2 0 1 5

Degree Project /Senior Project / Graduate Thesis

and

W o o d b u r y S c h o o l of A r c h i t e c t u r e

Architecture L o s A n g e l e s

BArch faculty

MArch faculty

MSArch faculty

Interior Architecture L o s A n g e l e s

BFA Interior Architecture faculty

Architecture S a n D i e g o BArch faculty

MArch faculty

MSArch RED faculty

Marc J. Neveu, Chair

Berenika Boberska / Scrap MarshallEwan Branda / Maxi SpinaFrank Clementi / Matthew DainesMicah Rutenberg / Peter CulleyMark Stankard / Mark Stanley

Peter CulleyMark EricsonAnthony FontenotJoshua Stein

Hadley Arnold / Peter Arnold

Christoph Korner, Chair

Annie ChuHeather Peterson

Catherine Herbst, Chair

Philipp Bosshart / Eric Johnson / Marcel Sanchez-Prieto

Stan Bertheaud / Philipp Bosshart / Eric Johnson / Hector Perez / Marcel Sanchez-Prieto

Mike Burnett / Brett Farrow / Tyler Hanson / Lloyd Russell / David Saborio / Jonathan Segal / Ted Smith

5

721415571

869298

104

111

116

118

136

138

166

170

Woodbury School of Architecture

Degree Project, Senior Project and Graduate Thesis 201

2015Bachelor of Architecture

Ewan Branda, Coordinator

Berenika Boberska

Frank Clementi

Peter Culley

Matthew Daines

April Greiman

Scrap Marshall

Micah Rutenberg

Maxi Spina

Mark Stankard

Mark Stanley

Master of Architecture

Anthony Fontenot, Coordinator

Peter Culley

Mark Ericson

Joshua Stein

Master of Science in Architecture

Hadley Arnold

Peter Arnold

Bachelor of Fine Arts,

Interior Architecture

Annie Chu, Coordinator

Heather Peterson

Bachelor of Architecture

Marcel Sanchez-Prieto, Coordinator

Philipp Bosshart

Eric Johnson

Master of Architecture

Hector Perez, Coordinator

Stan Bertheaud

Philipp Bosshart

Eric Johnson

Marcel Sanchez-Prieto

Master of Science in ArchitectureReal Estate Development

Ted Smith, Coordinator

Mike Burnett

Brett Farrow

Tyler Hanson

Lloyd Russell

David Saborio

Jonathan Segal

FacultyL o s A n g e l e s

FacultyS a n D i e g o

Norman Millar Dean

Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter Associate Dean

Marc J. NeveuArchitecture Chair, Los Angeles

Christoph KornerInterior Architecture Chair, Los Angeles

Catherine Herbst Architecture Chair, San Diego

Corrigendum

The following students graduating with a Master of Science in Architecture were instructed by the following faculty:

Student Gregory Andrade: Instructors Anthony Fontenot and Mark StanleyStudent Cyrus Dorbayan: Instructors Bill Roschen and Christi van Cleve

W o o d b u r y S c h o o l of A r c h i t e c t u r e S a n D i e g o C a l i f o r n i a

W o o d b u r y S c h o o l of A r c h i t e c t u r e B u r b a n k C a l i f o r n i a

5L o s A n g e l e s

o

pen

/ c

lose

d ?

“O

ne

do

or

clo

ses

and

an

oth

er o

pen

s”

so a

wis

e pr

ofes

sor

told

me

upon

gra

duat

ion.

It m

ade

sen

se.

I w

as l

eavi

ng

th

e w

arm

co

nfi

nes

of

an u

n-

der

gra

du

ate

acad

emic

wo

mb

an

d e

nte

rin

g i

nto

a n

ew l

ife

of

pro

fess

ion

al p

ract

ice.

It

was

, I

was

to

ld,

go

ing

to

be

a

sho

ck.

Des

ign

wo

uld

be

rep

lace

d b

y re

dli

nes

; th

eory

wit

h p

ract

ice;

th

ou

gh

t w

ith

act

ion

. Su

re,

I co

uld

mak

e a

bit

of

mo

ney

, b

ut

at w

hat

co

st?

Th

en,

I fo

un

d D

uch

amp

’s d

oo

r at

11

ru

e La

rray

. It

is

at o

nce

b

oth

op

en a

nd

clo

sed

. A

nd

, so

met

imes

, n

eith

er.

I

off

er y

ou

th

is o

ther

do

or

as a

mo

del

of

the

situ

atio

n y

ou

no

w f

ace.

Per

hap

s it

may

all

ow

yo

u t

o r

eco

nsi

der

yo

ur

de-

gre

e p

roje

ct a

nd

yo

ur

app

roac

h t

o p

rofe

ssio

nal

pra

ctic

e.

You

may

ver

y so

on

co

me

to r

eali

ze t

hat

th

e q

ues

tio

ns

sur-

rou

nd

ing

yo

ur

pro

ject

do

no

t si

mp

ly e

nd

up

on

gra

du

atio

n,

no

r d

oes

yo

ur

pro

fess

ion

al l

ife

nee

d t

o n

eces

sari

ly d

isre

gar

d yo

ur

acad

emic

in

tere

sts.

I ra

ise

this

as

a p

oss

ibil

ity

bu

t n

ot

a m

and

ate.

Ho

w w

ill

you

fram

e th

e d

oo

r b

etw

een

aca

dem

ia a

nd

pra

ctic

e?

It’s

yo

ur

do

or,

an

d y

ou

r h

ing

e. I

s it

op

en,

or

clo

sed

?

Marc J. Neveu Architecture Chair

7

Constructive Mythologies

Collectively, as a studio, we will argue that vision-ary architecture and the Mythological City is indeed constructible, and unlike the utopias of the past, can become material, tactile and experiential through carefully orchestrated collisions with the everyday fabric of Los Angeles.

Every city has its Constructive Myth– something which explains how it has come to be in both its physical and its perceived form. In some cities, this Myth is more obvious spatially; in others, it exists only as a fiction. For Los Angeles, this could be the Endless City, the City of Sprawl, the American Dream, Arcadia, or the City of Cinematic Fictions. But per-haps these Myths have run their course...

What would happen if a foreign Myth, in all its inten-sity, collided with Los Angeles? This necessarily would result in deformations and transformations on both sides. The grafting of the “other” into the context of Los Angeles would also provide a kind of de-familiar-ization of what we think of as ordinary or banal– and begin a blossoming of sites into their unexpected po-tential– in both poetic and pragmatic (useful) terms. The key aspect will be the examination of distinct local situations and archetypal L.A. forms which are often overlooked, local economies and cultures in need of reinvention. We will explore the spatial and programmatic opportunities in the frictions and alli-ances between the “mythic” and the local.

Berenika Boberska and Scrap Marshall, Instructors

L o s A n g e l e s

Daniela Angelo Adrinee Bodakian Marilyn Chavarria Amanda Clay

Gregory Dulgeryan

Elizabeth Fernandez

Chadi Hakim

Jose Iglesias

Joseph Miller

George Rivera

Kelly Ta Vedi Vartani

S t u d e n t s

9

Adrinee Bodakian

Porcelain Landscapes : The Blossoming of LA’s Hidden Water Infrastructure

The water infrastructure of Los Angeles remains hidden to the general public. In effect, we have little knowledge of where the water comes from, how it is treated, how it gets to our faucets, and where it goes after our use. The project proposes not only to uncover water infrastructure in or-der to make it visible, but also to orchestrate its spatial, experiential and functional blossoming into a series of ceramic vessels and landscapes in an attempt to inspire better stewardship of water. The project merges the very industrial functions of a water treatment plant with a more poetic reading and potential public uses including a playground, an amphitheater, as well as the everyday functions that utilize water, such as a laundromat. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where pipe work blossoms into vessels that hold water, this project is a spatial transformation of water infrastructure into a white porcelain landscape.

L A

Daniela Angelo

Potential Difference : Photovoltaic Flooding of Los Angeles

Los Angeles dwells in the space between an imaginary attic and fictitious cellar; a place that is dreamed to be hopeful and bright. However, the city is deprived of the experiential aspect of the dark basement and the mysterious attic. By conceptually flooding a neighborhood in Los Angeles with a photovoltaic plane, a common ceiling in-between houses is created, allowing for a dual atmospheric experience to exist above and below the plane. The plane is then explored through shared structures capturing a spatial stair-case– a vessel connecting the cellar to the attic. An archipelago of structures begins to traverse the polarized spaces alongside the existing ordinary structures poking up above the datum. The idea of property lines is washed away beneath the datum plane as towers that serve as generators, staircases, lanterns and batteries cross boundaries, interfering with traditional ways of inhabiting a neighborhood, generating new social interactions.

11

Amanda Clay

Immured Projections: The Potential of Walled Cities as an Urban Strategy for Future Los Angeles

immure 1 (archaic or literary) to enclose within or as if within walls;

imprison2 to shut (oneself) away from society

projection 1 a jutting out; a part that juts out2 an estimate of future possibilities based on a current trend

Today’s gated communities of today continue to offer protection and separation between the people who choose to live in them, and those who live outside of them. Strict regulations preserve the specific atmosphere and spatial structure of each community. The project seeks to amplify the historical trajectory of gated communities of Los Angeles in order to uncover their hidden poten-tial– and perhaps desirability– in spatial, architec-tural, and social terms. The extreme thickening of the wall and other operations would lead to the emergence of an archipelago of Walled Cities. The over-regulated walled cities would act as nodes within the autonomous regions beyond, providing centers of regulation, industry, and retail.

L A

Marilyn Chavarria

Folkloric Farmscapes : Re-drawing the American Landscape

It has been several years since I’ve seen my family, absorbed as I’ve been, enthralled by city life and my circle of friends. I can recall, as a young girl, living my whole life in the countryside, where my parents and grandparents grew up nurturing the fields. As I arrived at the far-reaching fields of the land I left behind, I noticed its appearance was different. An intervention had taken place. It was unfamiliar. I suddenly discovered a walkway as I stepped onto the freshly ploughed ground and fields of fruit. Gliding through this endless path-way, a beautiful tune reached my ear. As I contin-ued, the melody of the music reached closer and closer. As I progressed, the pathway transformed its long extended arm into a cavernous perfor-mance space in the middle of the field, lines of thread spinning above my head…

So begins an exploration into the future of Califor-nia’s Folkloric Farmscapes.

13

Elizabeth Fernandez

American Gothic - Inverting the “American Dream”

American Gothic explores the future potential of public space and social integration in the Watts district of Los Angeles, and questions the usual language deployed by architects to tackle these issues. The semi-suburban houses of Watts exemplify the stubborn, if fading, notion of the American dream. Pleasant and rational, the single family houses, with picket fences protecting the front and back yards from the ever-encroaching city, speak of a detached private domain.

American Gothic uses the idea of the Gothic as a symbol of revolt against society’s rationalization and demarcation of private and public space. The fantastical and the everyday meet in the Gothic wooden towers and pits in a series of new public stitches that cross the L.A. River. By taking frag-mented, clandestine social activities and incorpo-rating them into the everyday yet soaring forms of the collective Gothic, we can begin to question the way public space is designed and used.

L A

Gregory Dulgeryan

Public Industries - Hidden pockets

Along with Los Angeles’s commercial and transit development, boulevards have manifested hidden pockets of underutilized space within the burgeon-ing city. This project focuses on the “in between” spaces of the major commercial boulevards of the San Fernando Valley: the transitional spaces of narrow alleys and parking lots between the commercial businesses and the residential homes. This backstage world would hold a new type of spatial form and use; a collective cottage industry. This industry brings residents from nearby housing units, with their unique mix of hobbies, direct-ly from their private living rooms into a shared structure of collective productivity. Their specific placements are dependent of the unprompted proximity formed between the existing and the new. The project then grows from these sponta-neous relationships to intensify an atmosphere of hidden density. The architecture explores occupan-cy through fields of suspended mechanical fabric spaces, to accommodate the evolving configura-tions of the program.

15

Jose Iglesias

Mechanics of Nature

The project explores the endgame of nature and parks within cities, as begun in the mani-cured and controlled urban parks of today and as seen in history, specifically in the artifice of Baroque gardens and in Romanticist ideas of the picturesque.

The proposal is for a highly augmented park– fake nature which becomes a decoy masking an electric steam power plant. The labyrinthine cliff employs folds of geotextile fabrics, har-vesting the steam of the power plant to create a soggy landscape, traversed by pathways and nestled hybrid follies.

L A

Chadi Hakim

The Emotive House

The development and ubiquity of Tract housing in America has allowed houses to be built quickly and cheaply. However, in creating endless en-claves of identical houses, these dwellings have become constrictive and unresponsive to both the pervasive demands of contemporary life and the forces of the external environment. This thesis contemplates an alternative form of housing that takes emotion, responsiveness, personality and character as its key drivers. Thanks to the integra-tion of pneumatic systems and alternative con-struction details, the emotive house can peel its walls, reveal hidden spaces, converse and flirt with the neighbor’s house and, in the extreme, protect the neighborhood from the unpredictability of its surrounding environment. Here, a new suburban sphere is formed through the transgression and distortion of property lines, where the house, its inhabitants and environment become critical and dynamic catalysts for the radical rethinking of domestic space.

17

George Rivera

Burbank Hydrohoods

The Jeffersonian Grid has relentlessly controlled the American landscape for over 200 years, asserting a false equality over the land and its people. This project questions and erodes the grid through the exploration of the San Fernando Valley’s ancient landscapes, revealing its active but hidden hydrological functions. Here, an alternative urbanity is created: spaces which anticipate flood events and the cyclical nature of the seasons; an emergent new folklore and the everyday functions of a neighborhood: all highlight the increasingly important relationship of water, landscape and culture in American life. The project achieves this through the spatial and architectural interpreta-tion of a series of reservoirs, stepped excavations, cistern spaces, sinks and nestled programs that support the needs of a local neighborhood. Inhab-iting these new “Hydrohoods” is a series of urban monsters or social utilities that hybridize the mor-phology and demands of major rain events with the poetics and potentiality of the everyday.

L A

Joseph Miller

The Lost Season

In contemporary architectural discourse, natural atmospheric conditions are often looked upon as a hindrance to the construction of a stable and controlled interior environment. ‘The Lost Season,’ however, looks to use local climate conditions acting on a site to generate an architecture that embraces and amplifies these conditions, through an orchestration of spaces as well as purpose-ful mis-specification of materials and mis-use of building tactics. The project looks to the presence of these atmospheric conditions as key drivers in the design of alternative and heightened interior climate. The ambition here is to generate an interi-or landscape of seasons that are rarely experienced in typical Southern California weather. Spaces orchestrating specific atmospheres are accurately positioned, allowing for “seasonal” changes to oc-cur within the liminal corridors between the larger volumes. In these threshold corridors, Los Angele-nos can experience weather such as precipitation, humidity, and post-precipitation dew.

