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Get an inside look at what our students and faculty are doing beyond the studio at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. More about @pool.la: POOL is the student magazine of the Department of Architecture & Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles. POOL is driven by an interest in an expanding definition of architectural work that, in a culture of high volume content exchange, considers curation as a primary form of cultural production. Following this, we contend that the syllabus, the archive, and the aggregator are all valid forms of architectural work that we welcome and encourage in our publication. POOL is a site of this type of work, experimenting with interface between its three primary platforms: event, digital, and print. Events and ongoing digital publication act not only as productive indicators of relevant themes, but also feed into an annual print edition. POOL aspires to reach new audiences, seeing the separation of fields into hermeneutic discourses as unproductive, and strives instead for the inclusion of new and unexpected audiences through the incorporation of media unconventional to architectural discourse. POOL is supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts with a grant for the year 2017. Partial funding provided by UCLA Graduate Students Association Publications.

Swipe ➡️ to discover a series of work from across our programs that sparks conversation around [Critical Exploration of Technology].⁠ ⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ 1. Deep Urbanism with Guvenc Ozel and Benjamin Freyinger, IDEAS Technology Studio⁠⠀ Work by: Onur Koyun, Won Choi, and Zhi Zhou⁠⠀ 2. Advanced Building Construction with Julia Koerner⁠⠀ Work by: Yixiao Wei, Yulu Wang, and Casey Knudsen⁠⠀ 3. Computational Humor with Theo Triantafyllidis⁠⠀ Work by: Christina Charalampaki⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Technology accelerates change to our methods and tools as well as to our contexts. This change often occurs more quickly than our analysis of technology’s effects. We attempt to predict technology’s role in the built environment, envisioning its possible effects for critical reflection.

At a large scale, parking provides a coarse sectional strategy that dislodges the serial plane as the given datum of building, while remaining adherent to the necessities of circulation and movement. Against this sectional ready-made, the gym provides a more pliable counterpart, whose specificities derive as much from sequences of use as from dimensionally defined volumes and surfaces of action. The M.Arch. first-year core studio, Between Architecture: Section and Elevation, proposes to nest together a parking garage and a gym. While at first glance the organization and circulation of cars in a parking garage may seem a banal coordination of metrics, there is a great range of logics to be gleaned from this choreography of ramps, slabs, spirals, and staggers. ⁠ Work by: Wei-Shih (Wesley) Lin⁠ Section: Jason Payne, Spring 2020⁠ ⁠ ⁠

We look forward to welcoming Kelema Lee Moses, Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Occidental College, to speak as part of our 2020-21 lecture series next Wednesday, October 14. ⁠ ⁠ Dr. Kelema Lee Moses is an assistant professor of architectural history at Occidental College. Her current book project, Island Modernism/Island Urbanism: Encountering and Contesting U.S. Empire in the Pacific, argues that island cities offer a place-based perspective to urban studies that account for spatial restrictions, where architects and planners attempt to develop inventive approaches to balance economic interests, environmental issues, and Indigenous imperatives.⁠ ⁠ Her published work and research have been supported by an ACLS/Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Society of Architectural Historians, and the East-West Center at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.⁠ ⁠ As a result of public health precautions put in place by the university, all lectures will be hosted virtually via Zoom. Register via the link in bio.⁠ ⁠ ⁠ Image: Belt, Lemmon and Lo in joint venture with John Carl Warnecke and Associates, Hawai'i State Capitol, Honolulu, HI, 1969⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠⠀

The M.Arch. second-year Building Design with Landscape Studio focuses on the disciplinary issues, techniques, and organizations of the urban landscape; the metropolitan field. As a complex hybrid of landscape and building, the city will be used as the didactic and actual context for the investigation and invention of new models of, and analogs for, the role of the landscape and public open space in architecture, and vice versa. The concern is less with the architecture of the individual iconic building, which assumes the city as a deferential background, but rather with the architecture of the prototypical—the invention of new typologies (in this case, of urban living) whose potency lies not in their rarity, but in their capacity to be repeated.⁠ ⁠ Work by: Cullen Fu⁠ Section led by: Narineh Mirzaeian, Fall 2019⁠ ⁠ ⁠

Students in the M.Arch. third-year advanced topics studio, Center for Experimental/Electronic Music with Neil Denari, designed a small, highly-detailed building with brick being the primary envelope material. Based on the compositional systems of Minimalist and Ambient music, they housed two specifically designed acoustic and amplified performance spaces and storage and archives of historic material. ⁠ Work by: Donxiao Cheng, Winter 2019⁠ ⁠ ⁠

