"We are no longer at leisure to design landscapes of leisure; instead, landscapes here begin as demonstration landscapes - real-scale, living dioramas depicting certain kinds of landscape increasingly characteristic of the Anthropocene."
---- Jason Payne (Coordinator)
Yara Feghali (Instructor)
Pingting Li & Mingxi Cao (Team member)
413 Design Studio March 1 UCLA, Fall 2022
Our demonstrating landscape is discovering journey through the non-linear walking paths to different landscape zones divided by meandering wall, inspired by traditional Chinese garden.
The discovery starts from the outer to inner, passed from the wastewater pipes garden at the north and dry channel landscape at the south to the succulent garden in the center. The order is not prescribed, in this discovering journey, visitors supposed to get lost, run into a dead end, or jump into a new landscape unexpectedly from one sided of the wall to the other side. We also borrowed the framing idea from the traditional Chinese garden to punch the small holes on the wall to restrict the view towards the other landscape zone when visitors passed by.
The journey goes from outside to inside experiencing various ways dealing with landscape to accommodate different social interactions, such as recycling water plants, covered playground, amphitheater. Although our concept is to present the water shortage in LA, the whole site is 80/90% covered by dry landscape and no need of water except the central succulent garden.
We treated each edge differently, respond to the surrounding neighbors. We designed community garden at the south edge to give the residents a place to gathering together. For the west side facing to residential community, we plant trees to corresponding to their landscape. The walls at the Eastern side are more or less closed to block the view from the golf course.
In terms of building, we used same language as landscape, the path extends inside the bubble created circulation for interior. The wall became column connected the ceiling, and we also punch the hole on the wall letting the light in.
We have machine on the first floor, with no access from visitors but the stuffs work here. We have exhibition, viewing deck, cafe for the visitors on the second floor, the path from landscape leading visitors experiences different zones of the building and inside and outside of the building.
