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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. 




Very Large Architecture ︎ Studio Nine


ARCH 491
Fall 2019 ︎
Los Angeles

Instructor
Jason Rebillot






Work by B.Arch student Dana Ladd


Using California’s Central Valley as a laboratory for experimentation, this studio investigated the relationship between architecture, territory, and economy through the design of very large architecture. Large structures such as distribution centers are increasingly common as logistical operations are consolidated for reasons of efficiency and geographic competitiveness. Designing such a large building opens up a range of questions at the margins of the discipline. For example, when does a massive architectural project become infrastructural? When does it become landscape? When does it become part of urban systems exterior to it? When does deep interiority become a kind of urbanism in itself? What role do aesthetics and formal composition play at large scales, and how does one navigate through an endless space? How does a massive building get subdivided into smaller zones? A related hypothesis for this studio was that very large architecture might have the ability to impact urban-territorial systems and networks, where they operate, and how they relate to each other. Through its sheer size, magnitude, and gravitational effect, very large architecture could possibly act as more than just a building.




Work by B.Arch student Aarti Patel


The Central Valley


From architectural, urbanistic, environmental, infrastructural, economic, political and cultural perspectives, the Central Valley (CV) presents an incredibly rich and fluid set of conditions. Historical issues remain present, such as the persistence of agriculture as the CV’s most dominant economy and related issues of worker’s rights (the legacy of Cesar Chavez being the most emblematic), the dark history of Japanese-­‐American internment camps, Dust Bowl-era migrations to the CV from the center of the US, and a long legacy of complex water control and distribution systems. At the same time, the CV hosts several major urban centers including the state capitol of Sacramento, Fresno, Modesto, Stockton, and Bakersfield. Today, the CV is evolving toward industrial agriculture and it has become a breeding ground for extensive solar arrays that capitalize on the CV’s significant solar exposure as well as massive new distribution centers that take advantage of the CV’s central location on the West Coast. Environmentally, the CV is home to several species of migratory birds that depend on the surface water located in wetlands for survival. However, those wetlands are drying up- presenting a changing ecological balance in the region. Culturally, the CV is often thought of as little more than the infrastructural connection linking Northern and Southern California despite the richness of conditions found throughout it’s geographic area of more than 22,000 square miles. Equally problematic, design culture tends to focus on the ‘glamorous’ poles of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. This studio cast those conventions aside, preferring to embrace the unique and diverse spectrum of phenomena present in the Central Valley.






Model by B.Arch student Christian Boling



Work by B.Arch student Ka Kit Chiu








Catalog Description


The studio intent is to explore and test architectural design as it relates to one or more special contemporary issues. The studio is open to both fourth and fifth year students.