theLARGE LECTUREproject
Roger Nunez
LA 203, 2015
Table of Contents -The Lexicon _Composing Landscapes - Subject, Method, Technique _Projective Ecology - Flood Control Freakology: Los Angeles River Watershed _Composing Landscapes - Typology _Rambunctious Garden - Ch.9: Conservation Everywhere _Susan Mases - Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden Lecture _Sou Fujimoto - U.C.L.A. Lecture _Gabriel Fries-Briggs - U.C.L.A. Lecture _Greg Lynn - C.P.P. Lecture
Metaphorical To represent an obeject with more than just one sense. The ‘Rio Hondo’ does not have any section that is an actual ‘Deep River’, but rather it is a cut out of Los Angeles which allows the city to live. It is a river of life, not simply water.
- I captured a scene where the natural world was expressed the best. Here is a section of the Rio Hondo with trash and graffiti running through the dry riverbed.
Here the smooth curvilinear lines illustrate the flow of the river and the scraps of trash represent the topography in relation to how this new ecology directs the river.
Lexicon
Enmeshed The experience of feeling completely enveloped in a new dynamic. Stepping into the channel, one feels pulled away from the city, enveloped in a new setting of concrete, water, and life.
Interplay At first sight one quickly notices the differences in life such as the ducks interacting with all the trash that has accumulated, taking advantage of the vegetation that has been able to grow due to the water and sediments getting trapped in the trash.
Over time mounds of vegetation accumulate and create mini ecologies. Here a daily chair has become a focal point of the relationships formed in the river and shows unique interactions.
Trying to show the potential for life to flourish being pinned in an environment where nature is paved over, the ecology of the river manages to keep breathing and living and attracting life.
The transparency in the red line expresses the effects from its environment. Being able to distinguish differences in the same object based on the surroundings is important to understand a site.
The horizontal lines are parallel all flowing in a harmonious form and are obscured when they come in contact with an object in their path. But the line find a way to coexist and the interplay between the object and the flow is shown.
Reduction
There is a huge reduction in nature as you travel north from Whittier Narrows, it is an interesting experience the first time one visits the site. I was struck by the sudden stop of nature once I arrived at the Rush St intersection, the thinning out of nature shows the reduction caused by industrialization.
Boundaries
Walking through the channel, all you see are different limits and restrictions for nature, for visitors, for life. Trying to control such an entity with so many components is impossible, you may be able to direct the flow for a certain time, but nature will cross over.
The hard barren landscape is transformed by the persistence of nature to grow. The cracks in the infrastructure are enough opportunity to let plants flourish through. On the floor, a different partition is created by trash holding sediments and promoting plant growth.
The drastic stop in vegetation is shown as the channelizing of the river takes over the landscape. What was an ecology of lush green life is drastically reduced into a barren flat land where life is stretched to to extremes and finds ways to flourish.
What seems to be a solid block is cut by a thin path way, the path of nature. Even being so minute, nature finds the potential here to thrive and breaks the limits of the pavement.
The dynamic variations of the shapes seem free and spontaneous as they grow but come to a complete halt. When trying to design for this site, it was difficult to figure out what to create to promote and encourage life to seep into the river again.
Framework
The support system for Los Angeles is in large The Los Angeles River, allowing the city to live and function. The vascular structure of the rio hondo supports numerous forms of life and cut infrastructure.
The supporting columns are the support system for the bridge and the ecology of the river has also turned them in to the support system for different forms of life. There are vines that grow vertical clinging to the columns and there is a dense formation of ecologies all along the bottom.
Vascular Flowing through the river is more than just water, there is a flow of nature, a flow of community, a flow of labor, a flow of support for the city. I can notice the channel is a highway for the community and is a great opportunity to improve circulation.
Along the channel there are numerous connections to different systems. Here the pipe is a connection to a system in the city, the leak coming from the pipe creates a new system, the small amount of water forms a system along the channel floor.
The straight lines are the support system for the cubes. Layering the structures over each other creates different support systems of their own. In relation to the Rio Hondo, the simple support systems are multilayered and support numerous ecologies.
Each line is a direction of flow, showing the structure of the system. Putting the different systems together forms a complex matrix and creates an entire new system.
Unnatural
Flexibility The Rio Hondo has been able to adapt to numerous changes in life and improve ecologies based on the living circumstances. Life in the Rio Hondo does not stay idle, it is constantly changes.