19

Vedi Vartani

The Abbey of Los Angeles

Phenomenologically, humans do not dwell on the present moment– we anticipate the future or remi-nisce about past. In our destination-driven society, the focus has been obtaining future goals in a way that often detracts from the joy of the journey. The Abbey of Los Angeles, through its various produc-tive actions and spaces, aims to unsettle pragmatic work habits, transforming work into a contemplative act and turning everyday ordinary occurrences into extraordinary phenomena.

The architecture of this Monastery explores the possibilities of deconstructing habitual actions and thoughts through the orchestration of a series of surreal places and sublime atmospheres. The visitor should be able to learn and unlearn constantly, there-fore the project will become a school of thought, a place of contemplation, the temple of “Now,” focus-ing on the ephemeral nature of the moment.

L A

Kelly Ta

Burbank Atlas of Repository Landscapes

The construction of this Atlas begins with the myth of the film industry leaving Los Angeles resulting in a loss of jobs, a downturn in econ-omy, and an overflow of movie sets spilling out of abandoned production studios. After rounds of city-wide delegations, these fictitious environ-ments are relocated to Burbank: the heart of the world’s cinematic production and a city where so much is filmed but so little of the city is actually seen. In efforts to revitalize activity throughout local businesses, the sets are refitted, reoriented, and repurposed to undertake new roles within the urban environment. The unusual juxtaposition of mundane reality and constructed fantasy results in catalysts for programmatic changes to the city’s extant conditions accommodating co-existing, collaborative programs. The densification of cin-ematic remnants throughout the urban landscape results in a redefinition of Burbank as neither city nor film set, but, instead, a synergetic hybrid of pragmatic nostalgia.

21

Multiples: The Archipelago and the Franchise

Architects today are often asked to choose between formalism and social engagement. In this studio, we examined the possibility that architectural form has social and political agency. We situated our exploration of form within a particular subset of formalism: the multiple and the problem of variation within a type. We looked at the human-machine interface and the problem of generic storage, in the belief that contem-porary “interactive architecture,” rather than being lo-cated in boutique installations, is actually found—and is much more ubiquitous—within the large storage and data centers of today’s corporate franchises.

Our definition of automation thus had a broad mean-ing, touching as much on the programmatic as on the formal and the technological. We approached these themes through a number of historic and contem-porary sources, from Durand to Mitchell’s Palladian Grammar and early computer art, to Aureli’s more re-cent writings. At the heart of our exploration was the polyvalent nature of the allegedly generic franchise, with its multiple combinations and permutations in which architecture might reclaim its status as an object that at once accommodates and resists the pervasive forces of capitalism and urbanization.

Ewan Branda and Maxi Spina, Instructors

L o s A n g e l e s

Gevork Aelian

Denisse Alejandre

Lauren Amador

Michael Anderson

Vincent Ang

Viviana Colin-Torres

Adrienne Fortin

Melvy Gonzalez

Juan Guardado

Ariga Khachekian

Robert Mehring

Timothy Nelson

Tomás Ortiz

Harold Ramirez

Adrianna Saavedra

Yervand Sarkisyan

Samvel Simonyan

Sal Vargas

S t u d e n t s

23

Denisse Alejandre

L.A. Kultur Forum

This thesis explores the European concept of the comprehensive culture forum and how it can propose an alternative model for the public library. Since knowledge is no longer limited to books, today’s culture allows people to absorb information from social interaction. What would make this cul-ture forum any different from the rest? While Euro-pean culture forums are funded and controlled by their governments, American culture forums would be privately owned and branch out to their com-munities for growth. This project proposes a cap to an already existing volume, organized through the compositional device of the umbrella. The form will be structurally supported and confined by the circu-lation spine, and the remaining volumes will house programs such as the cafe, performance center, museum, and the library plaza. The result would be the reincarnation of the library.

L A

Gevork Aelian

The Displaced Agrarian

This project proposes a winery in an urban context by displacing wine production from its tradition-ally agrarian setting. It takes as its starting point a linear production line: harvesting the grapes, de-stemming, fermenting, aging, bottling, and stor-age. It examines how this linear system reacts in a compact urban condition, looping back over itself to create spatial opportunities not otherwise seen or experienced in a linear system. As the wings of the form begin to turn along with its system, it begins to create programmatic and volumetric rela-tionships. The resulting spaces substitute for the pastoral ideal and its associated nostalgia.

25

Michael Anderson

Transposed Rustication

This project for a storage facility for private art collections and antiquities in the plinth of the Bank of American Plaza in downtown Los Angeles ex-plores the problem of architectural rustication. As with most buildings of importance, materiality and ornament convey vital information about purpose, program, and organization. Rustication, when liberated from its strict definition as building or facing with rough-surfaced masonry blocks having beveled edges and pronounced joints, produces a new experience for the user through perspec-tive and materiality. Here, ornament can provide information of program and define space, and can be seen as a threshold for exchange rather than an absolute boundary.

L A

Lauren Amador

Habit Unfamiliar

This project takes the latent non-building of a parking structure and fully materializes it into an unoccupiable storage space/spectacle. The typical architecture of a parking garage as a fabric building and the habit of parking are banal. In this project, an automated parking structure eliminates conven-tional inhabitation and circulation, and intensifies the programmatic potential of the ground floor. Turning from the predictability and inertness of blind functionality, architecture becomes novel with a change in technology and user habits. Divorced from the typical ramp-based form, the typical Dom-ino diagram is modulated from a neutral form to a highly specific, tuned mechanism. It is efficient and light, familiar yet surprising. It is time to abandon attempts to make the parking garage into an occu-piable architecture and instead replace the tedium of utility with a jolt of momentary intrigue.

27

Viviana Colin-Torres

If / Then Mode

This thesis challenges the assumed form of the urban intersection. It proposes a multi-use, spec shopping mall that bridges, activates, and ulti-mately defamiliarizes an urban intersection in North Hollywood. In combining the flexibility of fashion and the durability of architecture, it develops the intersection through an array of fac-tors such as site conditions, urban networks, and local interconnections. In place of the linear and singular model of the bridge, it employs the mat building diagram to span the intersection, thereby producing a vivid new architecture that considers the changing social and physical demands of users over time, and stitches the space of the intersec-tion into the surrounding urban fabric.

L A

Vincent Ang

Paper Monument

Documents have always played a central role in the construction of cultural identity in the West-ern world. In this age of corporations, however, cultural identity is no longer strictly bound to notions of ethnicity or nationality, nor to tradition-al conceptions of high culture. This project for a processing facility for Iron Mountain– a company that offers secure storage and document destruc-tion services– proposes a new type of cultural in-stitution, the next step forward in the evolution of archives, libraries, and museums. Located just off Grand Avenue, the principle monumental cultural axis of Los Angeles, this facility is the first step in Iron Mountain’s claim on the future of cultural, institutional, and corporate memory. By combining generic container with specific form, it asks what form a new monumentality might take today.

29

Melvy Gonzalez

Cymatic Exchange

This project extends the San Fernando Valley Swap Meet to provide a space of exchange for Craigslist transactions. Inspired by its context, it amalgamates the tectonics and the arrangement of the flea market and the big box retailers and warehouses across the street. Given the unknown properties of objects and services being exchanged, the building propos-es a condition of maximal spatial variation, arguing that programmatic flexibility is supported by spatial specificity rather than generic free plan. It turns to Cymatics or resonance patterns to introduce ways of changing circulation and creating visual connections within spaces. As the resulting fragments aggregate to a whole, a range of spaces are developed. These spaces range in sizes, open spans, and privacy, to support the multiple programs of Craigslist.

L A

Adrienne Fortin

Habiliments of Industry

Can the ceiling define a new landscape? This project for a textile manufacturing building propos-es an interior condition based on the modulation of the umbrella service ceiling through the material principles of fabric. Like the traditional industrial open floor plan, the ceiling houses all services and enables a flexible open floor plan. At the same time, the modulated ceiling creates an overhead topo-graphic landscape, a set of places that preserves the universally serviced space below and at the same time promotes spatial differentiation and hierarchy.

31

Ariga Khachekian

Boundary Museum

This project examines ways in which a contem-porary institution might be inserted into a histor-ic district in downtown Los Angeles. It proposes a new type of institution in which art museum and art storage are hybridized. As museums store more and more of their collections in analog and digital archives, the boundary between storage and dis-play becomes blurred. This new hybrid institution organizes distinct programmatic zones into a series of layers: digital archives are below, a public muse-um in the middle, and physical archives above. In this way, the hybrid program composed of discrete elements creates a new kind of museum as an interface to a largely automated storage system, while offering a heterogeneous formal language for relating the building to its context.

L A

Juan Guardado

Community Modulator

This project transforms a network of local USPS offices into community hubs for the sending and receiving of physical mail and digital scans and prints. As such, the local post office becomes the interface between the physical world and the virtual, where objects are transformed into data and vice versa, and where new types of commu-nications can be carried by increasingly obsolete infrastructures. In this context, the architectural elements normally associated with stasis and sta-bility, such as walls and floor slabs, might be con-sidered interfaces rather than merely separations. The result is a blurring of the line between wall and floor, creating a fluid flow of space, objects, and data.

33

Timothy Nelson

Bargaining Unit

This project proposes a system for embedding amenity nodes for factory workers within the open spaces of the contemporary automated manufac-turing facility. Each node houses a combined pro-gram that brings managerial operations together with amenities for workers, such as cafeterias and break rooms. Using a cross-grain logic that is at once compliant with and resistant to the panopti-cal and technological demands of surveillance and transparency, these nodes assert an autonomous form that disrupts the open, column-grid system of the factory while encouraging spatial continu-ity. The result is a condenser of management and labor, a communal environment that encourages collaboration and recuperation through accidental and serendipitous interaction.

L A

Robert Mehring

Vestibule

Circulation is normally seen as wasted space, a function to be minimized or eliminated entirely. This project recuperates circulation as a zone of spatial experimentation. It proposes a missing public interface for big-box Ikea stores in which the perversion of Ikea’s recursive and labyrinthine internal circulation systems are taken as a starting point for an attitude to public space. Within this double-layered skin system, a series of vestibules and entrances infest and latch onto the highly engineered existing circulation of Ikea, piercing the surface and shaping a public space from the non-place of the big box store.

35

Harold Ramirez

Ghost Series

This project proposes a series of nightclubs on Hollywood Boulevard, where the context creates a relationship between multiple corner lots that can be understood as a far-reaching narrative. The narrative of the “ghost” is derived directly from an approach to the program: kinetic architecture transforms each nightclub to adapt its program to its temporal and spatial context. From sunrise to sunset, each build-ing emphasizes its commercial and retail activities, while from sunset to sunrise, each emphasizes its nocturnal activities. In this way, the formal urban problem of the static corner building is addressed through a constantly changing serial logic.

L A

Monolithic Montage

How can a single architectural monolith act as a picturesque montage? Montage in film is the putting together of short shots, edited and merged into a single sequence, so that time, space, and information are compressed. Questioning the frag-mentation inherent in the architectural montage, this project arranges parts of a single monolith into a picturesque order by promoting a series of oblique views on all sides of the building. Each monolith organizes a series of sound stages ac-cording to a pinwheel ordering system. As in film, each side of the pinwheel is treated as a single scene in which oblique perspective becomes the dominant and generic view.

Tomás Ortiz

37

Yervan Sarkisyan

Soft Bunker

The basic goal of civil defense is the well-being and security of people in the event of a disaster. This project considers a cyber-attack (a new type of a disaster) that results in civil unrest or cha-os. It provides a community’s private and public space. By emphasizing dual-purpose programs, it promotes peacetime value as well as disaster-time effectiveness. The resulting complex offers a place of refuge where architectural space and social events take the place of network services and social networks during times when all of our online systems go down.

L A

Adrianna Saavedra

Unlimited Poché

Contemporary speculations on the future of the library tend to focus either on the virtualization of the book or on new types of public space with diverse and hybrid programs. By contrast, this project for a prototypical branch library of the L.A. County Library System directly considers spaces for reading and storage. It reinterprets the great read-ing rooms of the traditional library as a complex of smaller and diverse spaces where reading can be-come a private affair. Building upon Le Corbusier’s spiral diagram for unlimited growth, it uses poché to interweave spaces of storage and reading. In so doing, it introduces finite and discrete space into a diagram of infinite accumulation.

39

Sal Vargas

Toolbox

This project proposes a series of self-help toolboxes providing access to printing workshops, digital fabri-cation, and other facilities to communities dispersed throughout Los Angeles. Each toolbox creates a space for community-based development with the ability to adapt to each individual community’s needs as its members see fit. The result is a recog-nizable type that is adapted to its local conditions. Inspired by Adolf Loos’s concept of the Raumplan, each building’s exterior is an abstract form that as-serts its autonomy from its neighborhood, while its interior houses a rich assemblage of cultural activi-ties specific to its community.

L A

Samvel Simonyan

Autopoietic Showroom

Today’s techniques of mass customization liberate industrially manufactured architecture from the regimes of self-similarity and repetition inherent to pre-digital manufacturing processes. Digital tools, we are told, allow for radical variability within a coherent formal language. This project explores a different form of variability within architectural prefabrication. It proposes a big-box showroom for prefabricated building components, organized through the compositional device of the nine-square grid in which domestic wholes are produced through the aggregation of the parts available for purchase. The result is a constantly changing, autopoietic interior streetscape in which inconsis-tent protocols between manufacturers’ parts result in a whole that is modulated through the irrational logic of the glitch.

41

Frank Clementi and Matthew Daines, Instructors

Fabricated Memory: Architecture as Mnemonic

“There is a wide measure of agreement… that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-me-chanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter.”

- Sir James Hopwood Jeans, 1937

Architecture addresses the roles that memory and meaning play in the composition of space, while ex-amining the societal value of objects and actions. This studio encourages students to identify shared spac-es and experiences which serve to trigger collective cognition and act as receptacles of collective memory. We also explore the relationship between interpre-tation and reaction. Image, music, speech, texture, etc. trigger visceral reactions: pupils widen, hair rises, hands clasp, stomachs turn. What is the connection between mind, experience, and physical reaction? These three: matter, mind, and making, form the basis of the studio—though the relationship is cycli-cal, not linear. Each in turn affects the next. Crafting an artifact imbues intrinsic value, matter is subject to altered interpretation, and the process continues.

L o s A n g e l e s

Faisal Alzakari

Roberto Beltran

Joseph Fitzjerrells

Fernando Garcia

Cecilia Herrera

Karla Lopez

Tarek Mustapha

Alfredo Sanchez-Mendoza

Gerardo Sandoval Nicholas Wilkins

Tatiana Zavala

S t u d e n t s

43

Faisal Alzakari

Temporal Dispersal | A Flowing Community

Can there be architecture without buildings, with walls or floors extending indefinitely to create a spatial field? Architectural space, is not only vol-ume, it is also the in-between. This project generates a “gray area” community; at in-between scales, in-between configurations, using in-between forms (plan vs section). Relating constructed architec-ture to compositional art, it questions construction, experience, and representation; and the relationship between the invisible and the visible, figure and ground, finite and infinite, planned and improvised. Methods analogous to musical notation choreograph compositions of fragmented shapes, or “notes, to produce a music-like composition. This composition then propagates, creating an endless field of walls, lines and floors, exhibiting perceivable patterns, sequences, and occasional chaos and chance. Main-taining relative indifference to the composition of the whole, it honors the production of difference at the “within” scale and more fluid, bottom-up– as opposed to top-down– forms of control.

