Leaky L.A.


Design project - Speculative streetscape design exploring the future of A.I. generated aesthetics on the facades of Downtown Los Angeles Arts District.




This design project bathes in exuberant aesthetics of the strangely beautiful. It explores leakiness in architecture. Leakiness happens when a realm of representation slips into another realm, such as when rococo’s aesthetics drips into realism. The design tweaks these multiple representations of spaces, and collapses them into a leaky whole using image style transfer AI. These environments are visualized through personalized VR apps.



Leakiness aims to unsettle the viewer, and immersive reality intensifies this effect. This disturbance reveals to the observer the mechanisms involved in the aesthetic experience of reality. The objective is to enable critical thinking through the prolongation of that visual experience


This corner designed with machine and human vision, exists in an immersive space. Different types of representations overlap. There are point clouds, 3D scanned meshes, 2D spherical photographs, and real footage. The aesthetic bleeds onto the sidewalk making it part of the building. The result is an instance of leaking between the digital and the physical world.




Thesis for Postgraduate Master of Science in Architecture - SCI_Arc, 2018 - Crits: David Ruy
Yara Feghali / 2024