how retail must adapt to accomplish what online shopping cannot. The rise of major online retailers such as Amazon necessitates a fundamental change in how both retail and distribution spaces function. Shopping and distribution can become fully separate programs to fulfil different needs. Distribution has the ability to become automated and immediate while the retail space for the consumer will shift into an experiential model.

These experiential spaces are designed to facilitate the use of highly curated products in spaces that do not require the large support and storage spaces that are commonplace today. User engagement is driven by cocreation, social interaction, and spectacle. The retail spaces work in conjunction with exterior spaces to become a public social center. Shoppers can choose or design the product they want, then have it delivered, either immediately from the automated distribution center or later delivered to their home. Digital integration through cell phone and social media connections allows for seamless transitions between shopping and receiving a product. This project seeks to create architecture which facilitates interaction, experience, and spectacle.

Plug & Play Mixed-use: Residential and Commercial Spaces

Rodolfo Urioste, Azusa CA

The project will implement 3D printing technology for its construction. This is done to help lower the construction field level of pollution as it helps to reduce the waste from concrete production while minimizing the cost and time frame of the building. The units are printed on-site and lifted by a crane system to their permanent location. The unit themselves are only limited to the structure that envelopes them. The modules are created with how Legos work together to give an almost infinite number of possibilities.

The printer first constructs the shell of the unit that is to be placed in the structure.

The structure itself contains the utilities necessary to make a space livable. The units can be moved in different increments meaning that the building could have a different appearance when necessary. Once the units are placed into their permanent location, walls are added to the interior to make the spaces required for day-to-day living. This allows for any module to evolve to the needs of its occupants. Secondly, it allows for units to have an extended life as it does not need to be demolished to have a new interior. By allowing the interior walls to move when necessary, we can give new life to old units and lower waste.

Section Wendy Gilmartin: Wendy Gilmartin, AIA is a licensed architect and writer. Wendy was previously the Los Angeles partner at FAR frohn&rojas, with offices in Los Angeles, Berlin and Santiago, Chile, and project architect at Assembledge+ in Los Angeles. She holds an MArch degree from Rice University and owns and operates WGA (Wendy Gilmartin Architecture), a full-service architecture firm serving at the intersection of sites and cultures in underserved inland regions of Southern California and the Mojave Desert. Wendy sits on the Advisory Board of Directors for the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and her writing has been published in The Los Angeles Times, LAWeekly, Landscape Architecture Magazine, The Houston Press, The Dallas Observer, KCET’s ARTBOUND, The Architect’s Newspaper and in the books Latitudes: An Angeleno’s Atlas (Heyday Publishers), and Best Practices (OHM Editions).

The Quarter Center Skateboard Manufacturing and Retail Center

Ayin Alicea, Redlands CA

The proposed project will be a skateboard manufacturing shop. There will be a retail portion of the space to sell wares, a maker’s space for manufacturing, offices, and an exterior board testing space. This will be an adaptive reuse project of a pre-existing industrial storage building.

The concept for a skateboard manufacturing shop came from The Berrics, an indoor skatepark located on the same campus as the proposed building location.

The structure’s shape is inspired by a quarter pipe. As there is an art gallery in addition to the skatepark, the project will utilize a preexisting was as a “graffiti wall” for skaters and artists alike as a community gathering point. Through field research on skateparks, as well as interviewing users, a design for a test area for manufactured skateboards was crafted. The exterior test area would consist of a half-pipe, grind rail, pyramid, steps, and a pump track connecting them all. The ground floor of the project contains a retail section for the public, and an openplan workers space for manufacturing with additional storage rooms. The second floor consists of office space with a large roof deck viewing Downtown LA.

Growing Community Through Food Community Garden and Cooking School

Beatriz Irene Vazquez, Tijuana Mexico

Food brings people together. However, many communities in Los Angeles do not have easily accessible and affordable fresh produce. An example is Boyle Heights, which is a predominantly Hispanic and Latino community consisting mostly of low-income families. There are many elementary, middle, and high schools in the area, but parents worry about their children being left unsupervised and exposed to violence while they work. The Latino community of Boyle Heights also struggles with diabetes and would benefit from establishing a program that focuses on healthy eating habits as well as outdoor activities.

This project will focus on providing a space for the community to grow fresh produce, learn how to cook, and host afterschool programs for unsupervised children after shool. The organization of the project is based around a shared, central open space with visual connections between buildings. The central space is populated by trees, beds of corn, and fragrant herbs in containers that hang from structural elements. A greenhouse is situated on the southern edge, which grows a variety of vegetables year-round. The cooking school provides an opportunity for residents to learn healthy recipes while the afterschool program provides a much-needed resource for the families of Boyle Heights.

The Alley Art Studio and Brewery

Blake Burrows, Carlsbad CA

The intent of this project is to bring the community of Los Angeles together through the idea of creativity, culture and conviviality. I am proposing an art studio and a brewery that are mixed in unvonventional ways. An a-typical mixture of seemingly different programs would allow for different people from different backgrounds to come together and feel welcomed.

I am proposing this idea because I love bringing people together and creating an environment that is welcoming and that is safe. Art walls offer young and emerging artists a platform for exposure in a lively environment of creatives and other makers -- some being brewers, sculptors, or simply those who appreciate art and beer.

At the ground level, studios and a small gallery interface with a kitchen and brew tanks/distillery in the centralized atrium. Ideas of front of house and back of house are explored and questioned in the plans and section qualities. On other floors and at the public roof deck, various scales of interaction spaces offer visitors ways to explore more art and craft brews with friends and other art-lovers.

The Green Space Co-Working Office Tower

Chelsea Marks, San Bernardino CA

Los Angeles does not have enough park space for its vast population. The ratio of park space to urban space in Los Angeles is less than half compared to all other high-density cities across the country. Considering that green space has a substantial impact on mood, focus and overall health, it is vital that the spaces people spend many hours in daily include access and views to green spaces.

This project takes a critical stance towards the standard office tower and asks if infusing working spaces with nature can allow people to feel a sense of ease and benefit from the healthly aspects of being in nature as they are working in a park-like setting.

The Co-Working office program consists of individual offices and small group offices, all with certain specific relationships to the introduction of native plants; this placement of greenery is based on environmental factors like: water use, shade and structure. There are also more public areas of open assigned desks and open workspaces with access via a monthly membership, and a fully public, LA River-adjacent cafe for casual networking. Just as there are many levels of membership, there are also many levels of the nature experience.

Some of the offices have direct access to greenery while others have balcony planters. Other offices have views of elevated green spaces and others are surrounded by hanging vines. When we return to work post-COVID, the project asks if people might rather work in a closer relationship to green spaces, and, if so, will they focus better, be less stressed, produce more, and be happier?

The Dome The New Boyle Heights Community Center

Corey Norman, Tampa FL

This Recreation Center project has a close relationship with the historic, art-deco Sears building across the street on Olympic Avenue and to the L.A. River. The Recreation Center building is purposely juxtaposing the old Sears building and as it connects with views of the L.A. River. The area is park-poor even though the community is mostly made up of families with young kids. Of the minimal park space in the neighborhood, most of these little parks are located on the north side of the Interstate 5 freeway and are not only out of reach but dangerous and neglected.

The intent for this project is to give back to the community, especially the youth.