L A

45

Joseph Fitzjerrells

The Station

The Station utilizes the inherent action of a modern train station and integrates it with a lively social space. Trains are dramatic, loud, and kinetic. The arrival and passage of a moving train is undeniably exhilarating. The mass and velocity of this histor-ic means of transportation could integrate with a dramatic social space such as nightclub, where they would symbiotically benefit each other from the associated noise, flashing lights, activity, and vibra-tions of the arrival and passage of trains and people.Coordination of sight lines, shared program and materiality and transparency allow inbound trains an exciting glimpse into the nightclub. Serving as an attraction and promotion, riders on the train will be intrigued by seeing into the club, and are tempt-ed to stop to check it out. At the same time, club goers inside will be able to see the train glide past gracefully, gaining speed or slowing, or thundering though with lights flashing.

L A

Roberto Beltran

Heroes & Horses

Architecture allows the senses to be triggered in a manner that influences emotions and therefore a memory or thought is provoked. This project explores the relationship between memory and emotion through the juxtaposition of the programs of both life and death. This program consists of veteran housing, equestrian facilities, and a ceme-tery– all interconnecting in a harmonic manner. The articulation and manipulation of the spaces allows for a symbiosis to be expressed that thus creates opportunities for the living and the dead to reach a balance. There are spaces within the architecture that express moments of subtlety as well as moments of aggression. The architecture acts as part of the landscape in order to reinforce the idea of the relationship between the living and the dead. The equestrian facilities are also part of the landscape that eventually transitions into a ritual ceremony commemorating and celebrating the veterans.

47

Cecilia Herrera

Connecting Threads

This thesis deals with significant and insignifi-cant conditions and how we assign significance to common moments in life. Using a Duchampi-an Readymade style of integration, the project explores stitching two miscommunications. The first miscommunication is between something my father heard and what his gifts mean to me. Every year my father gave me pink balloons, but on my 14th birthday, the balloons stopped coming. The miscommunication was how much I hated pink, a statement my father heard and how the color did not matter when it came to the balloons my father gave me. The second miscommunication is the site. The site miscommunicates what it is and what Google says it is. People arrive expecting a park but find an abandoned lot. The idea is that these existing miscommunications will stitch themselves together to provide a space for a father and a daughter and any visitor to communicate.

L A

Fernando Garcia

Elysium Thresholds

Can architecture, as a connective thoroughfare, act as a definitive threshold to reinvigorate the disparate urban and social conditions created by 20th century dead-ends and culs-de-sac? A “utopian island” in Elysian Valley, better known as “Frogtown,” seems lifted from a parallel functional universe and aban-doned as another patch of the fabric of Los Ange-les. This patchwork of urban growth obstructs the continuity of the city’s ecologies. The undeveloped perimeter of these obstructions emerges as threshold conditions, especially at street culs-de-sac. When considered together as a series of operational nodes, these truncated roads can speak as mementos and begin to redefine the bike path and river as circula-tory spinal elements to Elysian Valley. With the in-terconnected uses of the bike path/river and streets, these threshold events will act as social condensers and collective signifiers of the new connected nature of the Frogtown neighborhood.

49

Tarek Mustapha

Divination

The process of adjudication is one that requires the discovery of facts. Before the trial, the action in question has already occurred, requiring those charged with judging the action to go through a process of discovering evidence and justification for a verdict of either guilt or innocence. Architec-ture, on the other hand, is commonly a process of iterative articulation and development. Aiming to merge these two processes, I began by developing a talisman. This talisman is generated through the use of various mediums of exploration, and the conditions influenced by these mediums. These conditions become sets of rules and data in which the architecture can be discovered. Within this dis-covery, the performance of adjudication will occur.

L A

Karla Lopez

Village of Constructed Memories

Memory is often lost with the increase of urban density. Would it be possible to preserve the memory of a community in the face of increas-ing density? The intent of this project is to aug-ment the stereotypical suburban residential typolo-gies through the creation of a specific village, or rather a community of residents that represents how people in this particular community live. This will not only be about questioning generic subur-ban housing and density, but about understanding the way people with memorable experiences live through a physical community, and about making connections between these memories and experi-ences, to utilize them as a means to create spaces that reflect that use. It will be about keeping the memories of the community through the use of materials and typologies that already exist, and about creating spaces that allow individuals to live the same way they use space.

51

Gerardo Sandoval

Santa’s Workshop

The sublimation of a toy shop to a penitentiary recalls being ordered to “go to your room” to reflect on your actions. The room acts as your personal reha-bilitation space– “your prison”– but also where the artifacts of your memory reside. Santa’s Workshop challenges the traditional, segregated prison, and pro-poses a penitentiary integrated into a community. The workshop consists of diffused, almost pixelated sub-terranean fragments that make up a system, focusing on reintegration versus punishment. The workshop and the imprisoned “elves” work as a unit to deliver children toys and at the same time help rehabilitate the prisoner. The interspersing of public space, resi-dential neighborhood, and prison workshops acts as a motivational strategy with the gradual exposure and social interaction inmates receive as they maneuver from the subterranean central core towards the lofted crust. With a secure core, a merged mantle, and an almost public, broken-up crust, the prison expresses itself on the surface as enigmatic, illuminated archi-tectures of absence.

L A

AlfredoSanchez-Mendoza

Working Both Sides. Stitching Arts and Sciences. Creating Fantasies From Logic.

Creativity and logic are often segregated to separate hemispheres. This project proposes to formally intertwine them to produce a school of thought that encompasses craft from “both sides of the brain.” Existing warehouse buildings serve as an organizing logical grid within which Boolean procedures unite disparate programs. This unity literally and symbolically connects students and programs repurposed to strategic locations. Boolean logical operations– subtrac-tion, addition and intersection– craft spaces with cues for visual relationships. The connec-tions become evident. The combination of two existing warehouses across an alleyway, as well as the integration of two conceptual modes, provide for previously unimagined outcomes. Furthermore, variations of Boolean logic operat-ing within this logical grid create communicative spaces. The gap or alleyway creates a unique habitat for this mixture of crafts.

53

Tatiana Zavala

Disrupted Program

Disrupted Program challenges the boundaries of mundane functional architecture, focusing on augmentation through fragmentation. The proposal enhances existing generic dwellings, allowing for the influences of sought desires. The disruption fractures the uniformity of the buildings, allowing objects of memory and desire to infiltrate and juxtapose aug-mentations to serve the unmet desires of the users. Cutting across boundaries of private, semi-private, and public spaces, Disrupted Program creates a lively communal environment for residents.The site consists of existing residential buildings that pro-vide for the needs of daily life, whereas Disrupted Program fulfills more of the wants. The disruption of program interjects movement, fracturing the monot-onous continuity of floors and walls. This provokes a visible break between private and public spaces, and juxtaposes them with incongruous forms and cele-bratory uses. The intervention allows residents and visitors to transport mentally and physically from one unique experience to the next.

L A

Nicholas Wilkins

Perceptive Indication

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe justified his ‘impres-sionistic architecture’ in terms of the new kind of perception produced by the speed of modern life. We can no longer appreciate building details at the speeds we are capable of traveling. Ob-jects have hidden energy shown through images from a camera traveling at different velocities. A successfully marketed image is recognized and understood easily and quickly, even if cunningly conveyed. Architecture can be scaled to allow var-ied perception from a range of traveling velocities. These differing velocities are experienced through various activities; driving, walking, cycling etc.., from being stopped in traffic, to traveling at 70 mph. The location and orientation of the building relative to these velocities plays a role in its per-ception. The participation between the viewer and the structure can be activated not only through the facade but its internal articulation. Form and content are related through the velocity and the duration at which a person views the construct.

55

Mixed Use : Hybrid Architectures, Topological Reconfigurations, Uneasy Pairings and Unexpected Visitors

“Criticism – particularly in the form of critical practices of design (poiesis)– should be simultaneously emancipatory and conservative (i.e. situated), acting as a reconciliatory medium between ‘prophecy’ and ‘memory’.”

- Introduction to ‘The Landscape Imagination: Collected Writings of James Corner 1990- 2010’ by Alison Bick Hirsch, 2014.

As we look back within our cities for resources and pleasure, and question our sprawling desires, we search spaces amongst and above the unchartered in-terfaces for new combinations that have been politely avoided before. Ghettoized components of a com-bined operation– a distant sewage plant or hidden oil field– can hide intriguing truths. But what to do with permutations that are symbiotic in program but antag-onistic or just plain uncomfortable architecturally? So begins the search for compressed conditions, montag-es, existing places that need to shift in the quest for a lively, meaningful marriage. Los Angeles is the city of awkward interfaces: topologically (mountains meet flood plain), infrastructurally (transport, primary en-ergy and water supply meet residential canvas), eco-nomically and culturally (Hollywood meets Watts). Fu-ture narratives and speculative fictions are employed to better understand issues of our own moment. We look to the imagination to liberate opportunities.

Micah Rutenberg and Peter Culley, Instructors

L o s A n g e l e s

Abdullah Alessa

Nada Almehairi

Oliver Aus der Muhlen

Mohamed Bensasi

Edda Figueroa

Devin Flores

Robert Ko

Alan Manning

Grace Park

Jessica Santana

Arvin Shirinyans

Paul Tuason

Sylvia Zilifian

S t u d e n t s

57

Abdullah Alessa

Interior Public Space | Filling the Gaps of LA

In the city today, people meet in many interior public spaces, such as churches, gas stations and bus stops. Public interiors play a significant role in a variety of spatial transformations, such as allowing for gathering and shortcuts. Today, over 2000 gas stations occupy L.A.’s landscape. The design of gas stations is typically stripped down to pure function and they are highly accessible. This makes them an ideal urban element that could play two roles in the city: community gath-ering and the perpetuation of movement. This project envisions the future of Los Angeles, where the gas station is seen as a community gathering space of “significant”design. The current design of the gas station could be reinterpreted as an interior public space with a sense of privacy and shelter. The canopy and other elements would be modified according to the site to create a space where the community can gather and meet.

L A

59

Oliver Aus der Muhlen

Inhabiting Unintended Spaces: Collaborating with Antagonistic Weather Conditions

The building discipline controls and regulates atmo-spheric conditions toward the well-being of its oc-cupants. But the functional intention of a factory is to manufacture a product, without regard to human comfort within the mechanized construct. Often, these industrial complexes are off-limits to the public and mysterious to most civilians. But along-side human curiosity resides the primitive yearning to explore the unknown. Perhaps it is the craving to enter places that are restricted, the interest to occupy areas unsuitable for humans, the desire to become symbiotic with the inhospitable. What if the accidental effects of condensation forming within and around the walls, piping, and machinery of a factory could prove to be opportunistic? Through the selective matchmaking of program to existing space, the architecture opportunistically induces a reaction between opposing weather conditions in order to supplement a building program that is beneficial to human inhabitation.

L A

Nada Almehairi

Metro Stop, Thrill Start: Entertaining Transport

A 2011 statistic showed that 72.3 percent of Los Angeles commuters use automobiles to drive to work and 7.3 percent of commuters use public transport. In New York 41% use the subway and 24% drive, while in London, 79% of commuters use public transport. Meanwhile, in the same year, 19.1 million people visited the amusement parks of L.A., 16.2 million came to Disneyland and 2.9 mil-lion came to Six Flags. So, how can L.A.’s love and proficiency of entertainment transport help adjust the psyche towards utilitarian methods of move-ment? Looking at methods of pleasure transport, both in L.A. and further afield, and identifying and forming landmarks and nodes in the typically landmark-less Valley, this investigation tests the possibilities for a new type of transport interchange at the North Hollywood Red and Orange Line ter-minus that entertains while it propels.

61

Edda Figueroa

Farm House Ha-Ha / City Reality-Check

A simple garden wall separates a residential area from the Inglewood Oil Field in an accidental collu-sion between primary industry and domesticity.

How can a more sophisticated dialogue be developed between these two apparently conflicting worlds?

Reframing the industrial landscape as a pastoral scenario and employing devices of the picturesque– a floating farmyard, framed bucolic views and a living wall– a new set of romantic relationships is developed as decoy to the cleansing machine below the surface.

L A

Mohamed Bensasi

Fortified Fiction: A Tale of Three (Walled) Cities

Go within to go out, to get out. Fiction provides an escape route from the uncomfortable realities of life. In being tricked, we are offered the chance to become the people we want to be and lead the lives we would like to live. If escape from reality relies on fiction, then falsities, too, require truths to set their escape in motion. Paramount Pictures on Melrose is the only major film studio remaining in Hollywood. Within its fabled walls lie 62 acres of stages, work-shops, offices, infrastructure, architectural scenes, and open spaces. Could Paramount become a place of escape from the city by introducing the ingre-dients of everyday real life? In this scenario, three notional Angeleno protagonists – The Curator, The Flaneur, and The Gaffer – are new inhabitants of the Paramount Walled City, each occupying and creating unique places between fact and fabrication.

63

Robert Ko

Where the City Stops: Designing for Life on Hold

Time is an important aspect of our lives. However, when one loses the ability to control one’s time, it triggers a range of responses spanning from boredom and stress to introspection and relief. But being thrust into that pause of time is perhaps it is the ideal setting for self-reflection and rebalance. The Building and Safety Department Building in Los Angeles, specifically the space of plan check and permit processing, creates a stressful atmosphere because it governs time in a way that is unproduc-tive and inefficient for the architect. The plan check department provokes psychosomatic responses such as increased heart rate, sweating, etc. that warrant a territorial response on the part of the architect when struck with these moments. This intervention would therefore take the stressful energy created by these existing pauses of time and redirect that energy to be more positive and self-reflective.

L A

Devin Flores

The People vs. Courtroom (2015)

Social jurisdiction orchestrates a strict role in our society and imposes major design limits on the buildings involved. An evident typology affected is the courthouse, where issues of control and cultural metaphor are played-out in architectural arrangement and ornament. The evolution of the past twenty years has rendered the nature of the courtroom obsolete, thus radically departing from limitations on race, gender and politics. Los Ange-les is a shelter for sites of governance that con-form to normative protocols, yet also conform less to imperial world cues than most other American metropolises. This study will investigate the role of outdated patriarchal spaces that are currently stagnant, seeking to break down the authoritarian environment of the courtroom. Working within carefully defined limits, the project will refer to the mechanics of theatre, utilizing its dynamics (stage lifting, scene changing) and the additive concepts of interior materiality to develop new systems of democratic spatial arrangement.

