Fletcher Studio won 2nd Place in and international competition, A New Infrastructure: Transit Solutions for Los Angeles, sponsored by the SCIFI (Southern California Institute of Future Initiatives) program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (sci_Arc) and The Architect’s Newspaper.
This proposal asserts that infrastructural investment should lead to a reformulation and simplification of the entire transit system, rather than discrete interventions. Termed by some “a managed fantasy”, Los Angeles is a mirage. It is defined and sustained by it’s aging infrastructural legacy: freeways, channelized water networks, power grids, and sewage. These networks have grown horizontally, in response to and in anticipation of human land use. They underpin a vast landscape of sprawling enclaves served by an incessant frenzy of individualized transportation. Yet after decades of relative climatic and geological stability, cheap reliable energy input, and resources imported from distant sources, the fate of this experiment is increasingly uncertain. The gathering forces of resource scarcity, global warming, sea level rise, economic destabilization will all serve to radically alter its future modes of transport and development patterns. In the face of these challenges, Los Angeles is placed in a unique moment of opportunity—with a chance to assert its resiliency by radically altering its modes of infrastructural, not as a measure of remedial planning, but as a matter of survival. It must inoculate, desalinate, articulate and abandon.
Predicated on three symbiotic constructs, Flow, Focus, and Fuzz, this exhibit outlines a possible scenario for Los Angeles over the course of the 21st century. Taken together, they comprise a mutually supportive metabolism that responds to and embraces regional pressures as a catalyst for new land uses, new economies, new forms of transportation, and new modes of urbanism. Recognizing the vital role that mobility, water, and sewage will play Los Angeles' future, it must begin investment in a core armature of new bundled infrastructures which will allow the city to survive impending peak water/peak oil. The city must reorganize along the matrices of transportation, water and sewarshed networks, and grow infrastructural tentacles out into the world to ship and receive. . Let the streets fall apart! Lets mine them for valuable minerals and petrochemicals...
