ARC 301
Instructor - Nadim Itani Spring Quarter 2018
The design of the West Hollywood Multifamily Housing project was first developed by the study of creating 4 different unit modules that consisted of one bedroom, two bedroom, and townhouse units that were then aggregated across a site of 50’x100’. The units were organized along 2 bars that ran parallel to the long dimention of the site. One of the main emphasises of this study was to have each unit be able to have access to their own courtyard spaces in and between the bars on a multitute of different levels.
The site later expanded to 100’x130’ in which the original 2 bars expanded to 4. The 4 bars eventually housed 10 units consisting of: 6 one bedroom flats, 2 two bedroom flats, and 2 townhome units on two floors atop a subterranian parking structure directly below. The exterior of the project was primarily oriented in the East-West direction because of the original composition of the bars running in the long direction. In order to break up this singular directionality, a grid was devoped in both the X and Y axis. Walls to seprate rooms and different units were organized along the grid running in the north and south directions to stitch the project back together after it had been organized into each bar. This was both done in the interior but also on the site with the organization of courtyard spaces and landscaping within and around those spaces.
The exterior of the project began as a volume, but was then became more of a planar composition in which each side of the volume was deliberately peeled away. The openings were selected as a study of proportion on the overall elevation with each bar being composed of glass in the West elevation, to appear as if each bar is floating. Each bar was clad in corrugated metal panels that act as a rain screen as a study of material, making each appear as a monolithic structure.
106 TOWNHOUSE TWO BEDROOM UNIT
TOWNHOUSE TWO BEDROOM UNIT
NORTH ELEVATION
SCALE: 1/16” - 1”-0”
SOUTH ELEVATION
SCALE: 1/16” - 1”-0”
EAST ELEVATION SCALE: 1/16” - 1”-0”
PROFESSIONAL WORK
Bank of America Interior Renovations + Bank of America Exterior Renovations 2021-2024
Pomona Main | CA7-110 444 S Garey Ave Pomona, CA 91766
This is a sampling of the work I have done for Bank of America interior renovation projects. In these projects I have produced sets for presentation to store design for pricing, as well as construction document sets. Sites were spread throughout the county and I had worked on over 20 sites total.
The task was to renovate each site to coincide with Bank of America’s latest brand standards which were constantly updated throughout design and documentation.
Pomona Main | CA7-110
444 S Garey Ave Pomona, CA 91766
DESIGN NOTE
01DEMO EXISTING FLOOR FINISH; PREPARE SURFACE TO RECEIVE NEW FINISH.
02DEMO EXISTING ENTRY MAT; PREPARE SURFACE TO RECEIVE NEW FINISH.
23REMOVE EXISTING WINDOW-SHADE SYSTEM, TYP.
40SALVAGE AND RELOCATE EXISTING FFE IN BLUE, TYP. RE: NEW PLANS.
41REMOVE EXISTING FFE IN RED, TYP.
43DEMO EXISTING SCREENS AND SUPPORTS AT CSR STATION. PATCH AND REPAIR COUNTER TO MATCH EXISTING ADJACENT CONDITIONS.
61EXISTING MILLWORK TO REMAIN.
62EXISTING LAMINATE FINISH TO REMAIN.
63EXISTING MODULAR PANELS AND DESK TO REMAIN.
64EXISTING BAC STANDARD MODULAR PANELS TO REMAIN.
GENERAL NOTES
A.COMPONENTS IN BLUE INDICATE ITEMS TO BE REUSED AND RELOCATE, REFER TO PROPOSED PLAN(S).
B.DASHED RED COMPONENTS INDICATE ITEMS TO BE REMOVED / DEMOLISHED.
C.REMOVE WALL BASE WHERE EXISTING FLOORING IS BEING REMOVED. PREPARE WALL SURFACE FOR NEW SCHEDULED BASE.
Pomona Main | CA7-110
444 S Garey Ave Pomona, CA 91766
01PROVIDE NEW FLOOR FINISH.
02INSTALL NEW WALK-OFF MAT PER BAC STANDARDS.
03INSTALL TRANSITION STRIP PER BAC STANDARDS. TYPICAL AT FLOOR FINISH TRANSITIONS.
23PAINT EXISTING DOOR AND FRAME TO MATCH WALL.
