The California Plaza

Jonathan Cooper & Marco Tadros

Los Angeles is a city of great diversity, which gave us a chance to find a new LA that is embedded in Los Angeles that we can understand and simplify into rules of intensity that we can accelerate to get to our density, We explored the bunker hill area for the public to private relation that is already intense in the bunker hill area.

Using the California plaza, along with other references from the bunker hill area, to form our precedent study to answer the question “How to densify Los Angeles?”. This precedent allowed for several different interpretations of the densification dilemma to be formulated and implemented.

These interpretations include a new reading of the relationship of “public to private” and “private to public”. Examples of this include a public stairway that starts on the public sidewalk that leads to a private part of the building that extends over and covers the public street below. Furthermore this private building has columns that support it that are built on public space forming a “new Infrastructure” idea. The next reading comes from a public plaza that is carved out of the top of this same private space, that is accessed from the other side of the building from the public street.

These sets of rules were used as a guide to help inform the placement of the new infrastructure.

First step was choosing a fairly generic site with enough variety in urban grain and road hierarchy to allow for different types of implementation. The first implementation of the rules was looking for appropriately sized building from the built environment of Los Angeles with a proportionally sized mass to cover, bridge, or extend over the different road/Public spaces in the site. The second rule was re -creating that public space on top of the added building, by carving out a public space. The next step was creating secondary connections between buildings to make an interconnected mass that has connections to different public and private parts of our site and buildings.

By doing so our rule becomes the inhabiting of infrastructure to create a new type of infrastructure that duplicates the space by moving the “right of the public space” to the top of the added building. And reuses the “privately owned public spaces” to create publicly owned private spaces that originate from that transfer of rights vertically and horizontally.

Two California Plaza, Arthur Erickson

California Plaza was a winning entry in an international developer/architect competition for the redevelopment of 11 acres of land (four downtown city blocks) in the Bunker Hill Redevelopment area of Los Angeles. The proposal includes over a million square feet of office space, 750 units of condominium housing, a 400-room luxury hotel, 82,000 square feet of retail space; and a 33,000 square feet Museum of Contemporary Arts. The project urban design concept is to integrate the project’s diverse uses with the surrounding area and provide an active link between the down-town office core andthe Music Centre, at opposite ends of the site. The solution incorporates cultural, recreational and commercial activities, which combine to create a new public and commercial focus for the greater Los Angeles region.

Source: Arthur Erickson, California Plaza