65

Grace Park

The Unspoken Exchange: The Exchange of Goods Between Two Worlds

Social disparity between the extremely rich and the extremely poor is a pervasive issue in Los Angeles. This nation’s most privileged and most underprivi-leged citizens reside within a 15 mile radius, and yet have no interaction, which causes segregation and furthers social disparity. However, engaging these two worlds would heighten the attention to this matter and allow us to explore architecture’s role in social issues. Amongst the retail stores on Skid Row, a new trend-setting luxury fashion store attracts the privileged consumers of the Westside of Los Angeles. On the surface, the two worlds seemingly collide. However, beneath the surface, there is an unspoken exchange between the two worlds that mutually benefit each other. These worlds exchange cardboard, textiles, and edible waste through three loading docks, which act as portals that transform these materials into something useful for the surviv-al of the other world.

L A

Alan Manning

The Glamour Machine: A Sublimation of Celebrity Image Valuation

LA’s relentless network of billboards conditions subconscious modes of valuation within the urban environment. How can this strata of detached floating spaces, visually authoritative yet physically inaccessible, be transformed into a high value place of habitable exposure? The Chateau Marmont, whose cultural significance is measured in high profile indulgency and tragedy, straddles a unique arrangement of billboards. Some meet the ground, others tower, and one hovers above the villas of the Chateau itself. This cluster of billboards has the potential for permeated architecture where the image of the celebrity is surveyed, advertised, and dissem-inated. This thesis uses the site’s artificial elevation to both expose and hide the ‘untouchable’ A-list celebrity, providing programs that reveal the persona but privatize the person. The strategic reconfiguring of image valuation results in an architectural subli-mation. Visually encountering The Glamour Machine conditions a way of seeing by rechanneling our desire into an enhanced association with prestige.

67

Arvin Shirinyans

Migratory Disaggregates

We live in a city that is fixed on the one hand while constantly evolving and transforming on the other. The fixed city is that of buildings; the other city is of technology. The technology of everyday life cre-ates the opportunity for us to fulfill the necessities of our dynamic and moving lifestyles to the extent that updating our devices as often as every week in order to satisfy our latest needs has become standard. The demolition of architecture on a daily basis brings new attention to the words “function” and “functional life.” What if architecture was to be reconfigured, reoriented, and reintegrated into its new conditions instead of being demolished? Migratory Disaggregates conceives of an architec-ture that moves and transforms in an intelligent fashion, unmaking and remaking the new and old together in order to engage and satisfy the new requirements of contemporary life.

L A

Jessica Santana

The City and the Black Box

The city in the 21st century is moving away from revealing the truth of its broader operation. A problem with this increasing opacity is the city’s desire to resolve internal spatial realities and their interaction with the public. Los Angeles has a plethora of large-scale buildings that restrain a continuous urban experience. Thus, the black box, impenetrable and uncompromising, represents the impossibility of total transparency and resolution. This thesis interrogates the black box phenomenon in search of an architecture that is contiguous with the city and reconciles the dissonance between the black box and the experience of the city. Looking at the Hollywood Storage Building as the Black Box, the study will aggregate a journey of discovery. Worming its way into this unknown city, revealing what is hidden, and exposing life within, this thesis is an exploration from the inside out.

69

Sylvia Zilifian

Blossoming Rampart: A City Growing Within A City

Los Angeles: best known as a sprawling metropo-lis with a freeway network strewn uncomfortably within. However, is there another way to regard relationships between the city and its network of superhighways? The approach of this thesis is to treat the highway as a ‘river of transportation,’ reconnecting earlier traditions of public and pri-vate places located next to major lines of move-ment. This investigation cites a stretch of the 110 Freeway in the heart of downtown L.A., where the city works as an artery connecting various condi-tions to one another. Seeing existing infrastructure along the strip of highway as modulators between fluidity and fixedness, this thesis reimagines future possibilities for the highway. A temporary shut-down of the strip every Sunday allows residents to engage with passersby, establishing a new com-munity of blossoming thresholds, and introducing up-beat culture to the typically unenthusiastic ac-tivity of traveling along the shores of the highway.

L A

Paul Tuason

Industrial Co-Inhabitance

Unlocking industrial landscapes in the search for urban serenity. Los Angeles has 55 known oil fields located within the county limit. The city of BaldwinHills harbors a massive 1,100 acre site that contains up to 800 active oil rigs.

L.A.’s soundtrack, laid down on the cycle of derricks at work, begins a transformation from distaste towards the sublime. Where typically L.A. has been successful at camouflaging evidence of primary industry, this approach exonerates the tools of extraction from being the enemy, and searches for harmonies between machine and inhabitant.

71

Rotate View – Elevating Dissenting Spaces

Los Angeles famously represents itself as a private and horizontal city. Recently, Downtown L.A. has been transforming and expanding due to vertical pos-sibilities for residential and commercial occupation. Being high above the crowd below and overseeing the city offers a unique type of prestige and power. Elevated vantage points and optimal transparency result in expansive, ever-changing, privileged views. The uses though, are typically private– law offices, expensive restaurants, luxury condos, and current tower occupancy rates hover at about 40%. What happens when these norms are shifted, rotat-ed, extended, converted, transformed? Inspired by a vertical rotation of Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip and Louis Sullivan’s The Tall Building Ar-tistically Considered, we will examine a public-private reversal to occupy high spaces with civic programs, events, situations in public spaces floating over the city, working over 800 ft. above the ground on a siteless site. We will operate somewhere between two tragic mythological figures– Aeneaus (who needed to be connected to the earth for his power) and Icarus (who flew too close to the sun). Taking advantage of views, expansion, atmosphere, transparency and human response, we will transform floors 55 through 57 of the 707 Wilshire Boulevard tower.

Mark Stankard and Thomas Stanley, Instructors

L o s A n g e l e s

Jagruti Eadala

John Ha

Nancy Hernandez Ron Hernandez

Bani Davod Hesar

Byron Marroquin

Reza Mirrezaie

Aysha Muzzo

Matt Nguyen

Mayra Orellana

Jason Sanabria

XanDr Stack

Justin Yap

S t u d e n t s

73

Jagruti Eadala

Collect, Preserve, Display, Rewrite - LA Rare Book Athenaeum

A rare book library contains collections of rare and precious books for people to view, read or refer to. The L.A. Rare Book Athenaeum will operate as a sacred ritualistic experience while being open to the public. The library within will be a temple of litera-ture to preserve, rewrite and honor books. The Ath-enaeum will be arranged according to the book’s origin in relation to the 707 Wilshire tower. Book shelving provides the architectural armature of the Athenaeum. Threats to books, such as misuse, fire, and marking, offer design inspiration.

The architectural approach, outward expansion from the core, enables extension beyond the tower’s edges. The expansion zones contain reading rooms, preservation labs and the scriptorium. A bookstore will sell replicated manuscripts and rare books. Mini-forests will be grown for production of manu-script paper.

L A

75

Nancy Hernandez

Recomposing the Suburban Neighborhood

The American Dream has been defined as a single family home with a garage, front yard, mail box, sidewalk, living room, kitchen and domesticated ob-jects, allowing everyday tasks to be conquered daily by a woman. That image is dated, or is it?

With the rising demand for urban housing, this pro-posal regenerates the American Dream through the eyes of a woman, including past advocates like Char-lotte Perkins Gilman, who insisted that progressive homes should cater to the needs of working women. Hannah Hoch utilized confrontational collage to challenge the status of women in the domestic realm. Their views and techniques are applied to the single family home, then raised, inverted and flipped to oc-cupy high spaces for urban families. This approach to highrise homes privileges a woman’s point of view to balance family and work life and create new neigh-borhood experiences within the 707 Wilshire Blvd. highrise cityscape.

L A

John Ha

Refraction: Superposition of Self and Space

Standing In Line is a truism of human existence. Whether at a coffee shop, check-out counter, doc-tor’s office or cafeteria, being In Line is a certainty in how we live our lives. The wonderful essence of being In Line is that it’s neither here nor there. Our desire isn’t to be In Line, but to instantly be at the End of Line. In Line is being in limbo, an inevitable imprisonment of our physical location. A typical In Line experience is at the DMV. It’s unavoidable, yet architecture can create com-positional dialogue between the Line and banal administration agencies, changing the reality of the In Line into a sublime cognitive engagement of spaces and experiences. Through spatial narrative, storytelling that augments and maneuvers program to create suspense and eagerness, and superposi-tion of programs via a day/night cycle, In Line can evolve from the arbitrary waywardness of transit into the absoluteness of destination itself.

77

Bani Davod Hesar

Land-Air Archive

For the past two hundred years, real estate has become a significant value for Los Angeles– to own property in L.A. has become a way of life. Do we care about the history of the property we purchase? What about the quality of the air we breathe? I propose an interactive archive where people search for property information and evaluate the quality of L.A. air. Located at the heart of downtown, floors 55-57 of the 707 Wilshire Blvd. tower will be a place to study the history of Los Angeles property and the quality of the air above it. The building’s long cantilevers will continuously collect and monitor air samples. Land-Air Archive allows the public and real estate professionals to interactively learn about the city’s past and speculate on its future. It simultane-ously monitors and protects the land we live on and the air we breathe.

L A

Ron Hernandez

Engineering Beautiful Failures

The job of an educational institution is to teach what is known and stimulate students to develop accepted information along a progressive path. Putting the understood status quo to the test and redefining it allows for the loss of fear and the finding of courage to explore new boundaries. A higher level of learning takes place when teaching shifts from being understood theoretically to being experienced practically. The touch and feel of a material, combined with an understanding of its properties, allows for design experimentation that is both guided and felt. The scientific comprehension of experimental engineering can lead the creative design of architecture.

Three selected floors within the 707 Wilshire Blvd. highrise will house an institute to create a play-ground for experimentation with structural ma-terials and design. Material labs, a wind turbine, studios, offices and support spaces will combine to develop ongoing highrise structural innovations.

79

Reza Mirrezaie

Disaster Relief Scaffold: An Urban Appliance

In times of disaster, our ancestors fled to the highest terrain for safety. Disaster Relief Scaffold cradles an affected population with architectural nourishment and shelter. Natural or man-made disasters occurring in the heart of the city, including electrical brown-out, minor to major earthquake, zombie apocalypse, drought, hurricane, flood, etc., will be addressed with the scaffold’s vertical modular components. The scaffold’s solar skin produces electricity, educational information, and advertising revenue for disaster relief. Survival pods traverse the building skin to service the floors within the tower and people on the ground. They can also take flight to remote lo-cations as needed. The egress stairs provide vertical circulation and help to structurally anchor the tower. The entire curtained scaffold system can be applied to other towers in other cities as a global urban di-saster relief network. This Disaster Relief Scaffold at 707 Wilshire Blvd. functions as a giant appliance to provide services to victims in central Los Angeles.

L A

Byron Marroquin

Amalgamated Live / Work

The Downtown District of Los Angeles is experi-encing transitions and growing at a rapid pace. The blue-collar maintenance and janitorial workforces are affected by these urban development changes, forcing longer commutes from suburban outskirts. In theory, it makes total sense for people who clean and maintain a building to live within that build-ing. This shift reconciles the live/work typology for the maintenance workers of the 707 Wilshire Blvd. tower. The Justice for Janitors Union becomes literally exposed to the city by occupying portions of the building at various floor levels. Window cleaning lifts transform to communal circulation. Programmatic spaces, such as housing, child care, a union hall and a flea market, activate the workers’ presence throughout the tower. These strategies are derived from Russian social condenser communal housing, allowing maintenance, janitorial, and office employees the opportunity for new social interac-tions through a combination of cultural and atmo-spheric layers.

81

Matt Nguyen

Avian Migration Hostel

This project transforms three upper floors of the 707 Wilshire tower into a sanctuary for migratory birds. Los Angeles advances toward the sky with high-rise buildings, while above us, the avian migration of the Pacific Flyway occurs annually since before human existence. This clash between human and bird domains creates opportunities for architecture to participate in an ecological system at both global and urban scales. With programs to monitor climate change based on bird migration patterns, the project includes an observation center, an avian infirmary for injured birds, an outdoor learning space, various nesting places, and an artificial wetland. The Avian Migration Hostel rethinks what it means to co-min-gle animal species with human settings. Concrete, wood and steel armatures provide numerous struc-tural niches and voids as nesting spaces for birds of various sizes and species. Depending on the migra-tory seasons, the architecture adjusts to accommo-date bird versus human demands and interactions.

L A

Aysha Muzzo

Circulation: A Non-Monumental Itinerary

In “The Practice of Everyday Life: Walking in the City,” Michel de Certeau relates that the story of a city is composed by the “operators” within the city. “Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces.” The character found on the street created by passersby exists far beneath the 707 Wilshire Blvd. tower. Transposing an everyday path from ground level to the top of the tower generates a small scale street path that creates spaces com-posed by various operators. The literal path from street level, elevated and transformed to the tower’s floors 55-57, provides leftover areas for programmatic events to occur. Everyday programs derived from found objects in downtown L.A. will play a series of minor roles within and around the tower. A bar, chaplet, and eight other programs lead to an activated and articulated space, rather than a space without a story.

83

Jason Sanabria

Revealing Graceful Violence

Violence is seen as a primitive way of using physi-cal force to hurt, damage or kill someone. Grace is defined as simple elegance or refinement of move-ment. These words are opposites, yet can combine to create interactions that otherwise would be invisible– the grace behind the violence is often overlooked. To reveal those beautiful moments spatially and materially, I will create a boxing gym that provides the knowledge and skill to transform an average athlete into a superior one, inspired by Rem Koolhaas’s “Downtown Athletic Club.” Rath-er than having a typical ground floor boxing es-tablishment, this project elevates the boxer above the city to breathe healthy thin air and be inspired by dramatic views. Spaces derived from body training exercises and boxing rings will create new physically activated architecture. Public viewing and awareness will reveal the tensions between boxers and the spectators that pay to watch their gracefully violent interactions.

L A

Mayra Orellana

Sky Vault: A Necropolis for Los Angeles

Traditional cemeteries were set apart from the city in order to separate the living from the dead. However, due to urban/suburban sprawl, the horizontal figure-ground conveys tensions between the metropolis and the necropolis, solid versus void, whole versus particle, dirt versus marble. The typology of a tower allows this horizontal program to take new direction and become infinite in rela-tion to the ground’s footprint. As part of the urban density, columbaria niches replace burial plots, like downtown micro-apartments replace suburban houses. The efficiency dematerializes and maximiz-es space for an experience of post-mortem equality and overall simplicity. The hybrid program re-iden-tifies the spaces of grief, sorrow and remembrance into a heavenly atmosphere. Exterior gardens and irreligious sanctuaries hover above the city grid with privileged views. The architectural charac-teristics provide a series of interrelated elements: mass versus void, illuminated yet dark; weightless yet heavy; claimed and unclaimed.

