#losangelesarchitect

“Title 24” (California’s Building Energy Efficiency Standards) inspired the design of the net-zero homes. We see the state’s recently implemented code as an opportunity to reinvent the Southern California single family dwelling. While a midcentury Case Study-type glass house is still possible under Title 24, that home would require high embodied energy materials and consume lots of power, undermining the Energy Standards’ aims. Instead, the Santa Monica Courtyard Houses assume a different look and feel that is more suitable to current climate conditions. Having far fewer windows, the outside form reduces the amount of heat gain and lowers energy use while still allowing residents to enjoy indoor-outdoor living... More

The Textile Room aims to physically stage a direct response to the exhibition brief set up by the Curators, following the tradition of formal experimentation and material innovation in Southern California that the show embodies. The Textile Room illuminates the possibilities of extreme lightweight materials in architecture, by producing a supple, quasi-rigid and cloth-like space that physically and experientially blurs the threshold between hard and soft, textile and tectonic, intimate and public. Patterns The design and material development of the Textile Room is developed in collaboration with North Sails Flexible Composites division, taking advantage of their advanced technology. The pavilion surface panels are constructed of yello... More

A Mute Icon: Responding to the brief of providing a commercial office building in a very formal context, the project aims to construct an authentic dichotomic image: one that can be confused for a strange civic building, too mute to be publicly engaged, but yet too eccentrically unusual to be privately used. Governing the construction of this image is the problem of mass. A simple volume cladded in a dark tinted glass curtain wall is cut diagonally into a crystalline shape, therefore creating a more idiosyncratic silhouette. A horizontally subtracted balcony slices the mass horizontally across the two main facades, and affords the medical offices with more visibility and a direct relationship with the exterior. Adjacent to the main entry at... More

The Sonos exhibition was intended as an immersive series of environments employing strategies of metamorphoic architecture. An emotional connection between music, space and pattern is experienced by the audience as their bodies move throughout Sonos Studio. Projections and materials distort and misrepresent form, creating three somewhat indeterminate environments: serene, playful and explosive. The explosive atmosphere is constantly fragmenting through patterning and the inversion of form and shadow. Joshua White The playful space’s pink reflective insides are energized by projection creating vivacious and unpredictable surroundings, while the “serene” space remains comfortable, soft and stable. These material and sp... More

The design of Temporary Space LA aims to emulate a form of micro urbanity inside the art gallery. Upon entering the space, visitors will be confronted with a user-friendly more akin to a public realm feeling than to a traditional art gallery. Taiyo Watanabe, Patterns, Temporary Space Our strategy produces attractive and intricate spaces out of existing anomalies: columns placed in weird positions were purposely eaten away by walls and masses, so as to clean the interior as much as to give it spatial meaning. As a result, we imagine the large abstract and figurative paintings by Richard Shelton will not only be viewed as autonomous objects, but as possible and ever-changing articulations to larger architectural constructs. The projecti... More

Zhixin Hybrid Office Park is part of a large new campus development situated in the outskirts of Chengdu in Sichuan Province that comprises about twenty new buildings. The program requested an innovative mixture of private residences, office space, and leisure facilities that allow a new startup company or a local headquarters to enjoy proximity and cooperate identity all at once. The project presented a perfect occasion to speculate in a context with very little context wherein despite the specificity of each new building, everything is also fairly generic. Patterns The building is organized by a diagonal wedge of circulation that dynamically cuts the plan and connects front and back. The mass is subtracted from at its corners, gener... More