Like almost every major American city, Los Angeles has a severe housing deficiency inflected by the particularities of the city’s history and geography. The challenge for architecture in this scenario is to produce novel forms of inhabitation that similarly hybridize LA’s suburban and utopian legacies, finding in them new impetus for contemporary design.⁠ ⁠ The M.Arch. third-year advanced topics studio, Boxes, and How to Live in them with Other People led by Benjamin Freyinger, chose to inherit a disciplinary problem: the box as a house for a new kind of family. Rudolph Schindler imagined the box as a pure spatial container capable of sponsoring totally new kinds of inhabitation and familial configurations. Despite his own words, the box in his work also becomes the site for tectonic experiments in frame construction and decorative effects tied to the logic of assembly.⁠ ⁠ Work by: Georgia Pogas, Winter 2020 ⁠ ⁠

We look forward to welcoming Rania Ghosn, Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at MIT School of Architecture + Planning and founding partner of the practice DESIGN EARTH, to speak as part of our Fall 2020 Lectures next Wednesday, October 7 at 12 PM PDT!⁠ ⁠ Rania Ghosn is an architect, geographer and partner of Design Earth. She is currently assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture + Planning. Her work critically frames the urban condition at the intersection of politics, aesthetics and technological systems - be they energy, trash, or farming. Rania holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a Master in Geography from University College London, and a Bachelor of Architecture from American University of Beirut. Prior to joining MIT, she was an Assistant Professor at University of Michigan and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Boston University. Rania is founding editor of the journal New Geographies and editor-in-chief of NG2: Landscapes of Energy. Some of her recent writings have been published in GSD Platform, Journal of Architectural Education, MONU, Thresholds, Bracket, San Rocco, and Perspecta.⁠ ⁠ As a result of public health precautions put in place by the university, all lectures will be hosted virtually via Zoom. Register via the link in bio.⁠ ⁠ ⁠ Image: Geostories, Rania Ghosn

The built environment is an expression of culture. It supports social and technological structures, connecting people, environment and machine in ever-evolving, and increasingly urban, networks.⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Swipe ➡️ for a series of work from across our programs that addresses [Engaging Urban Cultures].⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ 1. Big Dumb Building with Ramiro Diaz-Granados⁠⠀ Work by: Michika Watanabe⁠⠀ 2. LA-ND with Jeffrey Inaba, Gillian Shaffer, and David Jimenez Iniesta, IDEAS Urban Strategy Studio⁠⠀ Work by: Lecan Li, Ruoyang Chen, Aron Caracamo, and Yeawon Min⁠⠀ 3. Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher in conversation with Tatiana Bilbao, 2019-20 Lecture Series

Get an inside look at what our students and faculty are doing beyond the studio at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. More about the project: Building the future seems incompatible with preserving the past. It’s not just that new construction too often entails the physical destruction of historical sites and structures—it’s a matter of different priorities as well. Preservation is bound up with complex questions about culture and heritage, while development tends to be focused on more tangible problems of logistics and construction. Yet both archaeological excavations and new construction start with a hole in the ground. Seen through this lens, both projects are grounded, literally, in the same brute reality of moving vast volumes of earth. Our proposal for the Sabbiyah Highway Archeology and Infrastructure Research Center takes confluence as its starting point, proposing that building new infrastructure and excavating ancient sites are fundamentally related processes, appearing to be in conflict only when not properly coordinated. Today, many of the greatest archaeological treasures of the Ancient Near East are scattered across the museums of Europe and North America because many of the first archaeological expeditions in the region were undertaken by colonial powers in the 19th century.  But the recent discovery of important ancient sites on the north coast of Kuwait Bay offers an unprecedented opportunity for Kuwait’s 21st-century development to unfold in parallel with the discovery of its ancient past. Accordingly, the Center integrates elements of operational infrastructure with facilities for archaeological research and the display of ancient artifacts, offering a case study that could guide future development across the region and around the world. Project team: Garrett Ricciardi, Alekya Malladi, Gesthimani Roumpani, and Yanrong Yang

Design is shaped by the questions we ask, the contexts we interrogate, and the methods of engagement we adopt.⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ Swipe ➡️ for a series of work from across our programs that addresses [Design and its intellection]. ⁠⠀⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ 1. Workhouse III: Latent Futures with Hitoshi Abe⁠⠀ Work by: Ada Luchao Wang⁠⠀ 2. Superpositons Exhibition, Katy Barkan and Gabriel Fries-Briggs, Fall 2019⁠⠀ 3. Terminal Terrain with Narineh Mirzaeian⁠⠀ Work by: Christina Rodriguez and Phoebe Webster⁠⠀ ⁠⠀ ⁠⠀

We are excited to announce our virtual events lineup for the fall. While we will miss welcoming our community in person, we look forward to connecting virtually for our Fall 2020 Lectures. ⁠ ⁠ Click the link in bio for more information about our upcoming events and public programming.