85

Justin Yap

The Phenomenal Transparency of Neurodegenerative Disorder

The Phenomenal Transparency of Neurodegen-erative Disorder weaves education, research, and treatment for neurological degenerative diseases. It correlates elements of private institution and public learning, defined by transparency and trans-lucency, as well as revealing and layering dedicat-ed and transitional spaces. In traditional facilities, such as at UCLA & USC, research and health pro-fessionals are separated and secluded in privatized institutions. At 707 Wilshire Blvd. in downtown Los Angeles, neurological degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and ALS, will be studied in innovative cross-disciplinary methodologies. Patient care, disease research, and a learning center are actively intertwined on floors 55 through 57. This will allow for the public to experience the impressions and materiality of the spaces, which allude to specific degenerative characteristics. In addition, the implemented herb garden, featuring plants such as sage and rose-mary, will help with memory retention and aid in research and future discoveries.

L A

XanDr Stack

Instituting Ambiguity: The Hive

The pinnacles of the downtown Los Angeles skyline tell a story of segregation: consumerized ground floors, capitalistic private domains above, and private shopping malls masquerading as public space. This project opposes this separation of urban functions and hierarchies, proposing a more integrated Team 10– like approach, encour-aging interaction to learn and socialize through spaces of aggregation. By appropriating capitalist architecture to effect social change, interaction is encouraged across social and economic barriers to focus on community growth rather than individual aggrandizement. Intervening directly in the elitist space of the upper floors of a modernist skyscrap-er, a public domain is established that is reclusive without being exclusive: an open, all-inclusive athenaeum for the digital age.

87

Diana Barash

Learning From Graffiti: Getting up and Burning

Polychromatic. Superficial. Anarchistic. Schizophrenic. A palimpsest. Bad grammar. Big worded bubble letters, flairs, melted misspelled drips, the constructed contort-ed picturesque, territorial markings, a bedazzled design attitude, wit and sarcasm.

Learning from Graffiti explores the complex rela-tionship between anarchic operations and the built environment using non-conforming methodologies, vocabulary, and techniques of street art. Using prompts from the trade such as ‘rosettes in heaven’ ‘scrachitti entrance’ and ‘throwie pop up gallery spaces’ a series of site interventions upon the as-found canvas of the historic Bekin’s Public Storage building in Hollywood form a self-initiated hostel. Graffiti becomes inhab-itable space as it misuses, re-appropriates, and rede-fines the existing blank face and gridded matrix of the building. ‘Spray Caps’ of dorm rooms, and ‘one liner’ circulation systems weave, wind and drip through this cellular monolith.

Peter Culley, Instructor

Diana Barash

Julius Taniguchi

Sam Sabzalijamaat

Mojdeh Kazemi

Dahlia Bukhamsin

L o s A n g e l e s

S t u d e n t s

89

Sam Sabzalijamaat

Surface of Performance

“The urban environment becomes a stage on which architecture literally and actively performs.” - Branko Kolaveric

This investigation seeks to improve the spatial con-ditions of the urban environment, utilizing dynamic surfaces to generate vibrant, hyper-programmable settings that respond to both different users and programs. It explores flexible, adaptive, and interac-tive qualities in architecture through a simplified set of self-modifying angled planes that create vastly different scales and environments. The multiple conflicting programmatic needs directed towards Pershing Square and the Parking Garage cry out for a solution of movement and adaptation. At differ-ent times of the day, week, month, or even year, the patterns of use completely change demanding a totally different set of tectonic configurations and interrelationships to form a more tangible relation-ship between the living and the built environment on the city stage.

L A

Julius Taniguchi

Tinkering with the City: Remixing Rodeo Drive

Tinkering is a tool of curiosity, of figuring out how and what, and thus is a potential driver of innova-tion. As a practice, architecture is– to the loss of experimental configuration and discovery– distanced from tinkering. Further, In typical construction, the consumer has limited knowledge of the compo-nents lying beneath the surfaces of the buildings they inhabit. By exposing the compositional logics of buildings and their mechanisms, new architec-tures emerge from disassembled existing conditions in an open-ended process where the bits are more important than the finished product. Here, in highly polished Beverly Hills, fashion boutiques are reduced to aggregate pieces laid out on the street for all to see as a new didactic.

91

DaliaBukhamsin

Swimming Skins

A façade may demark or alternatively belie its interiority, but either way, some hints of internal operations are difficult to avoid. A nostril suggests the lungs within, just as the smoke exhaust fan may mark a voluminous atrium down below. Look-ing from the inside out, our world is moderated by these same devices.

The internal operations of an aquarium clinic opened up to the public– where a whale overtakes a street and turns the city and the envelope inside out– form a didactic scenario of operation, inhabi-tation, structure, and program.

L A

MojdehKazemi

Naked Island: In Search of the Sublime

Los Angeles is the quintessential sublime city, a com-plex blend of sunshine and smog, a place where the beautiful and the ugly occupy the same fabric and form, where edges dissolve and some information gets lost. As a ‘city on film,’ this mysterious duality is perhaps best investigated through the medium of the movie in a real-world materialization of film-ic staging, bringing to life the shadowy inversions that repress and reveal the contrasting conditions of architectural scenography. Using translations of the representational techniques of the motion picture, space is created and amplified echoing juxtaposed light and dark depiction. Set in a confluence of civil engineering infrastructures, this investigation is a graphic play of high contrast manipulations and ambiguous infinities. Enacted as a journey through a series of drawing and framing techniques, we enter a storyboard between imagination and reality.

93

Tamim Almamood

Architecture Unbound

Architecture is a discipline based on the delineation of boundaries. Lines are used to separate interior from exterior, public from private, and above from below. This disciplinary predilection for boundaries is largely tied to the representational practices that are at the center of architectural production, planning and sectioning. The geometric and formal properties of walls and floors are bound to single lines that can do little other than separate one thing from another. Architecture Unbound thesis confronts this prac-tice by deploying topographic contour drawing as a means of defining architectural form and space. Walls and floors are no longer structured by single lines, but by many. Each line providing a nuanced reading of differently bounded conditions. Interior and exte-rior no longer exist on either side of a single line, but overlap and intermingle through the accumulation of variable contours.

L A

Mark Ericson, Instructor

Tamim Almamood

Fatima Al Shuaibi

Mohamed Noamani

Sergio Legon-Talamoni

Nafiseh Salavatian

L o s A n g e l e s

S t u d e n t s

95

MohamedNoamani

The Projective Envelope

The building envelope is often considered a means of mediating between exterior and interior condi-tions. In the design process, the envelope’s orga-nization is contingent upon the overall formal or massing strategy of a given proposal. This thesis proposes an alternative to this strategy through a detailed analysis and translation of the Saudi Arabi-an Roshan Al Azhar Hotel into a design methodol-ogy that binds strategies of massing to the organi-zation, form, structure, and usage of the building envelope. This thesis argues that the building enve-lope should not be seen as simply a technologically and mechanically advanced wrapper, but rather as central to all of the organizational and formal issues in a given project. The envelope ceases to be a wrapper of formal and spatial proposals. Instead, the envelope becomes the projective generator of architectural form and organization.

L A

Fatima Al Shuaibi

Figuring Gradients

Architecture defines a clear boundary between solid and void. A clear example of this is in the Nolli maps where private buildings are shaded in dark poche, and public space is left as white. Such renderings of space, figure matter as either solid or void, leaving little room to understand the variable densities of space that exist in both cities and architecture. This thesis revisits the figure ground map as projective architectural tool, by proposing a gradient between solid and void. It understands space not as either solid or void but rather as a set of variable condi-tions of programmatic and volumetric densities. It aims to identify architecture not as a static proposi-tion of solid objects and empty spaces but rather a dynamic and highly charged discourse of experien-tial, spatial, and formal densities.

97

Nafiseh Salavatian

Uncanny Figuration

Architecture is typically organized and structured through abstract systems of order, deriving formal and spatial strategies through the intentional and systematic accumulation of geometry– an approach that favors purity, alignment, and clarity. This thesis proposes another alternative, systematically de-ploying the uncanny as a drawing methodology for the production of form, space and programmatic organization. In lieu of abstract geometry, Uncanny Figuration, accumulates familiar figures drawn from existing buildings as an organizational framework for the production of architecture. In so doing, it allows unexpected interactions between programs, forms and spaces. Restrooms intersect the proscenium of a theatre stage. The collision of stair geometry and window mullions introduce a dense organization-al grid which is materialized as a series of pleated surfaces. The familiar figures of architectural form become the progenitors of an architecture of unex-pected encounters, disruptions, and resolutions.

L A

Sergio Legon-Talamoni

From Flatness

The photograph, especially the still photo has traditionally been put in a precarious position within the discipline of architecture. Too often, it has been placed in the realm of documentation, thereby negating its potential as a projective me-dium. Placed before its geometric dimensions and constrained by its two-dimensional medium, we are blinded by the photograph’s animation of that which fills the frame of the photograph in all of its transparency. The flatness of its medium necessi-tates the imagination to animate the represented space, imaging the entire architecture at once. The space is no longer what is viewed presently, but the sum of that and what has been seen before. The photograph denies this progression by fixing time absolutely. This thesis seeks to deploy the photograph as a projective medium of architectural representation by translating its properties into a strategy for the production of form and space.

99

Rafif Alsheblw

Vertical Glendale: The Architecture of Intensification

This thesis explores the notion of a “Vertical City,” with all the intensity and diversity typically associ-ated with a dense urban center. The site is locat-ed adjacent to the Glendale train station and will serve as the site for investigating the re-forming and re-planning of a vertical city. The site serves as an extraordinary meeting point of various flows, including local and regional travelers. This project attempts to rethink the concept of the skyscraper, creating a “vertical neighborhood” composed of a great diversity of programs typically found spread out across the city landscape, yet condensed and organized vertically. This new urban configuration seeks to introduce intensified relationships between programs and social groups, encouraging novel forms of human interaction. This project seeks to offer an alternative to the horizontally dominated cityscape of Los Angeles.

Rafif Alsheblw

Catherine Eppes-Fletcher

José Eduardo Martinez

Behnoud Najafi

Crystal Paraiso Tan

Anthony Fontenot, InstructorL o s A n g e l e s

S t u d e n t s

101

Jose EduardoMartinez

The New Ecology of Animal/Man: Exploring the Relationship between Humans and Bees

This thesis explores the ambiguous relationship between animals and humans, particularly that of office workers and bees. Given the pressing ecolog-ical concerns of the period, there is an urgent and practical need to reimagine the urban environment as a shared place of coexistence for various species. Architecture is explored as a new type of interface between species that allows for cohabitation typically unseen in the natural world, creating an unforeseen level of ecological integration. The specific ecosystem associated with individual species is explored to en-hance the relationship between the natural world and architecture. This study seeks to integrate bees into the urban setting to demonstrate their vital function in the larger ecology. The Long Beach Civic Center building, designed by Allied Architects in 1976, is the site of intervention that will serve as a prototype for reinvigorating urban ecologies by showcasing novel forms of interfaces between man and animal.

L A

Catherine Eppes-Fletcher

Destabilized Architecture

Architectural conventions, or “norms,” create an architecture and environment that is easily taken for granted. Unnoticed and repetitious, architec-ture becomes part of the mundane task of daily unconscious activities, with never a moment to destabilize or denormalize the act of engaging with architecture. “Destabilized Architecture” challenges the architectural norms to destabilize the body, engaging it with architecture. The site of intervention is the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Building (1964), an environment dominated by a mundane program of offices, grids, bureaucracy and homogeneity. This thesis explores the oblique as a means of fracturing the relentless grid attempting to destabilize normal activities and architectural conventions. The oblique offers an opportunity to reorganize the existing mundane program of offices, destabilizing the movement through it and the interactions of its various users. This thesis seeks to create an unavoidable experi-ence that will return the conscious act of engaging the body with architecture.

103

Crystal Paraiso Tan

Piranesi’s Carceri and the Architecture of the Underworld

Piranesi’s etchings of the Carceri serve as the point of departure for an investigation into a new form of spatial architecture based on “three-dimensional hatching.” The theoretical and formal complexities of etchings are analyzed to reinterpret their spatial qualities of chiaroscuro and phenomenal transpar-ency as the basis for developing a methodology based on Piranesi’s techniques and principles. The atmospheric characteristics and the ambivalence of a fragmented architecture that compose the dungeons of the Carceri etchings inspire an appreciation for the qualities of subterranean spaces. The site of interven-tion for this project is the ruins of the underground Hollywood Subway station of the Pacific Electric Red Car. The abandoned infrastructure serves as the “Carceri of Los Angeles.” The subterranean spac-es of the subway offer an opportunity to challenge the legacy of the “Architecture of the Sun” that has dominated Los Angeles and inspires a more delicate relationship between architecture and light.

L A

Behnoud Najafi

Adaptable Architecture or the Ever Changing Grid

“Mat-building can be said to epitomise the anonymous collective; where the functions come to enrich the fabric, and the individual gains new freedoms of action through a new and shuffled order, based on interconnection, close-knit patterns of association, and possibilities for growth, diminution and change…” - Allison Smithson

This thesis explores “adaptable architecture”as a form of infrastructure that can enable individuals to adapt themselves to their place of habitation. Architecture becomes an agent of participatory ur-banism, encouraging new forms of performance and spatial change. The program is a“media camp” for a collective of young actors, directors, writers, travel-ers, artists, media creators, and trend promoters. The adaptable aspects of the project enable its temporary residents to manipulate their spaces in novel ways to live, preform, trade and create. The site is located at the intersection of the California High Speed Rail, Metrolink train station, and the Burbank Airport, linking various neighborhoods and industries.

105

Omar Al Barak

Sky Safari: Exploring Hollywood with Bird’s Eye

From the sky toward the earth’s surface is a magnifi-cent space full of intersecting moments with many nat-ural elements. Birds are one of the things that we don’t deal with directly. However, by adding nature and birds to the city and giving people a new experience through new vertical and horizontal layers, one can be trans-ported to a space surrounded by real environmental elements that cleanse the view of the urban.

Joshua Stein, Instructor

Omar Al Barak

Rebecca Fox

Alejandro Ochoa

Helsa Smith

Nan Wang

L o s A n g e l e s

S t u d e n t s

107

Alejandro Ochoa

Civic Terrain: Breaking the Principles of Capitalism

Adam Smith once said “Happiness never lays its finger on its pulse.” Our current economic system operates in a profit mode in order to have a to-talizing market but in the last couple of decades we have leaned toward a hyper-consumerism that has consequently eroded our civic space. In Los Angeles and other cities around world where public space is supported by private development and commerce, this undermines the potential for civic space in the city. This project seeks to explore play and learning in order to eliminate commerce from within its perimeter. It seeks to change the urban landscape, reviving it for the imagination and pleasure for all ages by engaging the theory of play and learning. It is informed by experimen-tation in order to create a place that brings all members of the community together.

L A

Keeping Up Appearances: An Architecture of Domestic Discontinuity

The house itself is a way of looking, a surveillance device monitoring the possessions that occupy it. When something is missing, the gaping space will cry out. Edith Farnsworth is quoted as saying:

“I don’t keep a garbage can under my sink. Do you know why? Because you can see the whole kitchen from the road on the way in here and the can would spoil the appearance of the whole house. So I hide it in the closet further down. Mies talks about free space, but his space is very fixed. I can’t even put a clothes hanger in my house without considering how it affects everything from the outside.”

