2021 Degree Project & Graduate Thesis by Woodbury School of Architecture

2021

Degree Project & Graduate Thesis

SOA LEADERSHIP

LOS ANGELES FACULTY

Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter

Bachelor of Architecture

Dean

Architecture Chair, Los Angeles

Bailey Shugart Anali Gharakhani Berenika Boberska Ewan Branda

Lara Hoad

Master of Architecture

Heather Flood

Interior Design Chair, Los Angeles

Ryan Tyler Martinez

Jose Parral

Bachelor of Fine Arts, Interior Design

Architecture Chair, San Diego

Mark Ericson ACS - Media Arts Chair, Los Angeles

Aaron Gensler Assistant Architecture Chair, Los Angeles

Heather Peterson

Master of Interior Design Heather Peterson

ACS - Media Arts Mark Ericson & Nikita Pashenkov

SAN DIEGO FACULTY Bachelor of Architecture David Pearson & Mikaela Pearson

Master of Architecture David Pearson & Mikaela Pearson

20213

ARCHITECTURE

BArch Faculty Faculty Bailey Shugart Anali Gharakhani Berenika Boberska Ewan Branda

Los Angeles

ACS - MEDIA ARTS Los Angeles

INTERIOR DESIGN

MArch Faculty

Ryan Tyler Martinez

ACS-MA Faculty

Mark Ericson & Nikita Pashenkov

BFA Faculty

Heather Peterson

MID Faculty

Heather Peterson

103

BArch Faculty

David Pearson Mikaela Pearson

107

MArch Faculty

David Pearson Mikaela Pearson

121

Los Angeles

ARCHITECTURE San Diego

5 19 35 51

2021 Architecture Class

STUDENTS Leonardo Acevedo Reema Aljasser Hamad Alshammari Andrew Barraza Patrick Castro Ricardo Jimenez Mosqueda Jose Montano Ryana Rangel Karla Sandoval Biayna Torossian Melissa Uyuni Raymond Vartan Benny Wu

Bailey Shugart Instructor

PER[FORM]ANCE: A MONTAGE METROPOLIS “The theater, in which architecture serves as a possible background, a setting, a building that can be calculated and transformed into the measurements and concrete materials of an often elusive feeling, has been one of my passions.”- Aldo Rossi 1979 This course explorers the cinematics of architectural performance in the city. Cinematography plays a vital role in how we will envision the new metropolis through the process of cutting and pasting (in this case, montage) as oppose to collage. The course will aim to develop an entirely new city based on the research of past cities combined with the advancing technologies of today. Our research will begin from exploring the mega scale “City”, down to the personal space “Body”. If we study the city more vigilantly, we will begin to have new ideas for how a metropolis should be designed. What components are necessary? Design acts as a stage for how we perform and communicate – design builds communities. Our goal is to research and create a montage of a performing city. Ultimately the final research produced will be a foundation for the stage for developing our ideas of per[FORM]ance and mobility in the metropolis through the lens of Architecture. Because the main topic of this studio is not about any real context, the students will invent a universal site to support the project. “The city is more than just a complicated pile of regulations and properties. It is the place where culture is made. The city is dramatic theatres where we make and watch stories unfold. We watch people perform, but we are also the performers.” – Hernan Diaz Alonso.

G.L.I.T.C.H

Leonardo Acevedo

My project seeks to use high-density housing as a base model for new single-family typologies, where a dense urban environment and suburban lifestyle can co-exist in a single lot. The glitch helps blend these two typologies and showcases a surreal city that can be formed. High-density housing is typically associated with giant brutalist megastructures where space, light, and form are considered last. This project seeks to focus on these fundamentals in exchange for practicality. The glitch that runs in my project shows how functionality and practicality may be affected; it will correct itself like a glitch. This correction can come in new forms of circulation and transportation, and while one may argue that this may be short-sided, the alternative of continuing to develop for practicality has ended up not working. Allowing these new developments to accrue on single-family designated zones can provide the density required and give new spaces and homes.

X-TRANSPORT

Reema Aljasser

The future of the world lies in its urban environments, and public transportation is an important contributing factor to urban sustainability. It builds thriving communities, creates jobs, eases traffic congestion and promotes a cleaner environment. However, As towns and cities are getting bigger and busier our roads are becoming ever more congested. there are more cars on the roads now than ever before, so people being actively encouraged to use public transport when possible to lighten the load and to ease the pressure. Busses, trains, trams and taxis are a great examples of moving multiple people around with the use of a single vehicle, but its not hard to see that this tech is dated and do a serious upgrade. Today we are looking at the future of public transportation and the vehicles that will change how we move through our cities.

The Sun of Sci fi Museum

Hamad Alshammari

Museums are institutions created in the public interest. They engage their visitors, foster deeper understanding, and promote the enjoyment and sharing of authentic cultural and natural heritage. Museums acquire, preserve, research, interpret and exhibit the tangible and intangible evidence of society and nature. Museums, in their many iterations, can be many things in a com-munity. After 20 years we going to move the museum in different way from now. The plan of the museum to move the museums with more technology technique to get more visitors and create a new atmosphere for the future museum. Use the robot for the movement this is one of the new ideas in the Museum, Also, the robot explains the artwork. When it comes to generating engagement with an audience, one must necessarily turn to interactive technology, which has proven very effective attracting visitors of all ages to cultural institutions all over the world.

A.R.C. Tower

Hi there, I’m Andrew Barraza.

Andrew Barraza

Through guidance of my Professor Bailey Shugart, I have been researching modern urban environments and cinematography techniques to develop a narrative on what I believe the year 2121 will look like. Reflecting on our current global status, the issues of climate change and resource depletion cannot be ignored. We are also enduring a global pandemic in which humanity is fighting a multi-front war against biology and psychology. In the midst of isolation and quarantine, we quickly discovered the need for socialization and recreation. It can be argued that the MVP of this pandemic was technology and its ability to allow us to virtually connect, socialize, and interact with one other. Technology can also be developed to help us restore our relationship with nature. I believe the relationship between technology, nature, and building must be smeared. This proposal is an investigation into how developing technology can collaborate with nature and recreation through architectural design; in order to further enhance the human living condition. This is A.R.C. Tower

Fictional Agents

Patrick Castro

The process of identity formation is not something that we innately possess and reveal, but rather constructed through narratives we conceive in the spaces we have agency over. A new landscape emerges within the context of these systems by human modes of leisure and play shaping fictional externalities against internal dialogue. Reality becomes depicted through physical gestures while fictitious narratives are illustrated by sequences of interactions. Removed from the sphere of familiarity to embrace fictionality, inhabitants are on a journey of self identification through inhibition of spaces. Action creates the carved environment of the villa activated by scales of occasion happening in each environment. Each story becomes a new way of inhabiting the individual and collective wellness experience. Form follows event. Event follows man. Fiction becomes the engine to understand identity in context of the new landscape.

Fragmented

Jose Montano

Fragmented explores the future metropolis as a 3-dimensional space and the convention center’s role within. As the new metropolis transforms into a 3-dimensional context the convention center’s expansive footprint is no longer efficient. The contemporary convention center’s footprint must be broken up, distributed in a decentralized fashion, and stitched back together to make something new. The issue that this project tackles is the issue that plagues city centers everywhere, invasive mega structures that sprawl through a cityscape creating a dichotomy between its active participants and passive participants. Fragmentation of these expansive footprints allows for an opportunity to increase the organization of spaces in a way that that benefits from the new metropolis’s 3-dimensional context.

Level Up

Ryana Rangel

As architecture students, we are taught that spaces are activated once a person enters it. What accountability do we have as designers if a space is created to confine, execute or torture a person? Through research and thoughtful design, this project seeks to look at the past, present and future methods towards detention centers that can further improve the livelihood of prisons. This project will seek out methods of humane practices as well as design that can rehabilitate and improve the conditions of prisons as well as the communities they are a part of. As we seek to design for our future city, we have to begin designing spaces that speak to the future of mankind. Level up is more than a metaphor, but a beacon of change for the future to build yourself up when brought down, but most importantly it is a symbol of growth for the future.

Polychromatic Characters

Karla Sandoval

Educational spaces are a central part of youth development. Designing spaces that promote learning in children also includes creating environments for individual differences. This Youth Center will provide spaces for a diverse audience through a variety of interior and exterior spaces that includes all types of interaction, learning, and collaboration. The focus will be to create a connection between the youth and architecture. The design intent of my Youth Center is to create a strong sense of community within a new city by designing a vibrant, technologically advanced facility that will allow architecture, the landscape, and the community to operate as a highly sustainable built environment. This facility will represent and be accepting to all cultures, genders, and backgrounds in an effort to create ethnic, social, and economic diversity within a community. This project will be the epicenter of youth-centered activities, services, and opportunities through its transparency, openness, and connectivity.

S.A.F.

Biayna Torossian

The title of my project is S.A.F. which are the acronyms for Sustainable community, Affordable housing, and Fresh city. This project sets up to provide relief for a virtuous metropolis. The three key components work together to alleviate some of the pressures that current cities face on a daily basis. The project involves private, semi-private, and public green spaces that help to minimize CO2 emissions. To aid the process, there are carbon capture machines strategically installed around the building to help clean the air and make the city more enjoyable. The units are designed for families who earn less than a certain amount each year. These residents would be given electric cars in order to reduce air pollution to the very minimum, once again stressing the importance of minimizing carbon usage. Additionally, solar panels would be mounted to the window frame that doubles as windows collecting all of these energies. The future of cities could relieve many of the challenges that communities face by providing them with affordable and sustainable architectural spaces, giving cities a new face.