68RELAMINATE EXISTING COUNTERTOP WITH PL-18.
71RELAMINATE EXISTING MILLWORK CABINET, DOOR, AND DRAWER FACES.
81NEW MILLWORK CABINETS AND COUNTER PER BAC STANDARDS. FINISH WITH PL-7.
100INSTALL FILM ON GLAZING PER BAC STANDARDS.
103INSTALL NEW MODULAR WALL PANEL SYSTEM. CONSTRUCT AND PROVIDE POWER PER BAC STANDARDS, TYP.
123PROVIDE ACCESS TO EXISTING POWER THRU CSR MILLWORK.
140PJM TO COORDINATE POWER FOR NEW FIXTURE.
141PJM TO COORDINATE POWER FOR NEW MEDIA WALL WITH EXISTING CONDITIONS.
163EXISTING LAMINATE FINISH TO REMAIN; PJM TO CONFIRM CONDITION AND REPORT IF REPLACEMENT IS REQUIRED.
164PATCH AND REPAIR EXISTING LAMINATE AS REQUIRED.
165REUSE EXISTING MODULAR PANELS AND DESKS.
166REUSE EXISTING MODULAR PANELS IN BAC STANDARD.
GENERAL NOTES
A.COMPONENTS IN BLUE INDICATE REUSE AND RELOCATE ITEMS.
B.COMPONENTS IN RED INDICATE NEW ITEMS.
C.PAINT EXISTING WALLS P-15 UNLESS NOTED OTHERWISE.
D.PROVIDE NEW BASE AT LOCATIONS WHERE REMOVED.
E.FLOOR FINISH INSTALLATION DIRECTION TO MATCH CENTRAL ZONE U.O.N.
F.PAINT ALL EXISTING WALL FIXTURES TO MATCH WALL
CW-4LH-WH1
This is a sampling of the work I have done for Bank of America exterior renovation projects. In these projects I have produced sets for presentation to store design for pricing, as well as construction document sets. Sites were spread throughout the county and I had worked on over 50 sites total.
Manhattan Beach | CA8-103
Concept Design Package - Not For Construction
02.12.2024
The task was to renovate each site to coincide with Bank of America’s latest brand standards on the exterior to have a consistent architectual identity across all branches. This has been a large ongoing effort that launched in 2019 with Bank of America’s launch of their latest prototype with new signage and exterior finishes. This began to be implemented after the completion of the prototype across the Bank’s almost 4000 branches.
Site Information
Lease vs. Owned: Leased; lease ends 12/20/2027
FC Ranking: 330
Manhattan ID: CA8-103
Address: 1200 Highland Ave, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
Gensler Site Number: 1019
Gensler Designer: Wesley Mason, genslerexteriorsteam@gensler.com
The Downtown Los Angeles Arts District was traditionally home to many of L.A.’s artists, but today it has become too expensive and exclusionary for artist’s to live within. A different art audience has come out of this exclusivity and limited access, those who are spectators. Art critic David Hickey describes these audiences as, “Spectators were nonparticipants, people who did not live the life—people with no real passion for what was going on. They were just looking. They paid their dollar at the door, but contributed nothing to the occasion.” Spectators are different from participants, “While spectators must be lured. Participants just appear, looking for that new thing—the thing they always wanted to see—or the old thing that must be seen anew—and having seen it, they seek to invest that thing with new value. They do this by simply showing up; they do it with their body language and casual conversation, with their written commentary, if they are so inclined, and their disposable income, if it falls to hand.”1
This is a conversation of underground versus the mainstream, a problem common in the Los Angeles Arts District, where those who come looking for the underground eventually push it out and it becomes the mainstream. This pushes out the artists that made these spaces unique and their audiences as the “participant” becomes the “spectator”.
Part of this problem stems from low wages of the working populations of the city who work increasing hours to afford their modest homes and have less time for leisure. They can no longer afford to participate in the Arts District. The Arts District has become more for the affluent where less of these people have access to the arts. This has pushed out artists and the working class from the inner city
as market rate apartments and luxury retail shops replace working class housing.