This area of the city is mainly surrounded by heavy industrial factories and train tracks, with some older buildings (like Sears) sporting an old-fashioned architectural style. Along with plain rectangular industrial buildings of the warehousing and industrial areas, the new Boyle Heights Community Center project proposes a different architectural future for the neighborhood: One that breaks away from the past and looks toward new technologies, new ways of recreating, and new ways of being a public building. The new Boyle Heights Community Center has programs that support the youth in education, safe spaces, and sports, to collaborate, hold events, language classes, after school programs and raise money for various local non-profit groups. The community center would act as the anchor or tether for these local organizations and neighborhood groups, tying them all back to a single safe and convenient location.

Vertical Farm & Marketplace

Edgar Lopez, Long Beach CA

Climate change has hit California throughout the past few years. We’ve had wild fires when it doesn’t rain as much during the year, and when it does -- flooding and hillside slides are the norm. The main sector that gets impacted is agriculture.

Farms need water in order for their crops to grow and also the climate has to favor them too. With scientists predicting more climate changes in the years to come, farming will need to change dramatically, moving indoors to industrialized spaces.

This project asks what kind of architecture can combine industrial farming development with the interaction of the community near the L.A. River and so it proposes a vertical farming facility with a marketplace and public open space area near the river.

People would be able to have access to the building and learn the process of how a vertical farm works in the lofty greenhousing area, while they also buy some of the produce that the vertical farm will grow. In concert with the propsed L.A. River MAster Plan improvemnets in the area, once the river gets fully developed, it will bring more people to the site, where they could use the open space area that will be provided and experience both the demostration greenhouse and marketplace. This exposure of sustainable practices will help understandings about climate change, and help communitcate to the public how we might grow food in a more efficient way and it will need less space to grow a large quantity.

Green Manufacturing Facility by the River Clothing Factory & Office Space

Elizabeth Terry, Santa Fe Springs CA

This manufacturing facility creates clothing for small businesses. The architecture proposes a hybrid building that will include social green areas within. Having green spaces in the facility can help reduce stress levels and have more productive workers benefiting the company and the environment. The outdoor spaces too will integrate with the new improvements along the L.A. River that are to be implemented in the coming years. The project sees the future of working as being more integrated with such green spaces for health and well-being.

The ground floor includes an exhibition room and the reception area as you enter through the west elevation. The maker space is the long bar on the north side all throughout the ground floor with triple high space and a mezzanine.

The other upper floors include the office space that over sees the factory area. It will also be more environmentally friendly for the office employees with the greenery incorporated in the façade and outdoor balconies.

Both factory, office employees, and leaders will have relaxing sharable green spaces. Having the site by the river will be a beneficial for the surrounding nature and for the people that pass by the pathway along the river.

Having the thought of our environment throughout the whole development process of factory facilities, it can make a change for the future.

M.A.S. Media Arts School (Focusing on Film and Music)

Emiliano Zavala, Salinas CA

Los Angeles is known for many big industries such as film and music. Since these industries are known to be associated with famous people and wealth, many do not pursue them because of the limited number of opportunities there are. Although Boyle Heights is a community that is a part of Los Angeles — known for music and film industry — not many people within this community are exposed to the profession of filmmaking or music industries in L.A. This part of Boyle Heights, in between the communal and industrial area, makes it an ideal location for a Media Arts School that allows for creativity and opportunity to learn about music and film for the younger generation.

This project is a school that gives resources to a community of many young individuals (ages 13-18) who rarely have such opportunity to let their minds grow and be creative. Program of the project consists of a media library, studios, and theatre, among other things, where the architecture creates unique flexible spaces that can be used for socializing, learning, and performing. The project within this site serves as a beacon for those in search of what they are looking for: A place where you can expand your mind and search for creativity.

Heights Community Center Community Center for Adolescent Youth

Emmanuel Casillas Monzon, Highland CA

Space is hard to come by. There are many individuals that do not have an area where they can truly find a balance of work and leisure, as their available environment may be overwhelming or lacking in one aspect or another. For example, there could be overcrowding in a familial household, or a lack of available technology. With future development being planned across the Los Angeles River, there comes a great opportunity to propose an addition to the surrounding landscape that will benefit its community members.

The proposed project is a community center that serves adolescent youths.

A community center seeks to create a space where individuals can utilize its various programs to their own benefit. Whether it is to learn something new, use its provided amenities, or just meeting up with friends to relax, a community center has a variety of possibilities to explore. The proposed project would begin to consider how one would utilize these spaces both as a collective and individually. Understanding a space’s access to natural daylight and its adjacencies will begin to create a dialogue that is then pushed along with the help of its materiality, program selection, and the users themselves.

elLA Wellness + Resource Center by Women for Women

Evelyn Gonzalez, San Jose CA

The women of Los Angeles face disparities and disadvantages across various levels. From the wealth gap, to mental health, to food insecurity, and more, there is a lack the spaces dedicated to solve these. elLA is a mixed-use wellness and resource center for women in Los Angeles. The program features a wellness center, a coworking space, an educational component, and a small short-term transitional housing program. The program aims to critique what we commonly accept as “healthcare,” “education,” & “workspaces.” In these spaces, women will be able to get the services they need to help them heal from past traumatic experiences, and the life skills generally lacking in public education.

The coworking space will serve as a safe and inclusive space to help women network with and be inspired by other women. The project prioritizes healthy living and connection to the land by providing a community vegetable garden and an open greenscape as the roof. The architecuture supports this objective for all the program components to connect, by allowing the women to circulate throughout without giving up their right to privacy and safety. Both the program and massing aim to bridge together the gap that hinders these women to heal and move upward.

Form Follows Farm DTLA Indoor and Outdoor Eco-Farming

Hannah Leigh A. Viana, Cavite Philippines

“In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language.” - Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture

The Department of Economic and Social Affairs states that COVID-19 overturns the decades of progress in fighting poverty and the global food crisis. In approaching such problems, the project offers a hybrid skill-learning facility utilized to teach the surrounding community how to do farming and provide additional job opportunities near the Los Angeles River area. The project aims to compose qualities that will create valuable experiences for its users.

It is the architecture of studying the collection and arrangement of forms and studying the experiences created within these forms, the creation of community and camaraderie among the marginalized in Downtown Los Angeles.

“Form follows function” is an idea first stated by the architect, Louis Sullivan, in which he means that a building must be primarily designed by its function, rather than by aesthetic considerations. This senior project questions the hierarchy of “form” and “function” in this axiom. The project acts as an instrument to explore the idea that form and program could simultaneously and iteratively be adjustable under the problem set.

Bridges Community Center Community Center & Makerspace

Juan Ramon Vazquez, Los Angeles CA

The development of the Bridges Community Center in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles was formulated around creating connections with long-time residents and new members of the community. With the Community of Boyle Heights facing the effects of gentrification, the need to develop a common space where residents and incoming developers or businesses can come and plan together is essential. By acknowledging the benefits of development and the need to preserve community and culture, the center will serve as a place where residents can come to learn, or further develop business skills that will provide better job opportunities on the onset of new businesses coming to the area.

The center’s development, and emphasis on the job training and makers spaces, ultimately came from the desire to address the predominantly workingclass residents’ needs as they are at risk of being priced out of the region.

Developers in the region are threatening to displace low-wage community members as the construction of luxury housing sweeps over the county. The loss of existing regions of affordable housing, along with the impact of the pandemic on low-income workers, ultimately provides a need for secure employment opportunities which will be targeted through classes held and the center.

