AA Visiting School Los Angeles (2021)
Student work examples, BA
The Myths of Los Angeles was a visiting school I set up and taught with Jimenez Lai in 2021 through the Architectural Association Visiting School in Downtown Los Angeles, building on a series of drawings and research we had developed together in 2020 with support from the Downtown Center Business Improvement District. The school focused on re-imagining Downtown Los Angeles, looking at the gap between the city’s powerful cultural image and its physical and social reality, and using its strange mixture of oversized infrastructure, denatured landscapes, skating pools, googie architecture, intense colour and cinematic imagery as material for architectural speculation.
The project asked how the aesthetic of Los Angeles could be understood in an early 21st-century context, particularly within a post-digital culture saturated by gradients, glitches and highly constructed visual environments. We worked through themes including Zooming Between Myths, The Flying Fleet of Social Zones, Cities within the City and the 2.5-D City, using drawing as a way to construct new readings of the city and to question the relationship between representation and experience. The work moved between the physical and digital city, asking how architecture might respond to a metropolis that is experienced through images, screens, infrastructure and social space as much as through its buildings.
The visiting school developed the previous year’s research into an exhibition and publication, with students producing individual projects that were brought together through large and small-scale 3D ‘paintings’, allowing the work to operate collectively as a re-imagined image of Los Angeles. The teaching combined architectural drawing, digital production, visual research and speculative thinking, with the school using the particular mythology of LA as a way to test how architectural representation can alter our understanding of a place, and how the city itself might be reimagined through new forms of architectural and visual language.