FLAT POOLS

Designers: Florencia Pita & Jackilin Hah Bloom

Project Team: Simeon Brugger

Los Angeles, CA. 2017

Proposal to paint the Los Angeles River.

Flat Pools is a speculative installation that places two-dimensional swimming pools along a stretch of the Los Angeles River basin.  Although currently the Los Angeles River is a hot topic among city planners, landscape designers, developers, and architects, to develop it into a viable destination, for a long time it was merely a backdrop in films and photography and only existed as part of Los Angeles culture as an artificial image.  On the other hand, California’s backyard pool is a familiar place.  In the 50’s and 60’s Southern California was deemed the “Sunshine State” speckled with a terrain of backyard pools signifying leisure, fun, Hollywood, and domestic paradise.  However, economic downturn and an unending drought produced exceptions to the California dream.  Derelict pools exist and have been the backdrop for subcultures of skateboarders and graffiti artists.  The Los Angeles River has similarly been the context of the counter-ideal.  If the epitome of domestic life is the backyard and it’s pool, then at an urban scale, Southern Californian’s backyard is the Los Angeles River. Besides their topographic characteristics and figural geometries, a waterless backyard pool and the Los Angeles River’s latent potential to be more than an infrastructural watercourse, their hard, dry surfaces beg to be painted, skated, slid on and driven on.

In Flat Pools, the vastness of Los Angeles River basin is mottled with reconfigured, two-dimensional swimming pools between the First and Sixth Street bridges.  A visual plunge into a collapse of figures, textures and color is discordant with, but reinforces the natural flatness of the Los Angeles River.  The pools are not layered on top of each other deliberately to reinforce the hard, flatness of the riverbed.  Instead, two to four swimming pools are merged together to form larger figures, and they are autonomously distributed along the river to visually mitigate the river’s large scale and seemingly endless vanishing point. Three-dimensional geometries of pools are flattened - scoops are replaced with outlines, depth is replaced with a gradient “pool blue” color and splashes translate into intersecting lines, grooved into the river’s concrete surface.  At the scale of the river, the pools become puddles, muddling the sense of actual pool depth.  This encourages the reading of and the deciphering of the feedback between flatness and depth within the space of the installation. 

THE NEW ZOCALO

Designers: Florencia Pita & Jackilin Hah Bloom

Project Team: Rachael McCall (Team Leader), Ivan Bernal, Kyle Branchesi, Javier Cardiel, Charmaine Lam, Nader Naim, Hyo Seon Park, Shane Reiner-Roth, Sandy Sanchez, Nithya Subramaniam, Claudia Wainer

Model Builders: Zaid Kashef Alghata, Cristina Macia Briedis, Coleman Butts, Albert Chavez, Isabela de Sousa,
Wan Sun Kung, Diastika Lokesworo, Matthew Momberger, Nader Naim, Hahn Nguyen, Pinar Seven, Simon Sun

Consultants: Russell Fortmeyer (Arup, Los Angeles), Rodney Rojas (SCI-Arc Fabrication Shop, LA), *Special thank you to SCI-Arc for their support on this project.*

Curators of The Architectural Imagination: Cynthia Davidson, Monica Ponce de Leon

Mexicantown, DE. 15th Venice Architectural Biennale 2016.

U.S. Pavilion, The Architectural Imagination.

The New Zocalo is an urban platform. A Spanish word for “base” or “footing” that in Mexico can also refer to a town square or plaza, zócalo is here understood as an elevated plinth. Hovering above street level and aligned with the adjacent rail yard, the plinth’s colorful textured paving traverses a series of gardens while broad oblique walkways connect formal and informal destinations. The raised platform is accessed from below, where parking is available on grade. The platform supports six clusters of buildings, some of which break through its plane to also engage the street level with lobby entries. They include a theater with a restaurant, a recreation center, a winter garden with a cafe, a marketplace that accommodates indoor and outdoor retail, an outdoor band shell, and a cultural center. By raising the public plaza, the project affords visitors new views of the rail yard and surrounding neighborhood and allows public space to coexist with busy vehicular flow at street level. 

MARIBOR HOUSING

Designers: Florencia Pita & Jackilin Hah Bloom

Project Team: Marie-Sophie Starlinger, Freesia Torres, Wan Lee, Makenzie Murphy

Maribor, Slovenia. 2012

2111 AI 100YC Project - Maribor City of Culture

This proposal aims at introducing a color saturated image roof-scape to the city of Maribor in the form of NEW HOUSING and neighborhood CULTURAL CENTERS. Located in the current zone of industry, the development will begin along the River Drava and continue to fill in the entire area of industry. The roofs of the amassed buildings are a layer of colored ceramic tile where each tile is a pixel, completing a geological satellite image of the existing Maribor landscape. The formal disposition of buildings is derived from five primitive roof typologies of existing roof types in Maribor. Each primitive is re-shaped then merged and morphed into one another to create a new family of contemporary forms. Each building’s unique form aligns to the geometry of the adjacent buildings or is incongruently misaligned. These conditions create unexpected courtyards and open spaces to allow light and air through the buildings. As housing and shops line the streets, a cultural building (library, theatre, school, church) is located within a few miles from one another, forming neighborhood destinations within the old industrial zone. Seen from the river, the red clad roof-scape of the old town Maribor, extends to the NEW HOUSING, the previous site of obsolete industries, is now a site bustling with people and culture, with color saturated roof-scapes, and meandering landscapes.

