- New alliances
How should architects in the future operate in a world where knowledge, economy and culture is exchanged across borders and continents?
This project recognizes architecture as an important part of the global-local age where even the smallest articles are connected and constitutes a very complex world - a unity of units.
No place on earth can be defined entirely by internal connections and exchanges. It will always be constituted of larger relations and influences that’s impossible for the human body to comprehend.
The biologist uses biopsies to get an understanding of the small but crucial mechanism in much larger objects. Likewise the architects must see smaller local environments as key structures for operating in the future. Local environments are crucial for humans to understand and thrive in a globalized world.
These environments creates an affiliation - a sense of place. Here we retract and reflect.
I applied this theory to Pershing Square in Los Angeles (below).
Los Angeles is a decentralized structure. Its rapid growth is made possible by the ever expanding infrastructure. A huge part of the city is privately owned and leaves minimal space left for public recreational areas. This affects Los Angeles in a way where there’s no ground for local environments which are exactly what the city needs to create a sense of place. This is an interesting dilemma for this project that wants to question the dynamics between the global and the local.
The intention is to create a new urban landscape at Pershing Square in Downtown Los Angeles.
The space constitutes different open venues for cultural and social activities and sports for the locals in the area - a kind of staging of the city’s impulsive behavior and unpredictability. The new scene for the everyday life a city normally manipulated and staged by the movie industry.
The methodical study is inspired by the way natural science uses biopsies to examine biological phenomenons. This project tries to mimic this method by looking at the urban context as a chain reaction of different layers of systems and exchanges. The new landscapes on Pershing Square is slowly developed - bit by bit - by these architectural phenomenons found and processed in the urban context.
Photos of a physical model processing and merging the contextual layers into biopsies that is used to produce the landscape.
Night views of the landscape showing a dynamic and vibrant atmosphere - like looking through the microscope down on the living organisms in the petri dish.