New Beginnings

Melissa Uyuni

This project sets out to rethink youth homelessness through the lens of architecture, bringing new ideas for creating an environment that focuses on safety, comfort, and refuge for the youth. We must rethink how to address homelessness where current shelters today are unfit and are occupied leaving the youth without a roof over their head. This project introduces a new model of housing for the homeless youth. Developing a new shelter typology that challenges the existing typology of homeless youth shelters in helping to rehabilitate, educate, and integrate with the community. Through the new development of this new future city, it allows a particular focus to be spent on the crisis of youth homelessness resolving a positive change in the social wellbeing of the youth. A city creating opportunities for spaces that not only address the current state of shelters, but a new beginning for the youth into the world.

Building The Future

Raymond Vartan

This project is built upon the foundation of a new future city. This project proposes that in this new city, businesses that have typically found their way to the edges of a city will be returned to the city center. While there are various reasons that this migration has happened to these skilled trades jobs, one of the largest factors is due to their need for extensive space. With the inclusion of new technologies, as well as a dedicated fabrication center that supplies parts and pieces for the businesses with a drone distribution system. The future of these establishments will decrease their physical footprint while increasing the performance of the job.

Portal

With a trajectory of more than 68% of the world’s population living in dense urban areas and the continued development of mixed-use buildings appearing in our cities, it places the current mixed-use typologies into question. Is traveling in a singular direction from level “X” to ground level and back the most efficient way when needed quick access to daily need?

Benny Wu

This project is proposing a new typology for mix-used developments, allowing for vertical growth which will interlock and connect to adjacent buildings, thus improving the efficiency of movement and circulation, but also a person’s experience. This project proposes a way to allow communities to be created within towers that will combine and disperse programs in such a way, eliminating the user to travel to the “ground level” for circulation. The circulation must progress from our typical “ground” movement and begin to design for the movement of our future cities.

STUDENTS Angel Escobar-Rodas Stephanie Green Ulysses Hernandez Marta Huo Fumiya Ishii Kevin Lugo-Negrete Kevin Medler Joseph Monck Ramon Ricafort Adrian Rios Maria Samano Michael Sanchez Saul Santizo Koni Tsai

Anali Gharakhani Instructor

SMOOTH CRIMINAL In architecture, the term “ornament” has been deemed taboo for some time. As a much-debated topic, architectural ornament has been scrutinized, criminalized, victimized and dissected for centuries. While the use of ornaments in certain styles of architecture is still revered, its contemporary place has yet to find solace and is often subject to ridicule. Using Gottfried Semper’s “Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics” as the primary underpinning document to pull from, students establish a series of specific self-driven investigations and methodologies to examine whether ornament can make a comeback in the realm of architecture while considering its origins in the art world. Students select sub-topics, around which to build a body of research, critical analysis and a thesis. Smooth Criminal explores the conceptual, physical, formal, phenomenal, behavioral, performative, and sensory qualities of architectural ornamentation as a means of remediating its relationship to the current cultural landscape.

SLA Folly

Angel Escobar-Rodas

Ornament as the medium for expression provides architecture with character. This expression is often revealed through facades, colors, intricate decorations, and other styles of architectural ornament. This project will provide a public anchor at the intersection of Obama and Crenshaw Boulevard in Leimert Park by utilizing urban and architectural textures. The urban texture of Los Angeles is made up of a network of roads, with public landmarks anchoring the west and north sides of the city. However, public landmarks are scarce in the south and east sides of the city. Those that remain are leftovers of former affluent white communities that used to reside there. Using the program of a public plaza, the project leverages its already established position as a political platform, market, venue, playground, and school over centuries.

Nostalgia

Stephanie Green

The culture of the 1950s and 1960s sparks a sense of nostalgia in a time period which Hollywood entertains to replicate such memories. What cues spark the giddy feelings so prevalent in nostalgia? This thesis aims to explore iconic textural cues of interior spatial moments such as the diner counter and the diner booth. These textural elements and extracted pieces of a 1959 Cadillac El Dorado control the exterior ornament while Tropical Deco controls the form. Together, the blend brings a modern characteristic to retro representations. In the time of pandemic uncertainty, interior program is brought outside. The goal is to push these elements to architectural and ornamental boundaries without losing the essence of nostalgia. Nostalgia: the feeling (sparked by visual representation and cues) or recalling of memories from a previous time, by one’s own memories or by those they wish to experience in a past time period.

Medusa’s Labyrinth

Ulysses Hernandez

Located on the island, Agria Gramvousa, lies one of the most ancient monsters from Ancient Greek Mythology. The all-mighty Medusa fled to the island after her prevail in the battle against Perseus, to grant us the privilege of experiencing her tale through her very own Labyrinth. This labyrinth takes on the challenges of evolving ornament into story telling devices and inhabitations. Medusa’s Labyrinth invokes notions of frippery with its undulating roof conditions that express homage to the original topography of the untouched landscape of the island. Not only will this labyrinth serve as an experiential quest but as well as a living quarter for the all mighty being. Here she will be accommodated with narrow intertwining halls that mimic her locks of snakes as well as gardens and aquatic features to represent the monster’s once beauty.

One-Stop Shop

Marta Huo

With the rising population in Southern California, Los Angeles has to expand infrastructure to increase mobility causing most Angelenos long hours of commuting in their cars. What if there was a way to shorten the commuting time in between errands? My thesis will combine grocery shopping, car wash, and drive-in movie theaters within one structure offering a one-stop shop for consumers. This multi-level proposal will offer different routes between three major programs and aid the elimination of long distances in between. With the goal of providing convenience, consumers choose the programs they prefer to experience while driving through the entire project without stepping outside their vehicle. As a model for the future of the mobile-centric city, this thesis offers a newfound idea for forming multifunctional networks.

Encrypted Anomalies

Fumiya Ishii

This thesis attempts to assert decontextualization inside Downtown LA’s iconic Westin Bonaventure Hotel, originally built in 1976 by John C. Portman Jr. While the project reaffirms Edward Soja’s analysis that the perception is encrypted by the symmetrical plan, it examines that very symmetry in an effort to further articulate the labyrinth. “...its pastiche of superficial reflections bewilder co-ordination and encourage submission instead.” Imposing a partial augmentation of the building’s plan enforces a plasticizing method to challenge its typology that is analogous to the Southern California car-centric culture.

Harmonic Segments

Kevin Lugo-Negrete

The human body, its movements and positions have influenced architecture for centuries. In ancient Rome, the body was depicted in works of sculpture in public piazzas. Muybridge studies motion through photographing a moving body in the 1870s. Motion was captured per frames depicting a set of positions the human body creates through physical activity. American dancer, Loie Fuller explored motion through silk dresses worn in her dance performances in the late 1920s. Inventing the “Serpentine Dance”, capturing the creation of space interpreted through her manipulations of the dress. These examples embody the importance of the human body in the creation of space, which has little direct influence on the architecture of the contemporary age. This project aims to redefine this role by employing the human body in establishing functional expression and the production of an ambiance through ornament as movement.

Meant Apart

Kevin Medler

Housing typologies in Los Angeles have varying degrees of ornamentation. The ornament is traditionally plastered to their facades as an afterthought. The dingbat is the most iconic apartment typology in Los Angeles, with ornate street-facing facades and drive-up covered parking. The Spanish Colonial Revival is the most widespread single-family housing typology in Los Angeles, with complex wrought-iron detailing and intricate tile work. In this thesis, historical examples of these typologies are broken down to their key elements of ornamentation. These essential features are stripped of their material properties, thus leaving their representational geometries. These geometries are then reconfigured, rescaled, and reoriented based on a repeatable set of principles, in order to generate new form and space. This meticulous design process aims to integrate ornamentation into the logic of the building as an essential piece rather than a mere façade treatment.

Flip the Script

Joseph Monck

The relationship between Ornament and Architecture is intrinsically one of part-to-whole nature. A building’s ornament is a part that represents the building’s style or quintessence. Much like this relationship in architecture, big-tech platforms have logos we see on all our screens each day which act as corporate ornaments of the digital landscape. Overwhelming acceptance of our new digital reality has caused these companies, and their logos, to spread like viruses to all corners of the globe. This viral-type growth and corporate ornaments will serve as the formal foundation for this degree project’s explorations. By applying the contemporary artistic principles of reappropriation and decontextualization to Big-Tech logos, simple geometric forms will manifest. These geometries will serve as the basis for multi-scaler part-to-whole aggregations which simulate viral growth. A growth which will reinfect Big-Tech headquarters in an attempt to inject greater ethical utility upon these company’s consumer business practices.

Crude Eye

Ramon Ricafort

Crude Eye analyzes the conventional use of exterior finishes as interior applique as a way of exploring the interconnection between interior program and architecture. A meticulous process of discovery aids the fruition of three-dimensional spaces from pure two-dimensional vignettes, leaving leniency for interpretation by any given viewer. Further investigation depicts the transformation of material itself from an interior finish into architecture and objects. Furniture begins to embody materials applied to architectural surfaces such as walls and floors. By redefining our conventional understanding of material application, lines between interior and exterior applique begins to blur.

Biomorphic Shedding

Architecture skin systems often perform solely as a facade and do not perform any additional function. In the biological world, skin performs numerous functions. Skin as the outermost membrane of the biological body can signify ornament on the architectural body.

Adrian Rios

In this thesis, the functions of reptile, bird, and marine life skins are explored through textures, colors, and functions within the architectural context. The program, a learning center for the ecological and environmental sciences, will serve as a foundation for an interactive skin system. Positioned in Boyle Heights, one of LA’s most polluted and underserved neighborhoods, this project attempts to establish first-hand access to an educational institution while providing an active air pollutant filter.

