Research Brief

How does density look like: Los Angeles

The intention of the Design Research Program of the City follows one simple question: How does Density look like? The aim of the Design Studio is to develop a research on the city, which is neither driven by a scientific approach of following abstract floor area ratio (FAR) studies, nor is it guided by empirical case studies how Architects and Researcher can understand how Cities produces densities. Rather what the research aims for is understand the city as a Hyperobject1. Hyperobjects are to what Timothy Morten refers to as things that are massively distributed, very large relative to humans, weather directly manufactured by humans or not, have a significant impact on us humans and that we struggle to understand them. We discover we are stuck to them and realize as more as we know about them as more they withdrawn from us. What if humans do not design Cities anymore? What if the city becomes its own author? What if the City designs itself?

Today we built cars without drivers and buildings without inhabitants; we try to make cities smart; turn every urban entity into powers stations and have built after 9/11 more high-rise buildings then ever before. We don’t really know why we do that nor what we are doing, when we work with the city. Our actions on the city is driven by Hyperobjects, like capital flows, real estates investment models, global warming issues and are driven by what Henri Lefebvre called urbanization: the global tendencies to live exclusively in cities anymore. The city has turned into a hyperobject which affect our lives, which we know it is there, but have no idea what it does. If we ask: What is the aim of the city, what does the city do, we can say that the cities own aim since the birth of its appearances was to place urban entities in close proximity to each other. The city agenda therefor is to densify. Throughout its history the city knows three models of densification.

The pre-modern city

The pre-modern city, known as the ancient cities of the Greek and the Romans, have placed their Cities within walls. Inside of the this wall, all human spaces either for public purposes or privately owned once were placed next to each other and became separated by walls.

The modern city

The modern city, know as the industrial city, has placed our spaces within a grid or within a park. The city separated its functions and its buildings from each other by a space of circulation. The purpose of these public space was to contain all the spaces of inhabitation. Our spaces therefore became vertical, unified by voids and the wall became replaced by air.

The postmodern city

The post-modern city, known as our neoliberal city, is the city of PostFordism. Within the postmodern city, the public spaces moved into the private ones. Instead of placing spaces next to each other, the city became a diversified mass, whereby any function, program or event became stacked onto as well as into any other function. As Frederic Jameson, has argued in the Case Study of the Bonaventure Center in Los Angeles: the postmodern city has moved the public space into the private one. The material of unification was not air anymore, but the condition of air, mechanically controlled environments. The densification of the city seems to have one intention: to unify objects, from next to each other to onto and into each other. If we believe Gilbert Simondon argument of the individuation of technical objects, like the city is, then cities have the tendencies to join, fuse und melt their spaces into a new whole. How does such a new whole look like? This is the research question of the studio.

Frederic Jameson, has argued in the Case Study of the Bonaventure Center in Los Angeles: the postmodern city has moved the public space into the private one. The material of unification was not air anymore, but the condition of air, mechanically controlled environments.

The densification of the city seems to have one intention: to unify objects, from next to each other to onto and into each other. If we believe Gilbert Simondon argument of the individuation of technical objects, like the city is, then cities have the tendencies to join, fuse und melt their spaces into a new whole. How does such a new whole look like? This is the research question of the studio.