The channel is not considered a river by many. It is not a natural occurrence, the life within it does not happen in nature. But the Rio Hondo has created its own definition of nature and with that it has also created new ecologies.
In the photo, the unnatural is shown as the main support for a ecology of algae that has begun to grow on the river floor. At first, I pictured this assignment to be much more inclined on the infrastructure of the city, the first first thoughts when I learned my site were, well where is the landscape going to come from. But the entire channel changes and turns into numerous landscapes, here it seems as if the ducks are in a completely different area.
Showing the how a symbiotic relationship is formed from two unlikely objects is supported along the river floor and creates numerous ecologies to form all along the The flow within the two parallel lines shows the dynamic change that occurs within the channel, although the channel very still and monotonous, it is able to support a constant change, making it dynamic as well.
Dendritic The river has numerous forces acting on and it is also acting in numerous ways itself. There are many sources that create a complex multi branching system for the Rio Hondo and in the Rio Hondo itself, there are numerous systems formed based on the sources themselves.
A culmination of different lifes is shown here, the industrial life in the background, an aquatic ecology in relation to the synthetic shoreline of factories and across is a landscape covered in vegetation, creating a unique environment from all the sources.
The branching systems are a support for numerous bubbles of ecologies that form, whether they form by being held back by a piece of glass or growing over clothes that have trapped numerous sediments.
Interested Readings Projective Ecologies: Designing Ecologies
Nature and human culture are two very different things that must be united in order to create a future for ourselves. Past designs are centered around creating the romantic landscape as an improvement to what is there presently. That notion is what is creating an incorrect landscape, it goes to both extremes, we are not creating a balance between the different lives. From the start of the design process, one must always have in consideration both spectrums, what the land needs and what the person needs. If we give the same weight to the needs of the environment as we would to the placement of our flat screen television in our living room, the world would be paved in a much different organized matter. The different relationships that would arise by simply studying ecologies along structures in a coherent fashion would be enough aid to design a new landscape. As the relationships reveal themselves, your design does as well. I wish I would have applied this notion a lot more, better said to every thought process I had this quarter. Our design along the Rio Hondo was created from a design perspective, not from an investigative perspective.
Rambunctious Garden: Wedding the Jungle
Marris states that we should find a new approach to promote the rehabilitation of nature in our world. I agree with her approach, we should focus on promoting what present ecosystems live instead of creating past ecosystems that did not include us. That will not work, humans and all the pollution we create is unfortunately part of present ecosystems. We need to consider every aspect of life instead of trying to recreate it and make it perfect, nothing is perfect. By trying to construct something that does not naturally occur will require a lot maintenance and effort from the creators, huge golf courses are beautiful, but cost millions to maintain. Instead of creating beautiful scenes, Merris wants to take the natural occurrences of life and help them flourish. A naturally occurring system of life does not require any extra input, and will promote an abundance of biodiversity being free to expand as nature intended.
Parallel Genealogies Putting humans above nature as the dictators of the land has been the greatest downfall for our civilization. We need to understand the balance between the natural sciences and humanities in order to create a design that is beneficial to our world. Humans create with the notion that we are in total control, we want to control nature and design extravagant areas believing that nature will stay where we place it, but nature in constantly changing. Until we stop trying to direct and limit nature, we will never design with its full potential. As a new designer I need to grasp this notion and place myself within the ecosystem that I am designing for, in order to understand the dynamics of it. The future of this area of study depends on the way we approach them from the very beginning, from the start we need to be thinking about the future, how will my design change, what will cause it to change and how can I help that change bring about the best ecologies, when designing for such a diverse site such as the Rio Hondo, I need to keep reminding myself about these key points in order to create something that is worth it.
Composing Landscapes: The Design Experiment
The notion of layering is explained well to me in this reading. Layering is a form of experimentation to see how a design will affect surrounding systems. Before a design can be formulated, we need to see what designs are allowed and needed, we should not design simply based on looks. Layering transparencies and hatches is the process used in order to find opportunities, not to show a persons findings. I approached my deliverables from the point of view of expression instead of investigation. The hatches are meant to show my journey and in parts where they over lap is where the different systems can create symbiotic relationships if we can create a design that will help promote both ecosystems. The process of experimenting through layers of patterns was new to me, but through many defeats in designs, the idea of exploration finally sunk in. If I had tried to tell a story rather than show my findings, I would have developed a better design that would have given me what I was looking for, the correlations between nature and the community.