Teno Garden

Maria Samano

The Teno Garden project begins with the understanding of urban conditions of the Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles. The addition of a large garden in an urban environment that lacks green space is vital for increasing social interaction, physical and mental well being. The study of ancient Aztec design has led to the formation of Teno Garden. Through Aztec ornament studies, the structures of the buildings in the garden are created. While Aztec ornament plays a role in the architecture and how it engages with the garden and the visitors it also plays a role in the way the visitors move through the garden. In this environment ancient Aztec ornament is experienced at different scales, to walk in, sit on and enjoy through greenhouses, pathways, and hedges. The ornament enhances the visitor’s experience and visit. Like ancient Aztec artifacts, the ornament in the garden is controlled to enhance the overall architecture.

Keeping it Zen

Michael Sanchez

By analyzing ancient Japanese joinery, this thesis attempts to explore escapism in the urban environment. Positioned in Paramount California, an underserved community of Southeast Los Angeles, the project will offer a series of programs distributed throughout an outdoor garden. These programs are meant to exercise the physical and mental health of its local residents as well as any nearby visitor. The garden will take cues from three types of joinery, the primary is the “Y-joint”, secondary “Double Plug” and lastly the “Goose-Neck”, the notion of Zen is introduced in the neighborhood in an effort to uplift the community’s well-being.

The Middle Ground

Saul Santizo

The Middle Ground serves to better understand ornamentation and its place in the architectural discourse, through the use of spatial reflection and reflective material, with a meditative program in a growing suburb in southern California. Ornament and architecture are often at odds. Ornament typically adorns and embellishes a space, but more importantly removes a presence of the human body from that space, as well as their awareness of it. Reflections enhance space, therefore enforcing the very notion of inhabitation. This project claims that the presence of space becomes ornament vi ah reflection. The Middle Ground is situated on three sites and one lot in downtown Ontario, CA on the corner of Euclid and Holt. The city is in the process of growing and redeveloping, leaving behind holes scattered around. The middle ground will offer an unexpected place of refuge nested in a suburban downtown.

Roof-ature

Koni Tsai

Silver Lake Reservoir gives people water supply by reflecting the lake with aquaponics which gives the restaurant food. We want to dine in a well-ventilated restaurant during this Covid 19 pandemic because Covid is airborne. During this Covid19 pandemic, restaurants cannot dine indoors because of recirculating air. The solution to this is HVAC. Thus, having apertures in the architecture will reduce transmission of Covid19. People find comfort in eating fresh food while socializing in a shelter. We currently cannot enjoy that due to Covid19, social distancing, and infection control requirements. The ventilations from the gaps in roofs and the openings in the walls will create better ventilation. The Asain Culture Complex UnSangDong Architects + Kim Woo II shows apertures in architecture which inspires me to put openings in the architecture. The roof serves as an ornament because it fails at one of its traditional and primary purpose of being a roof. It fails to protect us from the rain.

STUDENTS Jose Agredano-Perez Abrahim Alsimari Khalil Bin Sabaan Erik Escobedo Khun Hein Samson Levi Cory Matsuda Matthew Negrete Erik Ortiz Andrei Joseph Paraz Madeline Ramirez Emanuel Velexis Teguh Carlos Urtiz

Berenika Boberska Instructor

ENVIRONMENTAL COMMONS AND THE CITY Climate change is altering both landscapes and cities - creating a new area of extreme environments and, simultaneously, revealing deep inequalities in society. How can architecture and cities respond? Can the ancient concept of the Commons, as applied to forests, fields and bodies of water - be reimagined in contemporary Los Angeles? The studio explored difficult and altered landscapes of LA and its edges: debris basins, spreading grounds, fire zones, aquifers, landfills and smoggy atmospheres - finding there rich possibilities for new architectures and ways of stewarding the landscape. Our prompts were: who would be part of this Commons? what purpose, spaces, materiality, or rituals would emerge from such a scenario? And, of-course, would there be any “glitches”? Through a variety of provocative projects, the students looked beyond the typical responses and biases of technocratic environmentalisms as well as attitudes towards “undesirable” or marginalized landscapes. Environment Drawing, Two Rooms in a Landscape (an Encounter), a “Tell-tale Detail” and a narrative – all provided highly articulated moments to view this propositional world. .

Stewardship of Smog

Jose Agredano-Perez

Healthy air is a human right contended by institutional environmental racism. Often, the marginalized and underserved communities of LA bear the heaviest toll of pollution. The Los Angeles Air Basin is mixed with pollutants and particles spilled from the extensive road system and surrounding nature. The project proposes a different way of looking at this complex phenomenon – by questioning our perception and relationship to the air of Los Angeles. This tower sequesters smog with reaching attractors directly from the sky. Smog stewards analyze the particles at the Smog Archive, where the history of Los Angeles pollution is recorded. At the Smog Factory, particles are repurposed into various new materials and technology. The base rehabilitates the surrounding air with an integrated graduation tower that remedies respiratory ailments. The project would allow East LA to occupy the Emission Offsets from the Smog Market and block institutions from procuring their clean air.

The Secret Garden

Abrahim Alsimari

This project reimagines the ancient idea of the Walled Garden as an urban edge for contemporary Riyadh. A necklace of mashrabiya walls and towers trace the boundary between the city and the surrounding wilderness. These structures channel gray water to nourish the hidden gardens. enclaves of lush vegetation and shade, forming an environmental threshold against the harsh and dry landscape beyond. This new Environmental Commons is established for both the visitors from the city and those who live and work at its margins. Transforming the ancient Najdi techniques with modern technology , the walls are fabricated from 3D molded panels of date-palm pulp, which in itself is a cultural symbol of food abundance in the desert. The filigree mashrabiya surfaces modulate the environment through light and veiled views. creating hidden spaces within the walls and glimpses into the mysterious gardens behind them.

The Merged Forest

Khalil Bin Sabaan

South Central Farm, also known as the South Central Community Garden, was considered one of the largest urban farms in United States - at 14 acres. In 2006 the farmers were evicted, the land bulldozed and sold amidst strong protests disputing the validity of this action. The land still remains an empty lot today. The project explores the idea of the Ground as Commons in Los Angeles. In this contentious site, the social history, the past agrarian uses, and questionable ownership, all become part of understanding and embracing the complexities of the ground condition. A food forest covers the ground level of the site, a memory of the farm, but this time without the allotment boundaries or fences – an open resource for the surrounding neighborhood. As one enters the Forest, multiple paths lead to small clearings hidden within. Instead of meadows, these in fact are cuts in the ground - sunken atriums leading to dwellings carved below the shared ground.

The Wash Commons

Erik Escobedo

The ‘Wash Commons’ is a speculative project that questions the stability of landscape, dwelling, human inhabitation, ownership and community. The thesis explores the concept of ‘living ruins’ to create a new landscape – an alternative settlement - that embraces the collision between domesticity and nature to craft new spaces in the debris basins of northern Los Angeles. Here, ‘living ruins’ create an image and a space - of both the past and the future; incorporating both found, natural and fabricated elements that represent time, use and value. These open and fractured typologies – spilling down the wash in the form of accumulated chance debris – in turn cultivate a new collective ground. This new ‘Wash Commons’ is representative of a community without boundaries, a community of suburban pioneers that dismiss dystopia and embrace the romanticism and poetics of the future.

Water Infra-Culture

Khun Hein

The hinterlands of Los Ageless are a strange mix of suburban outposts and productive agricultural landscapes, both struggling with an unsustainable desire for growth and for water. Much of the water infrastructure for both territories is hidden from sight and from experience. The project proposes a new way of experiencing and stewarding water infrastructure. Taking clues from vernacular and indigenous forms of water distribution, such as the Puquios of Peru, or the Quanat - water infrastructure becomes a spatial and a shared social experience. The architecture becomes a devise for registering fluctuations: rooms poised for flooding with water from below or light from above, water levels stains - all amplify the perception of droughts or of abundance. This is a collective space - a Water Commons - where a new practices and culture can emerge which is not about extraction and agricultural productivity - but stewarding, replenishing a shared aquifer.

2050: A Plastic Revolution

Since the beginning of man-made settlements, the accumulation of trash and how to dispose of it has posed a challenge. The approach has always been to put trash out of sight, so that it can be out of mind. As we progress further into the Anthropocene, materials are completing their life cycles and becoming “extinct”, eventually only to be found in landfills - in the artificial concentrations and layers of plastiglomerates and technofossils.

Samson Levi

In the year 2050 Plastic Priests scour the landscape of what used to be the Calabasas Landfill - finding deposits, forming chambers, and harvesting the newly precious materials that can no longer be sourced naturally. Carving a Monastic Commons becomes a reflection of these resources for both their strengths and perils. By remaking the landfill into an Abbey with devout life to the materials forgotten, trash is elevated to treasure - bringing about a newfound landfill joy.

Harvesting The Loom Of The Carbon Tolls

Cory Matsuda

Reimagining the half-century long struggle between the extension of the 710 freeway and the community of El Sereno and Alhambra, a Carbon Loom sequesters atmospheric carbon from Los Angeles’ motorways and weaves a new aerial landscape for the residents. As a means of harvesting once automobiles no longer emit carbon pollution, the toll space will be rented as reparations for the lease of land on which the loom was built. This is the Carbon Commons, a place of harvesting, weaving, thatching and building with carbon - testing new construction techniques and the emerging materiality. Over time, the woven architecture will also absorb the existing structures below, repurposing their remnants into thickened, hirsute carbon sinks. This new community is a productive Commons, sharing resources, tools, as well as collective spaces: private dwelling rooms, the hanging gardens, the communal pub, and the loom factory.

The Alchemical Laboratories of Salis Grounds

Salt is the Philosopher’s Stone, representing transcendence and ultimate knowledge. In ancient times salt was associated with thought because of its ability to crystallize. In its purest form it was held to be a fluid living substance inhabiting a higher realm. Salt becomes a vital symbol of thinking, feeling and true consciousness; mind and matter constantly in flux through dissolution and recrystallization.

