2020 Degree Project & Graduate Thesis by Woodbury School of Architecture

2020

Degree Project & Graduate Thesis

SOA LEADERSHIP

LOS ANGELES FACULTY

Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter

Bachelor of Architecture

Dean

Mark Ericson Ewan Branda Cody Miner Paulette Singley Scrap Marshall Teddy Slowik Yasushi Ishida Ryan Tyler Martinez

Ewan Branda Associate Dean

Heather Flood Architecture Chair, Los Angeles

Christoph Korner Interior Design Chair, Los Angeles

Jose Parral Architecture Chair, San Diego

Ryan Tyler Martinez Assistant Architecture Chair, Los Angeles

Master of Architecture Ryan Tyler Martinez

Bachelor of Fine Arts, Interior Design Heather Peterson

Master of Interior Design Heather Peterson

SAN DIEGO FACULTY Bachelor of Architecture David Pearson & Mikaela Pearson

Master of Architecture David Pearson & Mikaela Pearson

2020

ARCHITECTURE

BArch Faculty

Mark Ericson Ewan Branda & Cody Miner Paulette Singley & Scrap Marshall Teddy Slowik & Yasushi Ishida Ryan Tyler Martinez

5 19 35 53 69

MArch Faculty

Ryan Tyler Martinez

BFA Faculty

Heather Peterson 91

MID Faculty

Heather Peterson 101

BArch Faculty

David Pearson 103 Mikaela Pearson

MArch Faculty

David Pearson Mikaela Pearson

Los Angeles

INTERIOR DESIGN Los Angeles

ARCHITECTURE San Diego

2020 Architecture Class

STUDENTS Arman Abou-Nasseri Jeremiah Elijah Bergara Nicholas Francis Guarna Matt Jungwoo Kim Jessica Alejandra Martinez Lucas Alejandro Mok Christian Dean Parsons Max Marciano Perez Kenia Retiz-Lopez Sharece Bianca Shabazian Yixi Song Kristine Stepanyan

Mark Ericson Instructor

OFF SETS If (as the philosophers maintain) the city is like some large house, and the house—atria, xysti, dining rooms, porticoes, and so on—be considered miniature buildings. i Since the inside is different from the outside, the wall—the point of change—becomes an architectural event. ii This studio formally analyzed the geometric and formal differences between the interior and exterior lines of the wall. Students began by collecting a large set of building plans and sections and cataloging them. From this catalog students selected a single precedent and built a computational model of the project based on an analysis of its formative geometry. Through this analysis, students structured a drawing methodology for the production of interior and exterior form as a set of interrelated but distinct objects. Following from Alberti’s description of the house, students proposed a program of either the house or of housing. In either case, central to their work was the interrogation of the means by which space is subdivided, nested, or otherwise accumulated within the object of architecture. While all students began with Alberti’s prompt of buildings within buildings, each student’s project is based on a distinct method of offsetting derived from their historical research. Leon Battista Alberti, The Art of Buildng in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neal Leach, and Robert Tavenor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988) 23. i

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction, 2nd ed. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977) 86.

Deprogramming Domesticity

Arman Abou-Nasseri

What is the usefulness of a technocratic architecture of strict programming within the dissociated digital space of modern society? Is there a possibility of an architecture that serves form and space before program, allowing for internal customization from inhabitants? In Islamic Iranian architecture, as Klaus Herdeg notes, the aesthetic qualities of rooms are more important than their program. This creates a flexible and adaptive space where form and organization precede use. Furthermore, the axial confluences between city, structure, and mecca within this architecture creates a set of irresolvable differences that are seldom smoothed over or hidden. Instead, they are embraced in an architecture of irregular thickness, incomplete lines, and skewed entryways. It is these differences and not the specificity of program that contributes to the production of spaces of discrete character and complex form. This project proposes an architecture fueled by the irresolvable difference of the city, that seeks to resist the relentless tides of individualization and polarization created by modern society.

Absolute Void

Jeremiah Elijah Bergara

The project focuses on showing two forms designed by of exterior and interior voids rather than the program and site. Through Louie Khans research of Orford castle we can see the importance of these voids. This hierarchy of void can be seen in the Exeter Library and as well as National Assembly of Dhaka. Louis Khan’s prioritization of one individual void begins to set the foundation of Absolute Void. The idea of Absolute Void is to use multiple voids to define the mass and of the building. These voids define the building, and as the building grows it becomes a fabric of voids and mass. The mass becomes an unending growth, but the voids are always defining the growth. The interior spaces use the voids as places to gather and circulate. The interior and exterior are also treated as separate entities within one another. This methodology of creating a building removes the common strategy of offsetting the exterior and interior. The two forms create unique interior and exterior spaces that could not be predicted from the exterior. The Absolute Void can be used to create an urban fabric that prioritizes open space. Open space, especially as green space, tackles many problems that the Los Angeles faces today.

Residual Figures

Nicholas Francis Guarna

In centrally planned architecture, the geometric figures of the circle, square, and regular polygon are used to structure idealized form. However, these idealized forms must exist in a city, with geometric and formal characteristic that are often far from ideal. As a consequence, the idealized form lives only at the center, with far more complex and less ordered forms radiating outward to the city. The centralized dome of the Church of St. Nicholas in Mala Strana Prague(1755), by Christoph Dientzenhofer, is such an example with form whose exterior is contradictory to its interior. This project builds on this formal relationship, but inverts it, pushing the idealized figures to the periphery and centers the architecture in the complex and discordant geometries of intersection and overlap. The project is no longer about a centralized dome, but instead the residual spaces that are made up of spatial relationships. This involves an understanding and consideration for all the aspects of design. The words inside and outside reflect a dichotomy in direct experience. The inside and outside cannot be seen at the same time. As a result, it produces a center composed of the residual figures from the intersection of architecture and the city.

Oriented Otherwise

Matt Jungwoo Kim

Otto Wagner’s Austrian postal saving bank (1912), is a work of architecture in which difference of orientation play a decisive role in the production of form. The overall plan of the building is defined by the interaction between a trapezoidal figure and rectangular one. The rectangular figure creates a grid of beams, columns, and stairs. The trapezoidal spaces serve as office rooms and corridors. The intersection of these two figures produces a set variable thickness between the corridor and the offices. This thickness preserves the dimensions of space by thickening the mass of the wall. It is a form of correction allowing for the complexities of intersection to be hidden in the thickness of the wall. It is a corrective measure through rotational offsetting. The hinge between two distinct geometries is used to mediate between their divergent forms. This project explores the generative potential of this relationship, using rotational offsetting as corrective measure between divergent geometries. It is a project for housing in which the typically repetitive housing unit is subjected to rotation, producing architecture that is oriented otherwise.

Analogous Figures

Jessica Alejandra Martinez

In the past year, Los Angeles County’s homeless population has grown to 60,000 people. This is due to the lack of affordable housing and a steep increase in rent. As a consequence, the streets have become the roof of thousands of homeless. Typical solutions to affordable housing deploy strategies of repetition and sameness, to produce an architecture of efficiency. These strategies subdivide the whole into a set of gridded parts without identity. This project deploys another technique of similitude, the analog, as a means of producing housing that although formally related, maintains its own individual identity. Aachen Cathedral (796 A.C.E) by Otto of Metz is an example of how analogous forms can be related to one another through adaptation of a central body. The connection between sets of centrally planned objects from different eras and styles is maintained through the use of analogous polygons. This seemingly discrete spaces maintain their similarity through a common tie to the generative figure of the circle. This project uses the concept of analogy to build a strategy of repetition for the production of mass housing with individual difference. It use analogy to propose other forms of repetition.

Vestigial Forms

Lucas Alejandro Mok

Offsetting within an architectural technique is the process in which a geometrical object is reproduced as a new object that parallels the source object. Walls are offsets, interior and exterior are offsets of one another, and buildings are offsets. In parallel, the production of architecture involves various forms of drawing, making, diagraming, rendering and scripting. Each of these methodologies are offsets of one another and of the architectural idea. Offsetting as a process is one that creates sameness while also creating difference. For instance, a modal shift from drawing to model presents a new set of architectural problems nonexistent within the drawing. And when the resolved model gets translated back into drawing, what results is something different, but also the same in that it retains the underlying properties of the former drawing. In all of these examples, the offset is the unintentional byproduct of the design process. Thus, this thesis seeks to explore the consequences of offsetting as an intentional product of the architectural process. It proposes the process of offsetting as architecture.

Volume and Line

Christian Dean Parsons

In the Abbey of Saint Denis (1135 A.C.E) two styles collide with a rectangular transept to bring about a unique condition. The western dome (mortuary of Valois) appears to be informally appended onto the western transept of the cathedral. This intersection is the collision of unlike systems, one Romanesque and the other Gothic. The Abbey of Saint Denis uses wall thicknesses, as the two systems collide, to modulate between these the unlike styles. It sacrifices space in the name of maintaining a strict definition of both Gothic and Romanesque vaulting. By privileging the vaults, the rest of the form changes accordingly, and takes on the aspects of both. The gothic vault is structured by light infused ribbed arches and contrasts sharply with the massive undifferentiated dome of the Romanesque mortuary. One is defined by lines and the other by volume. As the styles merge together at the point of intersection aspects of volume and line are intermingled producing and architecture of both. This project deploys the formal techniques uncovered in the analysis of the Abbey of Saint Denis to structure a project whose form is defined by the competing logics of volume and line.

Cities Within Buildings

Max Marciano Perez

The city is composed of competing interests, epochs, and regimes tied to the geometries of its grids. But now the city has entered the building. What was once the hectic grid of the city has become the interior. Landmarks, grids, boulevards, and buildings are projected deep into the buildings core. The outside is only the beginning; As the interior is defined so is its scale and angle in relation to the face of the building. Each penetrating disruption is influenced by landmarks referenced to the building site. As each disruption occurs so does it occur in elevation. The exterior of the building is a plane statement of sites geometric boundaries. The interior is complex set of intersecting bodies and figures. Material conditions are translated to obscure geometric imprints. Apertures connect rooms to distant and seemingly irrelevant axis. Circulation is far from efficient, and there is no dominant grid. The city is a building. The building is a city.

City of Walls

Kenia Retiz-Lopez

Architecture is not a problem of subdividing mass to produce space. Architecture is the accumulation of elements that add up to a set of discrete but interrelated forms and spaces. The Baths of Diocletian (306 A.C.E), are an example of this, in the which the element of the wall is repeated and scaled to produce as set of nested spaces that are both unified and divided by walls. The surrounding wall of the compound separates the baths from the outside, while niches within this wall invite interruptions and intrusions. The main bath building introduces another wall with similar properties to the compound wall, as it both prevents and invites overlap between the interior and exterior. The interior of the baths continues on this theme as rooms composed of walls assert individual identity while adhering to an overall formal logic building. This project deploys a similar technique for housing in which the excessive use of walls unifies space through division. Walls are circulation. Walls are housing units. Walls are art museums. Walls are youth centers. This is a project for a city of walls.

Subsidiary Cusps

Sharece Bianca Shabazian

Architecture prioritizes the ordered repetition of units of space. However, the city is rarely perfect and ordered. As a consequence adjustments must be made, producing a set of subsidiary spaces whose sole role is to absorb the difference between two divergent systems. The Landerbank (1884) by Otto Wagner is one such example. It’s main hall is defined by two distinct axis that are formally resolved through the use of a large centrally planned space. One axis running parallel with the main halls dome towards a parallel dome, and the other hinged from the center of the adjacent dome. The perimeter of the domes, and the gridlines of their tangent edges produce a set of ancillary spaces. These complex residual cusps differ tremendously from the orderly nature of the grids and centrally planned objects that they were derived form. Complex form is used to absorb the differences between two conflicting set of simple primary geometries. This project inverts this relationship, making the primary space, the residual cusp. Grids of organization are shifted at an urban level, an exterior level, and in interior level. This generates a differentiation between the interior and exterior. The residual cusps serve as the primary program of housing.