The architecture of the project aknowledges these impending changes by facing the sonn-to-be-implemented improvements along the L.A. River in this area, with a gesture towards integrating further with Washingotn Boulevard too on the south side. The building opens up in plan and section to the surrounding neighborhood in a gesture of incorporationg and openness.

Walls, Bridges and the LA River STEM Center

Julio R. Rodas, Downey CA

Adversity and hardships, in many respect sums up the history of Boyle Heights, once considered the most diverse community in Los Angeles. This project proposal would serve as a STEM center comprised of multi disciplinarians, programs such visual arts, dance, performing arts, film and video.

The design and development of the program is comprised of a series of elements home to Boyle Heights such as a Walls, Bridges and the L.A. River. Each element has had a historical and contextual significance in the development of Boyle Heights long before the concretization of the L.A. River, which provided the main source water for a generation giving birth to the city we know as Los Angeles. The twelve historical bridges of Los Angeles connect the big city to its suburbs and the walls/ dividers that ripped through the city with the construction of the East L.A. interchange are also considered.

This project focuses on these contextual elements and reinterprets their connections in and possible displacements to the built environment. The STEM center would not only serve a student population in academia but also local artists and community members, by providing tools for successes to the next generations of students who have historically been underserved and who have been at the forefront of many social and political movements.

Los Angeles Community Center Community Recreational Center

Justin Tabancura-Boldon, Virginia Beach VA

Within the overarching concept of creating a sense of community leads me to strategize the different community, and recreational, centers that offer different amenities to communities across the country. By analyzing a predominant industrial area of Los Angeles, we can further notice the industrial workers and their lack of different amenities for these neighborhood workers as well as the future surrounding residential community. A community recreational center dedicated to offering amenities to the neighborhood becomes a way to consider positive benefits of a recreational center in this area of Los Angeles. By understanding the necessities of a typical industrial worker, we can better enhance the daily lifestyle by incorporating amenities; this is a place for all people to interact, relax, and study during the day.

The Los Angeles Community Center will address the lack of amenities in the area while creating a space for people to maximize their day by utilizing all areas of the project. Within the volumetric studies and program design on site, the primary spaces will include a fitness area, few open workspace areas along with separate classroom spaces. The large fitness area(s) of the building will be the main focus of the project while offering outdoor amenities and a café along the ground floor for the surrounding community.

While all developments have their purpose, providing a community recreational center within a large industrial neighborhood poses many challenges itself. All constraints and opportunities of the site helps understand the need for amenities in the area while benefitting local workers and future residents of Los Angeles.

Center for Sustainable Art and Design Museum & Makerspace

Kaitlyn Aguilar, Oceanside CA

This project looks at future industrial developments along the Los Angeles River and proposes a learning center for sustainability in art and design. Sustainability is not a trend that comes and goes, it is here to stay and will be a part of every decision we make. It is critical now more than ever to start rethinking the process and product of design.

The west side of the L.A. river is a heavily industrialized zone that is home to warehouses, factories, and never-ending noise pollution. Yet the area is evolving, and more creative studios are appearing. Therefore, the hybrid program of a museum and makerspace aims to extend the knowledge of sustainable practices – a new way of thinking, living, and designing.

In the museum, a formal learning exhibition space will allow artists and designers to learn from the artworks of others and about the design potential in upcycling and recycling, as well as exhibit their own work in the space. At the same time, the makerspace is open to local artists to encourage a more hands-on experience through exploration, experimentation, and self-expression.

Together, these different spaces become activated as they weave together in curating a dynamic learning environment from observation to innovation.

12th Street Music Center Music School

Kristy Cheung, Hong Kong

The city of Los Angeles is a place full of hope and dreams for many aspiring artists.

There is an abundance of art schools located in Downtown Los Angeles, most of which are private institutions. The 12th Street Music Center will allow people of all qualifications to attend music lessons. It aims to serve the community by providing people the means to explore, enjoy, and nurture each individual’s musicality.

The architecture supports specific areas for learning, but also for meeting, gathering and waiting in groups, perhaps listening to all the music around the building — the things that are missing sometimes in busy life.

The facility includes a café restaurant, two performance halls, two rehearsal rooms, four classrooms, and a computer lab. Taking advantage of the Sunny Southern California climate, the top level opens to a mini open-air amphitheater for outdoor performances. In conjunction with the few neighboring entertainment facilities, the 12th Street Music Center will help bring liveliness back into the Wholesale District. The four-story architecture encourages users to connect with the local community through music, shared spaces, transparency, and views of the City of Dreams as they work towards their own.

Office in the Forest Workspaces and Makerspaces

Trisha Mejia, Burbank CA

The project is a workspace and makerspaces that rethinks what an office space could be in a post-Covid world espcially in providing flexibility for future uses.

The program consists of office spaces, both open and private, makerspaces, studios, a small cafe, and a daycare. The three main elements of the architectural proposal are the workspaces, the makerspaces, and the designed landscape.

The makerspaces would provide the technical knowledge, equipment, and spaces needed for crafters, builders, and engineers to share ideas, learn, create solutions to future problems, and even sell some of their work.

The landscape and office spaces consist of varying environments that would allow differing workspaces to accommodate many people’s preferences. These spaces are mostly open to each other, except for small pods that are used for more private work zones, to foster a sense of community, unity, and connectedness between the workers and the environment. The cafe and daycare are secondary programs that support the workspaces. Many parents of young children have trouble finding childcare while they work. Current offices also offer day care services to workers, so a daycare is implemented into this program as well.

River 12 Market A Market Hall

Melina Morris, Lillestrøm Norway

In a highly industrial area and located next to the LA River, the site is far away from any convenient store, sources of food, and entertainment. It offers very little green space and area for people to inhabit. Although it is highly industrial, there are still people working and roaming in the area and having a space to breathe would be ideal. Therefore, a market hall would be able to offer the locals a change of pace and scenery within the cramped industrial space and give the area a place to acquire food, goods, and some fresh air.

This project offers an architecture which supports aspiring entrepreneurs specifically, and food vendors and artists as well who have the ability to kickstart and conduct a start-up business in the market hall. A market hall is a type of indoor market that is open to the public and is defined as a covered space or a building where independent vendors sell food and other articles from stalls. In recent years, market halls and food halls, a variation of a market hall, have become very popular. Both market halls and food trucks started to become more common because people are seeking more unique, fast, and affordable foods that were not produced by big chain businesses like your typical fast-food joints. The rise and success of market halls can be explained by the changing food culture, the rapid increase of labor costs, skyrocketing urban rent, and growing trends of the society.

Extend and Connect A Collaborative Makerspace for Small Up-and-Coming Design Businesses Rebekka Charlotte Geleris, Copenhagen Denmark

Placed at the intersection of the industrial area of south east L.A. and the residential area of Boyle Heights, this small business incubator serves its users by bridging the gap between an initial design idea and the realization of a final product. In addressing this unique overlap of heavy industry to the west and residential zoning on the east, the project utilizes this unlikely overlap in bringing people and heavy machinery together.

The program has three overarching elements; design, build, and display. Each element serves the phases that go into making a product. The first phase is the schematic design and brainstorming. For this phase, the building provides shared offices and lecture halls where the business owners and designers can rent a space. The second phase is the implementation, which the makerspace and woodshop would aid. This space is meant to allow people to explore, get messy and problem-solve. The final phase is the displaying and selling of the items produced. This is the most leisurely part of the program where the public has access to the galleries, cafes and atrium spaces.