Matthew Negrete

As climate change becomes progressively grave, wildfires, pollution, chemical spills, and radiation scar the earth, droughts are increasingly common where lakes dry up and become barren salt flats – extreme landscapes of corrosive dust. In this thesis, these salt flats are reimagined as a new inhabitable environment and a testing ground for new technologies and social utilities. Here, optimism, philosophical enquiry and protoscience help craft new spaces and communities for an uncertain future.

Hinkley Healing SPA

Erik Ortiz

In Hinkley California, Chromium 6 has contaminated the land and polluted the water. The groundwater has been rendered unusable and the very earth - toxic. This thesis project explores how imaginative design strategies and natural materials can cleanse the land and where water can be purified, stored, and reused. Here, the people of Hinkley – a revived community and new water commons - have devised a method to turn the toxic solution below their feet into clean water and medicinal elixirs. A unique - local flower – has been grafted and developed to extract the chromium from the water table. The flower – a toxic yet beautiful filter - is used to create potions with healing properties while the process of water filtration creates a mineral infused water collected in pools used for healing baths. Hinkley, no longer a scared, toxic wasteland becomes a community centered around health, wellbeing and a place renowned for scientific invention.

Tumben Astronomical Research Fields

Tumben Village is a new agrarian community in Santa Clarita formed within the abandoned ruins of Newhall Refinery. This new ‘commons’ revaluates the rich history and relationship between astronomy, landscape and food. Here, cultures and tribes that once depended on the stars to help develop agricultural communities, are the seeds in which a new agrarian typology can be grown from.

Andrei Paraz

The Newhall Refinery - abandoned for many years - became a wasteland of historical remnants and fragments of the past. Now, these physical pieces are repurposed and serve as astrological markers to indicate a new farming calendar and a series of agricultural research spaces. The site is remediated with the soil becoming rich once again. Through a process of carving, the landscape is optimized, giving pioneer plants a better chance to grow and phytoremediate the soil while pioneer families craft new spaces for living, learning and leisure.

Domestic Fuel

Can the ability to manage a forest’s loss and regrowth through controlled fires, be applied to the built environment?

Madeline Ramirez

In the past, controlled fires were used to minimize the length and destruction of the fire season. But for the last century in California - fire suppression practices have been predominant. In effect, fires have become larger, more frequent, and devastating. What if we can find a way to coexist with fires again – both in the natural and the built environments that border it? Can fire be used in a purposeful and controlled way as part of the construction process in architecture? This project proposes a test neighborhood which stewards its own “fire commons” through low-intensity and frequent burns. Materials that are intended to start, accelerate or survive the fire - create remnants and architectures. Tinder porches, combustion ornaments, baked, bisque-fired ceramic rooms, and smoke closets all await the fire season to complete their formal as well as functional transformation.

Friends with Sediments

Emanuel Velexis Teguh

All along the edge of Los Angeles and the mountains, debris basins have been used to capture - and then dispose of debris - the sediment, gravel, boulders that are washed out of the canyons during storms. In the 34 days of rain a year, on average, in California storms can create powerful mud-flows which threaten the neighborhoods below. Debris basins have been proven to be a protection against this, yet the material they capture has traditionally been treated as waste. The project proposes to make use of the debris for construction in the surrounding farmland, thereby revitalizing the basin as a productive Material Commons for the farmers. Exploring cable tension and translucent materials that emphasizes the sediments, the basin becomes a spatial sediment trap. Here materials are being filtered, sorted, and prepared in gabion sacks. Gradually the surrounding farmland is embroidered by stone field-walls, shelters and debris parasols

SUBTERRA BASIN: Sun Valley

Carlos Urtiz

Urban sprawl floods the landscape with asphalt as far as the eye can see resulting in the underutilization of massive swaths of land and the continued abuse of resources. Meanwhile, Southern California faces an incredible shortage of housing, a homelessness epidemic, and the effects of climate change. With Subterra Basin, the San Fernando Valley has the opportunity to proactively invest in its resurgence as a viable place to live, work and play. By reimagining a landscape once excavated and then in turn a spreading ground for debris and trash collection, Subterra Basin transforms the Sheldon Pit into a new urban typology, developed strategically in a radical process of terraforming where civil engineering becomes a model of civic construction. The Subterra Basin revival responds to the specific conditions and needs of its inhabitants where both resources and physical spaces are optimized and purposefully used. Integrating rainwater collection, the creation of recreation areas and dwelling spaces through the use of “Gothic retention walls”, reimagining life in the San Fernando Valley.

STUDENTS Josue Alvarez Perez Raphael Capitulo Cindy Chilin Jean Paul De Guzman Derek Eskandari Kevin Flores Vahe Haroutian Arda Kilickan Dana Ladd Christhoper Madrid-Gramajo Aryana Mazloumian Rita Midourian Adriel Navarro Peter Patpatian Zackary Woxland

Ewan Branda Instructor

THE COMMODIFICATION OF SHADE / THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR This studio addressed three pressing contemporary problems: artificial intelligence and its effects on authorship, the outdoor classroom, and shade as a human right. Today’s intelligent algorithms are sometimes called “intuition machines.” Deep learning, for example, simulates human creative thought by compiling experience from data and then hallucinating new possible realities. The parallels to design are obvious, since all design authorship can be seen as the intuitive production of plausible yet fictitious realities through the making of controlled hallucinations. While the consequences of these methods in architecture are yet to be determined, we can be certain that they will irreversibly change how we view authorship. The studio asked how so-called intelligent software can help us at the beginning of a design problem. We started with a generative algorithm based on heuristic search and architectural diagrams, then introduced the more recent technique of Neural Style Transfer to augment those results. In so doing, we asserted the recent shift in the role of the computer from tool to collaborator: a tool extends, augments, and amplifies our latent human capabilities, while a collaborator provides original, insightful, and unpredictable proposals that lie outside our expectations.

The One-Off

Josue Alvarez Perez

Looking at all metropolitan cities in the world today it is clear that they are all slowly beginning to echo a similar architectural language. It appears that a universal style is inevitable. The one-off is exploring the collaboration between technology and culture to create a structure that is not only judged by its aesthetic qualities but by the personalized parameters that are a direct reflection of the site, program, and climate of its region. The project strives for an architecture that appear linked to its site yet imposed from without. The one-off begins by taking the conventional ways of approaching design through a 2-dimensional platform such as plan or section and adds a 3-dimensional component to generate form. Taking a 3-dimensional 2D kit of parts to compose a building will not only change the way we experience the space but also influence the way we identify with the building itself.

Amusement Workplace: The Superflat Pavilion

Raphael Capitulo

This project examines the office park type in response to the changing demands on indoor and outdoor space imposed by the current pandemic. It proposes the redevelopment of the Warner Center in the San Fernando Valley, a site that has been rendered unusable since it has little to no walkable outdoor space. In place of the monolith surrounded by an expanse of outdoor parking, the project proposes a flat campus of offices, retail, residential, and parks that blurs the line between softscape and hardscape, private and public, interior and exterior. The program activities relate to one another through the relationships each pavilion establishes with its neighbor. Inspired by the work of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, the spaces and landforms are generated by a set of overlapping parts that spread informally throughout the site. In the resulting environment, demarcation of activity is defined by overlapping pavilions and carving of the land.

Geno Square

Cindy Chilin

We all have seen many cases where individuals are rejected or ignored because of their past. This project proposes a trade school at the corner of Exposition and Crenshaw, two iconic streets in Los Angeles, where the formerly incarcerated can transform their lives. It is a form of a threshold whose purpose is to help the community it serves navigate back into the domestic world and to helping individuals explore the possibilities and opportunities in their future. The architectural form of the building is modeled on a complex of urban streets that create spaces allowing students to commingle and to live within the campus and community. Its complex network of outdoor spaces, gardens, classrooms, and dwellings echoes the multiplicity and complexity of its community and serves as a transitional space between institution and home.

The Fabricated Orchard

Jean Paul De Guzman

Recent pandemic societal changes have reversed the importance of enclosed versus open spaces. This project proposes an elementary school for LAUSD ‘s surrounding communities of Silverlake, Elysian heights, and Victor Heights. The site is atop a hill of the abandoned lot of the previous KDAY Santa Monica radio station in Echo Park, which will serve as a beacon of open and shaded architecture in response to the restraints of COVID-19’s regulations for enclosed spaces. Contrary to the usual approach of a collection of large buildings for a school, this project employs the strategy of a continuous plan of open-air shared spaces linking enclosed buildings lifted above the site by shading structures. Through this continuous series of shaded areas, a level of transparency is achieved throughout the project in response to the emphasis and integration of open spaces with supplementary enclosed spaces.

Satellite Campus Pavilions

Derek Eskandari

A recent shortage of classrooms has pushed public school districts to create satellite facilities shared throughout the community. This project proposes a network of temporary classrooms and labs supporting learning and interchange between academic levels and after school programs. Located on a series of empty sites in the city of Los Angeles that vary in size, form, zoning, its architectural approach starts from the aggregation of parts in the form of pavilions, shade structures, and portable classrooms, around a network of pathways that connect various neighborhoods. Program intensity increases where parts cluster together on larger sites, while parts distributed more sparsely will primarily provide shade, the primary agent for promoting social exchange and improving the quality of communal space. As a whole, the network forms a continuous urban space, a thread the weaves through streets, empty lots, and back alleys, to which the architectural proposal gives a unified visual character.

Aggregation of the Generic

Kevin Flores

Group Form, as conceived by Fumihiko Maki, can be understood as mereology, or as the study of part-to-whole. This project explores the problem of mereology in the composition of the program and site organization for a large school building. The systems of a school, such as classrooms, labs, offices, and circulation, can be considered parts of a programmatic whole, and their various interconnections make up a composition of parts. In the same way, the project proposes a decentralized approach to site access and address, where a fragmented building appears as a multiple from various points in the surrounding neighborhood yet comes together within the site to form a single larger figure. This approach allows the building to have access simultaneously to the main street, side streets, and alleyways. In addition to form, the program and site are also important for the mereological problem in architecture.

