Building with Landscape
UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - Design Studio 413 - M.Arch 2nd year - Fall 2025
Los Angeles grapples continually with the environmental challenges intrinsic to its geographical location. These challenges encompass geological instability, a highly diverse topography, recurrent wildfires, extreme temperatures and a persistent scarcity of water resources. The city confronts an unrelenting demand to sustain its ever-expanding metropolitan existence, particularly as the compounding effects of climate change exacerbate its immediate environmental milieu. Accommodating the diverse communal habits of urban living necessitates extensive infrastructural undertakings and innovative solutions. In an epoch characterized by a shift toward more subtle and concealed infrastructures, Los Angeles continues to rely on extensive physical infrastructures to secure its natural resources, a prerequisite vital for its survival as a metropolis.
Amidst the backdrop of adverse climate change, characterized by arid conditions, reduced precipitation, and frequent droughts, the foremost concern in Los Angeles pertains to the procurement of natural water sources for the city. Historically, the supplying of water to this arid locale has been a monumental endeavor. An intricate network of infrastructure facilitates the delivery of water into the city, primarily sourced from the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range via surface aqueducts and tunnels. Within the metropolitan boundaries, this water undergoes management via an expansive framework of dams, reservoirs, channels, and pumping stations, culminating in its delivery to individual faucets.
The development of essential civic infrastructures has traditionally served as a marker of a civilization's advancement, aiding in the organization and facilitation of evolving communal needs and desires. Present-day urban centers rely on public/private institutions to oversee and maintain these infrastructures, serving as intermediaries between resource cultivation, distribution, and public consumption. In a field invested in the cultural impact of architectural interventions, the conspicuous absence of influence and participation in envisioning the integration of civic infrastructures, which fundamentally impact the equitable and just distribution of resources to the public, warrants profound consideration. It is against this contextual backdrop that the studio puts forth the prompt to examine the agency of architecture in engaging with and speculating on its relationship to larger systems.
Students work by Ehan Boll, Benjamin Castle, Konrad Collins, Emma Fuller-Monk, Ava Gellegani, Taha Jamshidi, Evan Oestreich, Sydney Patterson, Cheng Wang, Schelle Yu, ShiRui Zhu - UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - M.Arch 1st year - Fall 2024