Los Angeles Veteran’s Resilience Center (LAVRC) Therapy and Research Facility

Michael Bonura, Melbourne FL

The Los Angeles Veterans Resilience Center is centrally located in at 2424 12th Street, downtown Los Angeles. The industrial neighborhood south of Olympic Blvd. and west of the LA River is in a state of flux as development moves in. Los Angeles county has highest veteran population in the United States, with nearly 20% experiencing a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) episode a year. The PTSD statistics combined with harrowing number of 22 veteran suicides a day calls for a response by our nation who has asked its warriors to fight the longest war in U.S. History.

The LAVRC will answer the call by providing treatment, furthering research and destigmatizing mental health for veterans.

The project says a building should expresses its function not through form but process. The recontextualizing of trauma is seeing events through new eyes. The process was applied to the building by the incorporation of existing elements and reused material which have scars of their former use.

The heart of the project is the memorial which will be created and changed by the veteran’s interaction with the space. As a veteran myself, I hope this project expresses damaged things can find purpose if seen in a new light.

Section Katrin Terstegen: Katrin Terstegen is principal of KATRINTERSTEGEN in Los Angeles, a registered architect in California, and Assistant Professor in the Architecture Department at California Polytechnic State University, Pomona.

She has taught at the Technical University Berlin, the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and the University of California in Los Angeles, served as juror on reviews at numerous international universities, and has lectured internationally on her work. In her research and teaching, she examines architectural typology and the language of materials and construction. She is former board member of the non-profit organization Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, where she served as President in 2019.

Prior to establishing her firm, she worked at Johnston Marklee and Brook+Scarpa in Los Angeles and at firms in Paris and Amsterdam. Terstegen holds architecture degrees from the Technical University Berlin and the University of Westminster in London and also studied architecture at the ETSAB in Barcelona.

Boyd Ceramics + Trade Toy District Ceramic Studios and Public Living Room Amaris Vazquez, Los Angeles CA

Boyd Ceramics + Trade in the Toy District in Los Angeles is a ceramics studio designed for both practicing and aspiring artists to work and congregate. The goal of the project is to procure a center for art production and cultural reciprocity – whether it be for a user’s sole intention to learn and acquire skills or to become a recognized artist in the community. Breaking the barrier of access to art, the program provides shared exhibition spaces, the means to sell professional artwork, and accessible classes and forums. Users exchange knowledge and engage in a cultural discourse through the process of making ceramics.

Formally, the building is designed as a heavy mass that appears to be floating above the ground. The intention is, first, to develop a design that can be conceived as an entity that contains everything while also possessing unlimited possibility – a oneness, as described by Valerio Olgiati and as demonstrated in Álvaro Siza’s design for the Huamao Museum of Art Education in Ningbo, China. Secondly, the project aims to introduce dynamic spatial experiences by carving into the building mass in section, creating a varied solid-void condition, similar to Jean Nouvel’s proposal for the Tokyo Opera House.

The Toy District Library Re-imagined Public Library and Cultural Space

Andrea Gabriel Lansang, Singapore

The Toy District is known for its vibrant network of bustling streets and alleys that are occupied by hardworking Latino vendors, scuttling businessmen and strolling pedestrians. The district is populated with diverse communities, immersing itself in different cultures from the surrounding districts, including the Arts District, Fashion District, and Little Tokyo, and has become a cultural hub.

The project proposes a new typology for public spaces: a hybrid of a re-imagined public library, combined with new cultural spaces. It focuses on creating interstitial urban spaces to enhance visitors’ experiences as they move from one space to the other and across a central courtyard that acts as a public plaza for leisure activities.

The concept of the project is to house three functions that serve as public resources and can act as an extension of the private living room. The multifunctional library performs as a resource center, providing information and technology; a learning center that provides collaborative areas and classrooms for workshops and classes; and lastly, as a community center that provides spaces for entertainment, relaxation, retail, and meeting rooms open to the public.

La Plaza Community Center Public Library, Cultural and Sports Activity Hub

Angel Terrones Calvario, Jalisco Mexico

The inevitable trend of modernization and growth in downtown Los Angeles calls for the creation of public spaces that equally serve its residents, workers, and visitors. La Plaza Community Center aims to become a hub for interaction where community activities can unfold and develop. The program includes multi-use rooms, auditoriums, a library, a fitness center, and several outdoor spaces that promote culture among their users. The building works as a small village consisting of a series of volumes that are organized around a central plaza. This urban void works as a multifunctional public space that emphasizes the building’s status as a community facility. In addition, this space provides a strong connection between the street and the dense network of callejones that are widely used by vendors and visitors alike. The sculptural character of the building provides accessible roofs and terraces that seamlessly connect to the ground and encourage pedestrian circulation on various levels. Generous windows at street level provide glimpses of the activities happening simultaneously on different levels. This transparency makes the composition highly porous and inviting. Ultimately, the building presents itself as an icon that can become a catalyst for the revitalization of whole neighborhood.

The Toy Box Library Library and Kindergarten in Los Angeles

Blessing Kim, Artesia CA

Located in the heart of the Toy District of Los Angeles, the Toy Box Library serves as a library, community space, and kindergarten. The library aims to collaborate with and provide services to the existing community of vendors, shops, and surrounding residential towers. Traditionally, the city lacks spaces for families and especially children, and the existing neighborhood lacks public places for children and for the community to gather and engage in activities.

The Toy Box Library creates these spaces for public engagement while functioning as a library and kindergarten for the neighborhood. Its program elements include an auditorium, community room, makerspace, rooftop garden, a traditional library, and a kindergarten. The project organizes these programs on each level through a glass box for the quieter and individual activities, and the interstitial space between this box and the façade for the louder and collaborative programs. The building’s massing takes advantage of the area’s distinctive pedestrian alleys by facing towards them instead of towards the street. The Toy Box Library is created for people to experience a public “living room” outside their homes by providing a variety of spaces for the community and for its children to learn, play, and rest.

Forgotten Volumes Library and Bathhouse in Los Angeles

Christopher Thai, Garden Grove CA

Located in the Toy District in Los Angeles, the building aims to become part of the urban infrastructure, providing bathing and storage spaces for the homeless population while also serving as an extended living room for the local residents.

In a post-postmodern world where “all our institutions [are] on trial” (Louis Kahn), the building seeks to become a metaphysical shelter for those in need.

Interior volumes house various pools that allow users to digest the knowledge gained from the library below. A double-glazed façade, operable windows, and moisture retaining plants provide the necessary ventilation for the bathhouse.

The steam that travels outside of the window becomes temporarily trapped within the façade, creating a cloud that engulfs the building before being dispersed to the outside. The volumes filter and diffuse the harsh light coming from the top of the building, making it more suitable for contemplation and self-reflection.

The various volumes that penetrate the floor plates serve as an intermediary between the human body and the building. Enlarged furniture divides the space and closes the gap between furniture and volumes, creating a scalar transition between the small plants, human body, enlarged furniture, volumes, building, and the urban fabric.

Kahn, Louis II. “19733: Brooklyn, New York.” Lecture given at Pratt Institute, Fall 1973. In Louis I. Kahn: Writings, Lectures, Interviews. Ed. Alessandra Latour. 320-331. New York: Rizzoli, 1991

Louis I. Kahn: Lecture at Pratt Institute Fall 1973, Rizzoli 1991

Pray & Eat! Sacred Space & Culture Center

Cristiene Morcos, Cairo Egypt

The Toy District is a dense neighborhood with a lot of activity from vendors, shoppers, and homeless people. The proposed project, a non-denominational spiritual space with a communal kitchen, is located along Los Angeles Street and East 4th Street and will serve as the spot where workers can take a break, residents can meditate or serve the community, and where homeless people can come for help to fulfill their essential needs of survival.

