Unearthed Artifact — LA metro entrance

AUD411: Introductory Design Studio
Instructor: Benjamin Freyinger
Duration: 5 weeks

The project begins with a reductive analysis of a vault fragment of St. Vitus Cathedral, whereby the most evocative and essential attributes of mass, surface, and line are extrapolated and translated through the
medium of physical jig and moldable sculpey. It questions whether these notions are capable of self-sufficiently expressing the physicality of a complex form or if their codependency is so intertwined that one cannot be understood without the others. The sculptural forms created invoke a tangible analysis of voids, thresholds, and part-to-whole relationships at an abstracted level. The digital and physical experimentations of these formal concepts elucidate both exactitude and inaccuracy, as found throughout the modelling process.

UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
Fall 2018

The metro entrance is conceived as a gateway into a layer of the city that has been ‘peeled open’. The sectional relationship of the vault fragment is extended from above street level into the underground in order to formalize the reactionary consequence of excavation into a new ad-hoc inhabitable natural environment. This
natural environment is meant to invade the space of the section and amalgamate the built and un-built into an infrastructural landscape of passage.