Multifocal Offsets

Yixi Song

The project elaborates on the concept of a hierarchy of spaces evident in the planning of the Forbidden City and modifies the former by introducing diagonal lines. As opposed to object-oriented solutions allowing to create recognizable but impractical forms, buildings are structured and placed to capitalize on the availability of free spaces. From this perspective, offsetting emerges as the defining feature embodying the concepts of innovation, expediency, and cooperation. The architecture in space presents several possibilities for creating harmonious compositions and incorporating the principle of hierarchy observed in the Forbidden City. In a nonconventional way, the project prioritizes the design of empty spaces by shaping the surrounding buildings and fully utilizing three-dimensional constraints of the structure. In this context, the primary goal is to identify the applicability and functional capacity of irregularly shaped non-conventional structures. Inspired by the linearity and offsetting principles evident in the Forbidden City, the solution emphasizes the creation of self-sufficient threedimensional forms.

Excessive Poché

Kristine Stepanyan

In contemporary architecture, thickness is no longer a significant aspect of a building. The transitional space between inside and the outside, the wall, has been demoted to a thin membrane of mechanical and structural efficiency. The project explores excessive poché through the proposal of a massive enclosure around one of Los Angeles most iconic structures, Dodger Stadium. Built in 1962 on land original taken by the city via eminent domain for public housing, Dodger Stadium sits in a vast sea of periodically occupied asphalt within walking distance to the epicenter of Los Angeles’s homeless crisis. It is a poché of useless void between the city and the stadium—a parking lot. The project proposes a multilayer housing wall of excessive poché around the stadium. Cutting into the void of the parking lot and surrounding the stadium, this project will provide a set of nested layers of housing, markets, and public spaces between dodger stadium and the outside. The parking lot a strategically fenced off and secured buffer between the city and the stadium will be connected back to the city by an architecture of massive thickness—an architecture of excessive poché.

STUDENTS Anahit Antanyan Edgar Cabadas Storm Campo Ka Kit Chiu Hosam Fatani William Garcia Kevin Guerrero Armen Janazyan Esra Killickan Aarti Patel Kimberly Perez Melissa Ramirez Kenia Roman Cortez

Ewan Branda and Cody Miner Instructors

HALLUCINATIONS: URBAN SPACE IN THE AGE OF AI 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 fabrication of controlled hallucinations. This studio examined the changing nature of design authorship in the age of intelligent algorithms. Students applied deep learning and texture mapping to the problem of urban morphology and housing, and turned to the work of Rob Krier for inspiration. In addition to housing, students were asked to incorporate a secondary program dealing with storage. Our working hypothesis claimed that machine learning negates the age-old dichotomy between the rational and the empirical, the diagram and the picture.

Harmony of Hybrids

Anahit Antanyan

This project started from a critique of two approaches to form in housing: the aggregation of parts that result in a “formless” whole (e.g. Habitat 67) and the monolithic figural whole that conceals its parts (e.g. Unité d’habitation). It proposes instead a third option, a hybrid of the two in which parts remain articulated in a larger whole object possessing strong figural qualities. Ideally, the synthesis of the static and dynamic, the modular and the monolithic, takes the best from each, thus creating an outcome that is both functionally pragmatic and formally unique. The scheme was derived from a field condition created by a Style Transfer algorithm. Colored texture maps applied to the resulting field produced pockets of spaces with distinguishable density components, thus identifying figural wholes within the homogeneous field. These texture maps helped identify program and occupancy by suggesting the location of separate housing blocks, storage, as well as the public and private outdoor spaces. The entire complex is wrapped in a uniform enclosing envelope that reinforces the consistency of the singular whole.

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Edgar Cabadas

This project explores the glitch as a potential generator of architectural form. The glitch is a momentary and localized disruption of an existing system. In this project, the existing system is a set of two-dimensional figureground drawings, while the disruption is produced by deep learning algorithms that examine these images and attempt to apply imagery of housing. In the resulting images, a set of primitives representing generic housing are disrupted by misinterpretations that suggest new programmatic potential. As glitches occur the simple forms lose resolution. How many times can this occur before the “glitch” becomes noise? The project attempts to exploit the glitch to catalogue conditions that can create unique spaces and form within architecture. Located on the former site of aerial space company Rocketdyne, the complex includes housing, marine storage, and data storage. In the resulting buildings, algorithmic glitches disrupt the otherwise smooth glass envelopes and simple geometric forms native to this area of Southern California.

Random Access Memories

Storm Campo

This project considers the architectural qualities of geological scenarios, namely archipelagos and caves, at the scale of a single site. It proposes a blending of three distinct programs: affordable multifamily housing, private storage, and a hypothetical new branch of L.A’s Department of Parks and Recreation that promotes e-sports and gaming. Every function of the project exists within one of two zones: green space or virtual. Within these zones lie the scattered islands of the archipelago for larger housing structures with greenspace, and the subterranean caves for storage and virtual recreation. This project is a response to the antiquated notion of recreation as a public right that only pertains to physical activities, as well as a response to the dystopian and monotonous nature of existing typologies of storage and housing. The project respects real nature as much as the virtual, not picking sides but leaving it up to the individual.

Wall-ness

Ka Kit Chiu

In today’s digital era, objects have become more virtual. In this context, our cognitive relationship to architecture as a composition of elements is more important than our specific reading of individual tectonic materials out of which they are made. This project is a study of walls as objects of perception, contemplation, and organization. As the first element in architecture to become virtualized through media, the wall also suggests a starting point for resistance to that virtualization. This project proposes a complex for housing and storage. Here, “housing” is a space for humans and “storage” a space for objects. The spatial dualities inherent in these programs are addressed by the wall as a unifying system. Using a machine-learning algorithm, the project generates a cluster of walls that act as a medium through which to navigate multiple resolutions of form and program, and as a structure for the relationship between us and the architecture we inhabit. This cluster of walls proves architecture’s existence.

Erased Housing+

Hosam Fatani

Transparency is often related to material pellucidity and intellectual clarity. In this project, transparency is interpreted as an act of erasing the segregation between the public and the private realm, a generative act to produce a social condition of transparency. Using a style transfer algorithm, torn and layered paper, and texture mapping, the project proposes a field of individual buildings that contain housing, art storage, art studios and exhibitions. Voids create a network of spaces of a fundamentally urban character such as courtyards, passageways, alleys, streets, common areas and other programmatic opportunities. By generating spatial qualities that break programmatic boundaries, erasing is a programmatic, social, spatial, material and aesthetic act. Through transparency, this project disregards the defined boundaries of the program, and establishes relationships connecting tenants with their surroundings.

We’ll Have One of Each

William Garcia

This project explores strategies of storing a collection of objects that are not formally relatable, creating a field of incongruous objects that are packed into a container that itself is composed of a heterogeneous and eclectic collection of forms. The strategy of packing was inspired by the storage program—prop storage—which contains many figures that would not at first glance be relatable in form but has a logic that allows the props to be stored holistically and logically. This method of packed peripheries can create figures compiled of many other figures, which may act as containers as well as create communities. Along with the eclectic figure of the prop storage program, the project proposes a generic fabric of row housing. The challenge then becomes integrating housing, storage and urban spaces with these concepts as guidelines, with connections formed through packing to create a new environment of controlled chaos.

Mass Perception

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” Aldous Huxley

Kevin Guerrero

Experience interprets reality. Those interpretations become patterns that we see throughout our lives. Architecture is a model of how we translate unfamiliar complex conditions into familiar ones based on experience. This project explores the tension that lies between the minimality of large-scale form and the maximality of detail. How does detail stimulate the senses? Starting from the Rorschach inkblot test created in the early 20th century, the project studies the relationship of detail to mass. A style transfer algorithm extrapolated the diagram’s detailed intensity to define gradient conditions from something large like an overall massing to something small like the detail of an interior courtyard. In the resulting housing and storage complex, mass becomes the catalyst of how space and movement is defined, while detail stimulates the senses to generate experiences that become memorable to the individual. As a result, this proposal seeks to find a gradient condition between housing being the maximal of detail and storage being the minimal.

The Introvert

Armen Janazyan

This project explores internal organizational orders within an introverted box. Architecture typically follows a standard of having most of its articulation on the façade, where it is exposed to others and excludes those who experience a building from inside. Instead, this project proposes a highly articulated central disruption to the interior of a block concealed by a homogeneous generic exterior. Located near the Van Nuys Orange Line busway, the building will provide affordable housing and parking for Metro patrons. The project explores how access and thoroughfare might be maintained within a large-scale monolithic building. In order to accomplish this, a cross-grain breaks up the box to allow for circulation along a single North to South axis. This cross-grain circulation allows the introverted box to retain its form while inviting circulation and providing access to local mass transit. By investing the interior with most of the building’s articulation, the project rewards those who venture into the building’s interior spaces to find its hidden architectural character.

Commingle

Esra Kilickan

This project explores the courtyard as an ideal urban, domestic and abstract form. It proposes a complex of housing and storage in which the urban courtyard defines urban space at the scale of the whole, the domestic courtyard caters to individual groups of residents, and the abstract courtyard serves as a strategy for articulating building form and for structuring the building’s approach to sustainability. As a whole, the project produces a coherent image by utilizing a specific shape in the form of the letter K, a module that suggests an approach to urban space based on the aggregation of primitives. In the resulting complex, these primitives and their associated courtyards create an environment where domestic and public life commingle.

Latent Figures

“Poetic forms in Architecture are sensitive to the figurative, associative and anthropomorphic attitudes of a culture.” -Michael Graves

Aarti Patel

We live in a world of memories, which architecture collects and represents through the combination of imageable figures and abstract forms. This project proposes a housing complex and a food storage and market hall that assembles a larger figure from individual parts. The identity of the building’s figure is determined by how it opens, closes, stands, extends, and rises, which the project explores in multiple scales in plan and section. The placement of the building on its site, as well as the storage program, demands something iconic; therefore, the building figure isn’t a general representation but rather incorporates an understanding of its surroundings. The resulting building modifies known forms in accordance with the site and program.

Pores of the City

“If you think about making a city that is much more porous, many accessible spaces, that is a political position, because you don’t fortify, you open it up so that many people can use it.” Zaha Hadid

Kimberly Perez

We generally think of porosity as an attribute of a material rather than as a spatial or political strategy. This project challenges that meaning and, in contrast, uses porosity to interconnect various forms to one another and to create inhabitable spaces within them. This project explores three distinctive ways of interpreting porosity: literal porosity, meaning the creation of voids in a solid; default porosity, meaning a building envelope permeable to light and air; phenomenal porosity, which overlaps or envelops the physical openings created by the voids. Voids are created and new program opportunities are produced where multiple masses intersect. Private program will be allocated within these new porous areas throughout the project. The primary program is self-storage, into which a secondary program of housing is inserted based on patterns introduced in places where texture maps and building form come together.

Geometric Atmosphere

Melissa Ramirez

The nine-square grid has traditionally provided a framework of constraints in which architectural design might generate form. Can the nine-square grid become more than just a geometric organization and become a generator of landscape and atmosphere? The overall program for this proposal includes data storage, a brewery, three residential types: tower, block, and party-wall housing. All three of these programs will take the form of pixels and produce a sectional landscape of towers. The scheme is generated by an algorithm merging a figure ground pixel drawing and an image of an urban landscape that contains housing units. The design process made use of nested nine-square grids and various texture maps to dissolve the rigidity of the geometry and create an atmospheric scheme of high-density towers. This gradient diffuses the grid by highlighting the cluster of pixels at its densest and transforming it into what is essentially landscape.