The project expresses two distinct atmospheres: the silent, beautiful sacred, and the loud, joyful culture. It is conceived as an L-shaped building with a communal plaza at its center and incorporates different types of light strategies for its interior spaces.

The sacred space has an indoor/outdoor space to illustrate the idea of heaven and earth and the in-between. It is not focused on a particular religion or form of belief but designed to welcome any believer, inviting visitors to enjoy and use the building as they please. The public plaza is a space that encourages the community to rest and gather for breaks. The culture space includes a café and soup kitchen, classrooms, a performance space, a kindergarten, and a roof garden for children.

Winston Street Library Library and Café in the Toy District, Los Angeles

Garrett Hartsuyker, Alpine CA

This project is a library in the center of the Toy District in Downtown Los Angeles and serves the existing homeless population through a series of educational and resource programs, vital to them as well as to the local community. The project is located on a sandwich lot along Winston Street and faces 4th Place, an alley that acts as an outdoor marketplace.

The project examines solid-void relationships and is grouped around a courtyard that faces the alley, with the intention to provide a pedestrian focused experience. The goal of the courtyard is to provide a public open space, something that is severely lacking in the Toy District, and a place for casual interaction between the homeless population and local residents. Voids within the building help break up its solid mass, making it feel lighter and inviting despite its heavy presence on the site. The project will allow for views and interactions into the courtyard, creating a lively space that is an enjoyable respite, contrasting with the bustling nature of the Toy District.

Cultural Continuity / Co-working Hub Toy District Community Center + Marketplace

Jamie See, Kowloon Hong Kong

The character of a city is not solely defined by iconic architectural landmarks and skylines. Rather, the combination of its alleys, market vendors, and urban voids form a more personal identity to the individual that experiences it. Like a tourist who wanders through the side alleys to acquire an authentic experience of the places they visit, citizens experience these urban spaces every day. The Toy District in Downtown Los Angeles is a 12-block district with the street acting as the fundamental public realm. Accessible quality public spaces where people can connect with the city are lacking.

The proposed community center features a co-working hub and a marketplace that extends from the courtyard of the center into the alleys beyond, engaging the surrounding neighborhood and reinforcing the interconnectivity within the community. The courtyards serve as gathering spaces, welcoming visitors and bringing people from the neighborhood together. The library will serve the public in pursuit of creativity and critical thinking, actively engaging with one another to imagine possibilities, nurture new ideas, and invent the future.

Cinque Museum DTLA Museum and Workshop of Toys

Jiaqi Huang, Wuhan China

Historically, a museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historic, or scientific importance.

However, nowadays museums serve a much more complex purpose. The idea of this project is to provide the public program of the toy museum while also offering gathering spaces that connect the surrounding communities of the Toy District and the downtown area, serving as a public “living room”.

The local residents of the low-income and low-rise area of the Toy District lack the spaces that would allow them to engage in culture. As a museum, the project does not only provide galleries so that visitors can explore the cultural and artistic life associated with the Toy District but also offers large workshop facilities where visitors can learn how to make toys. The museum encourages people visiting the Toy District to see exhibitions and experience the process of toy making. The museum welcomes everyone, including families and children, residents, shop owners, businesspeople, and the homeless.

Callejones Library Public Library in Los Angeles’s Toy District

Jose Hernandez, Olivehurst CA

Urban public spaces are essential elements in a city’s fabric and offer a pause within disorder. As Los Angeles continues to grow vertically, the public realm shrinks and remains confined to horizontality. Areas within the city promote a “quasi-public substance that, while suggesting an open invite, actually make you pay.”1 Since the public realm now seems to “cost money”, it is losing its public essence,2 limiting the dispersion of the diverse cultures found in Los Angeles.

This project proposes a library that is more than just a repository for books.

Instead, it presents itself as a democratized public “living room” and offers services to residents, visitors, and workers alike. The project is located in the Toy District, adjacent to a network of alleys known as “callejones.” While the district lacks public resources that address the community’s deficiencies, it has, through its street vendors and visitors, developed an urban atmosphere. The project explores an open floor plan, introducing new vertical public spaces through voids that are ideal for activities and interaction. The project’s ground floor serves as an extension of the alley, allowing for an exchange of ideas, and its overall transparency emphasizes its public essence, encouraging a sense of community.

1. Koolhaas, Rem. “Seattle Public”. Content. Pg. 139.

2. Koolhaas, Rem. “Junk Space,”. Pg. 162.

California Light and Space Museum A time capsule for the 60s/70s art scene

Kelly Bergin, Fullerton CA

Located in the Toy District in Los Angeles, the project is a museum dedicated to the work of the artists from the Light and Space Movement in Southern California.

The goal of the project is to create an environment that allows for social interaction while also paying homage to the art scene of the 60’s and 70’s. The massing strategy uses two rectilinear masses that hinge at the middle, this creates two twin courtyards that gestures to the urban fabric of Los Angeles St and the alleys behind the building. With the logic of the two wings, the interior circulation is curated by ascending in the left wing until the two masses hinge at the top floor, then descend into the right wing where the building meets again at a subterranean level.

Transparency, Reflection, Light, Space - key terms that originated from the genesis of the movement in the 1971 UCLA Art Exhibit. Many of the distinct bodies of work include these explorations and an overwhelming use of color. This is offset by the stark white mass of the museum that holds this collection of colorful and timeless art sculptures.

Toy Performing Arts Center Urban Infill in the Toy District in Los Angeles

Klaude Matias, Sacramento CA

Los Angeles is a leading cultural hub for performing arts, and although performing arts centers carry a motion of bringing people together, their uses tend to be exclusive to direct participants. This project rethinks the program type’s public intention, exploring activity beyond event occasion by creating a focal point in the Toy District, an area that embraces pedestrian movement along streets lined with retail.

The project implements an urban infill as a bar spanning a block’s length, becoming a public pedestrian corridor. Retail seeps into the ground floor, using the throughway for an arts-based marketplace, counterpart to neighboring shops. Auditoriums bulge from the spine and harbor neighboring lots, creating residual plazas. The top-floor school is tied to auditorium operations and provides visual connection to the ground floor.

TPAC puts performance art as background to public circulation. In exploring permeability and extensions of space, deep voids cut through the spine, shaping courtyards that break corridor sequences and become informal rehearsal spaces that admit natural light to lower levels. Rehearsing students are seen and heard from spaces of event intermission, leisure, and shopping. Celebration of the arts as background, the corridor building becomes a space of constant formal and informal activity.

Cultivation Sanctuary Live-Work Market Hall and Ecological Center

Logan Alvarado, San Marcos CA

With the population of homelessness in Downtown Los Angeles rising, efforts to house the homeless and provide them with opportunities should also increase. The Toy District is an area that showcases a vibrant commercial center while sharing its public venues with a displaced community. With an average of 90% of its residents below the poverty line, the three concerns of food, shelter, and employment are also the solutions that can remedy this condition. A facility that can provide all three elements will therefore directly address the needs of an overly crowded street environment.