Witnessing Discussions
Susan Mases - Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden Lecture
Ms Mases took a very structured approach to design, with a very deep understanding of flora. For her site, she kept iterating plant management and the control of pedestrian flow. She explained how visitors to the park are attracted more to certain plants, and this notion was new to me, to think about the lack of beauty a flower has as an opportunity to manage the flow of people. Mases was using less attractive foliage to keep visitors from steering off her designated path by applying wonderful plants in a visitors point of view and not distracting from their focus. Using visuals as a director and taking it a step further by using the lack of visuals even more effective to create smilingly barriers is a task that requires deep insight. She studied her site based on flora, on seasons and how the vegetation changes on flowering schedules based on season, on temperature, and on the flow of people, her study techniques can be applied to this project because she layered her findings to create the best path for her site, as should I, use my findings to layer and create the most opportunities.
Sou Fujimoto - U.C.L.A. Lecture
Mr Fujimoto has many relations to our investigative process, except our design process is his application. One of his design is the void home, where he took a home and created layers of voids to form the roof and walls. He described it as creating boundaries but being able to experience being in the wide open at the same time. His approach seems to be to create experiences and moments for his visitors but not letting them know what exactly they are feeling, so that they can create their experiences instead of him giving them experiences. Fujimoto creates mystery in his designs, like the library he designed, he formed that in a way where a person will always have to be guessing what is going to be around the next corner, as I was sitting in that lecture, it clicked that, that is how I felt during my site visits to the Rio Hondo, as I traveled down the channel, I did not know what to expect, I was expecting to see nothing but hard flat planes, but instead I was struck by a mini forests under bridges. The Rio Hondo has naturally created what Fujimoto creates, a sense of mystery and awe.
Gabriel Fries-Briggs - U.C.L.A. Lecture
Gregg Lynn - C.P.P. Lecture Briggs talked a lot about design process as well. Big part of his presentation kept reminding me of Fall quarter where we were finding forms. He explained the process he took to find forms for piping, to get the best flow through systems. One of his methods was very interesting, he found the best flow by looking for the voids before he looked for a design. He would construct an experimental system and fill the voids with expanding foam to later extract path ways for systems. It never came to mind to look for systems by finding voids in a representational cube like he did. This was a literal approach to integrate systems, because the systems he found were already integrated, this refinement of system investigations would be ideal for our site to find dynamics within the ecologies of the river. By experimenting with the flow of water or the path of an ant and mapping out their trajectory, one can extract different systems that are already occurring.
Lynn was a very simplistic designer, but through his simplicity, the context of his designs created complexity, which is what we all should have done for our designs. Lynn showed his example of a carbon fiber chair, that was incredibly striking. It was simple in shape and in application, it was able to fold away and pop up back into a shape of a chair and perform its program, but because of his context of making things as simple as possible and creating a seat that could be put away in such a minuscule and simple way made the chair amazing. He emphasized simple curves and simple surfaces and simple applications, so the systems of his designs can flow with each other with ease. He reduces components to innovate and discover, if we had taken away components from our site, and reduced it to a simple curve, we could not have been able to fully relate our design to our site and create a coherent system of ecologies, his application would be wonderful after our investigation.
The requirements for this quarter sound attainable but will require a lot of effort. I am scared at the idea of layering as a design process as it is very new and different to me. I feel as if my thought process will be challenged and thrown back at me a lot and that will create difficulties for this project. I’m also concerned with the amount of time that will be required, for project two, I personally felt that my commitment was being tested when I stayed in studio, and already for this third phase the requirement of time is far greater and I have spent more time in studio than before. I have always been the one to work at home, but working with a group now will certainly proof to be a difficult management aspect of this project. I am a great team member so I know I will work great with anyone and will do my best.
Personal Introspection
At this point, it is crazy to think I am capable of putting in so much time and effort, I did not know I could push through and meet a deadline under the pressure I was under. I feel as if I can complete this project, I can complete anything that is required. I learned to manage my time different, and fully change my mentality on how to plan my priorities. I plan my days as if leaving studio is an errand and being in studio is at home, and nights became abnormal towards the end. Nights are the productive time of day, after the responsibilities of life have been taken care of, the design thoughts that encompass my life while at work or home or in the bank can fall out, but the restrictions and requirements of the project make my thoughts worthless. The biggest lesson I have sitting in studio right now is, failure and perseverance is a choice of which you accept and focus on.