Inside Outside

Kenia Roman Cortez

This project explores architecture’s interior as an exterior and its exterior as in interior. As one moves from street to interior, one passes through various surfaces, which one alternatively perceives as exterior boundary and interior surface. This idea will expand throughout the site and allow for a sense of freedom within a confined and controlled area. Each major element consists of a ring of housing containing a data center, which itself contains an internal garden. Here, the boundary or threshold spaces are more important than the primary programmed spaces. These key moments are used for gardens or public programs. Starting from a series of figure-ground drawings that studied the concentric relationship between container and contained, the project used a style transfer algorithm to produce a new formal language suggesting complex spatial relationships beyond the simple concentric diagram of the figure-ground drawings. Each form was then arranged on the site to create a new relationship between the interior and exterior facades. Through these steps, the project expresses an alternative to conventional hierarchies.

STUDENTS Sejal Bahety Hayley FitzGerald Evelyn Garcia Jesse Gomez Annie Hetrick Tae Hyuk Lee Jose Monroy Jesus Ramses Montes Herrera Joshua Ordonez Ashni Patel Micol Romano Miguel Ruiz Aaron Servera Rodney Yasmeh Weidong Zhou

Paulette Singley and Scrap Marshall Instructors

EXTREME TAXIDERMY: SKIN JOBS, SPATIAL SURFACES, AND INHABITABLE WRAPPERS Extreme Taxidermy explores building enclosure as architectural clothing, developing textile design as the starting point of the design process. Working from the outside-in on the design of a tall structure, this studio adopts the adage “form follows fabric.” The word textile relates formally to texture, tectonic, context, text, intertext, hypertext, pretext, subtext, etc. and etymologically to the Greek tecton or a builder of roofs. Students wrote and designed a material text that they wrapped around a scaffold. This is a form of architectural taxidermy, that is, the arrangement of a tectonic skin on a scaffold. As Robert Bringhurst writes (The Elements of Typographic Style): “thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns—but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver... After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.” If cloth is a textus and, according to the 19th century architect and theorist Gottfried Semper, textile originated architecture’s structural framework, then his bekleidungsprinzip organizes the generative argument of this studio, that we clad our buildings as we clothes our bodies as we tell our stories.

Crystalline PolyChromasia

Sejal Bahety

“Crystalline PolyChromasia” concludes the 100 year-long, utopian journey that Bruno Taut’s Crystal Chain initiated in 1920. Expressionist architects such as Taut interpreted glass architecture as a symbolic material for transforming society into a crystalline paradise. While today it might be easier to imagine crystal architecture as fantasy fairy castles and magic caverns, the cult of crystal nonetheless inhabits a significant part of Los Angeles’s popular culture as a new age medium for personal enlightenment. If just owning or wearing a crystal portends significant spiritual transformation, then what about inhabiting one? “Crystalline PolyChromasia” represents the ultimate and supreme longing to merge with the purity, clarity, and glowing lightness this essential Expressionist element represents. This new crystal city aims to transform their utopian belief in glass’ transcendental powers into a super-tall skyscraper, now merging steel structural systems spun thin as spider’s webs.

Contextiles

Hayley FitzGerald

The conventional image of a skyscraper is generally one of a building covered in reflective glass hanging from a steel frame. Likewise, high-rises are thought to separate people from the street. “Contextiles” proposes to transform the typical tall building into a vertical urban fabric by rotating the street grid ninety degrees into the sky and developing its urban qualities to generate programs and landscapes that attract people to build a community. This tower contrasts with the predictable model of a skyscraper by making a more porous enclosure that wraps around floating parks and plazas. It replaces the standard curtain wall with a series of suspended volumes, which hang from an open enclosure supported by cross laminated timber framework. By extending outward from the building site at 6th and Alameda, mapping the surrounding context, and then projecting it upward, this high-rise will develop in section what it samples in plan. “Contextiles” will emphasize textiles inspired by patterns from 1960’s fashion, while embracing the natural materiality of cross laminated timber to replace the standard synthetic steel frame. This tall building intends to bring people together using the cityscape as the generative urban fabric, where inhabitants can walk inside and outside between lofted spaces.

Soft Pareidolia

Evelyn Garcia

“Soft Pareidolia” analyzes soft geometry as a way of exploring the interconnection between memories and cozy architecture. Soft Pareidolia’s interior spaces are derived from the leftover volumes of the teddy bear form, the quintessential plush toy, sitting and nesting next to each other. The connection of forms, through the process of offsetting and overlapping the physical teddy bear shape, generates inhabitable spaces. By reassembling what we traditionally understand as a symbol of comfort and security into a series of voids we actually may climb into, the teddy bear returns our hug, creating a space of projected memory and physical comfort while we nestle within its interlocking residual spaces. Located in Los Angeles’s Arts District, the soft architecture inserts a cushion of comfort and domestic longing in this mutable, dynamic, and hard landscape, while it simultaneously references the work of artists such as Mike Kelly whose work explores similar themes. It introduces to the architectural palate an aftertaste of sugary cuteness the teddy bear evokes.

Ornamental Ecstasy

Jesse Gomez

By intertwining Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel” with Pedro Friedeberg’s 2020 installation “Fifípolis” 2019, Ornamental Ecstasy explores architecture inspired by Latin American Surrealism. The terms churrigueresque (relating to the lavishly ornamented late Spanish baroque style) and rasquachismo (a form of customization derived from the position of the “underdog”) further inform this research. Where Borges offers the organizational rules for this proposed tower, Friedeberg provides the conceptual lens of playful irreverence. Aztec and Mayan ancestral ornamentation mutates into the ornamental ecstasy Adolf Loss vehemently prohibited. These ornamental motifs catalyze opportunities to spatialize surfaces, providing simultaneous opportunities to develop the irrational logic of a symbolic universe that embodies the past in a progressive, native-style of architecture for the Arts District in Los Angeles. An exoskeleton will surround the Tower of Babel with an ornamental form and structure that eats into its interior.

The “Arboratus”

Annie Hetrick

In English, an arbor serves as a vertical structure in a landscape or garden that provides shelter, privacy, shade, or a landscape strategy; it can also be an artificial apparatus for structuring the growth of plants. Stemming from the feminine, Latin root of arbor, in French arbre means tree—the perfect arbors found and engineered in nature. Artificial and natural, public and private, garden and architecture, the “Arboratus” consists of an open framework supporting colorful, performative nests which together create a contemporary typology of hybrid nature for the city of Los Angeles. When arrayed across the city the skyline, it emerges as an architectural forest where every arboreal tower rises to its purpose-driven height, an open framework containing tangential ecosystems that connect to other semi-corporeal, three-dimensional networks forming an urban forest. The “Arboratus” adapts itself to the structure of a rainforest: the Undergrowth Layer hosts the MychorrhiZone, the Understory Furban Jungle Layer supports silk-like cocoons (inspired by Weaver Ants and Tent Caterpillars), the Canopy Layer supports Hexapods, and the tallest layer, called the Apis, is the Emergent Layer where bees and birds breed and create food byproducts.

Auto-Couture

Jason T. Lee

“Auto-Couture” seeks to tell the story of a future Los Angeles in which technology has enabled all possible services to be automated and performed by machines. Beginning with a critique of the normative model of industrial production, it postulates that the conventionally linear diagram of industry, where all production outputs end in consumptive waste, is inherently unsustainable. The challenges facing the future metropolis raise the following questions: in the age of automation, how may significantly wasteful methods of manufacturing and production (such as fashion exemplifies) be positively readapted into a 360 degree sustainable model, and what are the implications of these changes for the architecture and urban environments that house these processes? “Auto-Couture” responds to these questions in the form of a skyscraper that merges diagrammatic sequencing with machine iconographies to provoke an inquiry on contemporary models of industry and urban life. As envisioned through the lens of the garment industry, “Auto-Couture” proposes that all stages of manufacturing are integrated under one roof and operated within a circular economy with closed-loop production processes.

Re-facing Portman

Jose Monroy

John Calvin Portman Jr., architect and real estate developer, is recognized for having developed hotels into neo-futuristic skyscrapers featuring multi-storied interior atriums that produced awe-inspiring interior spaces. While his work set a precedent for hotel architecture around the globe, not everyone agrees with this interpretation. According to Dwell’s founding editor Karrie Jacobs, this approach was “wrongheaded,” because “in city after city he attempted to replace urban street life with the canned vitality of hotel atria.” Inspired by the atriums but critical of how they produced hermetically sealed, urban bubbles, “Re-facing Portman” proposes to open the hotel atrium to the street while also replacing the anonymous, reflective glass envelop with an exoskeleton enclosure. The exoskeleton enclosure shapes the void, creating negative spaces on the exterior of the building. The exoskeleton provides transparency through areas of the tower, providing views of the interior, leading to curiosity of entering the tower and experiencing the views towards the exterior.

Xenophylactic Tower

Jesus Montes Herrera

The probability of a viral pandemic has become immanent. How architecture responds to this new spatial paradigm remains the question. “Xenophylactic Tower” introduces the topic of textiles as a multilayered protective skin, concentrating on the manipulation of a variety of textures as the technical processes for form finding. The alternations in the architectural fabric are interpreted as “hypertrophycmorphic” typologies that begin offering an adaptive layer of spaces. These layers act as barriers, introducing the topic of multiprotocol-spatial-protections (or MSP) against pathogens. Symbolically the tower becomes an all in one system that performs across many stages of penetration. The futuristic intent is that in the event of a worldwide pandemic the tower may become the genesis of a new civilization. Techniques such as layering, 3D printing, and casting are explored with the intent to find the relationship between hypertrophic and entropic spaces. Two-dimensional drawings, then, become the fashion pattern that evolves into a three-dimensional tower form.

Radiositic Tower

Joshua Ivan Ordoñez

Parasitic larvae tend to precariously position themselves anywhere they can gorge and grow. Certain fungi can take over another creature and use their carcass as a root from which to propagate. Exploring parasitic moths and the bushes they invade offers the opportunity to study a structure created through webbing, by corralling and taking over an existing structure through which it pushes out, against, and around. For the “Radiositic Tower” parasitic additions take over the existing structure of the 2015 Torre BBVA México (Mexico City, LegoRogers) to produce a tower that combines the programs of a radio tower/station, a library, and opportunistic housing. The existing building has been infected with forms that eat away at the original architecture from the inside out, becoming in and of itself a parasite threatening its immediate context. The transformation of larvae into moths drives the tower’s program in direct response to the way larvae make their nests. They coat the bush they inhabit with silk webs to protect them and allow movement as they consume the bush. Similarly, the project will be wrapped with netting which allows for playful yet protected circulation and relaxation.

Diaphanous Polymorphic Cloak

Ashni Patel

This project proposes to evolve a typical commercial skyscraper from a singular object, composed of a series of stacked floor plates piled one on top of another and wrapped with a generic enclosure, into tower composed of multiplicities of nested objects, featuring interlocking sections, and wrapped with a “Diaphanous Polymorphic Cloak.” While social media provides us with instant connectivity, the actual human interaction this fosters may be dangerously isolating and solitary. The goal for this project is to prioritize human experience by providing forms and spaces that support interaction and attract people to the experience through a diverse, multiplicitous, intersecting network of plazas, parks, and framed views of the sky. Layering one “Diaphanous Polymorphic Cloak” cloak upon another produces spaces that index their semi-public role as immersive environments whose program has been signaled by the techniques of folding, pleating, and embroidering. In a project where function follows fashion, the cloaks expose and conceal programmatic performances, based on the layering of thin and thick ornamental skins. The idea changes the dry expression of ornamentation into a simultaneously layered and nested architecture that privileges aesthetic sensorial responses to the altered-amplification of enclosures.

