Rejecting the Exiles criterion of comparability with 'classical' urban space, Banham claimed that Los Angeles's polymorphous landscapes and architecture were given a 'comprehensible unity' by the freeway grid in a metropolis that spoke the 'language of movement, not monument'. A hillside is cut vertically, making way for a freeway, which abuts a public open-air children's swimming pool. A gas station serves as a grand public plaza for a cascading monumental stairway.
Low speed meets high speed with the domestic perched over a freeway system.
These incongruous conditions, though not unique to Los Angeles, are more extreme there. Our contemporary condition of fluid interconnectivity has generated extreme levels of disparate and incongruous conditions, juxtaposing uncanny uses next to each other along the freeway, on the internet, on television, in our communication systems, and our bodies. The Studio will explore Los Angeles's urban landscape from its historic origins to its modernist buildings to its vast freeway system, and will ask students to explore the interconnectivity between the technology of place, natural landscape patterns, and cultural migration. Looking critically at historic shifts in the region's landscape, infrastructure, demographics, and built condition, students will develop a complex reading of the site's conditions and generate an appropriate paradigm within which to develop an architecture. The scale of the high speed freeway, local areas of intimate uses, and the intermediate scale of the offramp resulting in left over spaces will be explored simultaneously in the proposed project.