︎

WSOA In-Flux

WSOA In-Flux

︎


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. 




Meet Me In the Street: Very Long Skinny Street-Buildings, Building-As-Streets, & Corridor Housing Studio ︎ Studio Three


ARCH 587 Fall 2019 ︎
Los Angeles

Instructor
 Alex Maymind


Work by M.Arch student Chavez Xavier


The studio examined the cultural and architectural context of Los Angeles in order to ask several overlapping questions: what is the value and definition of “urban context” in a metropolis such as LA? How does architecture rub up and produce friction with larger discourses of urban studies, policy and land management? What aspects of architectural thought are forced to adjust to bigger questions and concepts from these adjacent disciplines, if at all? To tackle these questions, students investigated a formal and urban typology identified as “very long skinny buildings”: buildings which are more in dialogue the experience of driving in an automobile along LA’s boulevards, streets, and freeways than any specific architectural tradition or proximate context that may be claimed to the city proper (this is not to say that city-architecture, a category that has a largely European resonance, is not critical to understand as well). It is in this sense that we will consider the architectural consequences of understanding Los Angeles as a 21st century metropolis defined by freeways, traffic, commuting, signage, street walls, and commercial facades seen from a moving car in the tradition of Reyner Banham, Ed Ruscha, Denise Scott Brown and many others. The reality of the ‘facadeness’ of Los Angeles, the simulacrum of urban environments, and the role of streets are paramount to working in this design studio.





Typology

The typology of “very long skinny buildings,” loosely defined, is to be understood in dialogue with the streets: as circulation, as channels of space, as residual public zones, and as connective tissue. How these buildings-cum-streets relate to the actual and imagined space of the street will be a critical concern for the studio. This typology often can be visualized and thus conceptualized through a single long site section or drawing that demonstrates the connectedness to urban fabric and tissue, while also genuflecting and adjusting to contingencies in local areas and permutations of context. Unlike a purely linear building, a typology in which a specific section is repeated continuously (with or without variations) until the necessary length is reached, the very long skinny building is in dialogue with its surroundings, not simply a master continuous element working as hierarchically dominant to its surrounds. In this studio students focused buildings that do not reach the urban scale of the ‘megastructure’ or ‘linear city’ (that would bring us to city planning), but are on the other so large that they cannot be understood simply as a ‘building.’






Work by M.Arch student Chavez Xavier


Work by M.Arch student Mahzad Changalvaie


Work by M.Arch student  Nick Daniel



Work by M.Arch student Cody Carpenter




Work by M.Arch student Elaheh Merikhinasarabadi



Design Problem

Students were asked to design a very long skinny mixed-use building on sites in Los Angeles that incorporates housing for multiple constituencies as well as other programs. Each of these programs were interrogated through the history of corridors, hallways, and other long-and-skinny architectural devices. While housing was understood as a problem of serial aggregation of units in relationship to zoning envelopes and mass, students looked at the history of housing as something which redefines privacy, personal space and transience for urban populations.


Another key issue for the studio was the use and manipulation of standards, codes, and constraints that underlie housing. These standards should not be understood only as limitations but as productive fodder for your work. More importantly, students interrogated and manipulated these standards in the work, rather than accept them as static. These standards include physical descriptions such as the dimensions for room sizes as seen above, furniture layouts, and spatial requirements but also include more ephemeral architectural aspects like degrees of variation or repetition, integration of landscape and architecture. 






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.