2021, Spring Quarter, 10 weeks, UCLA
Group project with: Lisa Sumiko, Yelena Tamrazyan
Architecture exists as an ambiguous relationship between the part and the whole where reality obscures preconceived expectations. Instead of perceiving the whole, we only see fragments that then raise questions about scale, perspective, and program.
Tasked with encompassing multi-use spaces, different types of housing, and spaces to serve the community, my group created Topiaric Finds, a three floor, four million square foot structure nestled in the hills of Griffith Park. Through this project we explore different scales of programming that reinforces the enormity of our structure, so that it’s true shape and size is left ambiguous when viewed through human perspective.
Programs: Rhino, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro
Our complete, recorded, final presentation.
Topiary is the practice of forming plants into various clearly defined shapes by trimming and clipping their foliage. Our project amends this practice and uses the land to obscure parts of our structure to create a new and interesting external view.
Our Manifesto is an exploration of the integration of architecture and nature at the scale of nature, and charts the human experience from urban landscapes to the “natural” world.
For the creation of our manifesto (shown above left), we drew inspiration from the ideology of metabolism, the Japanese architectural movement which utilizes biological processes as the basis for design ideas. This guided the transition between the urban and the natural within our illustration animation (below). Our new manifesto image (above right) surveys the same fragments as before, but through a new familiarity offered by a reading of its totality. The once obscured hints of architecture are given new context. Deviating from the urban into nature, we now return back to the urban, or rather, the simulated urban scape where scale and program still hold a sense of ambiguity, both looking from the outside and from within.
Detailed plan of the second level of the structure.
