House to Housing 401
UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - M.Arch 1st year - Spring 2022
Los Angeles has served as a storied context for the single-family home as both a site of architectural invention and cultural desire and as an instrument of wealth creation. These dual narratives persist today despite economic realities that make both stories far less suitable to their intended audiences. This studio will unpack these dual narratives in order to survey their histories and understand their widespread effects. The impact of these LA histories mirrors those of the US housing market more broadly. In turn, these social, political, economic and environmental effects have severely limited housing supply, affordability and sustainability, and have shifted the site of the architectural problem from house to housing. It is this shift that the studio will engage as a set of spatial, organizational and social potentials for design to interrogate.
The value of homeownership has underpinned not only the American economy, but the very image of American life for much of the past century. Homeownership provided a foothold on the economic ladder, stability in community life, and the fantasy of manifest destiny at the heart of the “American dream”. However, with the collapse of the housing market and the transformation of the economy over the past decade, the housing dream—which masked the many exclusions it had been built upon—has been revealed as such. The barrier to entry into the housing market has become impossible for most and is especially steep in Los Angeles where home prices have skyrocketed and fueled waves of gentrification and displacement, further eroding the economic prospects of Angelenos and social and cultural fabric of the city.
While the promise of homeownership is inextricably linked to the image of life in Southern California, more than 75% of Angelenos rent housing, at a cost far exceeding the recommended 30% of household income. Because 80% of Los Angeles’s residential land is restricted to single family occupancy, the city, and the state, recognize zoning restrictions as a significant obstacle to housing supply and affordability. State and local officials are adopting new policies to address affordability and to reduce further exurban spawl and its associated deleterious impacts on transportation, air quality and carbon emissions. The recent adoption of two state laws allows by right development of up to four units on parcels currently zoned for single family use. Despite these aggressive steps to encourage private development of housing supply, the economics of housing production and deep-seated notions of individualism, private property and lifestyle all conspire to keep housing production at low levels. The average cost of a single-family home in California now exceeds $800,000. Low-income housing units are hardly more affordable, averaging over $500,000 per unit. Given that these costs include the high costs of land especially around urban centers, shifting from house to housing engages density as one vector toward greater affordability.
Students work by UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - M.Arch 1st year - Spring 2023
Building design with Landscape Studio 412
UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - M.Arch 1st year - Winter 2023This studio will focus on the order and organization of a building for plants—their development, preservation, and study. In taking on the particularities of such a program we are also turning our attention to the order of things more generally. As we move away from the conventions that govern human-centered architecture, making a building for both plants and humans (as well as their associated ecologies) will necessarily challenge many of our underlying organizational assumptions.
More often than not, the origin of architecture is located as an act of shelter, demarcating and establishing the boundary between the human and natural world, producing a categorical distinction where perhaps there isn’t one. Not only is this narrative one-sided, it is also inaccurate. Architecture has always had to address the needs, functions, and necessities of non-human subjects. Grain silos, animal habitations, storage units, power plants, server stations, and distribution centers, are all central to our built environment even as their forms and organizations relate to functions, measures, and behaviors different from our own. Living in the anthropocene, we can no longer invest ourselves in these dichotomous imaginaries, as we know the deep, intractable, and catastrophic relationship this stages.
Extinct in the Wild refers to the The International Union for Conservation of Nature ranking just shy of extinction, in which a species can no longer exist outside of human care and intervention. In this studio will use the term as a conceit to question the imagined binaries between architecture and the natural world, to situate our work in the realities of our current moment, and in so doing to return to perennial epistemic questions that underscore architectural work.
Students work by UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - M.Arch 1st year - Winter 2023
Building design with Landscape Studio 413
UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - M.Arch 2nd year - Fall 2022The fourth studio in AUD’s M.Arch I Core series and the first studio of second year, ARCH 413 initiates a move from more introductory studio problems of first year to increasingly comprehensive, complex, and real-world problems pursued through the second and third year. Building design indicates this course’s primary mandate as a continuation of previous building design studios, the building problem now being somewhat larger in size than those of first year (though not as large as buildings assigned in later studios) with more challenging programmatic requirements. Additionally, this studio introduces landscape as a subject and discipline unto itself, a field of study and work that often coexists around and through architecture. This course works to integrate building and landscape in novel and projective ways and requires that landscape be integral to the project. Further still, the design problem implicates urban design intentionally, encouraging its priority in the project by virtue of both site selection and program requirements.