Information Sanctuary

Vahe Haroutian

This project proposes a series of data centers in the broad expanse of an alluvial wash in northwest Los Angeles. The interface of natural habitat and technological infrastructure demands a reconciliation between the edge conditions of post-human techno-centric spaces and the physiocracy of on-site ecology. The performance of data centers relies on the ability to maintain low thermal output from energy processed by the servers, whereas alluvial fan formations are measured by habitat resilience and native biomass diversity. A successful union of these two phenomena, one artificial and one natural, rely on strategic placement of server blocks near hydrological events within the alluvial fan system that results in a boost in server performance and physiology of the site. Colors, patterns, and morphology inform the experiential mechanisms of visual observation. The signal-to-noise ratio between background, foreground, and edge conditions maintain the continuity of landscape in nature sanctuaries with the facilities present.

Vessels

Arda Kilickan

‘Vessels’ creates a new environment and better understanding of the educational space. ‘Vessels’ represents the variety of new ways of learning. In consumption societies, people want to learn specific fields easily, efficiently, and socially (to have possible networks with other people.). This project proposes indoor-outdoor educational workshop spaces for various technologies, which creates opportunities for the surrounding school district and residential area. Semi-Public Site encourages people to explore around and walk through the workshops to approach the end of the park. The selected diagram scheme is developed with the “close but not touching” principle as well as having one entrance point spread into multiple ways. This proposal starts from two different conditions. Firstly, the site and buildings operate as a connector between the Park and the main road. Secondly, the program space is completely controlled in the terms of light environment. The forms are geometrical works ideal for the environment in which people can have workshops for technologies such as VR, AR, Holograms. The Figure-Ground diagram has the purpose of directing main paths through the forms. The part is naturally creating narrow paths between each other.

Dumedale Waldorf School

Dana Ladd

The Dumedale Waldorf School asserts the community’s connection to the landscape through the study of the environment. Its orientation with the landscape and its vaults that anchor the building to the seaside cliffs and frame the light of the rising and setting sun all represent how the applied knowledge of the school preserves and enhances the environment as well as our relation to it. The choice of thematic element of vaults brings variety as well as unity. Just as the unique students are assembled into a cohesive and purposeful student body, the vaults have their own character while integrating with the rest of the structure. Recalling the historic precedent of other neo-gothic public buildings in the LA area, this school in such a prominent place is intended to be enjoyed by the students, faculty and staff as well as the general public.

Outdoor Transition

Christhoper Madrid-Gramajo

The current pandemic has given us an appreciation of all types of outdoor spaces as safe places for social communication. This project proposes an extension to an existing high school near Exposition Park and the USC campus south of downtown Los Angeles that transforms an existing model into new modes of use that exploit the outdoors. It starts by mirroring the existing building onto an adjacent lot, then inverting and transforming the conventional relationships between indoors and outdoors that it embodies. In the new building, outdoor space becomes an enveloping architectural shroud that supports the school activities and new types of events such as a weekly farmer’s market. The intensity of activity in the resulting outdoor spaces makes explicit its various uses and suggests ways in which the nebulous concept of the outdoors might be given explicit architectural form..

Education Beyond Frontiers

Aryana Mazloumian

This project houses an International School cooperative in west Los Angeles that offers exchange programs for visitors and immigrants to the United States. The school is a cultural and information resource center whose mission is to provide up-to-date information on political and economic trade, cultural understanding, and environmental issues to both its immigrant constituency and its broader public. Since the building’s visitors represent a broad range of immigration statuses, its image must be iconic and welcoming while recognizing the need for privacy and discretion. The building form exposes this paradox by creating an overall shrouding envelope through which only parts of its internal complexity are exposed. The program organization reflects this dual aspect, with the most public functions housed near the envelope and the most private at its center.

Urban Demarcations

Rita Midourian

In the ever-growing, vast population of Los Angeles, land scarcity has forced us to consider imperfect building sites. This project proposes a K-6 school on an undeveloped urban site bounded by a freeway and a busy arterial road. Its architectural approach starts from a response to the constraints regarding air quality and noise imposed by the site. The project examines the façade as a functional typology, focusing on the role of the envelope in air quality and noise mitigation in a building that requires flexible, outdoor spaces of learning. The envelope is conceived as vertical strata of various wall types forming a layered hierarchy of porosity, density, and transparency. As a result, the façade becomes a spatial organism that filters environmental phenomena beyond light and air. In so doing, it creates an architectural form that reveals the relationship between buildings and the environment in an era of climate change.

Domestic Third Space Serialized

Adriel Navarro

Learning can be difficult, whether in a traditional classroom or at home. This project proposes a place for youth to go to after school for tutoring, or between semesters for learning and coming together. Located in a residential neighborhood in central Los Angeles, this learning center camouflages itself within the domestic forms of its immediate environment. A series of pitched buildings that are reminiscent of the classic image of a home create learning spaces that are familiar. The layout of the buildings allows every interior space to connect directly to outdoor areas, allowing for a free-flowing circulation in and out of the buildings and through the site. These domestic forms used for building mass and shading structures result in a village-like assemblage, reinforcing the idea of community and learning. The resulting environment can be understood as the third space between school and home.

Into the Grade

Peter Patpatian

This project for a school occupies a sloped site at the foot of a mountain in north Burbank. Using the qualities of the cliff’s slope, the project utilizes materials and colors to blend the structure into the adjacent hillside, seemingly growing out of it. Using the outer layer and surface of the mountain and its slope as a midpoint, the structure juts away from the slope to expose its visible half, while inversely digging into the hillside, filling a void, of sorts, inside the living mountain. The spatial characteristics of the living mountain’s internal structure are designed to be solid and heavy; however, due to the additional and intentionally designed open-air passageways that lead down into the structure from the top of the cliff it is housed in, the environment is open, airy, and light. This project designs around existing natural structures in a way that is both natural and intentional.

C a m p u s : X A Capitalist Mereological Spin

Zackary Woxland

In architecture, the discrete proposes a discontinuous autonomy of building parts that are then used to create mereological assemblies. These assemblies, comprised of objects and program elements, are computationally constructed to create a new aesthetic and experiential relationships as a new whole. Campus: X uses the discrete to dissolve architecture’s hard-edge condition and unify corporations and communities. The proposed site is in Hawthorne, California and is currently an industrial park consisting of large technology conglomerates immediately adjacent to residential neighborhoods. This creates a hard-edge condition between the zones and the consequential attributes generate harsher living conditions, increased health and economic complications. While it may be a thriving place for technological growth, it has little regard to the way of life to the local community. By contrast, this project aspires to bridge corporations and communities in a symbiotic relationship that promotes overall welfare and prosperity through a newly emerging soft edge.

STUDENTS M.ARCH Rubi Cardoso Cody Carpenter Xavier Chavez Rubio Nicholas Daniel Samin Hozourirazlighi Elahe Merikhinasarabadi Pratik Sutar Maneh Tahmasian

Ryan Tyler Martinez Instructor

GRADUATE THESIS

The final project of an architectural education sets up an opportunity for students to cultivate and identify a personal way of working in relationship to an architectural project and long-term career habits and goals. The ambition of the studio is to create a platform for students to understand and develop a thesis in relation to current tangents of architectural practice in today’s context. We focused primarily on different ways of working, both through modes of techniques for accidental and deliberate research to help students argue and position their placement within a larger architectural discourse. The class was broken into four parts; Technique (How), Architecture Problem (What), Context (Where), and Theory (Why). These four parts were used to create a series of drawings, models, images, text, and diagrams to support one’s interest while simultaneously function autonomously as their own subjectivity. Each of the four parts built towards one final idea or position. The ultimate aim was to create a body of work that acted in parallel with traditional architectural contingencies such as site, program, precedent, codes, budget, and politics; while also focusing on authorship, form, shape, tectonics, representation, and theory within the context of a clear project.

SNAP

This thesis is an exploration of representation of architecture using physical objects. Within this, I have taken basic elements from an architecture drawing such as grid, border, scale, and material as my point of departure. During the development of the compositions, I play with elements such as forms, and material to develop a sense of heaviness, lightness, and dimension to snap an image in both plan and elevation using a drone and camera.

Rubi Cardoso

Digilog

Cody Carpenter

In a time where digital items have monetary value and land is being sold in virtual worlds, we must give space in architecture to the digital realm. No longer just a tool for working, but a space to merge our thinking between digital and analog and how we experiment and work with scale, materials, representation, images, and photography. Through the lens of a gallery exhibiting a project which questions compositional physics and small lots, this thesis will collapse the digital and analog into a single idea and test how we think about, talk about, and perceive architecture in today’s modern world.

Towards New Megalithic

Xavier Chavez Rubio

The stone signifies a primordial, prehistoric existence far removed from the technological. Nevertheless, offers great opportunities and architectural challenges, its irregularities overturn the rules of representation and the standards of resolution. This thesis is interested in challenging the translation of the carved rock and its heaviness to the architectural field through resolution studies. Studies that can be high resolution or low resolution, real or complex. Focusing on the mass, the edges, the material, the introspective object, and its genealogical and tectonic interpretation through the use of technologies and tools that facilitate its translation. Questioning the contrast in an urban environment, the primitive object in modernity. In addition, this project study the cave, for its interior qualities, experiences, its heaviness, and scale. The context of this project is located in downtown Los Angeles. The program of the building is a mixed-use recreation, museum/ archiving, and subway station

Making A Mess With Home Essentials

Nicholas Daniel

Over the course of the past year most of us have been confined to our homes due to the ongoing pandemic. Whether you live in a home or apartment you are likely surrounded by objects that would be considered household essentials such as furniture, appliances, and fixtures. Drawing inspiration from these domestic settings, this thesis project investigates the properties and formal characteristics of everyday household essentials through a series of exercises and experiments that consist of combinations, manipulations, arrangements, and transformations. The concepts of incongruity and defamiliarization are incorporated in order to take mundane recognizable objects and explore the possibilities of how these individual objects can come together to form a cohesive whole. How can these objects take on new, unexpected roles, and functions with the introduction of mess, chaos, disruption, and accidents in an effort to create unexpected forms and compositions?