Located on one of the most congested corner lots in terms of existing encampments, the “Cultivation Sanctuary” stands tall with a trichotomy of programs that include a rooftop greenhouse and garden center, multiple floors of shelter units, and a ground floor market hall that encourages community involvement. The “donationonly” facility seeks to operate in partnership with the less fortunate by diagnosing the food desert conditions of the most impoverished urban landscapes, offering temporary residencies to improve street conditions, and educate in agricultural training as an independent benefit. Lastly, the building utilizes passive strategies in order to reduce carbon emissions and strengthen a holistic cause.

The Toy District Magical Mystery Library A Public Library in Los Angeles

Luciana Hodara Rahde, Porto Alegre Brazil

Although culturally rich, the Toy District lacks cultural spaces to explore its character and provide important resources for low-income communities. With that, the library has the role of serving the residents and become an extension of their homes, a “public living room”, in order to bring back a sense of belonging and identity. The library, then, serves not only as a repository for books, but also as a neighborhood landmark that promotes cultural and educational events.

The project aims to connect users with their community through shared spaces as well as through visual connections within the project. Despite its monolithic exterior form, the project reveals an interior transparency that promotes these internal views. Following the premise that building and site are inseparable, the project seeks to engage with its site - not only physically but also conceptually.

Because the “callejones” are such an important aspect of the neighborhood, the circulation of the project adopts the character of these alleys, providing a promenade through the building. The bookstacks are poches of the walls and therefore become part of the architecture. They serve to divide the interior space and promote a full immersion of the user within the building.

Museum of Los Angeles Art An Art Museum and Community Center in Los Angeles M. Pearson Lord, Torrance CA

The project is an art museum in the center of the Toy District, located on the corner of East 4th Street and Wall Street, and displays art that is inspired by the various visual aspects and cultural experience of living in Los Angeles. The building is a ziggurat that was denied gravity, found through a negotiation between form and program, solid and void. The form stands separate from surrounding buildings, levitating off the ground and ascending away in order to draw people into the building and to create an icon in the neighborhood. The program requirements influenced this form, with the heaviest program requirements staying closer to the ground floor and lighter ones at the top. The terraces extend as a void within the volume, blurring the difference between inside and outside. The voids and solids then inform program organization by what spaces require enclosure or openness. The gallery and library need enclosure while a sculpture garden or the bar can take advantage of openness. The solid and void also inform lighting strategy, voids experiencing direct sunlight and solid requiring diffused light.

424 Center Dance School and Community Center

Sarah Coontz, Santa Ana CA

This project is a community and dance center located in the Toy District in downtown Los Angeles, a neighborhood with a significant homeless population and a lack of public open space. The focus of the project is to make connections between community members by providing the open space that is so desperately needed and by creating informal, democratized opportunities for people to watch and participate in performances. This is achieved through utilizing a strong urban gesture, transparencies, and selected views.

The project explores open space and circulation that encourages ad hoc encounters.

Purposefully framed views and an entrance that extends to the courtyard encourage pedestrians to stop, wander, and observe, creating an informal audience. The project juxtaposes privacy and formality by exploring the spectrum between public and private and casual and formal. There is a public aspect to both performance and practice as there is a private aspect to both performance and practice. By drawing the community in as casual observers and formal audience members, the project inspires the community and democratizes performance and patronage of the arts.

C.L.A.S.H. Community Library and Sports Hub Public Library and Recreation Center William Carreon, Long Beach CA

The project is located in the Toy District of Los Angeles and aims to bring a “public living room” to this dense part of Los Angeles by offering the two public programs that are arguably the most beneficial to the individual: a library and a recreation center. The library is one of the last standing democratic spaces where one can freely obtain knowledge and resources. The recreation center is a collaborative space that not only allows for human interaction but also promotes healthy and fitness.

While this project combines two very different and distinct programs in a singular building, it also expresses their formal clash of these two systems. The library is rendered in a series of stacked floorplates that are governed by a strict column grid, while the recreation areas are placed within a series of volumes that are floating within the library floorplates. Not bounded by the grid of the library, these floating volumes interrupt the structure of the library and create new and unexpected spatial conditions. This interplay of programmatic and spatial typologies revolves around a central atrium that houses than main circulation and offers an experience of visual connectivity throughout the entire building.

Section Andri Luescher: Andri Luescher studied Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich.

From 2008 until 2018 he worked at Johnston Marklee and Associates in Los Angeles. He was the project lead on residential, commercial, and cultural projects and oversaw the Menil Drawing Institute project in Houston Texas. He has been teaching at Cal Poly Pomona as an adjunct faculty since 2018. The same year he established the firm Schneider Luescher.

Luxury of Landscape Library and Gardens

Aang Castillo, Norwalk CA

In an area so overrun with homeless encampments, the very least that can be done is provide a little light to the lives of the people who are so often overlooked, ignored, and robbed of luxuries as simple as greenspace. This project serves to provide resources and recognition to the lives of Los Angeles. Skid Row is an area with a disproportionate amount of landscaping; Something so simple is seen as a luxury to the occupants of the area despite inciting comfort and a sense of shelter. My project will develop the idea of expanding greenspace and becoming more accessible to the homeless population in Skid Row. In this regard, landscaping has become somewhat of an elite privilege. It’s obvious that homeless people flock to nearby parks for shelter and protection from exterior elements, yet are also so heavily guarded and restricted from greenspace. We need inviting spaces full of light and life that won’t turn away those less fortunate, so this project sparks the idea of a public library to allow for those allocated resources to be shared with the people who really need it, while also serving an overarching purpose to expand the community with an experience of education within green environments.

R.I.S.E (Recreation Institute Serving Every Youth) Fire Station + Community Center Alejandro Parra Valenzuela, Selma CA

Los Angeles contains one of the largest centralized population of unhoused in the United States in its Central City East neighborhood of downtown, also known as Skid Row. Among this population of unhoused remains a less visible population of unhoused youth who live under extreme conditions. These children are exposed to violence coupled with the emotional distress of living under these conditions, which poses vulnerability and higher risks to their health and safety. Despite a dense network of social services, Skid Row is not designed or equipped to meet the current needs of the community.

The project proposal consists of a hybrid of a community center for at-risk youth with a fire station to provide the essential services to assist this demographic. The community center intends to foster a safe space for the youth to access resources, exercise, learn, and to allow mechanisms for mutual support, socialization, and growth. The fire station proposed would be in a central point of Skid Row with accessibility to fire services and resources for the community alleviating the pressure from the local fire station. The composition seeks to elevate the youth towards prosperity, which can play a key role towards the future of Skid Row.

5th Street Library

Allen Wang, Rowland Heights CA

Libraries have historically often been used by single individuals with the intent of amassing an archive of vast knowledge and information. Within the last 100 years, libraries started including more community aspects with the intent of sharing the knowledge found within the library and provide a space for communities to interact and exchange ideas.

This project aims to create a hub for the Skid Row community to allow everyone to have a meaningful space to gather, learn, and make. The library spaces provide room for individual learning through physical and digital mediums.

The community spaces provide areas for working together, exchanging knowledge and create in an interactive mode. The two programs allow for users to bounce back and forth between individual and interactive spaces to fit their needs while also creating inclusivity within the surrounding communities.

The project consists of two monolithic towers that are connected by a glass volume.

The glass volume provides open and light filled spaces, while the towers provide more closed and intimate spaces. A tree like structural system reaches through the open spaces and creates connections and openings between floors levels.

A Structure of Feeling Public Library and Homeless Center

Amy Suzuki, Rancho Palos Verdes CA

Today’s libraries are in a transitional period where knowledge has become widely accessible through the internet and is no longer tied to a physical building. How can a library continue to serve society and be more than merely a place for storage? Libraries today serve as hubs of culture, and communal gatherings and exchange. How can structure encourage a series of actions?

