Max Orroth
bjk> Architecture
P001 → Art Incubator
AUD 123: Spring 2024
Professor Benjamin Freyinger
Collaborated with Ward Miottel and Annie Huang
Tasked to design an adaptive reuse of a downtown Los Angeles building into a residential UCLA art school extension with the given precedent of the 201 CaixaForum Madrid by Herzog and de Meuron. Our design poses 4 structures in a complex where their objecthood is emphasized by circulation shafts piercing and holding the buildings in place. My team and I assemble a series of dynamic objects that work to craft an interior urbanism. At the macro level, these massive objects lean, bend, and shift in reaction to each other, but their movement is limited by piercing diagonal shafts of light and circulation. At the micro level, almost nothing is pinned down. Moving walls, fabricated on-site by residents, encourage individuals to engage in the design of their own living and working spaces, as well as in spatial conversations and negotiations with their neighbors and community members. Micro movements engender all aspects of this building radically common and quintessentially urban, while the architect’s macro movements serve to make the few decisions necessary to provide a template for this dynamism to successfully take place.