Little Los Angeles

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LITTLE LOS ANGELES Tianci Han

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Roman Antiques, 1756, and Ichnographia Campi Martii antiquae urbis, 1762

In The Roman Antiques, Piranesi reimagined the city of Rome based on series of fragments each of which conjures to a bigger picture as a whole city. These fragments are relics of ancient Rome composed of different monuments, public spaces, and residences. Los Angeles is also a city that can be easily categorized by a series of typical urban figures, gas stations, mini-malls, parking lots and apartment buildings. Thousands years later, when the whole city of Los Angeles is totally abandoned, people can still imagine the image of the entire city according to the remained relics of these typical LA figures. This intimate relationship between typical urban figures and the urban context is more clearly articulated by the documenting artworks of contemporary artists like Catherine Opie and Ed Ruscha, from 1960’s to 1970’s. Thanks to Ed Ruscha and the followers inspired by him, we can see that the image of complicated Los Angeles can be easily understood as a collage of ordinary objects,‘Twentysix Gasoline Stations’, ‘Thirty-four Parking Lots’, ‘Fifteen Pornography Companies’, ‘Ten Convenient store’, ‘Thirty-six Fire Stations’, etc. Altogether, they are Los Angeles. They are the new monuments of Los Angeles. They are also the key elements when we try to redesign a micro city in order to condense all types of Los Angeles characteristics in a concise way.

Los Angeles Monuments

Fabio Calvo, Antiquae urbis Romae cum regionibus simulachrum, 1527

Los Angeles Dream / Reality

Based on our urban observations we find even for such a large and diverse city as Los Angeles, people have the similar dream to live or come to this city. That is the dream to pursue ease, convenience, and freedom of movement, in a flat and smooth surface. Everything is fast, convenient and easy-going. But the reality of the city is not so flat and smooth. It’s actually very topographical and contested. So our first trials are thinking about the binary relationship between a dream-like urban typology and a representation for the reality of LA.

Los Angeles Line of Desires

Los Angeles Topography Study and the Urban Figures Applied Onto It

The combination of dream and reality is realized through different urban figures which have the neutral attitude and highly typological.

They are like containers of people’s elemental wants, including people’s demand for sleeping, eating, shopping and moving. They are very generic and crucial for the urban experience. At the same time they are also very flexible to adapt to different contexts and topography. These figures are like the basic components for your dream and at the same time realize your dream in the real city. So these urban figures are crucial for the experience in this city but at the same time we don’t sense them as figures. They form a continuous system which let you touch on the ground or at least feel like on the ground all the time. You drive in a continuous system to different figures where you experience some urban life in a more detailed way. You don’t mind the form behind the facade but just read or sense the contents from the interface. we can pick up a lot of formal languages from them we can use in the future design.

Los Angeles’ Way to Increase the Urban Desntiy By Folding the Surface

Bird View of Little Los Angeles

In the meantime, we bring in a new road in our project represent the line of desires. It is a continuous linear traffic system which entangles itself with all the architectural objects in a three dimensional way. Also this continuous line reflects the desire of the whole project to increase the density by folding and squeezing the original urban surface, rather than a easy way to erect up vertical towers. This is important to keep Los Angeles style. Los Angeles always tries to fold or squeeze its urban surface to accommodate more contents inside and still keeps the horizontality which has close relationship with the ground and automobile driving. This creates a kind of tension hidden under the urban form between the demand to increase urban density and the style to stay with endless flatness. The design of the ‘Line of Desires’ integrates the separate architectural objects together as a whole while still keeping them as distinct figures with their own morphological properties and higher urban density.

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Draft Version (Uncolored)

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Series of Section Drawings Cutting Apart the Line of Desires

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Typical Billboards or Commercial Ads Seen on the Streets of Los Angeles

Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. - Frank Llyod Wright.

This wise quotation from Frank Llyod Wright also reminds us of Rem Koolhaas’ famous essay on ‘Junk Space’, focused around the residue and negative space mankind leaves in the city. In Los Angeles, the urban ‘junk’ is even more vivid and diverse that they are the main characters in the city, instead of the well organised street space and meticulously designed architecture. The billboards, ads, and garish decoration on the buildings are everywhere that they are part of people’s daily life to provide necessary information and create an easy-going living environment. These loose stuff also reflects the lack of seriousness and monumentality in the urban contents of Los Angeles. They become part of the elemental features for the nature of the city and key objects to reorganize on for the redesign of a new micro-city of Los Angeles.

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Exploded Diagram for Little Los Angeles and its Loose Stuff

This is a new micro city trying to represent the typical characteristics of the hugeness, diversity, complexity and a higher density of the original Los Angeles. Due to the ethnical diversity in the city, Los Angeles is kind of well known for its large range of minority people’s communities with condensed living environment and styles linked to their original cultures. We have little Tokyo, little Armenia, little Ethiopia and Little Persia. In the future, we will also have a little Los Angeles for people to rethink the urban experience in a both familiar and strange way. The entangled and collaged urban images of the original Los Angeles will create a new urban environment where people not only get nostalgic recollection they are familiar with, but also look forward a futuristic living style which is absent in the present. It is literally a city in the city.

Typical Floor Plan Drawing

East Elevation

South Elevation

Bird View of Little Los Angeles

In the future we will be nostalgic for the present.

As Los Angeles confronts the need to densify, we propose a strategy to do so in a fashion that preserves and amplifies the experience of the city today, and makes good on its longstanding promise of a lifestyle of convenience and rich experience.

Fundamental to our phenomenological interpretation of the city is the idea that it is built by an urbanism of desire, connecting programs through continuous surface and the impression of horizontal movement. We observe that Los Angeles is topographically complex but feels “flat” from the perspective of the user because it is constructed on a continuous paved surface, with little to no threshold between parking and the contents of its structures. We also observe that the city strives towards the synoptic view: the hillside house that frames the panoramic urban spread below.

And so, the first engine of the project is a continuous paved Spine, lifted off the ground plane and compressed through switchbacks, along which residences are arranged. The spine becomes the crest of a constructed topography, serving as a plinth or “thickened ground” into which a wealth of other programs are intercalated, all connected to arterial roads and the Spine itself through grading and exterior ramps.

The second driver of the project is the ground plane itself. The adjacency of the site to the Los Angeles River offers the opportunity to lead in a system of channels, carved to maximize cooling winds during peak summer heat. We slice the building by the channel and further sculpt the profile of its facades to provide light and shading from the sun.

Tianci Han 06-2016