3GB DS STUDIO —City Hole
/ 2019 Spring Semester
From 3GB Vertical Studio / Instructed by Eric Owen Moss / Partner with Qin XIONG
Who says “What Los Angeles will be”?
We’re forever at work between two conceptual extremes:
architecture as enduring;
architecture as almost everything.
The site is at the crossroads of transit, residence, and commerce on the west side of Los Angeles, a new organizational center from which the city spreads out, north, south, east, and west.
The project offers the prospect of a re-imagined conception of the city that re-considers its urban history, its transit, its re-definition of the contemporary work place, and its vision of the inter-relationship of building to city and city to building.
The La Cienega/Jefferson Boulevard area of Los Angeles has long been defined as a happenstance low density mix of industrial, retail, and residential uses. Conceptually more a prototypical LA planning accident than an intended city plan for central Los Angeles. Jefferson runs east-west connecting south downtown and USC with the west side. And the new Expo line now confirms this east to west commute, as does the 10 freeway to the north. So the area sits on a primary cross axis of traffic and transit in West LA.
Recent additions include the Expo Line Station on the west side of La Cienega at Jefferson, a parking structure on the east corner, and a two million square foot development on the ex-KABC site to include housing, retail, and office space in a continuous seven story structure, and a 30 story apartment tower on the west side of La Cienega, south of the Expo stop.
La Cienega’s nondescript boulevard narrative [shared with such as Victory Boulevard, Lincoln Boulevard, Ventura Boulevard, Wilshire Boulevard, Vermont Avenue, Western Avenue] is in the process of substantial change:
New transport, new uses, new demographics, new scale.
The proposed project for the site is a 340,000 square foot contemporary office building project. To the north and east the project site fronts on Jefferson Boulevard so the project will have no view impediments on those elevations. The surrounding property to south and west has a height limit of 75 feet.
Above 75 feet views to and from will remain unobstructed in perpetuity.
There are no height limits on the property.
The proposal from us, we changed the site to a huge public space, and read as a mega-structure. The proposal is not trying to respond to the site or city, but let the city respond to it after the project is designed.