Allegorical Blooms

Micol Romano

Like insects in amber, two glass plates imprison sharp and curious figures of lace: suspended in empty space, frozen in time. “The Large Glass” is a portrait of immobility. It also is an invitation to make architecture. In Marcel Duchamp’s “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (1915-1923) large glass planes frame a mechanism, fueled by the desire for love, which produces the “bloom” of the Bride. We think of blooms during springtime, a gift Sandro Botticelli depicted in his quattrocento painting Primavera (Spring, 1480s), allegorizing the burgeoning fertility of the Renaissance world. Languid and linear, the female bodies appear to have a rubbery consistency devoid of bone, supported only by the gossamer gowns into which they disappear. Lace, brides, bachelors, and blooms contribute to the exploration of the allegory of an architectural wedding, which this project organizes into a tall building sited in the Arts District of Los Angeles, California. Just as Duchamp and Botticelli are bachelors who conjure their brides, “Lace Blooms” rouses the bachelor latent in the sacred part of the skyscraper, the thick load-bearing walls and solid steel frame. They culminate in the honeymoon suites.

Not So Tight

Miguel Ruiz

Originating in 1801, the Jacquard mechanism operated as an attachment to a regular loom that simplified the way in which complex textiles, such as damask, were woven. Joseph Marie Jacquard’s system of punch cards, which controlled how threads would rise up and down with each pass of the shuttle, became a significant precursor to the first computer. Created specifically with the task of weaving fabrics at a mass-produced scale, the machine also produced our first “glitches” when it missed its projected mark. “Not So Tight” translates the weave, the punch card, and the glitch into the language of a high-rise tower. The weave initiates a strategy of vertical elements that mirror the action of the threads in textile fabrication, while the punch cards serve as horizontal dividers through which the weave passes. The weave itself is imperfect, warped by the tertiary element of structure, producing a glitch that allows for select areas to move past the boundaries of the primary and secondary systems of enclosure and frame. Tightness and looseness work together symbiotically as a woven ornament that mediates spatial conditions of interiority and exteriority. “Not So Tight,” interrogates material thickness and surface transparency as the results of loose weaving.

The Citadel

Aaron Servera

“The Citadel” choreographs a domination of nature that seeks to transform spatial opportunities into high density fields of electric chambers, voltaic forests, palaces, tombs, and symphonies. High above the ground, the project imagines an atmosphere clouded by liberated expression through the ascension of creative arts and intellectual performances. Through a suspension of eclipsed highways and intersected masses, “The Citadel” explores geometric qualities and spaces in a series of artifacts, transforming space into euphoric experience.

Hyper Artus

Weidong Zhou

Proposed as the headquarters for Art Basel in North America, Hyper Artus reinterprets the experience of contemporary art fairs by merging art galleries and a luxury resort with a skyscraper. Through inserting large scale, atmospheric installations into the typology of a high rise building, while transforming them into a series of galleries and amenities, this project choreographs the integration of art and architecture in order to realize a series of composed atmospheric spaces. As Merleau Ponty writes: “There is a knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place, and which is not simply nothing, even though it cannot be conveyed by a description.” Driven by the composition of atmospheric spaces, this design involves investigations of artworks from Olafur Eliasson, James Turrell, and Walter De Maria, artists who pioneered articulating architecture into the production of experiential art. By exploring their various techniques among all the perceivable architectural components in this project, the design shall necessarily incorporate individual spaces in a series of diverse atmospheres.

Gemera Tower

Rodney Yasmeh

Given the increasingly limited space in cities and the desire for recreational areas to be located in urban centers, it is imperative to think beyond horizontal space. This leaves only one option, to grow vertically. While initially this may seem to be a viable alternative to controlling horizontal sprawl, the structural pyrotechnics necessary to stack sports complexes may make it challenging to realize. A project of this magnitude therefore requires economically conscious planning taking into account issues like the scale of sports and programs it will hold, occupancy, exiting, etc. to produce the appropriate design that can maximize available space and safety requirements. For this project, functionalism will supersede aesthetics because of the limited space available. Given that the recreational tower will accommodate several indoor activities (soccer, football, handball, tennis, martial arts, entertainment, etc.) its structural design will emphasize strength and flexibility. An undulating skin wraps the building, pierced by a void to introduce sunlight to the innermost spaces. The program within the tower requires large open areas free of columns, so structure then becomes a game, minimized and maximized across the entire complex.

STUDENTS Iman Almehdar Christian Boling Danielle Chatfelter Ulysses Hermosillo “Gary” Jia Hu “Selina” Xiao Luo Shant Melkonian Mitchell Morales Daniel Quintanilla-Rico Isabel Rodriguez Tannaz Rouhi Blake Shiu Matthew Stutzke Weining Zheng

Teddy Slowik and Yasushi Ishida Instructors

A JOINT VENTURE To contribute to the Housing+ initiative at Woodbury, this studio challenges a typical ‘mixed-use’ stacking typology and aims at proposing new formal/ programmatic relationships between housing and various other programs. The “American Dream” of a single-family home is quickly becoming just that… a dream. As cities continue to grow and densify we are left with less open space. SRO’s (single resident occupancy) and micro-units are quickly populating Los Angeles’s residential landscape. In these new typologies, amenities and other utilitarian spaces are removed from the individual housing units and become shared. Students took a closer look at these shared programmatic spaces and questioned their validity. With society becoming more isolated with technological advances, do communal/shared spaces still function as such? Students proposed a second (the “+”) program to occupy the site located in Little Tokyo and interlock with the housing program. The “+” program is required to be a near equal split with housing in regards to overall spatial volume (not square footage). Interlocking formal relationships were closely studied via research of Japanese joinery techniques. How can two radically different programs interlock and occupy the same urban site? How can shared spaces/amenities work across diverse programmatic spaces?

Visible vs Hidden

Iman Almehdar

To alleviate homelessness in the Little Tokyo district; my project contains micro-units and single room occupancy (SRO) housing units. Additionally, the project incorporates a multiuse theater with immense space and volume. It can adapt to provide amenities to residents when shows are not taking place. The theater is equipped to host many types of shows including circus, antigravity, aerial, and water shows. Its convertibility allows it to be an open space for dining, gymnastics, dancing rehearsals, or even a swimming pool. Furthermore, a third program was selected to bridge the two primary programs together. These are the entertainment shared spaces that incorporate theatre views. These spaces are distributed among the project to embrace and enhance engagement between residents while also providing views into the theatre. The project combines two contrasting programs, one where the purpose of the theater is to be seen, while the other maintains privacy for the housing units. This provides lower income individuals an efficient private way of living while in tandem providing access to entertainment and spectacle.

“Units” of Energy

Christian Boling

With the growing concern for a need of sustainable fuels to replace fossil fuels, bio-fuel technology has emerged as a major solution to this global crisis. The implementation of algae growth infrastructure into architecture with a bio-fuel refinery is a leading concept behind this solution. The existing plans for algae biofuel manufacturing have been left nonprofitable and unsustainable because of the large area of land that is required, but by creating a flowing façade of glass algae tubes, this allows algae farming vertically on any structure. Acknowledging Los Angeles’ need for housing as well, this program will be attached to Single Resident Occupancy (SRO) and micro housing units. By wrapping a housing structure, it maximizes the surface area to volume ratio needed for algae growth producing 130,000 BTUs of energy per gallon of algae grown. Annually, this power plant could power over 1,000 homes, or the entire building for 25 years. The housing program combined with the bio-fuel refinery form a symbiotic relationship in which each thrives off the other. The refinery uses the housing as a structure to attach its algae growing facade too, and the housing feeds off the power that the refinery produces. The excess power is then sold back to the city and the profits are used to subsidize the housing.

Hybrid Pilot: CO2

In order to offset high carbon emissions, large quantities of trees can be planted to capture carbon—but with the lack of open land and water in Los Angeles, carbon capturing facilities could be the next big solution.

Danielle Chatfelter

The motivation for this thesis is an attempt to bridge the gap and merge the boundaries between public and private spaces for single resident occupants, micro-unit residents and employees of the carbon capturing facility. Interstitial spaces and terraces located amongst the housing will allow circulation throughout the building while encouraging interaction between residents and workers. The fan units are located at the North and East perimeters of the building due to the North East prevailing winds. By distributing the CO2 capturing fan units amongst the 140 SRO’s and the 400 micro units, it is predicted that 500,000 tons of carbon will be captured per year. This new architectural hybrid could alleviate the carbon emission problem for an increasing urbanizing global society.

Harmonic Flow

Ulysses Hermosillo

Aquaponics is an integrated system that integrates fish farming and crop farming together. It is as the old saying states, “killing two birds with one stone.” It creates symbiotic relationships where these two programs come together and rely on one another. The plants require the nutrients of the wastewater of the fish and the fish require the plants to filter the wastewater. The only energy required is for the pump to move the fish water up to the plants and gravity does the rest to bring it back down to the fish tank once it’s filtered. A similar concept is applied between the housing and the “+” program of the design. The residential program interlocks with a complex infrastructure to support the aquaponics system. This creates a living space for both humans and animals where both depend on each other and work hand in hand for their occupants without interrupting one another. One can navigate through and experience both spaces at the same time. Fishponds become shared amenity spaces for residents to enjoy alongside Japanese gardens. The two components are complete opposites due to one being solid and the other liquid, but by coming together they complement each other and without their unity, functionality cannot be achieved.

Living on a Hangar

“Gary” Jia Hu

As the city of Los Angeles continues to densify, our current housing and traffic conditions are reaching their limits. LA’s existing infrastructure has divided how we live, where we work and when we travel. Eliminating single use spaces is one strategy to counterbalance the densification of the city. To address this issue, my project aims to unite housing, institution, and transportation under one parcel. NASA and Uber are currently developing an aerial ridesharing network aiming to take flight in 2023. With this new transportation system on the horizon, my project incorporates LA’s first Passenger Air Vehicle (PAV) Research Center. Additionally, responding to LA’s lack of housing and public spaces, the project will feature interconnected Single Room Occupancy (SRO), micro housing units and communal areas. These terraced housing units will also produce multi-purpose outdoor spaces for future tenants and air vehicles. Housing units and the research center share a series of public spaces which promote a greater community interaction. These public spaces begin to network visitors from the underground metro and its surrounding neighborhood to the air transport above. As a result, this project will define a new architectural typology for the rapidly urbanizing societies.

Water Sustainable Housing

Selina Luo

Los Angeles’ freshwater resources are rapidly becoming depleted. Currently, the water comes from Northern California, Colorado River, Owens River, and groundwater. These limited resources would benefit greatly from employing a local groundwater replacement system to purify reclaimed water. Typically in Los Angeles, greywater is released to the ocean, but could potentially be locally processed and provide drinkable water. This will greatly reduce the cost of transporting water from distant sources by at least 50%. My project integrates one of these water treatment facilities with housing. Greywater and sewage, which the housing program produces, will be processed through the water treatment system on-site and will supply drinkable water back to the housing. The surrounding urban context is quite dense and attracts many visitors. This new water treatment plant is visible to the street and showcases the process of locally treating water, and supplying it to the neighborhood. The plant has the capacity to serve 16 additional residential communities, and therefore reduce sewage from the city sewers and provide drinkable water to the surrounding communities.