How can architecture activate a social space? I decided to create figures out of the structural diagram as an attempt to answer these questions.

As a public library situated in the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles, the ground and second floor provide an expansive flexible space that acts as a community center and homeless resource center. Using large operable doors, the ground floor facing Gladys St can completely open up to the street to welcome anyone to come in, while a grand public stair invites visitors from 5th St up to the library floors. Flexible open plans allow for changes as the needs of the library develops overtime. By creating figures within the structure, this project hopes to provide not only a functional and adaptable library but provide beautiful spaces to those most deprived of it.

Grid, Objects and the In-between Space Community Art Therapy Center

Antonio Carbajal, Las Vegas NV

Skid Row is a neighborhood in Los Angeles that lacks in community, art and cultural spaces. Research has shown that art can be used as therapy as it provides a creative outlet for self-expression, self-discovery, and selfempowerment. At the same time, mental health issues are common among residents of Skid Row and depression and anxiety are more prevalent than ever.

Providing a public, social space for people to create art and express themselves could alleviate some of the issues that the residents of Skid row are facing.

Located on the corner of Fifth and San Pedro, this project sits in the heart of Skid Row, locating it near local infrastructure and services. Architecturally, the structural grid is at the forefront, it is exposed, celebrated and part of the architecture. Within this grid, gabled volumes are placed, causing a break in the grid. Programmatically, the volumes become spaces to display and exhibit the art that is being created within the building. The open spaces around the volumes become common areas that are used to teach, educate, produce and mentally recuperate. The building is a study of the grid, volumes and in between space.

Intersection for Interaction Community and Recreation Center

Cyrus Yat Long Leung, Hong Kong

Within the Skid Row neighborhood there are only two small communal spaces serving the area, which is not enough space for group activities and human interactions to happen. The proposed project is a community and recreation center located at the East corner of San Pedro Street and 5th Street. This busy intersection creates an opportunity for the center to become a magnet that can attract people from the area.

The center’s program is a combination of physical and static activities, which aims to bring individuals with different interests under the same roof. It consists of a branch library, multipurpose and activity rooms, physical therapy, swimming pool, gymnasium, and a multi-game court. While interactions normally happen horizontally, the possibility of interactions happening both horizontally and vertically is explored by designing a communal volume connecting different programs at the center. The lower levels are two building blocks with elevated walkways and stairs crisscrossing in-between, encouraging public movement and interactions.

This outdoor communal space acts like a vertical street and brings spontaneous interactions from the sidewalk to the center of the building. It serves as a crossing point and offers possibilities for positive encounters and dialogues to happen.

Emerging Library Engaging people with science

Dariush Seddighzadeh, Irvine CA

Skid Row is a neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles with a population of 11,000 residents. However, more than 30 percent of its population is unhoused with over 3000 people living in shelters and street encampments. Space for specialized community services should be developed to provide a safe space focused on education and development for the unhoused. The project consists of a library that supports interactive, physical and digital information within responsive and transparent spaces. The library will engage its patrons through educational programs provided within a transparent and open building.

A central open stair connects the different public programs spatially and provides an open and engaging space. A protected and private middle floor houses specific services for the unhoused where they can engage with each other and access social services. Individual small rooms are provided along the exit stair cores to provide temporary shelter for short term occupancies.

The public and private program are expressed architecturally as an open glass building, bisected by a more solid concrete volume. Thin metal screens on the facade create a secondary skin to provide shade and additional privacy on the outdoor terraces and street level.

The Stacks Library / Community Center

David Sierra Echeverri, Medellin Colombia

The proposed library and community center aims to address the lack of recreational and educational spaces in Skid Row. The combination of these contrasting programs provides a wide variety of services due to their components. The library offers spaces for education and networking. In contrast, the community center provides recreation space and showers for the unhoused community. The project fosters the interaction between the homeless population and residents of adjacent communities through sports and education. In conjunction, these programs transcend socioeconomic status and barriers, therefore simplifying human interaction.

Located at the intersection of 5th Street and Central Ave, the site geometry is a result of two rotated urban grids. This unique property provides an opportunity to develop an iconic structure that enriches the community. Its location at the perimeter of Skid Row could categorize it as a gateway, explicit and symbolic, bringing aid to a district in need. On the other hand, it welcomes individuals to a culturally rich and diverse neighborhood with potential for growth. The development of a library and community center can attract individuals from other districts and generate a social focal point. It would help those in need to leave poverty while inviting others to visit.

Cachito Arts and Recreational Center

Francisco Contreras, Los Angeles CA

When we talk about Skid Row we often think of violence, poverty, crime, drugs, and we hardly ever picture kids living in those conditions. Unfortunately, part of the Skid Row population includes children and teenagers. Their living conditions permanently affect them physically and emotionally.

Furthermore, there is no space that caters to their basic needs such as safe spaces to grow, share, and enjoy their life as any kid should.

Arts and sports can be a gateway to escape reality while also learning something that people can take with them through life. Therefore, I am proposing a mixed program building where arts and sports come together to help this community find a fulfilling path in life. This is a space where kids and teens from Skid Row and surrounding communities can gather and find a passion for a sport or develop artistic skills that can later become a career.

Each floor in the building provides a learning spaces that include a swimming pool, studio and art spaces, gym, running track, climbing wall, basketball, racquetball, and soccer court. The ground floor serves as the main gathering space which consists of a skatepark, and a plaza for public events.

Coterie Community Recreation and Aquatics Center

George Garcia, Las Vegas NV

Coterie is defined as group of people with a unifying common interest or purpose. Although the residents of skid row and the homeless live in two completely different worlds, they share this community together and have common interests they can pursue together. Building a rec center in Skid Row not only adds a place for the youth and adults in the area to spend their time but also creates a civic space that assists the homeless.

The project offers a multitude of programs that will add to a neighborhood that lacks public and communal spaces. The elevated building creates an open ground floor that accommodates an outdoor sports area. A middle floor serves as a lobby and elevated outdoor plaza, where one can go to the public indoor pool below or enter the community center above.

The square floor plan is laid out along a rotated grid that responds to the site and creates diverse and specific spatial qualities. While the use of concrete is utilitarian, the waffle slab structure provides carved ceilings unique to each program. An open courtyard resides in the heart of the building, bringing sunlight all the way to the pool level.

Community Alliance Fire Station / Social Services

Jack Hamilton, Corona CA

This project aims to introduce a unique and targeted program to Skid Row, one of the most underserved areas of Los Angeles. Working with public facility programs, this project aims to fill the gaps within the services that the city provides and focus on the areas of the population that could benefit the most from assistance. The program of this building engages with the community in a progressive way by integrating a fire station, social services and supportive housing under one roof. The fire department will be able to work together with social services to support the community its serves in a more holistic way.

On the ground level, a two-story plinth building contains the fire station and provides an open plaza on its roof. On top of the plinth, a slender multistory slab building contains the social services and housing. Exterior stairs and hallways create a network of vertical circulation, serving as interactive spaces for the inhabitants while creating a volumetric and expressive façade.

The Connections of Skid Row Recreational Center with Integrated Homeless Shelter

Jackson Delgado, Highland CA

In dense urban environments such as the Skid Row, buildings and facilities for communal activities are scarce in both quantity and size. In terms of centers for community, Skid Row offers just two public parks for all the residents of the area including large homeless population that resides there. By adding a recreational center with supportive housing and services in the center of Skid Row, this project aims to explore how to facilitate community in a dense urban environment by focusing on creating an open and inclusive built environment for the residents.

