Numbers & Forms
Designing a polytropos urbanism for La Cienega & Jeffereson Station, Los Angeles
The research project consists of two students for one Expo Station as the center of a 500 meter radius. We are interested in exploring how the multi-scaled city will evolve in fifty-year time. As the monorails in Los Angeles was built over the last 10 years with enormous costs, it is expected to reduce 10% of the cars off the streets and freeways, and would dramatically improve the flow of traffic in the city.
We worked with programmatic methods to produce general massing, where each form can adapt to certain typology. For instance, housing usually requires stacked and normative forms and organizations, and we can apply deviant forms to programs that have a looser fit in relation to the geometry of the building envelope. Such deviations from the norm express architecture’s formal response in relation to program. We are interested in working with the index of the gridded world as a referential matrix. In all of these examples, degrees and kinds of change to the norm set up the rhetoric of the project.
TEAM
Calvin Qiu, Bennet Liang
DURATION
2018.09 - 2019. 06
ADVISOR
Professor Neil Denari, Professor Dana Cuff, UCLA AUD
MY ROLE
Urban Planning Research, Spatial Analytics, Urban & Spatial Modeling, Architecture, Visualization
Urban Analysis
We first did a thorough investigation and documentation of the existing condition of the site will include zoning analysis, land use, land ownership, population, economies, demographics, and architectural massing.
Strategies and Scenarios
For capitalist and privatized society, how can developers make profits while contributing to public goods? We proposed co-living apartments that serves the 2028 Olympic Games as athlete dorms, hi-rise apartment towers that allow more footprint for infrastructures, commercial buildings that provide public assembly spaces and light industries that promote technology development. Meanwhile, the taxation revenue will subsidize hi-tech offices that provide jobs. Sports stadium serves the Olympics will open to the public and campus will be built to breed the next generation.
STAGE ONE: 2028 Olympics
POPULATION 14,763 NUMBER OF UNITS 4,836 FAR 4.7
BUILDING FOOTPRINT 72,863 sqm TOTAL FLOOR AREA 443,428 sqm GREEN SPACE PER PERSON 2.1 sqm
More people are working remotely and want more flexibility and mobility for their apartments with affordable price. We believe that shared space is a solution to increasing rapid urbanization. The existing empty land to the northwest of the metro station and part of existing low-density apartments on southeast will be transformed to new co-living zones.
Stage Two: 2040
POPULATION 3,659 NUMBER OF UNITS 1,494 FAR 6.3
BUILDING FOOTPRINT 42,863 sqm TOTAL FLOOR AREA 276,339 sqm GREEN SPACE PER PERSON 5.2 sqm
A bill will be passed to encourage transit-oriented housing such that residential buildings can be allowed to build up to 20 floors, about 60 meters high; It also requires developers to consider giving back to the public in exchange for more floor are bonuses, including 1) build more affordable housing units that don’t make that much profit; or 2) public space that are used to vitalize the community, such as build street for the public to travel, or encourage activities to make people might feel that they belong there (outdoor year-long event space)
In addition, multiple commercial centers are built along major corridors to encourage public engagement. The intersection of metro station is transformed to pedestrian-only walkways by burying car lanes below-grade. Multiple walkways are designed on second and third floors to let pedestrians to enjoy the greeneries when they walk.
Stage Three: 2050
The industrial zones on the southwest corner will be rebuilt and other civic zones will be built and existing small businesses will be replaced by larger manufacturers to provide more jobs. They will produce products such as green facades, green architecture windows, electric vehicle components and several robotic centers.
Civic centers are built next to apartments on the northeast corner and encourage residents to engage in concerts, sports, art exhibitions; some of them will be public storage for short-term living residents to temporarily place their stuffs and there will also be several government buildings to provide public services such as LADWP.
Stage Four: 2050 & Beyond
We are envisioning the northwest corner to become a complex of combining education and high tech to cultivate innovation and education for the public. The interlocking typologies are sharing and smart working spaces for startups to R&D new products for long-term benefits to the site.
A campus will be built next to education companies that provide bootcamps or other classes for people who do not want to attend college to get a certificate and an opportunity for those who are already working to learn more skills.