Culinary Communal Triangle

Shant Melkonian

My project is centered around the idea of how-to bring people together through communal cooking. Los Angeles is the second largest city in the US and has a rich cultural diversity. Each ethnicity has its own unique preparation in how they cook. This melting pot of cultures also brings with them unique cuisines from different parts of the globe. These cuisines provide an important link to cultural heritage. This site will operate as a manufacturing facility which produces utensils such as knives, forks, spoons, and chopsticks. The distribution of these products is not limited to the local restaurants and residences. They will also be open to the surrounding neighborhoods as well. With the ever-increasing population growth of Los Angeles, the demand for housing is growing. Micro and SRO (single resident occupancy) units provide an efficient solution for creating density in a small footprint. The intersection between each corner is defined as the shared communal kitchen spaces. The incorporation of these spaces looks to bring people who live, work and commute together into this space. This project will look to restore the typology of Little Tokyo by combining manufacturing facility and affordable single resident occupancy housing.

Recycle. Reuse. Ride: Upcycling Toward a Better Future

Mitchell Morales

Los Angeles is facing a major crisis as affordable housing and environmental sustainability within our communities is becoming more and more unattainable. The city’s quality of life is suffering from exposure to greenhouse gases. On average, one person generates 4.4 lbs of waste per day, totaling 139.6 million tons of municipal solid waste landfilled. It is because of this that I am proposing a Waste to Energy (WTE) Power Plant that ascends upon SRO (Single Resident Occupancy) units and Micro units. The WTE Power Plant will utilize city waste and repurpose it as a source of renewable energy to serve both the community and my project. In an effort to encourage alternate economic forms of transportation, recycled plastic will serve its own purpose. 15,000 tons of plastic will be recycled to make 132,000 sustainable bicycle frames through injection molding. Instead of increasing living costs and isolating models of energy production, we must begin to challenge traditional architectural typologies. Typical five over one, three over one, and stacking designs can begin to take on a new formal language. This project seeks to promote the interlocking relationships between micro housing and SRO’s, and a Waste to Energy Power Plant.

Soil Renewal Occupancy

Daniel Quintanilla-Rico

The importance of Soil cannot be overstated. Soil filters our water, enables our crops to grow, and helps to regulate the earth’s temperature. My project, located in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, intends to capitalize on the manufacturing of soil as a means to lessen the use of water. Water is crucial not only to urban development but industry, scenic beauty, recreation, and environmental preservation. Soil when combined with biochar, an extremely stable form of carbon, will use seventy percent less water. And like water, the need for housing is becoming a pressing matter. According to the California Housing Partnership and the South California Association of Nonprofit Housing, Los Angeles needs 516,946 additional housing units to meet existing demand. Micro Units and Single Resident Occupancy units permit high density in a small footprint. A ten thousand square foot facility can produce 6 tons of biomass per day and produce 93,182 kwh of energy. Providing enough energy to run this facility and a combination of 510 Micro Units/S.R.O’s off grid. Any excess energy produced would then be distributed throughout the city, allowing the facility to showcase its ability in an urban context.

E-Hauze

Isabel Rodriguez

Overpriced housing cost is indelible. The project explores the positive consequences of hybridizing an industrialized battery recycling facility in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles. A city where e-cars are becoming more and more popular every day is creating a new rising environmental challenge. What will become of these batteries once they are off the road? Car batteries still have up to 10 years of life left after they stop serving electric vehicles. With a high demand of micro and single residency occupancy (SRO) units, the batteries can be reconditioned and repurposed to save energy cost to subsidize housing. The idea is to promote a central core that features a system of ramps that vertically guides the occupants. The building is vertical in nature to provide adequate cross ventilation to both cool batteries and the residences. The energy plant draws power from the grid during low cost times to store in the battery cells and then reuse. While also representing the strain of the rise of electric cars and housing cost.

Integrated Cycle

Tannaz Rouhi

This project incorporates Micro Units and Single Resident Occupancy (SRO) Units with an Anaerobic Digestion (AD) Facility. This Facility is in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles which consists of numerous restaurants and cafés that each produce one ton of food waste per week on average. To reduce the embodied energy in processing the waste from restaurants and cafes, these wastes are transported to the AD Facility where they are mixed with human waste that is collected from the building. The AD Facility utilizes the Combined Heat and Power system to convert the waste into various energy types in addition to compost. The project is a community within a community. Micro Units and SRO Units are interwoven with each other. All occupants have access to common areas such as kitchens, lounges and a wellness center. This configuration encourages residents to gather while they are using the services. The common spaces adjacent to the AD Facility include amenities which are shared between the residents and the employees of the facility. This mixed-use project reduces carbon footprint by converting the waste into energy for the building, cars and composting it locally.

Sustentative Assimilation

Blake Shiu

In response to both environmental and housing needs, my project will incorporate an azolla farm and processing plant integrated with a residential component. Azolla, the fastest growing aquatic plant capable of doubling its biomass in as little as 4 days and has the potential to mitigate multiple environmental needs. Through various processes azolla can become food, thermoelectric energy, biogas, fertilizer, and is efficient at cleaning and filtering air as well as water pollutants. By combining an azolla facility with micro housing this project will produce a fully self-sustaining architectural hybrid for living that the residents will directly benefit from. The azolla farmed and processed on site will power every unit and provide them with clean water. Due to high yield rates and low growth time excess energy will be created and sent back to the grid to supplement unit cost. The pools and processing area will be shared spaces allowing residents to experience both the natural and manufactured processes on site. The project’s concept is a study that reevaluates the concept of sustainability and illustrates a subsistence model to meet environmental and population concerns.

Weaving the Gap

Matthew Stutzke

This project will seek to revitalize the mixed-use typology through the connection of industry and low-income SRO (Single resident occupancy). By connecting industry with low income housing, it creates a networked dependency on the people who live within the building as well as providing those same residence with new opportunity. Utilizing industrial clothing sorting and recycling with affordable single resident occupancy (SRO) housing. With attention increasing on the amount of waste we produce we look to find solutions to reduce the wasteful loss of materials that can be used. This is especially apparent in textiles in which 95% of the currently discarded items can be recycled or reused. The US discards 15 Million tons of textiles annually and only 15% is currently getting recycled. To be able to increase the percentage of clothes that are being recycled we need to move the recycling process closer to the source. This will reduce the amount of time and resources it takes to get the textiles to the facility. This site will act as a sorting facility for waste clothing as well as an industrial felt manufacturer. Combined this facility can separate clothes for resale and manufacture the un-reusable textiles into a new product.

Cultural Exchange Mini Apartment

Weining Zhong

Los Angeles is a modern metropolis with a rapidly incasing homeless population due to rising real estate costs and housing shortages. Los Angeles is a culturally intertwined city. My project is located within the Japanese cultural center of Little Tokyo. This project sets out to address the current housing shortage, whiles also incorporated a sake production factory to support the surrounding community. The housing is composed of SRO (single resident occupancy) and micro units. Smaller residential units provide greater quantities of housing at lower costs. Incorporating a production facility with these micro housing units will also provide employment opportunities for the residents. This will not solely be a production facility, but will incorporate a sake tasting room. The sake tasting room will being together tourists, visitors and local residents. This new attraction will greatly benefit the surrounding businesses. Conveniently, this tasting room is located directly above a metro station, and will therefore reduce the amount of drunk driving from this facility. By interconnecting housing with a sake distillery the residents and distillery workers will share common spaces and amenities. This will create an area where all can congregate and enjoy themselves.

STUDENTS B.ARCH Louiza Chilian Cindy Rojas Destiny Garcia Guy Blum

Ryan Tyler Martinez Instructor

DRAWINGS, MODELS, HOUSING, AND TEXT 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 degree project in relationship to current tangents of architectural practice in today’s context. Throughout the semester students were asked to participate in a series of assignments that supported conversations and theories in contemporary architecture with drawings, models, building ideas, and writing. 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. By the end of the semester, students were asked to conceptualize a clear idea and architectural argument which should be tested through the design of a building.

The Defamiliarization of Domestic Typologies

Louiza Chilian

This thesis challenges the use of the façade and window as a design tool for domestic typologies. The key difference between a domestic typology and a commercial typology is the perception of scale. Scale measures both the size of the facade and the amount of people the building can hold. The use of any commercial facade in place of a domestic facade challenges this dynamic. In both typologies, a window is often used as a visible path from one side to another. With the nine square structure as a guide, two curves are drawn with three points and used as paths for the profiles of low-rise buildings to extrude along. These two extrusions are combined before a high-rise texture is mapped onto the surface of the new object. New apertures are wrapped around this object to create a collage massing affect. The intention of this process is to defamiliarize the domestic typology by using high-rise facades for low-rise housing. This defamiliarization adjusts the perception and scale of a building. With the collage massing affect, the orthographic projections of the object are no longer clear. This gives the design more freedom over placements of domestic features that are no longer typical.

Dynamic Step Envelope

Cindy Rojas

Dynamic step envelope focuses on the surfaces or the façade of the building. It’s a series of projections pushing and pulling from an extruded profile. This creates moments of balconies and overhangs that are recessed and protruding from the building. What you see at the end of a project is a building, a 3-dimensional object. This building was extracted from a set of 2-dimensional drawings. What is on those drawings isn’t always seen in the final 3-dimensional object, the intent is to have a 3D object and be able to see the representation of a drawing. Using the profiles of the 3D object as the canvas for the 2D drawings, the profile of the building should be represented as a drawing. The drawing should give the illusion of depth to the profile of the building. The orthogonal views that are created by the drawings are on the building give a sense of 2D to 3D. In general, this projection or drawing is interested in making buildings look more like a drawing. The translation from 2D to 3D, certain details get lost in the process and what you see in the end is a building. So, the goal would be to have a building but still be able to see a drawing.

The Messy and Abstract: An Approach to Linear Composition & Graphic Figurality

Destiny Garcia

Lines, objects, and profiles are qualities of architecture; The scribble incorporates all of these qualities when translated into three-dimensional form. The architectural problem of line intentionality and composition in relation to an object’s graphic figurality investigates painterly techniques and their relationship to architectural building typologies. The scribble is comprised of randomized point placement within a bounding box, keeping the shape in an overall form. Through this process, an assortment of looping and twisting doodles are produced that are transformed into architectural representation from linear and figural qualities. The facade of the object is enveloped in a graphic that mimics the linear, random nature of the scribbled form. The project is in the context of Los Angeles, transforming the lot adjacent to Lafayette Park in Westlake. The programming of the buildings focuses on providing low-income and luxury housing, in addition to amenities and recreation areas. The design will integrate the park to preserve the existing outdoor areas, while enhancing the conditions. The graphic buildings act as a decorative element for the background of the park.

All Graphic

Guy Blum

This project seeks to explore the idea of how graphic collage and the geometry from the collage can be used to generate architectural design. Doing so is by taking the graphic collage and using its geometry to generate a new space or form. Using the floor plan as tool for organization, compositional contingencies and speculative aspirations, the goal is to utilize distorted graphic representation as a design technique and a production tool to discuss ambiguity for architectural research. The project is interested in how 2-dimensional graphics can turn into linework, depth, space, by translating them into 3-dimensional form. With this finding the goal is to find different spaces that could act as a floor plan as well as the skin of the building. The site for this project will be in the northern part of Arts District at the corner of E. 4th Place and S. Hewitt Street in downtown Los Angeles. This location is perfect since this building is a contemporary art museum. The layout of the museum will be different by having off the grid nocks for featured artist to exhibit their work which will challenge the visitor to look more into the building. Also, this building is taller than the other buildings around the block and has a vibrate color to use itself as a billboard within the city.

