Instructor | Theresa Hwang

Project | Vertical Metropolis

Work | Academic

Year | Fall 2013

Collaboration | Saul Archila

Project Description|

Los Angeles is a city that has been growing exponentially for the past 200 years and will continue to do so over the next 50 years. Los Angeles has also historically chosen to grow horizontally rather than vertically. With this in mind we are proposing a new vertical metropolis.

There is currently a major need for hundreds, if not thousands, of people to be accommodated. We have also come to understand through our research that many of the projects being developed for skid row are often maximized at around 200 occupants while taking up an immense amount of real estate that can be utilized for other programmatic elements. This is absolutely unsustainable for the mass community that needs to be accommodated in skid row. We realized through our analysis that much of skid row has countless missed opportunities for potential growth in the form of underexploited parking lots and rooftops that can be maximized. Therefore our concept is to maximize the square footage of skid row by utilizing these wasted spaces by establishing a major layered in-fill program as well as multi-leveled circulation connecting the layered program and the infill.

We are defining infill as taking all the possibilities of wasted spaces and using them to our advantage. We define layered program as the ability to stack or intervene commercial industrial and residential industries into a single building. The concept behind this is to always ensure that building zones are eliminated, and new districts can emerge within skid row that give this part of the city a new identity.