I propose a contamination of the spaces of domes-tic efficiency, in order to corrupt the rationality of the design, to provoke ideas relating to stigmas of the domestic.

Rebecca Fox

109

Nan Wang

Cyber-Zoo: An Architectural Bestiary for Augmented Nature

In the preface of Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings, he describes a child’s visit to the zoo. With wonder and fear, the child delights at those confused and mysterious creatures that he sees for the very first time. This project, as an architectural bestiary, brings to the adult world the stimulation and anxiety of children discovering the zoo for the first time. Through the perspective of the child in… Imaginary Beings, this project takes us on a trip to the near future, where we will encounter a new form of life, an augmented nature that is born of science and biotechnology. By using the backdrop of the Old Los Angeles Zoo, this speculative intervention is not only a home for those mysterious creatures, but is also a better chance for people to interrogate our idealistic and preservationist view of the nature.

L A

Helsa Smith

Olfactory Remembrance: An Architecture Evocative of Memory

Architecture is often derived from visual, audito-ry, and physical qualities of how one would like to experience a space. While the sense of smell is factored into the design process last or not at all, according to Marcel Proust, memory is very closely linked to the olfaction process. Proustian phenom-ena suggests that scents connected to particular events and the events themselves are recorded simultaneously within our minds as memories. This architecture ties scent to a particular moment in time as a means to create an architecture evoca-tive of memory. As individuals peruse through the site, scents will not only create a memory of what once stood in existence but also become an inher-ent guide to the users. Through an olfactory pres-ervation that focuses less on form and detail, one will experience a heightened sense of self whilst in the once lost Beatniks’ Gas House of 1950s Venice Beach, California.

111

Hadley Arnold and Peter ArnoldInstructors

L o s A n g e l e s

Gregory Andrade

Aja Bulla-Richards

Cyrus Dorbayan

Sandy Ghaly

S t u d e n t s

113

Aja Bulla-Richards

Confluence: The Intersection of Water Infrastructure and Cultural Practice

With over 7,000 miles of road, L.A. has the largest municipal street system in the nation. As the city reinvents itself, expanding public transportation and at the same time seeking long-term supplementary water supply solutions, this extensive monofunctional network is called into question. I propose a network of tributary streets that connect nodes of infiltration sites at commercial intersections throughout the San Fernan-do Valley. These sites will perform as social space and landscape laboratories for stormwater and greywater collection, filtration, conveyance and infiltration, initiat-ing layered social and ecological benefits to the city. Prototypical interventions are designed to not only re-duce unsustainable dependence on water importation, but also to transform single-function infrastructure into multifunctional, inclusive community watersheds. Integrating ecological performance into the fabric of neighborhoods provides multiple benefits and expands our experience of water, connecting everyday rituals to vast ecological systems and natural cycles.

L A

Gregory Andrade

Spectacle Space

“The spectacle is general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.” - Guy Debord

This thesis explores architectural form as a means of subverting “the spectacle” through the use of its own means in order to promote societal awareness. Engaging various influences far be-yond the immediate site, the project seeks to ex-plore a universal level of consciousness in opposi-tion to the “Spectacle of Freedom.” The accepted model of the past, present, and future continuum is dissolved into an opposition between cultur-al paralysis and the “Freedom of Awakedness.” The spectacle is then poised to become a vehicle supporting communication, interaction, cultural reflection, and exchange, the very qualities that are systematically eliminated in the “Society of the Spectacle.”

115

Sandy Ghaly

Urgent Biophilia

Until now, best management practices for storm-water conservation have been landscape solutions, directing and filtrating urban runoff after it hits the ground. In contrast, the relationship of buildings to stormwater has been defensive and negative, as evidenced by terms like water-tight, water-repel-lent, and water-proof, disconnecting a significant relationship between the built and natural envi-ronments. What is the role of design in crafting buildings and cities that consciously, visibly welcome hydrologic variability while increasing public aware-ness and engagement with water conservation? How can we enhance the relationship between buildings and landscapes to integrate the recovery and re-use of water? “Urgent Biophilia” reconnects nature with the built environment through a net-work of multi-faceted architectural systems that work coherently to steer variable climate change responses toward synergy. The goal is to construct an environmental scaffold that celebrates a gradual unfolding of unpredictable transformation, synchro-nized with precise hydrologic management solutions for each specific site.

L A

Cyrus Dorbayan

Envisioning Progressive Public Space for the Third Los Angeles: A City-Wide Proposal for 29 City Centers

Characteristics: Civic Programming: Flexible spaces that allow for multiple pro-grams to occur at the same time. Community Centers: Makes it accessible for all to understand and participate in city government and provides a public forum. Economic Platform: Creating sustainable public space is dependent on income generation on-site and nearby, and responsible to local social equity issues. Data Mining: Exploits the regional scale and city centers concept to determine value and benefit for neighborhood paradigms.

Method: To investigate and design one city center that integrates with the greater city by creating a destination public plaza on Hollywood Blvd. Located between two metro stops, it supports a transporta-tion corridor and community place-making.

Mission: Programming a democratic process in real time through spectacle, curiosity, and policy.

117

“I d

on’t

thi

nk y

ou s

houl

d st

rive

to

mak

e an

ythi

ng n

ew.

I th

ink

you

shou

ld s

triv

e to

mak

e so

met

hing

str

ange

.

B

ecau

se n

ew i

s on

ly n

ew f

or h

ow l

ong?

”

-

Coy

How

ard

O

ur g

radu

atin

g st

uden

ts a

re a

bout

to

ente

r a

new

cha

p-te

r in

the

ir l

ives

. It

wil

l be

new

and

als

o a

bit

stra

nge,

lea

ving

be

hind

the

com

fort

and

bea

uty

of t

heir

uni

vers

ity,

pee

rs,

and

facu

lty.

Onl

y a

coup

le o

f ye

ars

ago,

whe

n th

ey w

ere

fres

h-m

en a

t W

oodb

ury

Uni

vers

ity,

the

y en

coun

tere

d th

e st

rang

e,

a di

ffer

ent

kind

of

stra

nge,

the

kin

d th

at c

hall

enge

s yo

u,

mak

es y

ou q

uest

ion,

won

der,

gro

w.

They

lea

rned

to

embr

ace

it a

nd,

in t

heir

fina

l pr

ojec

t as

sen

iors

, th

ey c

reat

ed i

t. T

hey

tran

sfor

med

fro

m c

urio

us f

resh

men

int

o cr

itic

al t

hink

ers.

Thi

s is

the

firs

t ge

nera

tion

of

grad

uate

s un

der

my

lead

ersh

ip a

s C

hair

of

the

Dep

artm

ent

of I

nter

ior

Arc

hite

ctur

e an

d w

e, t

he

facu

lty

and

staf

f of

the

Sch

ool

of A

rchi

tect

ure,

are

pro

ud t

o se

e th

em g

o ou

t in

to t

he w

orld

and

infi

ltra

te i

t w

ith

som

e of

th

is e

xcit

ing

stra

ngen

ess.

L o s A n g e l e s

Christoph Korner Interior Architecture Chair

119

H

Interior Architecture

Annie ChuInstructor

Narine Ataian

Chelsea Cammaratta

Annette Chang

Melania Gourehzar

Mitzi Hernandez

Stephen Nguyen

Shabnam Peida

Casaundra Quackenbush

Heather PetersonInstructor

Kristen Dusold

Alena Elsen

Aleni Lopez

Omar Montelongo

Amy Rayne

Francisco Salgado

Meng Ting Sun

L o s A n g e l e s

S t u d e n t s

121

Narine Ataian

Formal Explorations

Architecture and fashion have always longed for a relationship of influence and translatability. The dis-ciplines have borrowed from each other techniques of fabrication, morphological attributes, relational concepts and material transfers literally and inter-pretably. In considering Galeana, a skirt created by Alexander McQueen in 2005, the project exercises the motives to translate the skirt’s system of formal and material relationships metaphorically. Inherent in the exploration is observations of influence by the underlying presence of the body, a fertile wellspring shared by both fashion and architecture.

L A

123

Annette Chang

Beauty in Imperfection: A Balance of Simplicity and Complexity

Wabi-sabi is about finding beauty in imperfection enhanced by passage of time; to slow down in or-der to experience the moment more mindfully, and also to mine value among the everyday. Inherent in the creation of an environment conducive to this intimate experience, this project takes the form a pavilion situated at a marginal corner outside of the Design Center on campus. The design and construction of the pavilion acts as a laboratory for material tectonics aimed at orchestrating an itiner-ary of sensorial engagement. The method of shou sugi ban, otherwise known as “cedar burning,” is explored to create a material context that embraces the manifestations of interiority and exteriority. This set of experiences forges the relationship between the interior and nature. It also allows a personal reframing of the marginal landscape to elevate that experience of the everyday.

L A

Chelsea Cammarata

Pattern Making Space

Interior Architecture has entertained a strong interest with surface-making. One of the methods of surface creation is through the proliferating of patterns that can exhibit interpreted material properties and invite tectonic translations. React-ing against orthogonal geometry within the Car-tesian system, pattern privileges surface-making and may offer different agencies and resistance to create the realm between architecture and the body. This project focused on pattern surface exploration to create interactive spaces, and to challenge the status quo archetype of spatial ele-ments and furniture.

125

Mitzi Hernandez

Adjusting the Nations Edge

The border between the United States and Mexico has been conceived as a barrier which privileges the present dominant power and diminishes the potential of the in-between to critique and rebal-ance the experience of the status quo. Informed by studies of social geometry of family meetings at the border fence, the project reconsiders a thickened border condition to express cultural attitudes towards space and object-making.

L A

MelaniaGourehzar

Spatialized Light: An Empirical Approach

Embracing the temporal effect of natural light is seldom the major impulse of interior architecture. The interaction of natural light and the interior environment creates a powerful dialog connecting nature with architecture. Conscientiously crafted re-lationships between light and use can enhance the experience of choreographed movement through space. This project proposes to explore this impulse by situating a series of interior experiences for a collection of glass art objects by Josiah McElheny, Jay Musler, Stanislav Libensky, Marcela Rosemberg, and Lino Tagliapietra in the Malibu light.

127

Shabnam Peida

Sublime Aperture

Architecture sculpts light into memorable geometric forms, paramount components of phenomenal ex-perience. This project investigates the ability of light to create perceptual space within physical space, and explores the materiality of light. The space of investigation is constrained by a monochromatic palette in order to provide an abstract context to observe the effect of light. Growing up in Sweden, I have internalized the contrast of intense winter darkness and vivid summer brilliance. Situating the project in Lund offers the disparity of extreme light conditions throughout the seasons. The specific light of this geographical location focuses and challenges a design solution that can elevate an appreciation for the poetics of light and darkness.

L A

Stephen Nguyen

Enduring the Transitional State of Silence, Darkness, and Surveillance

This work explores the inter-connective effects of silence, darkness, and of being surveilled. Silence can suggest unlimited space and can also mediate between the absence of sound and the presence of noise. Duration of the condition of silence impacts comfort levels. Darkness influences the mind’s eye to perceive imaginative and animated, or real forms. Naturally, the need arises to identify a connection of the existing, unknown form to a prior confrontation. The awareness of surveillance significantly impacts behavior, perception of time, and atmospheric qualities. In the presence of these three conditions to anchor spatial experiences, the project explores, through representation, the nuanced and layered effects of the transitional existence between the rational and the imagined.

129

Kristen Dusold

Contested Marks

A palimpsest can be defined as a surface of indexical languages and physical cues that record a site’s his-torical narrative. This thesis seeks to investigate the design potentials of the palimpsest and to challenge the myth of the tabula rasa. The Athenian Parthe-non, a palimpsest par excellence, will serve as a testing ground for reexamining how we discuss and define architectural history and its values.

L A

CasaundraQuackenbush

Appropriation: An Overlay of Systems

Bees claim territory by appropriating an existing situation. In the act of taking possession of an un-derlying system, such as a pile of twigs, the bees construct wax comb planes between the twigs, adjusting thickness of structure according to spans. Taking as site a typical type V wood frame house under construction, the project explores a parallel process by collecting discards in the house’s neigh-borhood, developing a language of interaction be-tween the western frame and those found objects, thereby territorializing the house by an overlay of installations. The design of those exhibit scenarios continues to investigate the process of appropria-tion, first by aestheticizing the found objects and secondly by establishing its display methodologies while negotiating the tectonic potentials of the overlay of systems.

131

Adeleni Lopez

Solid Draping: A Reinterpretation of R.M Schindler’s Concrete Construction

The rapid growth of technology has contributed to globalization and the homogenization of building technologies that often marginalize local, tectonic, and material traditions. The contemporary Swiss architects, Herzog & De Meuron, are known for their close study and translation of vernacular building traditions and material tectonics into contempo-rary built languages. Their tectonic translations are primarily focused on issues of envelope and skin, and are rarely explored as spatial and interior conditions. This thesis proposes to study the West Coast vernac-ular tradition of tilt-up concrete construction through a close reading of Rudolf Schindler’s Kings Road House. The vernacular techniques of tilt-up concrete construction will be reinterpreted to create interior spatial conditions that enhance the qualities of tex-ture, dimensionality, aperture, and threshold, which are made between solids, membranes, and delicately interwoven to create three-dimensional forms.

L A

Alena Eisen

Brackish Morphology: The Erosive Potentials of Architecture

Architecture often works to suppress the evidence of its use and the presence of its occupants. Through maintenance and upkeep, traces of human occupation and environmental wear are regularly checked or erased. This thesis will investigate the time-based potentials of wear, both human and environmental, to shape and develop new aesthetic languages, forms, and spaces by anticipating and employing erosive processes and their imprints.

133

Amy Rayne

Triangle: Memorialization and Interiority

Memorials have historically been designed and executed as exterior conditions or objects; rarely have they taken on the challenge of representing an event through interiority, and the few that exist have done so in a curatorial fashion, creating a museum. I believe there is great potential for interiority to memorialize historic events through a synthesis of light, material, and episodic indexing; in particular, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, which was responsible for the deaths of 146 workers, and sparked radical change in labor laws and building codes.

L A

Omar Montelongo

In Formation: The Complicity of Furniture in Constructed Environments

Furniture has the capability of generating socio-spa-tial bonds within the built environment, which can inform the boundaries of architecture. This thesis argues for the potential of furniture to act as a generator of spatial ideas and human relationships. Furniture ranges widely from the modest to the exclusive. Its functional and decorative aspects condense period and place, ritual, resources, and cultural aesthetic value. Thus, a table can engender a particular function. In this case, a table will be designed for the ritual of drinking yerba mate, using specific techniques and materials that either individ-ually or together reinforce its cultural value.

L A 135

Meng Ting Sun

Dilated Spaces: A Performative Investigation of Mechanism, Light, and Experience

Natural movement in our world is driven by the energy of the sun. Artificial movement is defined by the gesture of mechanism and the language of technology, which harnesses and manipulates the sun’s movement and energy. This thesis will explore the potential of mechanisms to negotiate between the natural world and the human world through the light-sensitive program of a rare book library–an addition to Gunnar Asplund’s Public Library in Stockholm, Sweden.

