HIGH-RIS CUL-DE-SAC

Landscape + Housing Studio
Fall 2019
Location: Silver Lake, LA
Prof. Garrett Ricciardi

This housing project located in the midst of low rise LA focuses on reorganizing the streets and courts of the horizontal urban sprawl into a packed and arrayed high-rise. A system of externally connected units are compressed and excised in an effort to carve out cul-de-sac atria and multi level streets as well as to dissolve the solid exterior and increase unit surface area. The local grounds are repurposed for urban agriculture, breaking the relentless repetition of LA’s sprawl with a rural agricultural park.

Eight living modules with roughly organized interiors are established and make up the multi-story packing process. Modules are always subtracted as wholes to organize circulation through the project horizontally while vertical shafts run all the way beneath the public ground to provide parking below grade. The projection and patterning of the facade is seen as a field condition of the original elevation’s packing pattern. Mapped to each unit, the facade further dissolves the monolithic nature of the urban high-rise by using pattern and the module edges to lead the eye to unique and independent units within their necessary repetition.

HIGH-RIS CUL-DE-SAC

Morgan Jacobs