When the profile of a building shares its character with conventions of topographic representation, it produces an ambiguous territory that is neither figure nor ground. Based on this observation, this thesis proposes a re-interpretation of a building’s relationship to the landscape by giving volumetric attributes to the conventions of site planning. The project is a collection of single-family homes sited on a slope in Highland Park, a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles. Through an exaggerated reconstruction of topographical lines, the distance between the buildings and the landscape is shortened, producing a neighborhood of buildings blended with the site. This strategy builds a new coherence between architecture’s form and land’s mass, where the overlap between the figure and the ground opens new opportunities for collective circulation and communal public space
2015 Summer, Master Thesis, Southern California Institute of Architecture, Highland Park, Los Angeles