Francisco Salgado

ACDC: An Alternative Contemporary Detention Center

This thesis investigates the typological relation-ships between contemporary art museums and prisons; specifically, their comparable strategies of lighting, materiality, surveillance, control, and anti-social organization. Constrained by the conventional material palette of concrete, steel, and glass, this project will explore the formal and atmospheric developments that have occurred within contemporary museums– such as innovative sky-lighting, or the tempering of brutal materials– and adapt those findings to the environments of incarceration, guiding their populace toward better post-incarceration prosperities.

137

“It

’s j

ust

an

oth

er p

roje

ct.”

“It

is

no

t h

ow

yo

u a

re e

nd

ing

you

r ed

uca

tio

n,

b

ut

ho

w y

ou

are

beg

inn

ing

you

r ca

reer

.”

I h

ear

mys

elf

and

my

coll

eag

ues

say

th

is a

nd

co

un

t-le

ss o

ther

cli

chés

to

eac

h c

lass

of

stu

den

ts a

s th

ey s

tru

gg

le

thro

ug

h t

hei

r la

st p

roje

ct.

Fro

m m

y p

ersp

ecti

ve,

the

Deg

ree

Pro

ject

is

a m

easu

rin

g s

tick

fo

r a

gro

up

of

peo

ple

wh

o c

om

-p

lete

th

eir

deg

ree

at t

he

sam

e ti

me.

It

is e

tch

ed w

ith

fri

end

-sh

ips

and

har

dsh

ips

and

I t

hin

k th

e b

est

clas

ses

rem

emb

er i

t fo

nd

ly.

Eve

ry y

ear

it m

orp

hs

wit

h t

he

dir

ecti

on

s o

f an

ab

le

facu

lty.

Asp

ects

get

bet

ter

and

so

met

imes

th

ing

s ar

e lo

st.

Bu

t w

hen

th

e st

ud

io i

s h

um

min

g a

t ei

gh

t in

th

e m

orn

ing

, I

kno

w t

he

stu

den

ts h

ave

fou

nd

th

eir

eth

ic.

Th

eir

mo

tiva

tio

n is

th

eir

ow

n,

and

th

at w

ill

carr

y th

em a

lo

ng

way

. T

he

on

ly

thin

g I

en

joy

mo

re t

han

stu

den

ts i

s al

um

ni.

An

d s

o I

wis

h th

em a

ll w

ell

and

wil

l se

e th

em a

gai

n.

Catherine Herbst Architecture Chair

S a n D i e g o

139

Speculations at the Edge: The San Diego – Tijuana Region

In our second year, we continue to research the contested territory of the bi-national border re-gion of SD/TJ. As borders harden between nations with economic imbalances, this region uncovers the nature of opportunism as a medium for adap-tations and mechanisms for survival, coexistence and a challenge to the established structures of both countries. Along the border, an opportunistic landscape materializes that promises to resist the alienation associated with traditional urban models of control.

The research developed in the course alights upon this notion of opportunism and harnesses recent interest in this region in order to discover and propose interdisciplinary contextual prospects and provide emergent philosophies, tools, and social practices while using the bi-national divided region as a laboratory for research and speculation into new forms of architecture and urban adaptations. Therefore, the projects in Degree Project are an array of opposing modes of operation that both benefit and polarize each other, coalescing points of view, stimulating and motivating the possibili-ties of architecture as a de facto actor in designing contemporary culture and possible futures.

Philipp Bosshart, Eric Johnson,and Marcel Sanchez-Prieto, Instructors

S a n D i e g o

Stephanie Absalon

Jeremiah Artates

Jason Bontempo

Richard Balistreri

Cory Bitting

Derek Buskirk

Joshua Chilton

Talyssa D’Avila

Mark Chien

Phillip Fowler

Sandra Guillen

Mehmet Gundogar

Ian Heacox

Juan Ixta

David Lopez

Bradley Marquette

Luis Madrigal

Jesus Morocho

Andrew Nguyen

Alexander Rodriguez

Jorge Rojas

Kevin Solis

Yesenia Taylor

Alvin Vuong

Forrest Whitmore

Abel Zatarain

S t u d e n t s

Jeremiah Artates

MotorHub: Highway Intervention

In the current age of automotive transportation, highway infrastructure has been modified to accommodate maximum efficiency for its users. The increased use of vehicular transportation has demanded the expansion of San Diego’s highway systems, which has evolved into a categorization of vehicular occupancy and modes of transport. The outcome of such manipulation and construction has yielded a separation between the proximity of the pedestrian versus the circulation of vehicular movement.

The MotorHub assesses the disjunction of vehicular experience of current highway infrastructure, and the existing systems of the Rancho Bernardo Transit Station. Through the studies of circulatory and programmatic communication, the MotorHub will revive the motoring experience and enhance the void which occurs between point A and point B.

Stephanie Absalon

Transitional Place

During the 19th century, transit stations were considered a central space for commerce, commu-nication and culture. Public transportation in the United States of America has yet to experience a resurgence in development and design, as has occurred in Europe, and continues to compete for ridership as the automobile stands as the conve-nient and predominately popular mode of travel. San Diego’s old town metropolitan transit center will serve as a testing ground to revitalize the cultural identity of the transit station, invigorate the public spatial experience, and strengthen the network infrastructure. This thesis is an explora-tion focused on excavating the interrelationships between the binary conditions of departure and arrival. In addition, the social and built structures facilitate in the determination of possible spatial conditions occurring in this indeterminate space are examined.

141S D

143

Richard Balistreri

Procured Sound

Given that the inevitable urban soundscape is something tolerated, but also an environment to which we have not found an adaptation, Procured sound is an architectural execution amassed from the field of urban sound studies to expose potential opportunities for manipulating the experiences of sound. Spatial experiences present new theoretical insights backed by relevant case studies to sup-port the outlook of sound and noise as they can be applied to architecture. Developments in sound studies are seen across various disciplines, but have not yet attained maximum potential in architectural debate. Being able to introduce innovative technol-ogies to control sound can advance the way archi-tecture is approached. The thesis aims to investi-gate sound, not as an obstruction, but to exemplify its architectural qualities and possibilities.

S D

Jason Bontempo

Mechanized Urbanism

The current maquiladora system within the Tijua-na, Mexico region metabolizes the urban region at a catastrophic rate. A mega-structuring measure is required to close this entropic open system and recalibrate the failing infrastructure of the Tijuana river aqueduct, which is both sacred and acts as a divisional gap within the city. This heuristic ma-chine will enable a transparent framework to allow surface stitching, a prosthetic mechanic engage-ment, and metabolize the failing system in play.

145

Derek Buskirk

Sonic Transparency

In society today, the concert hall is often com-missioned to be the face of our cities, yet, while the building and program is enjoyed by many, the internal experience is perceived as only for the elite. This project will explore how architecture can challenge the innate exclusive quality of urban concert halls through the control of sonics via surfaces. The goal is to arrive at an aural transpar-ency between the music-producing private sector and the music-receiving public sector, where the urban landscape of the city can coexist with the concert hall.

S D

Between The Edge: Inhabiting The Freeway Void

The post-industrial culture of San Diego has in-duced an urban flight, catalyzed by the modernist creation of a mass private transportation system of freeways. The resulting dissection of the urban fabric has segregated and destroyed neighbor-hoods. A design methodology to convert the null space of the freeway boundary-edge into a bor-der-edge, a destination, is explored in this thesis. These major boundary-edges have transformed San Diego into a city of archipelagos, introspective islands disconnected from each other. The city has the opportunity to mitigate the boundary of the freeway from within itself, by reestablishing a density of pedestrian connections and activity. The interjection of a border-edge will reinstate the human scale at the freeway edge and revert the introspective archipelagos of San Diego.

Cory Bitting

147

Joshua Chilton

Sociopetal Space Opposing Social Isolation

As our urban landscape becomes increasingly den-sified and vertical in nature, it is necessary for ur-ban neighborhood planning to provide more areas for quality social interaction. This can be accom-plished through the introduction of civic and social places into the high density urban fabric, offering multiple programs and activities to attract users of varied ages, socio-economic strata, and cultural heritage. Historically, public places have been the cornerstone of social and civic life for people in urban centers. Today, public and private spaces, especially in America’s consumer-driven society, have become intertwined, and social spaces for the public have become a hybrid. My proposal is in response to this changing dynamic. By combining the elements of a community arts and performance center, public plaza, restaurant and retail spaces with porous street edges, this project will provide such an outlet to the age-diverse and densely pop-ulated Cortez Hill community.

S D

Mark Chien

Recover: Strategic Integration Of Aquatic And Civil Culture

This thesis aims to investigate the vacant ground in Taichung, Taiwan, where former military hous-ing once stood, as an ideal site for interventions that trigger new forms of public life. The water culture endemic to the region allows the project to strategically intervene to preserve the cul-ture through the integration of seasonal aquatic fluctuation with public space. With components that amplify historical, cultural, recreational and natural elements, the intervention generates a decentralized system of dispersed, yet connect-ed, micro-parks. Interactions will extend, not just between people, but also to the parks themselves, connected by the transforming seasonal features and water level changes. Water retained for rec-reation will be filtered and distributed to the com-munity of Rainbow Village, a preserved portion of the original military housing, where water short-age is a concern. This thesis will investigate how the micro-parks become a negotiation between social groups and contested territory.

149

Phillip Fowler

Consequence of the Voids “Reconnecting the Urban Fabric Through the Voids”

Disruptive forms and splintering forces divide the city into parts that obstruct any hope of an organ-ic recovery of the city’s urban fabric. Consequence of the voids is a response to this reality. Through testing the redistribution of program in section with conflicting grids will create new forms of directionally neutral separated layers of complexity that will create meaningful relationships with the urban fabric. Today’s architecture has lost its conditional rela-tionship to the urban fabric. At the local level, we move around our city within one system, The Ur-ban Fabric. The urban fabric is not efficient, with uneveness, fragmentation, and divergent parts of conflict. Through defined design goals and the use of architectural solutions, a contemporary urban repair strategy will be deployed against imp erme-able urban edge conditions.

S D

Organic Mechanism

Talyssa D’Avila

Sheltering Interjections

This thesis will focus on current living habits, quali-ties of life, and spatial organization to re-distribute, re-adapt, re-shape, re-evaluate and re-configure the way we dwell in our homes. The subject area is the 1950s suburban home in Clairemont, San Diego (California). The architectural strategy is acknowl-edging that the existing living conditions are flawed and not focused on contemporary comforts, effi-ciencies of space, systems and structure.

This exploration is developed by generating a series of scenarios manipulating the typical model with a hierarchy of rules, allowing for hybridization of the dwelling. The hybrid system provides the necessary flexibility to sustain future habitation, emphasizing sustainability, physical and emotional health, materi-al quality and energy standards.

151

Mehmet Gundogar

Latent Territories: Waterside Opportunism

Seventy percent of the earth’s surface is covered with water, but the waterfront edges are scarce. During the industrial growth, the edges of the cities were taken over. ‘Cities’ growth was driven a divergent direction. Today some of these edge ter-ritories are vast, underutilized, and hard to access. This thesis seeks to discover potential strategies for infrastructure and architectural urbanism to reclaim the latent waterfront territories as new areas for design and future engagement.

S D

Sandra Guillen

Retrofitting Public Spaces: Fulfilling Urban Needs

As San Diego expands, density has increased with mega-building blocks and high rise residential towers, resulting in isolated communities. Archi-tects create massive buildings with short lifecycles to accommodate specific needs, ignoring the urban fabric of which they are a part. Spaces that promote interaction and integration with the community are usually ignored. These meaningless structures dominate the urban ecosystem. The multilayered urban experience demands a more holistic approach for designing public spaces. This thesis aims to investigate how the collective urge to develop well- designed hybrid public spaces can come about by focusing on the concept of horizontality to create an urban field with linear display surfaces, weav-ing a dense texture of interior and exterior spaces. This type of public space should be able to respond and transform constantly with the city as it grows, becoming the lens through which the contemporary city is represented and reunited.

153

Juan Ixta

Revitalizing Land: A Post-Leisure Experience

The Post-Leisure experience is the residual use of land that was once determined to be Leisure-pro-grammed. Contemporary issues such as economic downturns, water shortages, and aging infrastruc-ture have resulted in suburban and urban environ-ments developing rapidly and perfunctorily, leaving swaths of land open and abandoned. These empty spaces can serve a purpose in their abandonment. As such, golf courses are the focus of this investiga-tion to discover the underlying usages of a Post-Lei-sure experience.

The logics of the site and the death of the Leisure program originally intended for the site lead to the birth of new architectural typologies. This thesis will first analyze the site from a minimalist approach. Second: reintroduce new programmatic elements for the emergence of activity hubs. And third: deter-mine how the site will accommodate the privatiza-tion of the site and the public realm.

S D

Ian Heacox

Fragmentation of the City

The decay of industrialization in downtown San Diego has produced remnants of old warehouse skins that are either adapted or demolished. The destruc-tion of these artifacts due to their inability to adapt is inefficient, but a reality. However, these artifacts still have value: the historic aspect, the value of the infrastructure/land, and the industrial spatial feelings evoked by these decayed warehouses. These vacant buildings are often located close to major attractions such as the Gaslamp, Petco Park, and housing high rises, allowing for interesting interactions. Even with positive adjacencies to the site, these buildings are ig-nored in the city plan, creating fragmentation. While the building structure is made up of walls and space, this thesis aims to investigate how these artifacts can reconnect with the city center using the skin of the building. By focusing on the roof, the thesis will investigate the potential to open and connect the structure by perforating the skin.

155

Bradley Marquette

Life Support : Analyzing the Spaces We Inhabit

How can we develop spaces for both commercial and residential inhabitation that can adapt to our varying programmatic needs as individuals? These spaces hold quantitative and qualitative needs that can inform how spaces should react to a given environment. Through this we can ab-stract a kit of parts which can be used to develop a framework that defines orientation and the physical needs of these spaces.

S D

David Lopez

(Interstition) The Space Within the Line

In a globalized world with linked economies and in-tercontinental civic engagements, areas of persistent political conflict have emerged with a defining geo-graphic trend. This hostile line of political turmoil is aligned between 28- 33 degrees North Parallel: The Political Equator. Within this combative space lies Mexico and the United States. While the two countries are contentious with one another, they are not in a state of armed conflict, unlike other coun-tries along this political thermocline. This thesis aims to negotiate the geographic elements at the locus of Friendship and Border Field Park. This border space separating the U.S. and Mexico will be examined to determine which elements, if any, contribute to an environment of conflict. The observations will be applied to both sides of the border region to medi-ate the geographic factors and mollify tensions, re-conceptualizing the border. Through examination of the specific area will architecture and other elements be crafted to create regional continuity.