Blurring the Boundaries in Architecture

Samin Hozourirazlighi

Creating an ineffaceable experience is the most important part of architectural design. Maybe an ineffaceable experience is an unexpected one. How if we start and blur the boundaries in architecture to create an ineffaceable experience. Peter Eisenman believed that “blurring is a conceptual activity. This is because it is literally impossible to blur an architectural element such as a column or a wall.” He believed that blurring boundaries in architecture will happen by “detaching form from a one-to-one relationship with function and meaning.” This project tried to blur the boundaries between interior spaces and exterior by exposing some unexpected private areas to the exterior space. Also, switching the regular functions of the elements with an unusual one, was another tool that has been used. For instance, windows, Domes, Columns, patterns…

Thresholds

Elahe Merikhinasarabadi

This thesis seeks to establish a new architectural Century City Mall in Beverly Hills, with an emphasis on thresholds as a tool of connection between buildings, plinths, and ground conditions. The relationship between building elements and ground planes blurs the boundaries between outdoor garden space and interior programs, help to make new Mall with a new type of landscape that connected a Roof and ground. The relationship between clear interior and exterior thresholds starts to be challenged. The reality of threshold indicates both separation and connection suggests the threshold’s critical role in defining the relationship between the two sides, try to make new retails and a new type of Residential homes that offers an obscure spatial experience to have ownership in Mall. Above all, this thesis is interested in challenging the status quo of the plinth as a 21st-century architectural problem that blurs the relationship between land, ground, ownership, and architectural medium.

Void Volume and Mass

Pratik Sutar

Void Volume and Mass are some important phenomena in architecture. Being correlated they form an integral part of the design. The connection of a human to a structure is emotional and its experience is based on the space and environment created. Void is a space, which can be either habitual or perceptual. Volume gives you an idea of perceptual space and the quality of space displaced by the mass of the structure. Three dimensionalities of a structure with defined shape or form having a scale, character, balance and function is part of Mass. The attempt is to look beyond just the form created by the phenomena but also to make a user experience several qualities of a space created by these phenomena, like those emotions when a heavy structure protruding out giving that heaviness feeling, a slit in a dark room passing just a slim ray of light through it making a user feel claustrophobic or nyctophobic. As emotions play a vital role in our day-to-day life, it also helps one to understand and characterize a space.

Through Thick and Thin

Maneh Tahmasian

With the notion of destroying and rebuilding, “Through thick and thin” is looking at the spatial aspect of the dome as a historical and cultural element of Armenian architecture. It does not describe the dome as it is or has been understood, but it could be reconstituting the matter into something: more; powerful. This project focuses explicitly on dimensions like hybrid, compromising, distorted, expressive, emotional, complex, and political. This thesis’s site is in the town of Shushi, the Republic of Artsakh, now under the control of Azerbaijan. The cathedral was bombed during the Nagorno-Karabakh War and has become a place of conflict and destruction. This thesis aims to create a unique and impactful experience of discovering the old from the new for everyone who visits the site. It is the new architecture used to reconstitute, protect, and expose the history within the city.

Not topiaries

Anastasia Pozdoveya

Using history and evolution of topiaries as a point of departure, this thesis re-defines the traditional topiary context as we know it - the context of symmetry, flatness and alignment. In addition, if we look at the history of topiaries and gardens, it would suggest that gardens play a secondary decorative role compared to the buildings it surrounds. This conceptual thesis challenges the organizational strategy of traditional gardens giving them a primary role to dictate what happens within them. What if instead of following pre-determined and orchestrated circulation paths, gardens could create them? What if instead of just accepting carefully placed topiary forms on its ground, the garden’s terrain would inform where they should go? Imagine the scenario where buildings become decorative nuances of the undeniable tectonic presence of a garden. Reversing the roles of a building and a garden creates new design opportunities for architects to be free of historically preconceived framework and lets the garden terrain be the collaborating force in the creative process. The goal of this thesis is to use different materials, construction methods and scales to redefine the wall as a programmed space.

APPLIED COMPUTER SCIENCE-MEDIA ART Sungmin Lee Benjamin Luker Zane Zukovsky

Mark Ericson & Nikita Pashenkov Instructors

ACS-MEDIA ARTS THESIS STUDIO

This advanced capstone course will focus on technological explorations and functional prototyping for the Senior Thesis project. Focus will be placed on individually-developed software, hardware and/or mixed media prototypes. Students will complete their thesis proposals, including documentation, and defend the core concepts synthesized as part of their research and development process. They will demonstrate technical proficiency, conceptual originality, practical methodology, creative problem solving, and critical thinking in the implementation of their project.

Neural World

Sugmin Lee

Human-computer interaction in video games and virtual reality is centered on the controlled and intentional manipulation of virtual space. Although the body is often present in the game, it is usually no more than a virtual avatar composed of a digital skeleton without senses. This project expands the realm of human-computer interaction by incorporating brain wave measurements into the generation of virtual experiences. A headset collects neural data from the user during play. The neural data provides input that governs the user’s interaction with the game space and game assets. The net result is a world slightly beyond the control of the user but generated by them nonetheless. It is an untethered dream world generated by neural data—a neural world.

Terminal Eden

Benjamin Luker

In the year 2020, California saw some of its worst fires in its recorded history, including its first giga-fire in its modern history. Scientists and wildfire experts agree that the only way to create change is to educate the public to generate support for new policies. To address this, Terminal Eden explores the medium of video games to educate players on important wildfire and climate change concepts by integrating them into gameplay. The game provides real data about wildfires and firefighting strategies alongside an interactive simulation. This large-scale cellular automata simulation mimics the behavior and manipulation of wildfires based on real scientific models. By teaching important fire management concepts in an interactive way, the game becomes a tool to educate and familiarize players about the importance of fire management in an engaging way.

PRISM: An Interactive Game of Boolean Algebra

Zane Zukovsky

PRISM is a virtual reality puzzle game that uses Boolean algebra and logic to educate users on the structure of computation. The player journeys through a game space of Boolean algebra to repair a series of logic circuits. Through this process the player learns how information moves through the computer at the physical level. The game translates the rules of Boolean algebra into the simple movement of a marble through tracks and gates in a Virtual world. Unlike a diagram or a drawing, the Virtual experience allows for a radical shift in scale. Boolean Algebra is represented by large table sized gates and tracks that interact with the virtual body. The abstract nature of computation is replaced with a physical experience in the virtual world. This makes visible the physical interactions that govern the invisible digital world that surrounds us—making computation more accessible to a wider audience.

2021 Interior Architecture Class

INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE BFA Mohammed Alhadyan Naif Alotaibi Ivana Carbajal Megan Cassidy Kimberly Franco Anna Grubinski Ossyra Anginay Nazarian Marla O’Neil Lorena Perez Naira Petrosian Diana Samano Erika Shipcott Parvane Zainali Zhuoran Zhang MID Rutu Shah Farzaneh Akhavan Tabatabaei

Heather Peterson Instructors

SENIOR PROJECT

It is the business of the future to be dangerous* And it should be. Design, by nature, is an inconclusive practice that draws more inquiry than it resolves. As a matter of course, it requires us to come face-to-face with the limits of knowledgeto stare into the abyss, and keep working. Design is also an anticipatory act, attempting to represent and assume a future feat before it comes to pass. And so, a relevant act of design must tempt the danger of not knowing, and dance with the formidable future. The members if this graduating class are poised with a broad, heterogeneous mix of claims, and in them we see the daring and verve of tightrope walkers and fire-eaters. Their education has provided each of them with a deep orientation to the opacities of the future. We should be compelled by the knowledge that our students are uniquely suited to the task of wandering into the unknown with a rapt sense of purpose and a fine disregard for anything too certain. The future depends upon it. *Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1925

Lucid Space

Mohammed Alhadyan

The visibility of space is dependent upon light, whether natural or artificial. Sunlight is dynamic, directional, and ubiquitous. While we cannot control the source of sunlight, it can be relied upon in time, altitude, and azimuth allowing us to intentionally design for its shifting presence and absence across the cycle of day and night. We can design for the shape, hue, intensity, and location of light through its interaction with apertures and surface qualities such as color, texture, and finish. This project will explore light as an architectural material and temporal instrument of a program, shaped into dynamic spatial effects in volume and time.

The Mashrabiya Revisited

Naif Alotaibi

A mashrabiya is a traditional Islamic architectural detail that uses passive and evaporative techniques to cool an interior by allowing light and air to pass through a screen and across a surface of water. The language used to describe building envelopes is often borrowed from the way we speak about our own skin: porous, breathing, taut, translucent, but building skins are commonly hermetically sealed envelopes which are neither responsive or dynamic to their internal or external environments. This project will revisit the techniques of the mashrabiya, and use them to explore the potential of a responsive building envelope in cooperation with interior elements and arrangements such as evaporative cooling and thermal mass to mitigate the extreme temperature and aridity of the Arabian desert, allowing for diffuse indirect lighting, ventilation, and energy efficiency.

Water and the Street: A Speculation on Urban Bathing in Los Angeles

Ivana Carbajal

The sprawl of Los Angeles can often make communal engagement hard to find, and when public outdoor space is limited or suppressed in a city, the ability of an urban populace to commune is significantly reduced. Investing in public outdoor space contributes to the overall health of a community, and the act of gathering can improve the urban scape through an effective and positive presence with secluded moments of mindfulness and tranquility. This project utilizes interior strategies and perspectives, with a focus on materiality and spatial planning, to introduce a restorative and healing space into the urban fabric that can be used year-round for social and cultural engagement.