Within a regulating structural grid, private spaces are enclosed, and public spaces are open to the air, creating two distinct spatial environments. A mostly open ground level provides space for a variety of programs, such as a weekly farmers market or public events that engage the local community.

Sculptural stairs guide people through the building vertically and create orientation points within the repetitive grid structure. Colored concrete creates different experiences on the individual levels and gives each floor its own identity. The rigid grid of the building shows itself on the façade, but starts to twist and skew slightly, softening the buildings edge to the exterior.

Corner Library Public Library in Skid Row, Los Angeles

Jacob Struble, Corona CA

When we think of the Skid Row neighborhood, what comes to mind are affordable housing, charitable services, and the homelessness crisis, but missing are public and community institutions. There are thousands of permanent residents living in Skid Row aside from the unhoused who will benefit from public services. Libraries in the United States are transitioning from being private archives of books to communal spaces offering public services.

It is for this reason I propose a library to be constructed in Skid Row. The location is the active street corner of 5th and San Pedro to maximize its outreach.

The architecture will explore the dichotomy between libraries being historically centers of learning and contemporarily institutions of public service. Today, people visit libraries for numerous reasons, so the building should allow for flexibility and future changes in program. The new library consists of two vertical slabs that provide space for circulation and services within their poche space. Between the slabs, free spanning floors create large and open double height spaces that allow for flexible floor layouts that are adaptable to different functions. The solemn yet playful exterior reflects the civic nature of the building within the urban fabric of Los Angeles.

Skid Row Public Pool and Library Community Resource and Recreational Space

Jean Olmsted, Hong Kong SAR

My project situates a library on top of a public pool within Skid Row, intending to provide equity in public space, resources and recreation for the residents and surrounding communities. By aligning administrative and circulation spaces in a L-shaped core on the inner infill condition of the site, the rest of the building is freed up to correspond to short-term and long-term programmatic configurations.

The core and the free plan operates between lightness and heaviness and centers upon the public experience of the library and pool, while the L-core is concealed with reflective metal. The exterior is wholly clad with translucent and reflective polycarbonate and acrylic, giving the effect of a sheer or implied volume and an ambient, diffused interior. The programmed volumes within the library are similarly dissolved by use of glass and reflective metal. My project emphasizes the clarity and hierarchy of circulatory, structural and operational systems and explores various types of thresholds to merge and delineate space. The surface and material manipulation of the perceptive experience is meant to be a generator of a new architectural language of public space, serving those who are arguably in need of public space, proper resources, and recreational opportunities the most.

1.

Riley, T. (1995). Light construction. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

2.

Koolhaas, R., & Mau, B. (1993). Typical Plan. S, M, L, XL. Monacelli Press.

3.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). The Smooth and the Striated.

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Penguin Classics.

Canvas Art Therapy Center

Julie Habib, La Verne CA

An art therapy center can help the unhoused population of Skid Row by providing a space for focused creativity and help them integrate back into society at their own pace. The proposed center is meant to bring the positive effects of art into Skid Row through a combination of artistic activities and counseling.

The center is comprised of a variety of work spaces that are designed to spark creativity and conversations. The spaces allow for different community members to come together, engage with each other and gain a different perspective of their own struggles. The gallery spaces located throughout the building, as well as the open ground floor, are not only meant to showcase their work and continue the conversation but also to be a representation of their progress. Counseling spaces allow for personal interactions with healthcare providers, teachers and social workers.

The form of the building is direct reflection of the geometry of the site to allow for maximum square footage. The facade takes advantage of all the natural sunlight while providing a sense of privacy. The cores that lift the building are comprised of services, such as egress and restrooms, to allow for a flexible floor plan.

The Rec Complex Recreational Facility

Katina Velasquez, Porterville CA

Downtown Los Angeles is a diverse community, home to people of all ages, races, and ethnicities. However, this area also exemplifies the need for belonging within the community as this area is home to a large homeless population. This project aims to address inclusivity as a theme with a new public building in Skid Row. The developed program does not direct itself towards one group in the area but the community as a whole. The issue at hand revolves around a lack of resources when it comes to safe space and educational programs. Individuals in the area have little access to recreation and leisure outside of their own homes. I am proposing a recreational center with the aim to provide resources and space to allow for the residents to have social and cultural exchanges as a larger community.

The proposed building will house a mix of library and recreational programs within one structure. The different programs are stacked vertically and allow for exchange between the different users. The building volume and floor plans follows a geometric language of curves to create a building that lets spaces flow into each other and to create spatial connections within.

Tower of Opportunity Recreation Center and Library Tower

Ronald Ng-Alberto, Castaic CA

The proposed project is a recreation center and library at the eastern edge of 5th St in Skid Row. This new building will provide much needed community space in an underserved area. The recreation center with a basketball court and exercise facilities will allow residents to partake in physical activities, both individual and in groups. The library program will provide educational and informational resources to the residents and assist them with accessing social services. Hopefully this program will work towards assisting people in finding a way out of permanent homelessness and find a way back into a more stable life.

The building consist of a base containing the recreation center and two towers on top, housing the public library. A sculptural stair leads to a raised plaza to enter the library. Precast concrete is used to build a structure that is both permanent and flexible, while also being cost effective. A simple glass facade offers views across the city and allows the sculptural qualities of the precast structure to be visible from the outside. Hopefully this new tower building will become a beacon of opportunity for the entire neighborhood.

The Community Room Community Center

Rosalia Perez Romero, Indio CA

The community center at Skid Row, in Los Angeles, intends to provide functional and flexible spaces for visitors and community members. The current urban fabric lacks the spaces that are needed to house creative, educational and public service programs in this location. Its purpose is to serve as a living room, where people can come to participate, read, sit or watch along with others. It is meant as a site for social interactions and explorations, that are expressed throughout the use of visual transparency, gathering spaces and a dynamic central corridor.

Architecturally, the project reflects the historic building typology of surrounding structures through its use of heavy precast concrete elements, while also embracing modern lightweight technologies in the use of glass walls and mesh facades.

Program items include studios, classrooms, community rooms, kitchens, a library and gymnasium. All of which have adaptable qualities and plans to accommodate community, family, group or individual activities, while providing visual and direct access to the outdoors. It is important that all community members have access to spaces with programs that enrich their mind and body, as well as a built environment that is inviting and universal for current and future needs.

Façades and Falsity: Skid Row Public Library Community Library and Homeless Resource Center

Tyler Karasawa, Cypress CA

The Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles is well known for having one of the highest densities of unhoused individuals in the United States. This notoriety, in conjunction with the region’s disconnect to its surroundings, has resulted in a stigmatization of the community and the origins of homelessness overall. With the proposal for a public library, this thesis aims to combat the misunderstandings of homelessness through the creation of a shared space for the people of Skid Row that is considerate of their specific needs and desires. This library will serve as a space for interaction and a place that serves to the different needs of all residents.

The project looks to the architectural history of Los Angeles as a precedent for design, considering the influence of Hollywood and show business on the city. Los Angeles in part can be seen as an interplay between building façades and their interior spaces, developing out of the pseudo-grandeur of stage sets. Embodied through the idea of an “architectural shell”, the project serves as an investigation into this relationship between the building and its façade, the exterior and its relation or disassociation with the interior, derived from the influences of film and theater.