Building with Landscape
UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - Design Studio 412 - M.Arch 1st year - Winter 2026
The 412 Building Design Studio focuses on the relation of structure to architectural design, examining techniques of structural form-finding and expression. The studio oscillates between notions of structure as a response to the exter-nal forces that act on a building (gravity first among these), and spatial order. That is, we will think of structure do-ing two kinds of work. First, it responds to the conditions of physics by managing a set of vertical, lateral, and tor-sional forces. Second, structure organizes matter and space through its spacing, repetition, sizing, and, at times, through discrete and idiosyncratic gestures. Mediating between these two roles, the aesthetic expression of structure is the point where the presence of mostly invisible forces begins to merge with the design of architecture’s visible presence. In particular, this occurs through ornament and its longstanding role as the locus where the physically per-formative parts of architecture start to communicate with an audience through an expanded register of optical and spatial effects.
Students design a house for plants: an arboretum with a specific intent to conserve and, as such, educate the public on conservation on a real site in Los Angeles to produce a new building typology which appropriates the program for a dense urban condition with tectonic aspects supporting a fully planted out urban conservationist landscape. Our building proposal will serve as the enclosure to preserve and grow plants that would not otherwise be able to survive in the prevailing climactic conditions of Los Angeles. In addition to plant growth, the building will house the ancil-lary functions of research, and public engagement. Not only does structure regulate the basic properties of a building like span, height, and volume, but it is highly correlated to the kinds of decisions that will need to be made as the building attempts to serve various audiences: structures can be cellular or open, light or heavy, dense or aerated, and can move between these conditions. The ambition is to produce a more synthetic relationship between environmen-tal and structural agendas; however, structure governs here.
This blended nature of the program will require projects to simultaneously attend to the demands of plant growth (with great specificity for the requirements of plant species) alongside the requirement for human habitation. In both function and expression, then the building will level the proverbial playing field between the space of plants and the place of humans. The physical and spatial properties of structure are an ideal frame within which to consider this flattening of hierarchy between our building’s human and non-human constituencies. Program is a supporting char-acter, a productive contaminant to structural order which defines a simple boundary or limit of a system. Program has the capacity to mediate as specific elements may be assigned to either the ground or fly as elements related to overhead structure in order to meet the restrictive constraints of the building footprint and envelope.
Students work by Anna Merlin, Lucille He, Jessica Gonzales-Hernandez, Pearl Chou, Roselyn Tovar, Maggie Shun Ying Zhuang, Yunhao Chen, Caroline Abel, Yunxiu Katelynn Li - UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - M.Arch 1st year - Fall 2024