AA Visiting School Los Angeles (2022)
Student work examples, BA
This was an AA Visiting School I taught in Los Angeles in 2022 again with Jimenez Lai, titled RE: LAX / Los Angeles is No Place, focused on Downtown Los Angeles and the strange relationship between the city’s mythology, its cinematic image and its lived reality. The programme built on research undertaken in 2020 and 2021, looking at episodes and conditions across DTLA through ideas including social zones, the 2.5-D city, theatre, visual noise, food stalls, alley malls and the aesthetics of chill, using these as ways to understand a city that is constantly represented, fictionalised and consumed through images.
The studio asked students to contrast Los Angeles as an image with Los Angeles as an experienced place, questioning how closely its cultural myths correspond to the physical metropolis. This became a way of thinking about architecture within a post-digital city, where urban experience is shaped through screens, gradients, glitches, images and other forms of visual and digital culture, and where physical and virtual space increasingly overlap.
The teaching used a deliberately broad range of representational methods, including architectural drawings, renderings, photography, film, models, narratives, video games and performance, allowing students to construct different readings of Los Angeles and test how architecture might operate within its increasingly digital, physical and social landscape. The project was therefore concerned with representation as a design tool, using the peculiarities of Los Angeles, its contradictions and its cinematic image, to develop speculative architectural responses to the city in the early 21st century.