los angeles CALIFORNIA
SCI-Arc
Critic: Anna NEIMARK

A series of surfaces fold down to connect multiple levels between vehicular and pedestrian traffic. Situated in Boyle Heights, CA, the program consist of multiple housing units, that are loosely arranged along a series of surfaces that primarily act as an extension of the urban fabric. By destabilizing the typical housing typology, through the use of ground and posture, we start registering the new relationships between the existing and the new. The use of materiality becomes hyperspecific by indexing the relationship between typical architectural elements-roofs, walls, and windows by re-establishing their order. These typologies serve as an open framework for events to take place that are current in a typical residential neighborhood. These systems of operations break the conventional notions of property lines and lots, by creating new boundaries within the given site. The projects addresses how can we view something such as a city at an micro scale and connect it back to its macro fabric.

sP: What or who Influenced this project?
SS: At first the studio brief required the students to pick a precedent, and I chose the Guggenheim Museum in New York City by Frank Lloyd Wright. What interested me in the Guggenheim Museum is that the ramp acts as an extension to the urban fabric of New York. Through this process the relationship between the urban tissue and the building destabilizes the grid of New York City. Throughout the development of this project, I looked at lot of precedents in two components, projects that dealt with the relationship between infrastructure and building typologies and then single surface projects. The precedents that I primarily looked at was the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale proposal by Mos Architects, Jessiue Library by OMA, Seattle Public Library by OMA, and the 1111 Lincoln Road by Herzog & de Meuron.

sP: What were you reading/listening to/ watching while developing this project?
SS: I have read and watched some lectures during the development of this project that varied from Jeff Kipnis lecture on Single Surface Buildings, S,M,L,XL lecture by Rem Koolhaas, The Manhattan Transcripts by Bernard Tschumi, and Towards Form: Louis Khan’s Urban design for Philadelphia, 1939-1962.

sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?
SS: I’m interested in a lot projects by OMA, Morphosis, Gehry Partners, Herzog de Meuron, Peter Eisenman, Le Corbusier, James Stirling, and Mos Architects, as I find them very helpful for me currently in the discourse of architecture.