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| Surface
as Ultraskin |
8.2002
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| international
design competition special mention |
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| Surface
as Ultraskin |
8.2002
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| international
design competition special mention |
|
The building's ultraskin is like a hypersurface resonating of forces criss-crossing over one another. Landscape elements (the topographic sweep of the L.A. River), pieces of urban infrastructure (freeways, railroad), an industrial archeology of found objects (homeless boxes along the river banks, trucks) as well as elements of the newly proposed "buildings" were combined to create a generative geometry. The end result is a particolored, architectural quilt of multiple elements whose overall character is that of a re-configured ground plane; the initial scheme is morphed into an architecture that is more responsive to the datascape and thus reduces the perception of the newly designed building as an inserted "object" competing with the existing buildings on the site. Just as the physical space of the building acts as a media membrane that is informed by the existing condition of the idiosyncratic place it sits in (a curved bridge, the verticality of downtown, the LA River, the complex road system surrounding it, the railroad and the freeway interchange), so its final destination as archive center for the city of Los Angeles aims at gathering memories of the place, though on a different level. The unavoidable presence and materiality of the site is knit together with the intangible sphere of memory and its timeless information. Site On the L.A. River, between 4th and 6th street in metropolitan Los Angeles, the site is a "dead" place, a nothingness, a crash site, the collision of two plates. The river without water for months at a time can be perceived as a gaping wound lined in concrete, ripping the city apart from North to South. In this singular location, the river lies positioned between the cocky pride of the vertical economic center to the West, and the fragmented remnant of a natural park to the East. The Hollenbeck Park is practically choked by freeways (the merged 10 and 5 border it) and the overpass of 6th street which looms above. The L.A. River exists here as a border line within the city, a no-man's land which the homeless use as their roadway and drag racers invade for their illegal rallies. The river here completely belies its own metaphor as the origin of life. Program Bridging the river and embedded below it, visible and invisible, is the Minotaur's Warehouse (the wear and the tear house) which is an archive, a deposit for the memory for the city of Los Angeles. In this program, the past, present and the future come together in radical contemplation. Here are deposited the materiality of traces and the tangible fluctuations of memory. Dreams which have become realities and realities no longer knowable coexist. Here a "City of Quartz" pools its numerous micro-cosmic communities, its polyvalent and idiosyncratic cultures, its brave claim to temporality. |
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