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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.


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Roofscape Urbanism ︎ Housing + Food: Interventions in the Urban Landscape ︎ Studio Eight


ARCH 489
Spring 2020 ︎
Los Angeles

Instructor
 Anthony Fontenot


Work by B.Arch Students Patrick Castro & Chris Madrid-Gramajo


This studio will investigate a pioneering form of urban design referred to as “roofscape urbanism,” a new approach to creating sustainable cities. The proposition regards rooftops as a valuable and underused resource and consists of shifting activities from the occupation of the ground to flat roofs of existing buildings to introduce various new programs including houses and farms. Each student will select a building in Skid Row as a site of intervention for a prototype rooftop sustainable urban village for 10 to 20 inhabitants. Charting a new direction for urban Los Angeles, the design of the model community will integrate sustainable forms of housing, production of organic food, and jobs, situated on a building rooftop, while highlighting the possibility of Roofscape Urbanismfor the 21st century.





Work by B.Arch Student Matthew Negrete


Students are asked to create an innovative and sustainable urban vision for downtown Los Angeles. The site for this investigation will be the Skid Row neighborhood, an area that has long been challenged by issues of income inequality and housing shortage, with a fast-growing population experiencing interim housing. In 1976 city officials established Skid Row as an unofficial "containment zone," where shelters and services for homeless people would be tolerated. This studio proposes that in 2020 the city should now designate the neighborhood as an experimental “sustainable zone,” envisioned as part of a new program that incentivizes building owners to allow community groups to occupy their rooftops with various new programs including housing and farms. The program should be created to offer mutual benefits to building owners and the rooftop occupants. This studio aims to offer comprehensive solutions to the homeless crisis in Los Angeles and in so doing transform one of the most challenged areas of Los Angeles into a thriving neighborhood. The goal of the studio is to design an alternative, sustainable, and affordable model of a small urban village based on low-cost and high-quality minimal housing units, organic farming, renewable energy, while offering jobs to the inhabitants.




Work by B.Arch Students Patrick Castro & Chris Madrid-Gramajo



Rooftop gardens and green roofs provide multiple benefits to the city including purifying the air, reducing ambient temperature, regulating the indoor temperature, saving energy, and promoting biodiversity in the city. It also provides rainwater buffers while offering opportunities for innovative water storage, recycling and management. In addition, occupying rooftops helps achieve the goal of increasing urban density. The research will be based on existing and proposed urban rooftop farms, as well as various new proposals incorporating cutting-edge vertical farming technology, hydroponics, and other sustainable models from around the world. We will also examine some of the key issues related to urban farming in contemporary design debates concerning climate change and sustainable models of development. Part of the challenge of this studio will be to simultaneously address multiple social and ecological issues: housing, food, and jobs, while designing a sustainable rooftop community integrated within the larger urban context. Envisioning that the initiative will be supported by a series of grants by the city, each rooftop village will work with non-profits, urban farming programs, and organizations that help the homeless to ensure the viability of the project. The shift from living on streets to rooftops raises fundamental social, political, aesthetic, and ecological questions that should inform the design explorations of an experimental and sustainable urbanism.






Work by B.Arch Student UlyssesHernandez


Studio Brief

In response to the lack of affordable housing and fresh organic food in the city of Los Angeles, students will develop planning strategies and architectural proposals for a small urban village situated on a building rooftop in the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles. The newly designed community should provide spaces for at least 10 to 20 people to live, sleep, rest, work, and interact and should be self-sustaining. Each project should consist of small individual houses (not to exceed 350 square feet) and an urban farm, creating spaces where individuals and families can grow various types of fruits and vegetables. Various types of vertical and horizontal agriculture, including aeroponics, aquaponics, etc. should be explored. In addition, it should integrate sustainable energy technologies, allowing the village to produce its own electricity. The goal is to provide alternative solutions for housing, food, and job to help struggling urban communities prosper and thrive. The key challenge of the project is to integrate food generation, housing, and renewable forms of energy into a new communal urban typology.



Catalog Description

This course focuses the architect's leadership role in their community on issues of growth, development, and aesthetics through the study of urban design techniques and practices related to architecture and urbanism. A broad array of urban theories, tactics and strategies, building and space types, landscape and infrastructure design, and politics and policy making are explored through the dialectic between the private and public realms of the diverse urban culture.