The Start of Inquiry: Week 1
To start, I am an aspiring architecture student at the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design. My goal at the school is to be able to provide a way of thinking for the future of design and to make an impact that may not have been seen before. Last semester I read a lot of theory papers and essays that comprised of the reality of the world we live in the theoretical future that can be designed.
I found myself very intrigued by the final project for the Fall semester of the third year. The project dealt with multi-family housing and being able to efficiently and aesthetically add high-density near downtown Los Angeles. I started to think about how people are used to living in the city, and it comes from the standard single-family home with too much land. This prospective idea helped to generate a project that consisted of stacking 6-unit neighborhoods in a tower to be able to open up the ground plane as much as possible.
From this project, I took ideas in collaboration with Gabe de Souza Silva and worked on a project for a professional elective class. For this class, we looked at the proposals for a higher density of living along transit lines in West Los Angeles. The project got me into this mindset of thinking about design and how it correlates and impacts how people live. Transit-Oriented Living in Los Angeles plans to try to entice people to use public transit more. This, in turn, will hopefully lessen the number of cars traveling on the road. It was interesting to see the argument of people on both sides of the debate. People who owned single-family homes in the areas that were under the proposed plan were generally against the idea. However, some people need Transit-Oriented Living but were also against the idea. Digging further into research, it became clear that the Metro lines, in Los Angeles, were not sufficient or extensive to those who needed to get to work. Another big issue was how these living conditions were being built. The projects were assigned out to developers who want to build the project for a cheap cost to increase profit margins. The end product of this class project was a 3’ x 15’ isometric drawing, combining the fictional and the reality. The drawing aims to create a timeline of housing typologies from the past to the future. Developers are people and need to also begin to think about the impact that they have on a portion of the population’s lives.
Another interest of mine has to do with Las Vegas and the structure around how the city was and is being built. From reading Learning in Las Vegas, by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, it was interesting how they decode the city on an analytical level. The city is comprised and directed towards an accumulation of tourists. The signs overpower the buildings or on the other hand, the building is the sign or symbol. The structure of this city is unlike anywhere else. Out in the middle of nowhere to a popular tourist destination. Venturi and Scott Brown discuss the impact of the architecture and the advancement of the sign and its relationship with the human experience of place. A person’s reliance on signage and symbols to navigate the complex world we live in. I feel based on this, it would be interesting to look at a place with a language barrier and see how signs and symbols help to navigate and persuade people. For example, the “out-there” signs that comprise the streets of Osaka, Japan. The bold lights and colors lure people in a specific direction, whether inside or along a path. From this observation and fascination, people and designers can have a better understanding of how the average user reacts and understands a project. This is a way to see how symbols have started to dominate the architecture.
Thinking about how the world functions on a deeper level are what starts to intrigue me about a project or claim. The idea of Time as the fourth dimension of architecture and how it has the potential to make people react/move in a specific way. Time is a way to study the architecture of the past and its longevity for the future as well as see how design elements begin to push Time: make people speed up, slow down, stop, etc. The interest of time is another understanding of the reaction to people and the design and architecture that they interact with. Rather than just being a stagnant object or space, this idea helps to understand how people respond to design or points within a larger whole.
Overall, I want to be able to look further into the realm of people and how the user experiences architecture/design. People and users interact differently with buildings that the designers and others within the design field. Instead of designing for other architects, the user needs to be the focal point for design and see how that can impact the future of how and why things are what they are.