An opportunity to redesign our urban futures with recommendations on evolving architecture, transportation, and society. ArtCenter and UCLA looked at the iconic Sunset Strip in West Hollywood to envision how the future of smarter transportation (e.g. autonomous cars) and smarter systems could change our context.
Why?
The brief told designers to solve gridlock in LA using the micro-context of the Sunset Strip.
A Speculative Approach
Looking beyond the hype and buzzwords in mobility and architecture, we instead decided to first understand how technologies impact our lives and how we got here, to understand the implications of our future designs.
The Urban Diorama was featured at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, and A+D Museum, Los Angeles. Check it out here.
How?
Through our research, we identified the contextual characteristics of the Sunset Strip, West Hollywood, and came up with design principles to explore futures of our society.
Next Nature's work "Society of Simulations" which described how micro-experiences on apps and online media are essentially simulations of reality that we consume daily at an increasing rate, and how we find these simulations' representations more meaningful than reality itself.
Exacerbating this trend into the future, we considered an emerging counter-trend where there would be a need for 'moments of respite, rebellion, and protest' from simulations and technologies. Our minds, no matter how well-designed the simulations are, will always yearn for reality and search within our environments for those real moments and experiences.
For such moments of yearning for 'the real', we envision how architecture and mobility can together achieve that.
Urban space as
a relief from simulation
Using prominent counter-culture centers of today as spaces of relief in the future.
Using sightlines from the voids as guidelines for built forms
Picking the area around what is today Pandora's Box, the built spaces around it were reimagined.
Abstracted section view of the Susnet Strip as imagined. Travellers not travelling to the Sunset Strip as their final destination are pushed into the terrain rather than taking up valuable surface space.
Now that we have our urban edifices, how would mobility be able to weave through this context?
