The Unfinished L.A.
Self-organized and Growing Communities for Marginalized Occupations
Spring 2022 @ USC
Downtown Los Angeles, California
USC Inventive Housing Design Thesis Award
The self-organized, resilient housing model serves marginalized occupations near the LA River. It deals with cross-scale interactions to reconceive the built environment as an infinite and sustainable process instead of a predefined container or product. It grows with external dynamics while always attaining internal persistence in its function, identity and structure among local changes. It also responds to the issue of vertical social segregation to blur the stratification regarding floor levels by generating homogeneous residential clusters distributed vertically and evenly.
The design solution takes a basis on The Schelling model of segregation, which reveals how people tend to move into clusters based on social backgrounds and interest groups. So I have defined four villages: arts and crafts, education, sports and agriculture where people can choose their neighbors based on personality tests. They are encouraged to build up close relationships through 6 ways of unit connections. People have the freedom to choose the modules they want for each room through different configurations. What’s flexible about the prefabricated FRP modules is that as time goes by, it’s easy for the residents to expand or remove a portion of their units.
Model Photos
It responds to the issue of vertical social segregation, an invisible stereotype that vertical towers are defined as higher levels serving the richer while lower levels serving the poorer. The community takes a vertical approach to blur the stratification regarding floor levels by generating homogeneous residential clusters distributed vertically and evenly.
It has become an urban filter to accommodate urban fabrics and the disconnection between existing zones. The new community grows as an urban corridor to accommodate different fabric patterns, while units could be hung from the bridges, built over railways and attached to the building facades. The new interventions start to influence and reactivate a large region.