In a society where space has become a luxury and we are measured by what we own, theorist and philosopher Guy Debord offers this insight, “The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.”2 Concerned with self-image we are owned by our possessions in order to maintain our social status. We need to reclaim the arts district for artists. We all need to enjoy and experience art and make it less exclusive. There should be less focus on private ownership in a society that becomes more fixated with privatization over public ownership. Art should be for everyone.
Communal living should be popularized in which residents of the community collectively own parts of the project, and in which there is no hierarchy and all are represented equally, where residents provide resources for all to enjoy, and each contributes their individual skills to benefit the community.
The project will establish a commune as the artists work together and share possessions and responsibilities within the site. This will create a resistance within the Arts District against the corporate development model that builds luxury apartments pushing out residents who are forced to move their creative spaces elsewhere. The project will foster nonhierarchical spaces that create, “an architecture which took a fearless look at the logic
Communal Artist Housing - Arts District, Los Angeles
of grey, atheistic and de-dramatized industrialism, where mass production produced infinite urban decors.” The city frees us with its blankness, its featurelessness, allowing us to be anyone anywhere will represent an equality which is not available in a society which has become further divided as we find ourselves in the new gilded age.3 Within these spaces forms of radical art will be produced in which “total participation would have to take the place of the old spectacle, the directly experienced would replace conserved art, an all-encompassing art would take the place of art categorized in boxes, and a collective, anonymous production would replace the artists as a solitary genius.”4 These revolutionary forms of art will serve to further strengthen the collective community within the project, and that of disadvantaged peoples as a whole.
1 Hickey, Dave. “Romancing The Looky-Loos.” Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy, by Dave Hickey, Art Issues Press, 2012, pp. 146–154.
2 Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Black and Red , 2018, pp 16.
3 Artemel, AJ. “Retrospective: Archizoom And NoStop City.” Architizer Journal, 7 Nov. 2017, architizer. com/blog/practice/details/archizoom-retrospective/.
4 Stamps, Laura. “Constant’s New Babylon-Pushing the Zeitgeist to Its Limits.” Constant: New Babylon, by Mercedes Pineda and Pedro G. Romero, Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofía, 2015, pp. 12–31.
In 2023 our LA office was contacted by the Tokyo office to help come up with a concept for a facade and plaza design for a residential building by a developer located adjacent to Lake Biwa in Japan. They contacted the LA office because they wanted a more dynamic approach to facade design that only the LA office could bring expertise in as a global leader in the firm. Several concepts were developed pertaining to different would cities and the London concept was ultimately selected.
Fast forward to 2024 and we were contacted again by the Tokyo office to develope a retail building to serve the residents of the adjacent residential building we had completed the year prior. The developer wanted the building to have a dynamic form and to have a material pallet that communicated with the residential building. We also developed a plaza that took cues from the architecture and integrated with the plaza of the residential building. The organic shaped roof plane serves a variety of functions including programming for children’s after school activities and positive views for resident above. The project is currently under construction.
ARC 4031 - THE HERESY OF FUNCTION: ARCHITECTUAL PROSTHETICS
Instructor - Frank Clementi Fall Semester 2019
When the St. Louis Gateway Arch was completed it was dedicated to the American people to signify the westward expansion of the United States. This romanticised manifest destiny without thinking of the implications of the taking of land from the Native Americans.
When their land was taken the Native Americans were forced onto reservations, where the land was allotted to the Natives in checkerboard patterns which made it nearly impossible to use as arable lands to grow crops.
Lofted Lands takes this poor land allottment and stitches together the discontinuous land map and lofts between three maps in the back, middle, and front of the arch for a horizontal stich. Lofted Lands becomes an occupation of the Gateway Arch as a protest by the Native Americans, filling the Gateway Arch. The Gateway becomes filled with Native American housing during the occupation with a variety of public spaces located throughout. There is also a variety of cluster public spaces present, which are poor or lacking on reservations, such as a health clinic, a cultural center, and spaces for religious practice.
Lofted Lands allows Native Americans to occupy the sky within a monument that ignores the troubled history between the Natives and the United States. Lofted Lands also discusses air rights in the city of St. Louis where buildings may not be taller than the 630’ tall monument. Lofted Lands occupies the 630’ tall void space where the Natives claim their right to occupy this area. Here the Native Americans are also confronting that they have poor land on the ground plane so they instead take the fight to the sky.
LOFTED LANDS
Louis Gateway Arch Occupation
