Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water.” Bruce Lee

Sameness, apparent similarity and difference will be examined across our studio as practically
identical programs on nearly identical sites to explore differences in form, surface, structure.
Distinctions between sameness and difference are essential to principles of classification, creating
orders of things, whether we are considering types of insects or building types.

Using the LACMA campus as the site, including the parking area associated with the Paige Museum and the lot recently acquired by LACMA across Wilshire. Many of the existing museum buildings are being reconsidered as part of a master plan developed by Peter Zumthor. In response, a range of programs will be considered across the studio, with each critic providing a narrative to differentiate a normative program of a museum school (like the Corcoran) or a conservancy (like the Colburn School) are seen as a complement to the program at LACMA without conflicting with the master plan development under way.

This project attempts to address the flexible program though design rather than problem solving, explores, and creating new opportunities in the process. The project progressed through a series of stages that was mimicking and embracing the ephemeral, fleeting movements inherent in different forms of marshal arts. Systematic form finding and dynamically deforming mathematically defined geometries, this design will use the same primitive, and its various deformations in order to create series of misfit forms. The aim was to end up with a coherent architectural whole, which are simultaneously one and many. The design methods, and the primitives deployed, were not to become ‘indexed’ in the building design itself- rather they were utilized as an underlay diagram that aided in final form of the building (a sort of a dynamic 3D parti). The design uses phenomenal movement as the organizing force for the design, and explores martial arts for new inspiration for form, space, and effects of phenomenal movement.
ARTS OF MARS MUSEUM
The strength of the project stems from Martial arts’ movements, which create situations where two, or more discreet entities are joined by shared dynamics of the fight. Re-originating the dynamics of the fight into architecture offered new insights into creating coherent wholes out of otherwise disparate and discreet parts. The design attempts to capture this movement in a static negotiation between horizontal and vertically laminate forms that are self-similar, yet different enough to offer a coherent system to register the movement of the form.

414. Major Building Design Studio, Spring 2013, UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design