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WSOA In-Flux

WSOA In-Flux

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WSOA In-Flux is a publishing platform for student work launched by Woodbury School of Architecture in 2020.




Woodbury School of Architecture is distinguished by its multiple locations at the heart of the Southern California creative industries: Los Angeles, Hollywood and San Diego. Together, these sites form a critical infrastructure for architectural investigations.

Our undergraduate and graduate programs prepare students to effect positive change in the built environment, to tackle theoretical debates, and to take on architecture and interior design as critical practices. We educate our students as entrepreneurs, citizen architects, and cultural builders equally committed to professional practice, theoretical discourse, social equity and to formal and technological inquiry.

Our faculty are architects, designers, academics and policy makers practicing in Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana. This internationally recognized and award-winning group works closely with students to teach the skills required to push the limits of practice.



Mission

Good design is a human right. Woodbury School of Architecture produces graduates who affirm the power of design to improve the built environment and the lives of others by addressing the pressing issues of our time. We transform our students into ethical, articulate and innovative design professionals prepared to lead in a world of accelerating technological change.


Vision

The future belongs to Woodbury. Woodbury School of Architecture creates an environment that empowers our students to impact the future of the profession through meaningful built work. We imagine a world in which there are no disciplinary rights or wrongs, where diverse and sometimes contradictory values collide to generate new ideas, design innovation, unexpected practices, and the means to expand the influence of our discipline.


Woodbury School of Architecture offers a welcoming environment for students to develop their own unique design voice.  We approach the design disciplines multi-dimensionally, teaching a range of pedagogies and design methodologies. Our students leave Woodbury with the confidence to engage in local and global discourse.

Through engaged faculty-student interaction, we transform our students into innovative professionals with a commitment to the power of good design. Our students and faculty share a commitment to sustainable practices, community outreach and civic engagement.

Our School of Architecture is among the first 14 accredited architectural programs to be accepted for participation in the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) Integrated Path to Architectural Licensure (IPAL) initiative. Successful students will have the opportunity to have an architectural license upon graduation.

We believe that our school is a role model for the direction in which the profession is heading – improving gender parity and ethnic diversity among its members, and reaffirming the importance of ethical conduct and social responsibility. Ours is a welcoming community for every race and orientation, and we resist acts of intolerance in favor of thoughtfulness, generosity and kindness. The economic, ethnic, and academic backgrounds of our students reflect Southern California itself. We are determined to provide a place for open debate, the respectful airing of differences, and for rich forms of expression and imagination.


Site running on Cargo. 




ReForm: A New Civics Institute  ︎
Grad Studio Three


ARCH 587
Fall 2020 ︎
Los Angeles

Instructor
Cody Miner




Work by M.Arch student Bailey Bestul


Architecture in its disciplinary form has expressed a desire to continue the project of autonomy, that being a project unencumbered by circumstance. But architecture never operates purely in a vacuum, forces cultural and political, influence the world in which it operates and amends its ontological shape and sensibilities. This allows for the architectural project to maintain its relevance while exploring new territories in values, all of which should be enticing to the architect.




Work by M.Arch student Garo Klian


The semester focused on a historically loaded site in Downtown Los Angeles, formally known as the Parker Center, home to the LAPD from 1950-2009 and also used as a symbolic prop for the police in its Hollywood representation. With the recent demolition of the building, the site had a vision within a larger master plan of a civic center office tower housing government workers. This concept met its demise as it was plagued with internal corruption with city council, a sketchy financial backing, and a climate fraught for change. The students aimed to rescue the site from its toxic history new and old and return it back to the people in way of a Cultural Development Center & Civics Academy. A new utopian style typology, the Civics Academy acts as an institutional campus style program, built to enhance its citizens with knowledge of their rights and the functions of government.




Work by M.Arch student Clayton England



Work by M.Arch student Meruzhan Kartapetyan



Work by M.Arch student Emily Vanags



Within our exploration of the new Civics Academy the students pursued several factors engaged within a comprehensive project including ground, mass, tectonics, façade articulation, interiority, and infrastructure, all while negotiating issues of context, or what does it mean for the project to be contextual. Ideas and the default form of contextualism rely heavily on the replications and reproduction of its preconceived urban existence. Should this culminate in what already exists? This element of developer friendly notion to contextualism ignores the process of reformation. Investigations in existing facades and form while be our drivers in expressing novelty and interaction with the city. Our new proposals jostle, lift and reposition in order to allow itself situated amongst its predisposed ground and proximities.

Lastly the studio focused on the types of people or personalities that inhabit the projects. Usually architectural renderings are filled with generic silhouettes with grey fill, expressing no personality. Each student explored the making of their own entourage and individual personalities in order to answer the question: Who will inhabit this project?







Work by M.Arch student Pan Ying


Catalog Description

The systemic understanding of architecture is broadened through examination of the architectural object as a microcosm of an ever-expanding context, of a community or city as re-cycled. Building is introduced as infrastructure and infrastructure as intervention within ecology, land- and urban-scape, site, and territory.