STUDENTS M.ARCH Andras Rosner Demar Matthews Genevieve Enriquez Greg Fass Hitisha Kalolia Krishna Jadawala Mher Khachikian Parsa Rezaee Rand Alazawe Seda Petrosyan Stephen Mathew Zhanming Liu

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 relationship to current tangents of architectural practice in today’s context. Throughout the semester students were asked to participate in a series of assignments that supported conversations and theories in contemporary architecture with drawings, models, building ideas, and writing. 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 which 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.

The Line and the Knot

Andras Rosner

This work explores the line and the knot in the context of an elevated, urban pedestrian network of walkways and space. The line in the urban framework is typically the path, the street, or the avenue, while intersections can be considered the knot. Considering the urban context as a figure-ground, the two together are effectively the negative space of the “ground” in the urban landscape. The ground-level intersection is a brute knot, where vehicular and pedestrian traffic collide from 4 directions. Elevating the line/street and the knot/intersection from the ground for pedestrians is a natural response in an ever-densifying city and can create new types of spaces. Lines morph into tubes which break open to turn into paths, resulting in a pedestrian walkway system for New York allowing for fast walking unhindered by traffic, with vertical tubes tying into the subway system. Widening occurs around knots and transform to recreational spaces sorely missing from the densest parts of New York. The lines finally culminate in a super-knot which spawns a large vertical park, a destination, a hyper-urban refuge.

Black Architecture

Demar Matthews

My goal is to advance the development of a Black aesthetic in architecture. So many cultures have their own architecture styles based on values, goals, morals, and customs shared by their society. When they relocated to America, to keep their culture intact, they bought land and built in the image of their homelands. This is not true in historically Black neighborhoods. I’ve turned this architectural problem into my thesis. I found a Black homeowner who’s lived in Watts for over 30 years who has agreed to allow me to build a 700sqft. house as an A.D.U. on her property to begin to develop this Black aesthetic, and to bring resources into the community that everyone can take advantage of. For the past year I have researched and archived every major Black art movement in America from the Harlem Renaissance to Afrofuturism; Black architects and their work from 1920-today. As well as building techniques of several regions in Africa. Lastly, I researched films, poems, music and literature depicting Black culture. Most importantly, I’ve spoken with the Watts community and collaborated with members in the design/approach to this new aesthetic that will be for us, and by us. My goal is for us to take control of our image in architecture; To elevate, not denigrate Black life and culture.

Fruiti-tecture

Genevieve Enriquez

This thesis explores the relationship between food and architecture as a tool for design. Scale and representation are being explored by understanding a fruit’s appearance and its anatomy. Still life composition is being studied to translate into a massing and parti organization. The interior of a fruit’s composition will become a design technique to represent building material, structure, and system. The duck and the decorative shed precedent is heavily referenced of how this thesis is designed. Along with the ‘Stroop Effect’ is a secondary design tool where a facade design is suggesting a familiar object, but the materiality is suggested differently. Stamping and projecting are techniques that will be used to recreate a building’s appearance from the outside. Stamping of familiar characteristics that resembles fruit and projecting graphical in different scale will make you stop to observe the building. It can almost give you a hint that the image of a large strawberry will suggest that you will find strawberries in their marketplace. Then using a fruit’s anatomy to start forming programmatic and circulation spaces inside the building.

Non-Contextual Contextualism

Greg Fass

Designing spaces that can adapt to the evolving needs of users is essential in creating healthy and prosperous environments. Once a space is built, it becomes an inanimate object and freezes in time. Most spaces do not engage the user or adapt to the users’ changing needs. Creating a virtual adaptive space can change how users interact and feel within a space. The technique of kinetic architecture will be used to design a technology driven adaptable space through the deconstruction of surfaces. Sensors and microcomputers will be used to control the shape and response to objects in the room. Built spaces will be deconstructed with the use of scanning and computer programs and remapped into a virtual space that is then projected on the walls and ceiling of the kinetic room. Virtual reality design and real time video will merge together to transform the space into an animated or real time environment. The specific focus will be on rooms which are occupied for an extensive period of time often by the immobile, in locations such as hospitals and assisted living spaces. The goal is to take these normal bland room spaces and provide the inhabitants with a place of comfort.

Ambiguity in Architecture

Hitisha Kalolia

While ambiguity is often associated with lack of clarity, confusion or vagueness, it is, more precisely, an attribute that indicates the presence of two or more possible meanings. Figure-ground refers to the shapes, space or forms within a composition. The background helps to define the figure – whether through creating lines that define the shape of the figure, adding color that creates a mood, or establishing a reference point like place – but the figure is what the viewer notices and processes. Ambiguous figure-ground images, mostly represented as binary images, are fascinating as they present viewers a visual phenomenon of perceiving multiple interpretations from a single image. Ambiguity is everywhere, most things having multiple meanings. But as defined by Gaver, Beaver and Benford in their paper ‘Ambiguity as a Resource for Design’, things are not ambiguous in themselves: ambiguity is an interpretative association that emerges from the relationship between the object, its user and its context. Thus, ambiguity is an attribute that involves perception and experience and demands that the user or observer take an active role in the process of interpretation.

Anti-Thesis

Krishna Vijay Jadawala

Dualism as a concept describes how seemingly opposite forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent. Within the realm of architecture, it also describes how these contrary appearing forms may give rise to each other as they are interrelated to one another. The term also explores and understands the relationship between two blocks that are in direct contrast with each other but can create visual harmony using profiles, composition and material application in architecture. Considering Profiles and Composition as the design problem, this thesis delves into creating two forms next to each other that visually share the same silhouettes but distinct volumes such that the continuity is maintained between them. One form is the additive complement of the negative volumes of the other form. Thus, this thesis formulates upon examining the part to whole relationship by looking at the way puzzle pieces exactly fit within each other. Together, these seemingly contrasting forms create harmony and unity in the compositional aspects. As a result, it develops two distinct structures while maintaining the relative unity that allow the visitors to understand building separately and as the whole simultaneously.

Blind Wall

Mher Khachikian

Wall in architecture is defined as a divider. A divider of the interior from exterior, private from public, spaces and rooms. Walls can be built with different materials for different purposes and situations. In traditional masonry construction, walls supported the weight of floors and roofs. But in modern architecture, walls are only required as a shelter. This element sometimes is used for political issues and is a solution to separate lands and people. Berlin wall, Israeli West Bank barrier, Macedonian border with Greece are examples of border barriers around the world. The goal of this thesis is to use different materials, construction methods and scales to redefine the wall as a programmed space. To achieve this goal, I used detailed images of existing walls from different buildings to construct a coherent image of a wall to define a programmed space. The outcome is a programmed wall-building near the border of US-Mexico to provide medical and public services to visitors which will create a connection between two sides of the border.

Femvelopes

My thesis reconceives interior decoration as exterior ornament. Grappling with Loos’ Ornament and Crime, I challenge the modern facade through the lens of excessive adornment. This project begins with an aesthetic indexing of American domesticity and its depictions in consumer propaganda. This culture of exuberant, feminized homemaking was inscribed in wall covers, window covers, domestic objects, and appliances, which have all since been left out of respectable design discourse.

Parsa Rezaee

I use these interior elements to develop a neo-suburban aesthetic that infects modernism’s masculine envelope. Femvelopes decorate the modern shed at a cosmetic level, recontextualizing the relationship between interior condition and facade. Rooted in a Suburban Romanticism, my project aims to give agency to an age of decoration overshadowed by modernism. Femvelopes revise the past by staging a productive collision between a dated architectural dogma and an equally dated propagandistic style.

Volumetric Grid Composition

Rand Alazawe

The Grid is not a subconscious form, it is the creation of intuitive reason and the ambitious face of the new art. The underlying Grid composition approach supports a dynamic Composition that may need to adapt to the challenges in the environment, site, program, and underlying resources. The Grid composition approach allows a collaborative pooling of distributed functions and program resources across multiple zones. Grid construction is a valuable tool to search the new forms; owning to their wide diversity and flexibility. A fitness facility design with a dynamic massing. The site is located in downtown Los Angeles which is an energetic area. The massing Grid would start from the ground very softly and reach the sky creating different heights at gridding volumes and will create a peak in the form that memorizes the liberation of the spirit, energy, mind, and the connection between space and object. Looking toward exercising as an activity in which you lose negative energy and start to feel a lot of relaxation and good spirit helped me to design a dynamic object that works functionally right as a gym too. The thesis of my project experiments the functional grid capacities through the powerful organization and composition of consistent Grid volumes.

Recognizable in Plan not in Section

Seda Petrosyan

The Plan, as an orthographic projection, is the most fundamental representational tool in architecture. Moreover, plans can be seen as the handwriting of the architect. By using different techniques to represent information such as dimensions, notes, materials, furniture. The plan creates a relationship between circulation and program, helping to organize spaces. Plans are used as a starting point to find common ground in the development of volume and space. This thesis attempts to convey spatial experiences through the plan by repurposing (reconceptualizing, reimagining) quintessential modernist examples of the twentieth century that were designed with the free plan and their own, already known, volumetric characteristics. The attempt is to challenge the notion of a plan by revisiting ambiguity in architecture through a close reading of traditional representation. This project is a radical exploration of the plan. This project is questioning free plan. Free to misread, free to reuse, free to steal and free to question the status quo of the plan in architecture. This project will take a series of quintessential free plans and add high levels of designed complexity to each through adding walls, furniture, textures, people.

Perfect Circle

Stephen Mathew

A utopia is an ideal community designed to overcome the shortcomings of the place in which the visionary resides. Rather than simply complain about the state of current affairs, futurists, architects, designers, and dreamers utilize their talents to find a solution. The results of these projects are quite similar in many ways. Indeed, they have nearly universal commonalities among them, whether from ancient Greece or the Scandinavia of today. Probably the most recognizable feature is a very defined circular boundary. The circle is a symbolic shape that helps to reinforce the utopian ideals of projected cities in many different ways, but one of the most inherent is its planned nature. A built circle does not come into existence unless there is a deliberate effort to make it. It underscores that there are specific principles upon which these optimized communities are founded and thought has been put into what constitutes a sustainable balance for them to survive.

Orthographication

Zhanming Liu

The proliferation of digital tools has negated / undercut orthographic design. This thesis is interested in challenging the production of traditional orthographic representation in a digital environment. Multiple computer-aid design and modeling tools have been applied to alter and refigure classical orthographic design techniques to challenge our understanding of architectural production in today’s environment. As the advancement in digital productions, contemporary architecture has progressed further away from what we consider architecture 200 years ago. It is a fact that we lost most of essences of classical proportions and characteristics through history. The combination of modern digital designing tools and classical characteristics can help generate new building ideas. The techniques are mainly digital production tools in Rhino and Autodesk Maya including profile extrusion, Boolean operations, scaling, use of positive and negative spaces, sweeping, bounding box, contour, and tectonics. The context of this project is located in downtown Los Angeles. The program of the building is a mixed-use commercial, office, and residential housing. The goal of this thesis is to challenge the status quo of orthographic design.

2020 Interior Design Class

INTERIOR DESIGN BFA Faisal Ali Alowidi Zepur Avanesian Lianna Bagdzhyan Sidaq Gill Ryanne Hawkins Sarah Hiddawi Hei Tong Lam Brittney Valadez

MID Reem Aladham Eithar Alsayigh

Heather Peterson Instructors

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

Degree Project

A wall does not have to be silent. A ceiling is not just a roof. A window could be more than just a screen to the outside.

