DANCING LINES
High Density Housing Design
413 Building Design with Landscape Studio
LOCATION: Baldwin Village, Los Angeles
TYPE: Studio, Academic, Individual
SUPERVISOR: Narineh Mirzaeian nmirzaei@g.ucla.edu
Housing crisis has became one of the biggest problems in 21th century. in California, 60% of population choose to rent a house instead of own aone. Even so, some people still can not afford the high rent that they have to move to places that are far away from the work. In this high density residential project, I focus on how to use the land more efficiently and to create better living conditions to improve residences’ qualities of life.
Formation
To make the units more flexible and comfortable, I take away some units and use them as public open space. The roof of lower floors are gardens and places for activities. Since some of the corridors may be dark due to the location, I hollow out some floor plates to allow transparency and lights come through.
Space
Ground Floor Plan
Typical Floor Plan
To make full utilize of this limited land, I choose to use line as the initial shape and to guarantee every unit has enough light and garden views, I rotate those lines and connect them to form a larger line. Then I add some smaller buildings and connect them to the line building in the middle to give each section a centre surrounded by clusters. Every part has a different complementary program: library, auditorium,gym and commercial. All these programs are put on the ground floor and connect by outside walkways.
The building is divided into 4 parts, each of them has a garden as public space of residences. To emphasis the centre of each group, I give setbacks to each floor for the side facing centre and keep the other side flat. Because of this side back the building will become smaller on top and people can use the roof under as private garden . I also use double-loaded corridor at the bottom. When the depth is less than 30' ，it'll become outside single-loaded corridor.
Elevation / Unfolded Section