Situated in a nearby forest, the park carves away the landscape to embed an large scale fashion studio. Each element from the building’s interior to the bespoke landscape is imagined as a potential representation and usable space for the production of fashion and it’s presentation to the world. It is designed to be as bespoke as a couture dress while able to be refit to the imagination of the designers and director’s vision.
The building is organized into a linear bar, with largely open floors used to house varying stages of production - from crafting to exhibiting. The exterior is shrouded in layers of expanded metal mesh, louvered surfaces, and tile shifting the building’s appearance as vantage points and lighting changes. The landscape cuts from new plazas, through exterior atria, unto the natural landscape; always done so with the intent that each area can be imagined as a catwalk or exhibition space.
The near future. Desert villages turn into concentrated urban like towns. Gridded and repeated housing stock cover the once barren sandscape, spotted with discrete towers - a remnant of the urban identity of cities long gone. These towers sit vacant, holding space for an ideal vision of the past century; they could have been urban gardens, solar farms, or luxury offices and residences. Now they merely act as lighthouses for those traveling across the vacant terrain.
Los Angeles needs to densify, this is a given. As part of a culminating research studio at UCLA, the prompt addresses this inevitability. It proposes that the expo line running from downtown to Santa Monica could be conceived of as a new Arroy Seco highway. Along which a series of speculative 1 kilometer diameter cities would emerge centered around its stations.
As a proposition, this city for La Brea Station would contend that the city is impossible to reduce to a kind of master planning. That it should and could develop as a series of independent micro-narratives. Each of which would have its own political, cultural, economic, and conceptual forces acting on its urban logic - a total of 7 of these micro-narratives have been developed in this case.
What are the extents of each city? What are its boundaries? How do new strategies become sythetic with an existing? How self-reliant can a city be? What is a city of cities?
UCLA Instructor - Neil Denari w/ Tom Niu