Faisal Ali Alowidi

Marchland: The Museological Occupation of a Border

Zepur Avanesian

Since the invention of the first public art museums, in the late 18th century, architecture has maintained a relatively untested dynamic to the works of art that it hosts, despite the radical proliferation in art disciplines, as well as mediums and scales of production. One stands in front of an intimate Dutch still life painting at the Louvre in much the same way that one experiences Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan in the Grand Palais. As works of art have tested their formal diversity and size, the exhibition spaces within museums have grown larger, but few acknowledge or accommodate the experience of viewing large scale works of art. Part of the reason for this unchanging affiliation between art object and space of exhibition has been the accommodating expectation of architecture in this programmatic relationship, but what if architecture could play a generative role in the production of art objects? This project proposes the creation of an episodic, large-scale museum of buried galleries, sited along 2.5 miles of the border between Armenia, and the newly independent country of Artsakh.

Spatial Papers

Lianna Bagdzhyan

Wallpaper could be defined as a two-dimensional, planar surface that delivers a one-sided graphic transformation to a space. This thesis will explore a translation of wallpaper from its two-dimensional nature into its three-dimensional possibilities through the making of graphic and optical experiences. The five wallpapers of a traditional 1940’s single family home will be dissected into layers by color and shape, and manipulated to revisit programmatic and communicable settings throughout a home. Social space, privacy, and the performed actions of domestic functions will be considered throughout the distribution of the wallpaper patterns and spatial capacities.

Soft Separation

Sidaq Gill

Rudolf Schindler built a house for him and his wife, as well as another married in couple and their children in 1922, following a camping trip to Yosemite and close on the heels of the 1918 outbreak of Spanish Influenza. The project sought to formalize the experiences that the group had had living in canvas tents apart from clocks and schedules, and to assert a radical declaration of personal space, where each member of the house had their own undifferentiated room to do with as they pleased. Nearly a century later, we are facing a comparable global pandemic, and questions of physical boundary, cohabitation, and domesticity abound. This thesis seeks to revisit the site, both physical and conceptual, of the Schindler House in West Hollywood, and to renegotiate the terrains of boundary, surface, containment, visibility, and community through the material possibilities of textile logics.

The Syntax of Collapse

Ryanne Hawkins

In 1929, Mies van der Rohe and Lily Reich’s Barcelona Pavilion, challenged the perceptual stability of spatial boundaries through material effects. The veined surfaces of polished marble collated reflections of the surrounding landscape which were mirrored and expanded in shallow pools of water; while Marcel Duchamp’s groundbreaking work of 1923, The Large Glass, gathered and collapsed content behind or in front of its surface into a dynamic continuum of spatial arrangements. This thesis explores the visual collapsing of milieu in a domestic setting through apertures and material effects to create programmatic alignments that are precisely arranged and framed; becoming an interior condition assembled through visual participation.

Painterly Measures: A Exploration of the Grid as Matter and Space

A grid could be defined as a system of measure; an abstract system that both organizes and haunts Cartesian space, and can be used to analyze principles of proportion. This thesis will translate the notion of a grid into physical conditions by giving it thickness, materiality, and scale, and will be expressed through the design for an exhibition of works by the late American painter Agnes Martin, who used the grid in profound ways throughout her long artistic career.

Sarah Hiddawi

The Everyday Illuminated

Hei Tong Lam

07:00 07:15 07:30 08:00 09:00 10:30 11:30 12:30 14:30 15:30 16:00 16:30 18:00 18:30

Sunrise falls on the crease of a pillow. Soap bubbles burst in the bowl of the sink. The bristles of a toothbrush sparkle in the mirror. The blister of a poached egg rests in the pan. A stack of paper fall on the desk. A jacket is hangs from hook at the entrance. A nest of spaghetti steams in a bowl. Sunshine falls on a spoon set on the table. The words on page 249 of a book glow. Sugar sparkles in a teacup. A toy train passes through the tunnel on lit rails. A pencil rolls on a table. Sunset falls on the metal button of a briefcase. A bright disk of soup splashes in a bowl.

Continental Harbor

Brittney Valadez

Much of the paper architecture of the 1960’s and 70’s, made use of collage as a method for exploring utopian ideas or to take up critical positions on culture and society. Groups like Archigram and Super Studio employed the techniques of displacement, decontextualization, and juxtaposition in their collagic work to produce visions of consumerist cities, technological regimes, and urban narratives, but few of the visionary proposals from that time addressed issues of interiority. This project will reinvest in the formal techniques and methodologies of collage to create an imagined world arising from questions of pandemic and quarantine as they bear on issues of interiority and community.

Architecture of the Skin: Understanding Space through Touch

Reem Aladham

The connection between sensory response and our perception of space is an underexplored theme in design and architecture, but can help develop a much deeper understanding of how humans interact with, perceive, and use spaces. The human body works with multiple resources to understand spaces and environments around itself. Through the use of vision, smell, touch, hearing and taste, a wide variety of sensory information is captured and processed. Sight seems to be the primary and dominant sense in terms of perception and initial instinctive response. However, other senses like touch, smell and hearing can provide deeper insight from, and interaction with, the physical environment. In The Eyes of our Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa says, “All sense can be considered as part of the sense of touch, relating to the skin. There is a connection between the skin and the environment.” This thesis explores architecture and the haptic condition of touch, and how it works together with the other senses to produce an understanding of space. Various materials, temperatures, textures and design techniques will be controlled and manipulated to stimulate the senses and generate a corresponding response.

Inside the Kaaba: An Exploration of Admittance

Eithar Alsayigh

101

Habitation is one of the fundamental presumptions of architectural space, but in some circumstances interiority can be inadmissible due to cultural, political, or religious exclusion, physical limitations of capacity, scale, location, or fragility, or a space can simply no longer exist. The invention of photography greatly expanded architecture’s visual ingress through mechanical reproduction and dissemination. Today, other imaging technologies such as x-rays, infrared photography, augmented reality, and virtual reality allow us to confront notions of the uninhabitable through these various techniques of visualization. This project will utilize AR (augmented reality) to help access one of the least admissible interiors in the world, the Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Of the 7.8 billion people on earth, only its 1.8 billion Muslims have religious access to the holy site, but even within the Muslim population, the interior of the Kaaba is restricted to it’s guardians for two days a year. This project will take the form of an exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C., displaying original parts of the Kaaba alongside physical facsimiles with AR-enhancement, and ask questions regarding how we visualize and exhibit architecture.

SAN DIEGO B.ARCH & M.ARCH Within the Degree Project & Graduate Thesis Studios, 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

103

SAN DIEGO 2020 CLASS

Moderate Rate Transit-Oriented Housing

Sean Baba

Architecture, transportation, and infrastructure- three separate ideas that are somehow connected. There is a specific type of system that has the capability of creating a distribution network based on efficiency, movement, and connection. San Diego’s current public transportation system accommodates mostly lower income residents; other cities and transportation systems prove that this does not have to be the case. The development of East Village is creating a new identity for the district. One would assume that public services buildings, SRO, transitional housing, and homeless services are located throughout San Diego, but this is not the case. To tackle this intersection and division in social economic status, I have located a site that would influence and help interact/connect all people but specifically housing moderate rate income residents. This is the only site that connects all three trolley lines- a line that goes North, a line that goes East, and a line that goes South. This means that the site could house working class medium income families who live in Downtown, but work in places like La Jolla, Santee, and San Ysidro. The key questio is this: Can architecture influence the progression and development of moderate rate housing on a transit-oriented site?

Reclaiming Public Space

Josue Braganca

105

This project intends to bridge the gap between public and private through thresholds between the two. By reclaiming public space in the urban realm, specifically the relationship between recreational opportunities and underserved communities. The existing context should be encouraged to transform into a space for recreation and activity, thus injecting the underdeveloped community with the necessary infrastructure to grow. In a community such as Barrio Logan there are two distinct communities, the locals which live in the area and the workers which are primarily shipyard workers. There is a need in Barrio Logan for recreation, by providing a recreational center for the community we could begin to improve quality of life and community development through places of recreation and fitness. With a lack of parking in the area providing parking for those that work there would alleviate the street and create a center at which both communities can begin to mix and interact. Allowing for the recreation center to unfold into the alleys and street will reclaim and break the barrier between public and private.

Cultural Center: An Oblique Perspective

Analidio Costa-Gonzalez

In the 1960’s, the construction of I-5 freeway split the Logan Heights community, San Diego’s oldest Mexican-American neighborhood. This split lead to the birth of Barrio Logan and in turn created Chicano Park as the largest collection of Chicano murals in the world while maintaining cultural celebrations throughout the year. This thesis is seeking to support the cultural preservation of the community while providing a center as an extension of Chicano Park. This community center rises above the freeway enabling visitors to become mountaineers on its inclined roofs, thus making a statement of resistance to the current infrastructure adjacent to Chicano Park. The massive concrete walls and pylons exposed by the freeway and Coronado bridge become canvasses that permeate into the community center by allowing murals as cultural expressions. The Oblique Function of Claude Parent becomes pivotal to the organization of space within and above the community center. Pedestrian inclined surfaces dictating locations to pause, stand, sit, and enjoy the surroundings. A new organization of space based on the health and enjoyment of the body in motion becomes activated. Ultimately, this becoming a central location where visitors can come and learn about the community’s history and its authentic local culture.

Romantic Decomposition

Joe Gleghorn

107

Fossil fuel infrastructure dots the landscape in many parts of the world, the majority of these structures will soon enter their post-industrial phase. Pursuing both physical and sociological redress from the contaminations caused by these sites, this thesis intends to use the lens of nature and its ability to reclaim the abandoned as the key to navigating both the technical and social aspects of reintegrating fossil fuel infrastructure back into the community. Abandoning the ROMANTIC notion of nature, fossil fuel infrastructure will be used as a catalyst to rethink the humanities role within the cycle of their environment and establish a relationship of supportive ecology. ECOLOGY is primarily about lifecycles and it is through this refocused lens we can study the remediation of fossil fuel infrastructure. Looking at the processes of DECOMPOSITION, ephemeral architecture will be used to reconnect these sites not only to the community but the ecology surrounding these sites, bringing with it a cycle of decomposition and rebirth. Maintaining the concepts of decomposition existing elements of the site are used as nutrients to begin new growth throughout the site.

Market + Park

Camilo González

North Park is a rapidly densifying neighborhood in San Diego CA with a lack of growth in infrastructure. With this void, the project aims to create a public park that can transform to serve multiple community needs. Taking into account the surrounding context of a farmer’s market and a large consumer-based urban format, this project explores how the environment of the ‘market’ could challenge the perception of public space. This exploration challenges how the consumer’s preferences towards ‘markets’ could enhance public spaces. This is a key factor in reactivating nodes of the city in a more integrative manner. In addition, the project explores ways in which the inner space of these markets could dictate the users’ behavior that could shape a sense of civilness, collective entrepreneurship and alternate ways in which the community spends free time. The market space versus the public space is questioned through the analyses of architectural elements that respond to a grid system, where the column expands its structural and mechanical use to become a broad receptor.

109

Community Ecosystem Food

Honey

Gardens

Honey

scr

Pollination

Pollen

aps

s Egg

Foo

Hive

Savannah Jones

Decomposition

ost

p Com

BEE

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ergy

In order to care for the environment, we should learn from it. The environment is made up of ecosystems, which are basically communities. If every living thing naturally lives in communities, then that must be the best way to design for the environment. In this thesis the program is the four elements that make up every ecosystem: abiotic (water reuse, renewable energy production), producers (Gardens, chickens), consumers (the residents of the block), and decomposers (community compost). In a community it is expected that things are given and received, like “one person’s trash” is used by something else, then given back in a form that is valuable to a person again. The goal of this project is to architecturally create a community that treats its energy and resources, like an ecosystem. By changing rapid consumerism to a Waste as Resource System, and the architecture organizes activities and facilitates use and reuse. Architecture should care for the environment by using ecosystems as a model for creating community.

