Los Angeles Center for Architecture

LACA was a chance to design the theoretical “Los Angeles Center for Architecture” between the downtown neighborhoods of Little Tokyo and Bunker Hill, an exhibition and archival space of architecture for Los Angeles, à la CCA in Montréal.

The program called for a multipurpose space of around 10,000 square feet, dispersed between archival, exhibition and interstitial spaces. Throughout the development, superordinate questions arose about the exact formality and purpose of an archive. How do we display the widen array of representational techniques employed in architecture? While art museums may have the privilege of displaying exact works, architecture’s sheer scale limits archival and curatorial space to minimal representations of the field. In a world where digital files, drawings, mockups and models comprise the creation of a full-scale structure whereby the final result is the only implementation of the design in finalized form, how can the public be engaged?

Formally, the building was filed into the extraction from the field project. In this way, a feedback was necessitated between the logic of the field, the position of the extraction and the level of detail transposed. All interior geometry was created form an interpretation between the regulating parameters of the figure’s form and the spaces created by the figures’ interactions within the field. The figures themselves were organized in a way to question their purpose within the formal relationships present in the structure. Moments of clear representation between the figure and the extraction beg to ask whether a figure’s interactions are additive or subtractive. The precise existence of the figure is by that method called to trial.

Moreover, as an abstraction from the Palace of the Assembly in Chandigarh, LACA represented a philosophical trope and thematic interplay. Through its plans, moments of figures’ geometries shine through in a way reminiscent of the ‘thing within a thing’ proposition placed forth by Le Corbusier. More thematically, the building works to reveal private space into a more public sphere. As is such in Chandigarh, organization of spaces interplays the relationship of private and public realms, especially when projected via plan and section in drawings.

In this vein, circulation became extremely important. The placement of stairs along the façades of the building became vital both in the building’s formality and its ethos. The interaction between LACA and the public is exposed, and, as is such, you become the very exhibit. Your interaction with architecture is exactly how architecture must be presented. In a formal sense, their appearance in plan begins to define a new graphical style. A labyrinthine quality evolves, and an intentional ignoring of graphic standards is evoked to allow for a graphical quality to be presented.

Representationally, the project began to encompass alternative means of abstraction and depiction. For example, section drawings were produced with accompanying elevations. These demonstrated the universality of the geometrical forms present in the project. Not only did the figure taken to mold the geometry of the spaces leave its impression on the final result sectionally or planometrically, but entirely throughout each moment of the object.

After the creation of the building, a post-rationalization was taken on through a series of formal analyses to the geometry inherent in one of its plans, though this methodology would hypothetically be universally applicable throughout the building’s formal qualities as a whole.