Eminent Domain of Downtown Los Angeles
- Relationship to existing built environment.
This project is my final project at Cal Poly, incorporating a year of research and design. It is a work in progress and will be completed in early June.
Project Statement:
Eminent domain, compulsory purchase, compulsory acquisition, expropriation—international terms which all mean the same thing. It is the action of a state to seize a citizen’s private property, expropriate property, or seize a citizen’s rights in property with due monetary compensation, but without the owner’s consent. In most cases, it is for some larger ‘civic’ cause, a necessity for the progression of the society. Although many times used as a last resort, or for some truly greater cause, it begs the question of what property ownership really means, and in the case of the Haussmann system one wonders at the extent the idea can reach.
It is a ‘last stand’ mentality where the private party holds out for the last possible moment, attempting to take a stand against governmental power. Los Angeles, California provides the perfect backdrop for a dystopic understanding of eminent domain, encompassing interventions and additions to existing structures in the downtown area, providing civic buildings with a mixture of low, mid, and high income residential to combat the growing housing crisis in the LA area. Although questionably good and necessary given the amount of vacancy downtown, it provides context for the debate over this political issue.
According to retail figures, an average of 15% of the total commercial square footage of downtown skyscrapers in Los Angeles is vacant. In some cases, this rate reaches upwards of 25% annual vacancy. With all of this prebuilt, prime location real estate, downtown Los Angeles can be transformed in to a safer and more consistently inhabited space. The idea stands in stark contrast to the decentralized urban sprawl exhibited today, but downtown invigorations and revitalization projects rarely are so totalizing. With the help of precedent projects from Lebbeus Woods, Mark Wigley, Peter Eisenman and other deconstructionist architects, this project attempts to take a contemporary architectural point of view and adapt its principles to help visualize and critique a poignant and problematic political concept.
Although permanent additions to the skyscrapers downtown, each of these interventions would have to temporarily occupy the vacant space. Vacancy changes over time with tenants coming and going, demanding a temperance of any foreign structure and flexibility to occupy a vast range of different locations. At this stage in the project, the superstructure of the project, and even the interventions themselves are only concepts, ideas without details, but the vacancy can be mapped now with the help of computational tools.
It is a ‘last stand’ mentality where the private party holds out for the last possible moment, attempting to take a stand against governmental power. Los Angeles, California provides the perfect backdrop for a dystopic understanding of eminent domain, encompassing interventions and additions to existing structures in the downtown area, providing civic buildings with a mixture of low, mid, and high income residential to combat the growing housing crisis in the LA area. Although questionably good and necessary given the amount of vacancy downtown, it provides context for the debate over this political issue.
According to retail figures, an average of 15% of the total commercial square footage of downtown skyscrapers in Los Angeles is vacant. In some cases, this rate reaches upwards of 25% annual vacancy. With all of this prebuilt, prime location real estate, downtown Los Angeles can be transformed in to a safer and more consistently inhabited space. The idea stands in stark contrast to the decentralized urban sprawl exhibited today, but downtown invigorations and revitalization projects rarely are so totalizing. With the help of precedent projects from Lebbeus Woods, Mark Wigley, Peter Eisenman and other deconstructionist architects, this project attempts to take a contemporary architectural point of view and adapt its principles to help visualize and critique a poignant and problematic political concept.
Although permanent additions to the skyscrapers downtown, each of these interventions would have to temporarily occupy the vacant space. Vacancy changes over time with tenants coming and going, demanding a temperance of any foreign structure and flexibility to occupy a vast range of different locations. At this stage in the project, the superstructure of the project, and even the interventions themselves are only concepts, ideas without details, but the vacancy can be mapped now with the help of computational tools.
- Close up.