Beyond Nostalgia: A New Path Forward for the American Motel

Macey Laughlin

The advent of the American Freeway system in the 1950’s was an integral socio-cultural emergence of the American West. Bypassed highways ushered in an interstate landscape, characterized by homogeneous stretches of American roadside franchises. The urban fabric of the American Southwest shifted, and hundreds of smaller American towns were bypassed completely. The abrupt shift in American motel use in recent decades offers rich opportunity within the dispersed typology. These nostalgic structures line route 66 through both rural and urban fabrics, offering opportunity to provide socially valuable programs to their cities. Located in Nob Hill District in Albuquerque, this particular motel will shift to provide a space for an art and science residency program. Fine Art and Scientific Research are two of New Mexico’s top industries, attracting artists to the beautiful art studios of Santa Fe, and residents to the multiple national labs throughout the state.The two professions hold a dialogue with one another throughout history, but few residencyprograms offer a space for both disciplines to come together and influence each other throughtangible relationships and shared spaces. Motels have the opportunity to provide this program by slowing down the transition from public to private through semi-private workspace and courtyards.

Metagame Intertwine Reality and Fantacy

Li Ma Graduate Student

111

How can the fictional narrative be mapped to the real scenario through the form of buildings? There may be only one form of architecture, that is, the entity after the materialization of construction, the building itself can also be regarded as one of the existing forms of all materialized architecture. With the development of science and technology, the existing form of architecture becomes more and more diversified, but how many other forms of architecture exist? For example, Hitchcock’s movie “Rear window”, Calvino’s novel “ Invisible cities”, Lebeus Woods’ critical architectural painting and Esport’s (a form of competitive sport using video games) virtual world. The direction of the design and research is to map different forms of existence into the reality through the physical building itself. “Metagame” puts forward the concept that starts from rules and transcends space, makes the concept of space vague, to achieve the integration of virtual and reality. Circulation is composed of eight rings in series based on the principle of Mobius ring.Voronoi diagrams is used for the landscape design, and also get an interesting shape as the prototype of the building. In this design, an E-sport venue is used as the carrier to make the real world and the virtual world in the game form cross space, time, and create an immersive free space with heterogeneous coexistence.

Media – Plex

How can architecture increase productivity for a start-up company? Is there a way to co-habitate multiple, technology based, start-up companies, in order to promote the development of highly efficient technologies?

Ryan Matthew McComb

During my quest to find a way to fulfill my thesis questions, I have designed a vertical campus, intended for start-up companies to live and develop their ideas. This campus will act as a micro-city, as the inhabitants of the campus will have all of the essential needs of living a happy, healthy lifestyles on-site, so that they are able to devote all of their time and energy towards developing their ideas. The campus will have a separate workspace for each start-up company. However, linking multiple private offices together, will be collaborative workspaces or media labs.

Space Game: A Cinematic Methodology

Sharon Caroline Reis

113

This project intends to elucidate narrative through distilling cinematic techniques into an architectural design methodology. “Architecture exists, like cinema, in a dimension of time and movement. One thinks, conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences. To erect a building is to predict and seek effects of contrast and linkage bound up with the succession of spaces through which one passes” (Rattenbury, 1994). Both are known to manipulate time, space, light, frame, sequence, depth, motion, color and sound. The methodology proposed is translated as the Space Game. The Space Game is an operative space-time matrix where the only variable is program. Functions that control temporal events and processes of sequencing space are set before the user to develop an improvisational architecture much like theater. The Space Game allows for a socially interactive machine of ceaseless assembling and dismantling a kit of parts in order to tell the narrative. One can watch a film, make a film, play a game, learn to dance as a response to the changing needs of individuals to develop a narrative of bricolage. There is never one answer, but an endless variability in scale, light, form and access. This is architectural story boarding.

Developing Leftovers

Guilherme Ribeiro

This thesis aims to expand the limits of architectural design to broader aspects of infrastructure and urban issues. Infrastructure holds the city together, acting like connectors, linking architecture and people. These connectors often create slivers and chucks of space, which are most often not used. The reasons they are undeveloped are various, from ownership, to political reasons, or simply because their non-traditional shapes and locations. “Residual Spaces” generated by the development of transportation infrastructure is the condition being examined in this thesis project, representing the opportunity for the development of architectural intervention. The goal is to create a design proposal for a specific site which could result in a model to be replicated in other residual spaces. These urban voids represent the opportunity to add to the food production. Through blending form created by specific community needs with generic food production typology, the diversity of use can diversify, providing the community access to quality food, education and community space. Reducing the miles traveled from “farm” to table does not only provide more affordable produce for the consumer, but also means less emissions generated by transportation.

ICON Building

Giovani Sandoval

115

Thing regarded as a representative symbol; highly original or influential in popular culture. Exorbitant representation of the structure system builds to provoke discussion, absorbing the attention of spectators to admire the representation of an object, function, or process. Icon buildings are symbols that represent a city, a symbol that has connection value to people. Iconic buildings are generally identified differently in terms of design, size, and building style. Symbolize the connection with people, influenced by a methodology of architecture for the recognition of a city. So I intend to propose an icon building for San Diego. To create an icon, I have to look into the economic bases of San Diego which are naval, bio-tech, and tourism. Following these three bases can provoke a new technique of structure system that can be the symbolic representation of San Diego. The selected site is located in the Chula Vista waterfront at the San Diego bay. It is the building that characterizes the silhouette to create the place to make it phenomenal and capable of radiating uniqueness in the bay of San Diego. The surrounding texture of the bay, the access and circulation through the structure, its form, material, technology, and its spatial spaces can determine the iconic.

The Sublime: EV Charging Station

Angela Tamayo Cárdenas

This project intends to secularize the spatial qualities of religious architecture, essentially light and shadow which have the ability to change the perception of space in order to bring a sublime feeling. By utilizing techniques that religious architecture has deployed, the project intends to create a space that brings pleasure to the user. Sacred Architecture or religious architecture has a quality that is specific to its field. Which is the use of light, shadow and proportion in a manner that changes the user’s perception in such space. The feeling when someone enters a religious building whether a believer or not, is sublime, and it comes from those specific architectural qualities employed in the making of Sacred Architecture.According to Burke the sublime is something which inspires fear but for which the observer gains some degree of pleasure from knowing that the object is not of immediate danger to the observer. The secularization of architecture and the so-called divine, it is essential to this thesis.To secularize is to disassociate or separate from religious or spiritual concerns. The goal is to secularize the spatial qualities of religious architecture.

Receiver For Leisure

Korey Turk

117

A flexible space that can adapt and transformed with the future of technology advancement is an ideal space for expanding program. Utilizing the attic or crawl space know as “junk space” will allow for expanding units as technology advances. Non-bearing partition walls will allow for easy removal for expansion. Units will have junk space above and below for mechanical and electrical systems. It will also transform with the upgrading and advancement of technology. Floor and ceiling joist will span across the entire singular unit, allowing for the internal space to be transformed over time. Passive systems and technology will be demonstrated throughout the building. Utilizing the sun, wind and water technologies throughout the building to make it as efficient as possible. As technology advances and requires less junk space, floor plans will adapt and take advantage of the extra bonus space. Introducing the future of flying drone delivery will take advantage of this extra space and help form the program of the building. Being able to capture the natural resources that surround us while also introducing the new typology of drone delivery, will create an efficient and adaptable program for the building.

Historically, mail and horses go hand in hand. Historically, concrete and Brutalism go hand in hand.

Jacqueline Walker

Here lies a historic building on the outskirts of Point Loma, which acts as an island, surrounded by completely secure sites. The audacious Brutalist building was built to serve as a warehouse distribution center for the USPS and built to last. Through a series of additions and take-aways to the original building, the 1974 concrete giant will be altered to create transparency and fluidity throughout and to soften the Brutalist nature to fit the new program. The new program, The Equestrian Quarantine Center, will inhabit the space and preserve the building’s integrity, building upon its historically unique facets. The program will offer boarding and exercise for horses in quarantine. The facilities will meet the need for well-equipped and committed horse quarantine guidelines while also illuminating the ability to marry an exterior program with an interior space. Introducing an organic program such as this requires the building to become more dynamic and enhances the center’s key historical elements. By design, the building is fit for the distribution and regulated holding of registered mail. The same concept will be applied to this equine facility. “Preservation is architectures saving retreat” - Rem Koolhaas

The Anomaly of Autonomy

119

This thesis looks at the existing parcels of land taken up by dealerships today and looks at readapting them for the future of tomorrow. The premise is that with technology always advancing, cars becoming smarter and smarter, in the future where humans can no longer drive the dealership can provide the “old driving” experience.

Kyle Zahn

Focusing on the Ford dealer located in Temecula, CA the aim is to add an additional architecture to the rear of the lot focused on combing theprograms of dealership, museum, and interactive experience of driving. Tying into the history of Ford, cars, and the driving experience the lines of the building are meant to mimic that of the Ford GT. In a future world of automation, how can we experience what is so common and overlooked today?

The Polluted Garden in the Sun

Aaron Zamarrón

Arvin, California. A rural and agricultural based city located in the heart of the Southern San Joaquin Valley, has a population of 20,000. The city, which proclaims themselves as, “The Garden in the Sun”, ranks first in having the worst air quality in the United States. Because of the valley geography, wind carries pollutants of automobiles, wood and gas powered equipment and pesticides from as far north as Sacramento to the basin of the southern portion of the valley. This project’s intent is to help alleviate and provide a solution to the exacerbated conditions this community experiences by understanding the problem through the implementation of a research facility and by utilizing both passive and technological systems of architecture as a means of reducing pollution. Through context and analysis, the center-pivoting irrigation system and its subsequent shape of a circle are used as the base of design. The research facility can have dual functionality as a place for research and education with the inclusion of relocating California State University, Bakersfield’s Department of Agriculture to Arvin while other portions of the project can enforce areas of refuge from poor air quality through the utilization of different systems.

121

Degree Project & Graduate Thesis

Los Angeles Faculty

Los Angeles Staff

Berenika Boberska Biayna Bogosian Ewan Branda Olson Branka Nina Briggs Jeanine Centuori Ziya Cetik Carmelia Chiang Annie Chu Mark Ericson Todd Erlandson Heather Flood Anthony Fontenot Anali Gharakhani Matthew Gillis Patrick Geske Lara Hoad Helena Jubany Robert Kerr Timothy Kohut

Eric Baldwin Matthew Corbitt Galina Kraus Catherine Roussel Marina Zakarian

Christoph Korner Keith Marks Stephen Marshall Ryan Tyler Martinez Duane McLemore Louis Molina Cody Miner Eric Olsen Mark Owen Zach Pauls Heather Peterson Jason Rebillot Bailey Shugart Paulette Singley Teddy Slowik Gerard Smulevich Joshua Stein Linda Taalman John Turturro Thomas Valle Stallman

2020

San Diego Faculty Akore Berliner Stan Bertheaud Matthew Boomhower James Brunner Mike Burnett Kristine Byers Jim Churchill Brett Farrow Robert Gabriel Anne Garrison Ryan Goodwin Jeff Haile Tyler Hanson Catherine Herbst Slade Kaufman Rick Labonte

San Diego Staff Jon Linton Casey Mahon Salvador Medina Nathan Moeder Jose Parral David Pearson Hector Perez Lloyd Russell Dave Saborio Marcel Sanchez-Prieto Jonathan Segal Patrick Shields Ted Smith Bethany Turner Andrew Wagner David White

Janet Asuncion Ryan Burtanog Sandy Burlem Ryan Goodwin 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