157

Jesus Morocho

Moments of Sound and Space

Concerning the perception of sound, architecture has lost relevance, failing to address the percep-tion of the world through the simultaneous use of all five senses. Visual perception has been heav-ily and disproportionately favored in the field of architecture and this has deprived us all of the potential to use our other senses. Since a space without sound can feel even emptier, this project seeks to explore the reverberation of sound in a space and the quality of its reflectiveness that will be affected by geometry, proportion, and material-ity. This thesis seeks to enrich the senses of volume and space and would create opportunities for the public to experience these moments. The design will create a better transition from the overstimu-lation of the neighborhood of the waterfront, to an audio-rich space where the user can explore the building and enjoy the surroundings.

S D

Luis Madrigal

Manifestation of the Archive

A new Social Society has emerged with impli-cations of self-worth being determined through the consistent documentation of our lives using social media. We create an exponentially grow-ing amount of information that is in flux with the places that are physically able to store this infor-mation. Soon, our archives will begin to protrude into the cityscape when the demand for bigger and faster storage increases. Manifestation of the Archive revisits the manner in which architects deal with storage typologies in order to create new typologies adapted for data warehouses, stor-ing our increasingly cyber lives that have massive growing physical-spatial requirements.

159

AlexanderRodriguez

Mall Almanac

Because of shifting consumer trends, Shopping malls in the contemporary urban society have become inefficient structures due to the overcompensation of space, limitations of accessibility, and sterile social environments. The fundamental political struggle of city development has historically dealt with the juxtaposition of expanding private spaces and the limitations set forth by public spaces. The shopping mall, designed by Victor Gruen, was an innovative by-product of the post-war competition to accom-modate expanding middle-class families and to re-imagine a city’s walkability. Cataloging existing mall conditions such as Victor Gruen’s City Center Mall, Jon Jerde’s Horton Plaza, and Rem Koolhaas’s 360 Mall department store will inform the preceding evolution of public and private spaces in an effort to develop new components of urban social spaces.

S D

Andrew Nguyen

M.A.R.S (Modular Adaptive Residential System) Prototype 2.0

The M.A.R.S. prototype is a project that is designed to test and conceptualize how residences may be produced using a completely industrialized prefab-ricating process. The core concept for the building system is the manipulation of tessellating geometries in order to design a building formed by the overlap-ping vertices creating arrangements that are dy-namic, scalar, and responsive. This, in turn, enables users to adapt the building’s program and configu-ration to match their lifestyle needs. Furthermore, the M.A.R.S. prototype is designed with delivery in mind, using lightweight, cutting-edge materials to make project delivery possible in even the most dif-ficult and remote locations: locations where building on site, or delivery of materials, present a logistical challenge. This lightness enables the project to be delivered by traditional means, air transport, heli-copter, or even by remote aerial systems.

161

Kevin Solis

Compressed Interaction

This thesis concerns the identification of the al-leyway as a positive space, rejecting the negative archetypal stigma. Alleyways exist as the subtrac-tive space between architectural projects, allowing for opportunities to analyze different programs. Substance will replace desolation, encouraging the community to inhabit these spaces and enhance the functionality of the block, bringing the community together. Enhancing the alleyway, subtracting the negative public perspective and re-imagining it as positive, is necessary to add infrastructure to dispel the negative void.

Community spaces play a crucial role in the success of a city and its inhabitants. The infrastructure of the public by-ways engage the buildings, dwellings and formal public spaces. The thesis focuses on en-hancing a new infrastructure within the alley, bring-ing a community together and rejecting the negative identity traditionally associated with alleyways.

S D

Jorge Rojas

A Monument is for remembering forgetting.

A transition between two opposite conditions of-fers an infinite amount of possibilities where both identities (opposite conditions) have a sense of belonging. As an outcome of the continuing con-dition of dynamic change and ongoing processes of decay and renewal of the emerging metropolis, urbanity has brought with it feelings of security and financial prospects, but also significant draw-backs that emerge over time, such as segregation, social exclusion, and poverty.

By addressing the environmental challenges that divide two communities (opposite in financial and political stature) not just physically, but culturally, the topic of the monument will serve to commem-orate spaces of mitigation. A place where two communities can find a sense of belonging within a neglected site.

163

Alvin Vuong

The Enabled Environment

This thesis focuses on architectural surfaces and their ability to increase quotidian mobility. Con-temporary architectural design, limited by rigid parameters, has largely neglected the handi-capped and less mobile populations. Conven-tional design, while focused on energy and cost efficiency, tends to design buildings that are only functional to the largest swatch of population, ignoring users with more difficulty. However, an effective design can create accessibility for varied types of users, regardless of conditions of mobil-ity. The surface-oriented design will be described using a school’s built environment. The thesis will focus on school institutions as an archetype for general design principles in the community. Ad-ditionally, schools require design to account for a wide range of possible disabilities and users. There is a need for a designed built environment where individuals with disabilities are comfortable and productive members of the larger population.

S D

Yesenia Taylor

Media Meditation: Improving Architecture and Design by Utilizing Technology that can Educate, Inspire, and Communicate Ideas

While drawings, collages and models transmit an urgency to be understood, there are new technol-ogies emerging that could revolutionize the way architecture is represented. By comparing the work of the modern-age ‘paper architects’ (Perry Kulper, Thomas Hillier, etc.) to the new-age augment-ed reality technologies, it is possible to see how representation techniques have evolved to aid the imagination-impaired. This new form of represen-tation is a more experiential means for designing architecture and ensures that all questions posed by biased, static drawings will be visually answered and understood by the eyes of the user. This new mediation between designer and non-designer will change the way architecture is valued, not only provoking ideas and feelings, but also demand-ing memory and relationships. Changing the way architecture is represented is the key to influencing relevance and importance in the architecture and design professions.

165

Abel Zatarain

Deviant Bodies

This thesis investigates the potential of architectur-al prosthesis as an “auxiliary organ” by examining the contemporary role of the body in architecture. The body is examined as three classes; the orthotic body (in need of adjustment/correction to skeletal or musculatory structure), the prosthetic body (use of prosthetics to replace a lost or damaged limb), and the post-body body (a normal body that wishes to extend its abilities through orthotic and/or prosthetic devices). The site contains a grid of trees, this field is analyzed as a set of primary (tilt causes displacement of terrain), secondary (growth of one is affected by adjacent growth), and tertiary (voids cause growth along trunk) relationships. Can the investigation of ‘deviant’ body classes and their primary, secondary, and tertiary relationships of inhabiting space critique the role of bodies in architecture?

S D

Forrest Whitmore

Compression Boundary

While contemporary practice focuses on the arbi-trary manipulation of exterior surfaces to create ‘exuberant’ buildings, the compression boundary utilizes density, hatching, and axonometric repre-sentation to alter volumetric architecture within simple forms. Computational design technologies negate the complex intrinsic potential of tradi-tional architectural drawing techniques. Although these techniques have the connotation of merely being surface-based, the overlay and density of the hatching determines the aura, depth, light, resolution and structure of space.

167

Joseph Gravius

From the Inside Out

This project started out as an exploration into the relationship between taxidermy and architecture, which led to the relationship of the façade to the interior and how the poché becomes the in-be-tween space of a building packaged all together. In taxidermy, the skin is removed and placed around a form in the shape of the animal; here, the interior changes by being confined to the form of the Timken Museum, with the original façade then having an additional façade placed around it. The façade is encasing the interior, the same way the skin would act. Inspired by the fall semester in Rome and the work of Francesco Borromini and his use of geometry in the confined space of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, the in-between or poché created by surrounding spaces became more interesting due to their geometries for the new space created in the Timken.

S a n D i e g o

Stan Bertheaud, Philipp Bosshart, Eric Johnson, Hector Perez, and Marcel Sanchez-Prieto,Instructors

Joseph Gravius

Maritza Reh

John Shannon

S t u d e n t s

169

John Shannon

Transforming America’s Industrial Typology

This thesis will explore how innovation, technology, community, and abundance are producing an archi-tectural typology for America’s “New Industry.” The thesis will define the typology of “New Industry” and show how these typological characteristics are transformed into humane, economic, and ecologi-cal architectural feedback loop systems. The archi-tectural typology will re-adapt and re-vitalize the abandoned envelopes of earlier industrial typologies– “Old Industry”– while evolving to meet the new economic and social needs of American communities and industries. The El Toro Marine Base in Irvine, CA is an energetic urban setting with the necessary ex-isting structural and industrial landscape to allow the architectural feedback loops to succeed. The project will locate itself within the envelope of an existing hangar on-site. Once inside, the new typological characteristics and systems will be deployed through modular flexibility, expanding the existing envelope and its boundaries.

S D

Maritza Reh

Rescuing A High Voltage Fossil :Between Harbor Avenue and Main Street in Barrio Logan

The mix of uses as well as of a lack of a community centers in a post-industrial landscape produce an underprivileged community, and an environment that is not favorable to close social interactions, and does not encourage the people to improve their own ecological surroundings. Recognizing that complex systems of people, nature and environment impact one another in a reciprocal interaction, it could help to understand the different elements that are in-volved to establish the new positive conditions, and create a progressive and dynamic design. A range scale between public spaces and industrial design can help to recover and improve the relationship of the people of the community. In this case, the archi-tecture will be a mediator in the process where the citizens become the creator of the new space that will work like a catalyst, strengthening the social relationship, and increasing urban biodiversity.

171

Yu Kwang Chun

The Yellow Mellow

Nested in the heart of Barrio Logan, San Diego, this 22-unit multi-residential project is a revival project of an old metal shop that was rusting in its own pile of scrap. Barrio Logan is currently a community that is rising to its artful and diverse cultural potential. The project’s design is suggestive of the new tran-sition of the community, while keeping the design reminiscent of the gabled metal roof structure as an homage to the bustling industrial community. Ten of the live-work units are a conversion of the exist-ing building shell while the other 12 units are newly built lofts. The total development cost of the design is projected to be $2.9 million at a capitalized value of $4.1 million.

S a n D i e g o

Mike Burnett, Brett Farrow, Tyler Hanson, Lloyd Russell, Jonathan Segal, Ted Smith, and David Saborio,Instructors

Yu Kwang Chun

Al Hussein Dantata

Sin Hei Kwok

Seyed Marashi

Adam Martin

Stella Murphy

Paulina Olmos Brenis

Jeffrey Umphres

S t u d e n t s

173

Sin Hei Kwok

Voltaire 6

Voltaire 6 is a for-sale development consisting of six condo map homes. The project is located at the corner of Voltaire and Abbot Streets which is a block away from Ocean Beach, San Diego, CA. Walls and windows are articulated not only to emphasize natural light and ventilation, but also to avoid overlooking issue on a high density site. Each unit provides large private patio/balcony/outdoor showers to extend the spatial experience to outdoor. Four units on Abbot Streets on level three have valuable view to the ocean.

S D

Al Hussein Dantata

El Barrio

El Barrio is a small, mixed-use development in the heart of an up-and-coming neighborhood in the Barrio Logan area of San Diego, CA. Designed to blend in with the current built-environment by keeping the scale relevant so the building will not seem out of place, the complex is to function as small community within the neighborhood and to serve as one of the first steps toward the revival of the district.

The complex is comprised of 11 new apartments and 8 commercial spaces from the converted for-mer metal shop. The complex is expected to cost $3.1 million at a capitalized value of $4.3 million when completed.

175

Adam Martin

The Lyceum

The Lyceum is a development consisting of six “fee simple”– ie. for sale– homes. The site sits in the Ocean Beach Neighborhood in San Diego, Cal-ifornia at the corner of Voltaire and Abbot Streets. The project’s design and siting is highly influenced by the beach, located a little over a block away. Rather than create traditional row homes which are limited to natural light on three sides and share side walls, the intent is to clearly delineate ownership and create value via a more habitable gap between the homes, thus reinforcing the nature of indepen-dent ownership. Privacy is afforded by providing roof overhangs and cleverly orienting the windows. Each 2-story unit is given an uninterrupted view toward the ocean. The project is contiguous in character, but varied in massing and siting, leaving room for each home to take on a distinct identity within the overall development.

S D

Seyed Marashi

Beach Row Houses

Located in the Ocean Beach neighborhood of San Diego, CA, Beach Row Houses was the subject of an analysis of a for-sale project in the Real Estate development program. Considering its proximity to the beach, the site is a prime residential location which potentially could be a great purchase for a family of two or three. Row homes consist of 1 and 2 bed rooms with two baths, front yard, balconies on upper levels and car garage with a lift providing two parking spaces. The analysis started by studying neighborhood price comparisons and then examin-ing the site itself with regard to maximum usage of the site according to what zoning allowed. Finally, creating a pro forma in this study put everything into perspective about whether the project was profitable with respect to neighborhood market prices.

177

PaulinaOlmos Brenis

The Fold

The fold is a small residential project located in a beachfront neighborhood in San Diego, California known as Ocean Beach. This building occupies a 10,000 sq. ft. lot on the corner of Voltaire an Abbot Streets (2 blocks away from the beach) and consists of 5 three-story row homes, each paired with its own private patio and garage.

The Fold has the intention to provide ocean views to each unit and preserve their privacy at the same time, which is the reason of the orientation, position, and massing for the houses: One set back from the other, creating this space of natural ventilation and illumination. These 2 bedroom/2 bath units connect interiors and exteriors through large glazed openings and garage doors.

The building is intended to be sold right after the construction making a total return on investment of 50%.

S D

Stella Murphy

Barrio Mix

Located in Barrio Logan, this mixed-use development consists of 12 residential units, 6 commercial or live/ work units, and 1 large 2800 sq. ft. space intended to house a collection of cars. The residential units will be new construction flanking the existing steel fabrica-tion building on the site and creating a new urban edge that respects the pedestrian experience. The new live/work spaces will consist of new construction as well as an area carved out of the existing building within the shell. The total development cost is esti-mated to be $3.2 million with a capitalized value of $4.7 million at completion.

Jeffrey Umphres

Case Study - Massing

Through case studies such as this, we begin to under-stand how these characteristic forms can be assimi-lated into our developments from design, as well as being financially informed and having functional per-spectives. Each space has a value and every decision has both aesthetic and pecuniary consequences. By using this as a metric, we are guided toward a mean-ingful balance between design and performance.

Colophon

Book Design Team April Greiman / Made in Space / LA Louis Alvarado / Tiffany Chin

Photography Burbank Campus building Tom BonnerSan Diego Campus building David Hewitt and Anne Garrison Architectural Photography

Printer Typecraft 2040 East Walnut Street Pasadena, California 91107

Printed on an HP Indigo 5500 Press

Typeface Syntax Roman / Bold / Black

Corrigendum

The following students graduating with a Master of Science in Architecture were instructed by the following faculty:

Student Gregory Andrade: Instructors Anthony Fontenot and Mark Stanley

Student Cyrus Dorbayan: Instructors Bill Roschen and Christi van Cleve

Burbank Campus 7500 North Glenoaks Boulevard Burbank, California 91510-1052

San Diego Campus 2212 Main Street San Diego, California 92113-3641

architecture.woodbury.edu

Woodbury School of Architecture

Degree P ro jec t / Sen io r P ro jec t / G radua te Thes i s

2015