ORCHARD PARK

Designers: Florencia Pita & Jackilin Hah Bloom

Project Team: Emily Chen, Kirsten Wehrenberg-Klee, Kyle Onaga

San Francisco, CA. 2013

Ideas Competition 

What if Highway 280 is a memory in the form of ascending and descending pedestrian esplanades leading to a farm-like landscape within an mélange of patterns? Our proposal is a template for a large green space within urban San Francisco. The project seeks to combine a patchwork of programmatic variations with architectural specificity. Through a series of interconnecting esplanades, which ascend and descend, pedestrians are lead to elevated views of patterned farm-scapes within an urban setting. Filled within each of the six parcels and on the esplanades is a mosaic layout of urban patios and farm-like landscapes. Each is defined by a pattern, which is derived from small-scale ceramic tile configurations on patio flooring. The patterns are enlarged to an urban scale and extruded three-dimensionally, creating demarcations, edges and shapes for the park. The manifestation of these patterns are primarily fruit orchard trees but also include groundscapes of vegetable gardens, farmer’s markets, children’s playgrounds, water fountains, cafés, sculpture gardens, information kiosks, temporary exhibit spaces and performance spaces. As the entire park is considered public, the variation in shapes made up of greenery as well as boundaries and hard edges, produce areas of privacy and areas of discovery. The formal and spatial qualities of freeways determine the curving geometries of the interconnecting esplanades. These walkways are at times elevated, as they turn, split off, loop around and ramp down in controlled radii and slopes. Patterned elements are located along, below and on the esplanade. The esplanade promotes walking and biking and overall viewing of the park. Although the highway is transformed into a pedestrian-way, the design seeks to maintain the monumentality of the highway in the form of a unified yet diversified urban park.

TAICHUNG CITY CULTURAL CENTER

Designers: Florencia Pita & Jackilin Hah Bloom

Project Team: Ana Munoz, Emily Chen, Erin Lani, Ida Hammarlund, Kirsten Wehrenberg-Klee, Kyle Onaga 

Taichung City, Taiwan. May 2013

International Competition

This proposal for the Taichung City Cultural Center is a singular, landmark building, which encompasses both the Taichung Public Library and the Taichung Fine Arts Museum. In response to Taichung City Government’s initiative to develop a notable entryway to Taichung Gateway Park, we propose a building that formally yields a “gateway” into the new park. Much like natural occurring openings between large rock formations, grand breezeways or tunnels are proposed to separate the two volumes of the library and museum. Through a series of studies and manipulations of historical archway precedents, a three-dimensional form of the tunnels was generated. The volumes of the library and museum extend to the boundary of the site and are truncated on three sides. The single flat facade along Park Avenue represents the building as a solitary cultural hub, whereas the other two flat facades which face the park, define the museum and library as separate entities. Also in contrast to the street facade, the majority of the glass on the museum and library facades are translucent as well as recessed to allow for shade from sun exposure coming from the south of the park. To complement the design of Taichung Gateway Park, the same language of curves that detail the concrete edge of the flat facades, define the shape of the lower shop and cafe buildings as well as the ground paving and landscape around the site. Inspired by the artist Michael Lin’s use of floral textiles in urban settings, we developed a graphic from the national Taiwanese flower to carpet the undulating roof. The roof is made up of colored metal or solar panels, that act as pixels of a complete image. This imagery is used to evoke a sense of nostalgia for Taiwanese history through drawing from traditional floral fabrics. The image and coloration also provides a dramatic visual impact of the building from afar and from above - especially when seen from the roof garden of Sou Fugimoto’s Taiwan Tower building.

KEELUNG PORT TERMINAL

Designers: Florencia Pita & Jackilin Hah Bloom

Project Team: Marie-Sophie Starlinger, Wan Lee Makenzie Murphy, Freesia Torres, Jia Song, Danyal Sadiq, Emmy Maruta, Anass Benhachmi, Maria Soledad.

Keelung, Taiwan. July 2012

International Competition

Our proposal for the New Harbor Service Building Project is a porous base, five office towers and fifteen whimsical service columns. The large shaped columns anchor the plinth and towers to the site, symbolic of odd rock formations along the coastline and shipping container lifts. The curving profiles of the columns represent the edge of the coastline’s meandering outline. These fifteen columns are the primary structural elements which also house the circulation cores, mechanical units and water closets. The plinth is strategically designed to allow for the flow of cars and cargo on level 1F, the activity of the main port terminal on level 2F and VIP and ocean viewing on the mezzanine level of 2F. Shops and services are located on all levels, allowing for more efficient access to conveniences. Each level of the plinth contains a landscaped garden element. At the level 1F, the “Garden Atrium” provides light to the base level and is where the bike elevators are located. The bike elevators can be taken to level 3F, where bike parking is located. Level 3F in its entirety is the large “Plinth Roof Garden”. This level acts as a communal outdoor lobby for each office tower. Cafes, benches and raised landscapes allow for interaction and breezeways to occur naturally. Also the open space between the towers allow for “gateway” views to and from the ocean. The five towers are raised above this park area by the shaped columns and are accessible by the elevator cores which are located in these columns. The glass skin of the office towers are made up of a dense structural mullion pattern, with gradual changes in glass transparency. When seen from a cruise ship approaching the harbor, the building represents the unique rural and urban identity of its context, at the same time providing a single landmark image.