Well-Suited __ 2015 Summer

2015 Summer, highland park, Los Angeles

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