Marking Place

Megan Cassidy

Traces of human occupation on a site, as well as their unique imprint on it, are often unaccounted for in architectural projects. These traces must be reckoned with in order to value the integrity of the site, and create tension between the existing and the built. This thesis examines issues of spectacle, trace, and optics, engaging with the acts and artifacts of behavior belonging to a site; in this case, Runyon Canyon Park. Traces of the site will serve as departure points for elements within the interior, and will play a crucial role in discovering new domestic possibilities between program and the residue of place.

Generational Marks

Kimberly Franco

Buildings tell stories about who we are, and who we were as a people. The spaces we occupy are unintentionally marked from human wear and human participation. Scratched floors, soot on ceilings, coffee stains on surfaces naturally accumulate in a matter of seconds, minutes, hours, over generations of time. Designers do not often account for or acknowledge these forms of wear in the design process, or they seek to remove them through maintenance practices. In this thesis, I will explore domestic forms of wear that occur within a house over four generations, intentionally designing the relationship between human contact and the architectural elements in a home. Over time, the slow wearing away, breaking down, or building up of elements will be visible in the house and embraced within the design.

Materiality of Things

Anna Grubinski Ossyra

In The Principle of Cladding, Adolf Loos states that, “Every material possesses its own language of forms, and none may lay claim for itself to the forms of another material.” A critical understanding of materiality, and the deliberate manipulation of material characteristics, behaviors, and performativity allow us to achieve sensory alignment with architectural conditions and spatial effects. This thesis explores the importance of material authenticity in multisensory design, through the use of one material (white oak) in all of its tectonic expressions, to address a range of programmatic conditions, with the aim of achieving sensory resonance and material performativity.

INWARDNESS: An Exploration of Aperture and Interiority

Anginay Nazarian

A window is often defined as a cut in a solid architectural surface framing a view seen from the inside out, and privileging the gaze looking outward. This thesis questions the bias of outwardness, and wonders about the possible reciprocity of the window defined by inwardness, or seeing in. This project embraces deliberately “seeing in” as a means to rethink how an aperture can frame specific human events, and engender new interior potentials and unusual domestic arrangements, resulting in viewsheds that recontextualize moments of interior life.

Negotiable: an Exploration of Spatial Transience

Marla O’Neil

Architectural program is often an expression of conventional lifestyles formed by ideals of the past. In 1921 Rudolph Schindler questioned the programmatic conventions surrounding individuality, marriage, and the relationship of interior and exterior in the house that he designed and built for himself, his wife, and another married couple. The house was a social experiment, designed for the mores of the counter culture and progressive social behaviors of the time. This thesis will challenge the notion of conventional patterns of domesticity. It is an experiment which considers social typologies that reflect the relationship of the individual to the communal, and the constant negotiation of space between them, alongside the making and unmaking of designations between interior and exterior spaces.

Inverted Camouflage

Lorena Perez

An aperture could be defined as an intentional framing that creates a visual and spatial alignment between interior and exterior. Apertures can collapse the perception of physical distance between an interior space and the exterior context of site through disorientation, scalar play, material misattribution, and continuities of light and shadow. These techniques, a kind of inverted camouflage, work to situate a project in the textural, material, and spatial terms of its site, resulting in the creation of place between the built and natural environment.

Stereotomic Spaces

Naira Petrosian

Since the Industrial Revolution, people have become increasingly distanced from material transformations and processes due to shifts in cultural exposure and legibilities of making in artifacts of all kinds, including architecture. This thesis explores the materiality and stereotomic processes in working marble, from quarrying techniques to carving processes. The project seeks to address the issue of where materials come from, by bringing the history of marble and its physical processes into contact with a public. A marble museum will introduce visitors to the subtractive experiences of excavation and carving through exhibition spaces and sculpture workshops, allowing the public to directly experience the full transformation of a material condition.

Irregular Environments

Diana Samano

Natural typologies such as a canyon or a forest inspire and excite human beings because they possess qualities that are distinct from our experiences of the built environment. Much of the constructed world is composed of right angles, grids, standard measurements, and consistent, repetitive systems. Unlike the constructed world, natural environments are formed by irregular distributions of elements, complex forms, unpredictable shifts in scale, and varying surfaces. This thesis will explore the irregularities of a forest and pursue its architectural potential as a constructed environment, discovering how different qualities of this natural landscape can be translated into architectural qualities.

Prophylactic Architectural Membranes

Parvane Zainali

101

In the midst of a global pandemic, architecture will need to respond in unprecedented ways in order to contribute meaningfully to a post-pandemic world. The relentlessly practical nature of hospitals, their bleak and exceedingly despondent spaces, should yield to biophilic environments that encourage connections between humans and nature improving their physical and psychological well-being. In the search for an innovative, post-pandemic expression of architecture, while maintaining public health and safety, the use of thin, malleable, and transparent membranes offer the potential for ambulation and communion through interactive activities between the caregiver and patient such as hugging, playing games, gardening, checking vital signs, bed baths, and other routine treatments. This thesis explores the importance of transparency and tactility in addressing biomedical separation and the consequences of isolation while precluding contagion.

Po-Up Workspace

Zhuoran Zhang

Issues of shared space and public health surrounding the current pandemic have exposed many problems in our work environments, including overcrowded office layouts, substantial real-estate costs, and fixed floor plans unable to meet office activity demands. These issues have shifted the way companies work, and they are increasingly weary of leasing permanent office space. This project aims to explore the possibility of workplace models for the future, focusing on mobility, flexibility, and affordability, in the form of a pop-up workplace. The project’s goal is to investigate the potential of turning modular units and furniture into a system with a wider range of work typologies. Companies can then utilize this pop-up system anywhere, for any amount of time.

Circumambulation Experiencing architecture through movement

Rutu Shah

103

Our architectural experience is one of continuous movement, and therefore of circulation. Architecture is apprehended by a moving body in space and time. A designer can choreograph a route to create spatial effect, relying on matters of nuance such as rate of speed, duration, and the perception of light, atmosphere, texture, and materiality to influence the way a person feels in a space. The intentional design of architectural elements like stairs, ramps, landings, apertures, and thresholds can determine how an architectural space reveals itself to the visitor and heightens the engagement with a programmatic condition. In this thesis, I will explore the spatial components that enhance a person’s experience of a built environment through movement.

The Cabin of Natural Phenomena

Farzaneh Akhavan Tabatabaei

Architecture could be defined as the medium between a set of ever-changing natural phenomenon and human events. An icicle is an incident of condensation in time, accumulating between the cold, moist air of the winter atmosphere, and the radiating warmth of a human interior. A curtain billowing in the breeze of an open window may breach the boundary between inside and outside. In this thesis project, the interdependent relationship between metrological phenomena and interiority is explored through a cabin that intentionally ties the users to exterior phenomena, providing connection to a sense of place alongside natural incidents in time.

105

SAN DIEGO B.ARCH & M.ARCH Within the Degree Project Studio students are expected to demonstrate professionally competent thinking, questioning and doing in a self-directed manner. Each student determines their own thesis question and statement in Thesis Prep in the fall and uses that as guidance for an architectural proposal in the spring that creatively integrates site, program, context, construction and other issues expected of an aspiring architect. Despite the independent nature of the course the class is run in a collaborative studio environment where two key ideas are asked of each student as they relate to their endeavors. One, they must interrogate the relationship between form, construction and culture; and two, they must clearly identify how their inquiry sits within the tradition, discipline and profession of architecture.

David Pearson & Mikaela Pearson Instructors

107

SAN DIEGO 2021 CLASS

Lomas Park

Sabrina Diaz Aguiar

Situated within the developing city of Tijuana Mexico, Lomas Park utilizes urban reactivation strategies on an abandoned federal telecommunications site to provide public recreational space. The program proposed incorporates a network between the educational and retail programs on-site to enhance the residential and commercial culture already established in the surrounding area. Lomas Park places all enclosed programs under one roof, providing open-air corridors which can be utilized as permanent or pop-up commercial space, while the roof above can be used as an educational gardening program to enhance the commercial space below. The aim of Lomas Park is to provide a diverse nature-driven space for all beings within the area.

Design with Alzheimer’s in Mind

Samantha Diaz Aguiar

109

This project aims to explore on how architecture can provide a better quality of life for Alzheimer patients. The site plays and important role being located in a heavily forested area and light therapy being very important for Alzheimer patients, it allows for the patients cabins to be tucked into nature and allow them to spend most of their day outdoors. Color and texture provides a safe space for Alzheimer patients and can help them live a more independent and comfortable life. To keep their minds engaged there are different paths with different textures and different heights that allows them to explore in a safe way without them being at risk of wandering off. The A architecture uses different shaped cabins and colors help for patients to identify their surroundings.

Tijuana Billboard Wellness Center

Ethel Alfaro-Ramos

The project is to create a space for the community of Tijuana. The site is adjacent to the Tijuana-Tecate railway. There is an existing project to rehabilitate it into a trolley system connecting the whole city. Along the railway is an abandoned lot parallel and is a highly transited intersection. Tijuana is known for its extensive use of billboards, or “espectaculares”. The reason they are so widely used is because they are not well regulated. The project creates a space within these prefabricated structures, which the community can inhabit. Focusing on health and wellness, due to the proximity to a hospital and sports complex, the spaces within the structure will be places where people can get help and information from the various health foundations in the city.