PROBLEM: WATER AND POWER
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP, or simply DWP) oversees the largest municipal infrastructure in the United States. The scale of this network of streams and rivers, lakes and reservoirs, dams, aqueducts, culverts, pipes, stations, substations, and power lines is vast, spanning several western states. Physical evidence of this infrastructure is everywhere but goes unnoticed: everywhere yet nowhere at once. Usually its invisibility occurs secondarily, the inevitable side effect of ubiquity. In certain cases, however, the suppression of the system’s physical presence is purposeful, a conscious decision by its architects and engineers to hide certain objects in plain sight. This is especially true of the substations, buildings that fade into the urban background through dead iconography. This studio explores these substations for their potential to inform design at the intersection of infrastructure and architecture.
Students work by UCLA - Architecture and Urban Design - M.Arch 2nd year - Fall 2022
Virtual Herbaria -
MidJourney,
Augmented Reality and Game Engine.
Workshop 07 -
Bpro - UCL Bartlett - 2022 - London
Virtual Herbaria questions the way we visualize and utilize large data sets, archives, and libraries. With today’s technologies we have access to an infinite amount of online data, and years of archives and knowledge at our fingertips. Algorithms that can sort, search through, and identify hierarchy in that data are becoming extremely valuable because they are able to tell apart correct information from construct. In the last few years, we have seen the backlash of manipulated content, and the potency of fictitious representation. We are calling representation, reality, and artifice into question. With the catastrophic repercussions of the Crypto-Market on our environment, we will address climate change in the Anthropocene through the lens of Andrea Wulf in her book ‘The invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World’ and the work of Heide Hatry in her series “Not a Rose.” We are putting our preconceived understanding of nature and technology under scrutiny.
We will be studying the Online Herbarium of the Southern Californian Desert, more specifically in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Virtual Herbaria aims at reviving the California Desert Herbarium archive into an immersive experience through spatializing that data. After the Instagram statement that they are a video-based app, and no longer an image-based app, the interactions between user and product have become ever more important. We will use Unity Game Engine to design Virtual Herbaria as an interactive spatial archive where actual and created content will flourish.
We will dive into the exciting world of augmented reality, and games with Unity. We will start by discovering text to AI GANs with MidJourney. We will then learn basic polygon modeling in Maya, and augmented reality workflow with Unity 3D. We will then discover how to model terrain in Unity and get introduced to first person interactive game design by building a first-person game together.
Students work by Bpro - UCL Bartlett - 2022 - London Work by: Yue Wang, Aofan Song, Biaji Jiaqi Peng, Kun Chen, Jeremy Zhikun Wu, Esther Yunxuan Xiao, Fangyin Wu, Xanxus Liuyang Miao, Yiyuan Ma, Jane Paixuan Li, Mocandi Zihan Xiang, Martin Ziding Cai, Jiacheng Wang, Xuan Zhang, Joyce Qianyuan Jin, Olivia Wang, Sherry Yuhan Xu, Dingsheng Xu, Bonnie Qiyue Huang, Valerie Limin Wang
Virtual Herbaria - MidJourney, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Game Engine.
Summer Studio - M.Arch.II at UCLA A.UD IDEAS in 2022Virtual Herbaria questions the way we visualize and utilize large data sets, archives, and libraries. Virtual Herbaria revives the California Desert online Herbarium archive into an immersive experience through spatializing that data using augmented and virtual reality. Students designed these cacti and spaces as spatial libraries to walk through, interact, and be immersed in this fictitious California desert.
Virtual Herbaria questions the way we visualize and utilize large data sets, archives, and libraries. With today’s technologies we have access to an infinite amount of online data, and years of archives and knowledge at our fingertips. Algorithms that can sort, search through, and identify hierarchy in that data are becoming extremely valuable because they are able to tell apart correct information from construct. In the last few years, we have seen the backlash of manipulated content, and the potency of fictitious representation. We are calling representation, reality, and artifice into question. With the catastrophic repercussions of the Crypto-Market on our environment, we will address climate change in the Anthropocene through the lens of Andrea Wulf in her book ‘The invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World’ and the work of Heide Hatry in her series “Not a Rose.” We are putting our preconceived understanding of nature and technology under scrutiny.
We will be studying the Online Herbarium of the Southern Californian Desert, more specifically in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Virtual Herbaria aims at reviving the California Desert Herbarium archive into an immersive experience through spatializing that data. After the Instagram statement that they are a video-based app, and no longer an image-based app, the interactions between user and product have become ever more important. We will use Unity Game Engine to design Virtual Herbaria as an interactive spatial archive where actual and created content will flourish.
Students work by MSAUD - UCLA A.UD IDEAS - 2022 - Los Angeles