Health + Care: An Urban Hospital Renewal

Kayleight Cornejo

111

Piggy-backing off of UC San Diego’s 2019 Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) to rebuild the UCSD Hillcrest Medical Campus, my design brings the hospital’s original purpose (dating back to its initial construction, circa 1904) of care for local “indigent populations” into the present day. The current hospital continuously serves the San Diego homeless population day in and day out. Recognizing this, I have designed the site’s initial point of entry—the ground floor—and contingent open space plans of the LRDP to better serve this community through extra amenities not normally offered at traditional medical sites. These include public laundry, restrooms, showers, storage facilities, and a surrounding landscape of orchards, gardens, and outdoor cooking spaces for individuals to utilize. Through ease of circulation and a blending of open organic to built space, homeless individuals can visit the site for all medical, health, and daily life needs.

Redefined Ruins

William Dickey

This thesis project is meant to test the idea that a demolition site can become a positive and unique environment for the community through the use of demolition, preservation, amplification and the mysterious yet adored ruins. San Diego has a long and intimate history with what was once Jack Murphy Stadium. It has had many names but now has been reduced to a pile of rubble. My goal is to reimagine this iconic piece of San Diego’s history by giving it back to the residents, artists, and athletes. Using the existing architecture of this stadium I will preserve the key elements with barriers and structural supports, demolish and create space at the same time, and leave behind an urban playground that serves as an ode to San Diego’s past and provides a new type of habitat for the future. Redefine. Reinvent. Give it Back.

Sound Logic

Alison Hayes

113

The aim of this project is to understand the relationship between sound and space, and to apply acoustic principles to the design of a sonically optimized architectural environment. Sound Logic addresses and challenges the neglect of aural design. By analyzing the implications that sound has on our health and well-being, it is deemed an important variable in logically sound design. Traditionally sound is viewed as temporal, and architecture is viewed as static. As an attempt to challenge this notion, this research has indicated that all architecture is fluid. At a certain point, all matter deconstructs to vibrating particles. To test this theory, a series of acoustic devices were designed to explore the structural capacity of sound. Sound captures from the site were analyzed before being distorted, filtered, and compressed through the acoustic devices, and directed towards architectural structures in order to better understand the implications of sound induced vibrational damage.

Concealed Regeneration

Matthew Hummel

The Whitewater Preserve, located a few miles west of Palm Springs, CA, is a unique and sensitive ecosystem that host an array of environmentally critical and endangered vegetation and species. The habitat of the preserve, however, is currently recovering from the effects of a recent forest fire and continues to be under constant threat from forest fires that have become an ever-increasing occurrence in the surrounding landscape. This project seeks to investigate how an architectural intervention can be introduced on the site in such a way that it provides the framework to support the rehabilitation and expansion of the natural landscape in an effort to create a future condition that mitigates the probability and potential effect of forest fires on both the natural landscape and existing amenities on the site.

Sheltering the Mind

Margarito Mendoza

115

Good architecture can make a positive impact on the occupant’s quality of life. Areas of architecture has done impressive work to include spaces and its elements to incite positive feeling and mood in an individual. Mental health instability is one of the leading cause of deaths in the world and the numbers keep rising more and more each year (Our World in Data; https://ourworldindata.org). How can Architecture improve the quality of our mental health? The emerging discussions in Neuroarchitecture looks at the connection between neuroscience and architecture could be an opportunity. Sheltering the Mind incorporates the sublimity in massive boulders to make the spectator feel the need to encounter with the sublime on a regular day to day basis within our communities. This space brought into the city, will allow individuals to have naturalistic space and specialized programs (i.e. gym, therapist offices, and healthy food choices) that will allow them to empower and improve their mental health status.

Mi Casa: 20 Metros Sobre El Suelo

Salvador Orozco

Autonomous housing is a deeply rooted common practice in the city of Tijuana, Mexico and Latin America in general. As this border city continues to expand centric land is increasingly becoming unavailable, forcing disadvantaged citizens into urban peripheries. To challenge the inefficient social housing practices of today, Mi Casa: 20 Metros Sobre El Suelo, embraces autonomous housing through a series of platforms over Tijuana’s underutilized channelized river merging formal structure with informal adaptation. Thus, resulting in a more efficient, productive and economic social housing scenario.

Operation Enduring Success, OES

Amanda Pappas

117

Operation Enduring Success, OES, is supportive housing for exiting military members, that will offer programs specific to them. Upon removal from the military the transitional training into normative society is minimal. As many do well because of already established networks of friends and family, others are disadvantaged. This can lead to homelessness, suicide, substance abuse, and violence. Supportive housing does not yet exist for these individuals giving them the time they need to transition into normative society. By creating a scenery of familiarity by incorporating materials, practices, and encouraging comradery. The goal is to achieve new relationships with resources and opportunities they need, that military members don’t always use. Too often in society, when we think of veterans, our minds go to homelessness, as the end of the line. This architecture aims to support these individuals through the relationship of slabs and modified shipping containers.

The Archi.typical Guide to Universal Design

Allen “Nani” Reyes

With 17% of children or 1 in 54, and 1% of the global population, Autism Spectrum Disorder, a developmental disability is often subject to stigma, discrimination and human rights violations. Making us feel like aliens. Globally, access to services and support for people with ASD is inadequate, at a smaller scale public schools have poor or late timing in providing the extra aid need to those children. The built environment in which we roam currently is the result of the “nuisance of ADA” solely addressing physical disabilities.This thesis is presenting the “necessity” of change to ADA in a universal design approach. A spectrum of methodologies in which the architecture becomes the early intervention of aid as an engaging and developmentally supporting space, becoming beneficial to both neurodiverse and neurotypical individuals. Mental disabilities may not be seen on the outside, but it is the details.

Delirious San Diego

Endo Rosales

119

Delirious San Diego is a gonzo journalism approach towards the exploration of collapsing architectural moments in San Diego history. Through the combination of the past, present and future - an architectural repository of collective memory is transformed into an alternative San Diego history that may resemble our own universe, but offers opportunities for spatial and social explorations. Different sites throughout the city are explored through the mixture of different programs, architectural styles, historical events, current observations, future speculation and cultural artifacts. Elements of architecture are explored through San Diego specific influences such as Irving Gill’s work, or the cross pollination of absurd architectural devices such as the ‘Shamu Freeway’ or the ‘Taco Shop Tank’. Delirious San Diego is not a proposal for a better San Diego - it is a funhouse mirror that distorts our own reality to create a fiction based in fact.

Expansive Chula Vista Commons

Elizabeth White

The aim of this project is to transform a stretch of underutilized land into an expansive public space for the surrounding communities. The goal is to create an open common area where all of the neighboring communities can gather, linger and play in both open ended and specifically programed activities and sites. This transformation traverses a 3 mile stretch of SDG&E owned land in Chula Vista that spans from the 805 freeway to the San Diego bay. The majority of these parcels are fenced in lots, devoid of any structures other than the utility poles that carry the power inland from a transformer station near the Bay. The expansive Chula Vista Commons also serves as a green corridor/urban wild, and water recapture site. Utilizing mainly native plant species, with a few other drought tolerant species will reduce the need for fertilizers, and reduce the watering needs of the landscaping.

The Seriousness of Play

Ryan Rosen

121

Whereas spaces designed for children are “playful” and strive to connect, contemporary “serious, mature” architecture often discourages social interaction. In resolute contradiction to these serious principles, Contact Theory - one of the oldest and most studied theories in the social sciences - concludes that it is highly beneficial for citizens to have broader and more inclusive social interaction. Our current conceptions of “serious” architecture, expressed as rigid, divisive, and predictable, merit revision. The ABCs of playful design - Appropriating space, Bringing together, and Contrasting styles - define a path for future spatial interventions. Its architecture invites people to corrupt it, cooperate to use it, and feel supported in behaving differently, whether that is conversing with someone from a different social group or inviting all generations to play! Perhaps most importantly, an architecture guided by the ABCs of Playfulness will reveal a society striving to be united, inclusive, and, ultimately, friendly.

Degree Project & Graduate Thesis

Los Angeles Faculty

Los Angeles Staff

Yelen Aye Trevor Bikhram Berenika Boberska Ewan Branda Olson Branka Erick Carcamo Jeanine Centuori Jaco Chan Carmelia Chiang Matthew Corbitt Bruce Danziger Mark Ericson Todd Erlandson Heather Flood Anthony Fontenot Anali Gharakhani Matthew Gillis Ivaylo Getov Patrick Geske Aaron Gensler Eric Giragosian John Going Jordana Goot Sean Joyner Gottfried Haider Lara Hoad Helena Jubany Robert Kerr Christoph Korner

Sean Joyner Matthew Corbitt Galina Kraus Catherine Roussel Marina Zakarian Stephen Mansur Hans Wendel

Nancy Lo Miriam Malpartida Stephen Marshall Ryan Tyler Martinez Alex Maymid Quinlin Messenger Duane McLemore Louis Molina Cody Miner Eric Olsen Mark Owen Nikita Panshenkov Michael Peguero Lilian Pfaff Heather Peterson Jason Rebillot Catherine Roussel Bailey Shugart Paulette Singley Teddy Slowik Gerard Smulevich Joshua Stein Echo Theohar Linda Taalman John Turturro Thomas Valle Stallman Erin Wright Hans Wendel Gregory Zamora

2021

San Diego Faculty

San Diego Staff

Matthew Boomhower Brett Farrow Megan Groth Kathryn Hamilton Catheine Hertbst Jose Herrera-Najera Jon Linton Salvador Medina Jose Parral David Pearson Mikaela Pearson Hector Perez Marcel Sanchez-Prieto Andrew Sander Patrik Shields Andrew Wagner Ann Worth

Janet Asuncion Ryan Burtanog Sandy Burlem Ryan Goodwin Kevin Gahol Brenda Hernandez Slade Kaufman Susan McFetride Andrew Wagner

Woodbury School of Architecture Burbank Campus 7500 North Glenoaks Boulevard Burbank, California 91510-1052 San Diego Campus 2212 Main Street San Diego, California 92113-3641

architecture.woodbury.edu