The Los Angeles basin rests above the third largest oil deposit in the United States. During the late 1800’s and into the 1950’s, oil derricks and wells were visible throughout much of LA County (Venice beach, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Long Beach, & Pasadena). Today, much of this infrastructure has been taken down as drilling technologies have improved and in order to accommodate the high demand for property in the region. What most Angeleno’s don’t know is that there are still several dormant derricks hidden within the city, concealed behind false walls or within nondescript buildings.

This speculative project endeavors to answer the question: what might happen if this infrastructure were revealed? The design proposal explores bioengineering, botany, agriculture, and entomology in the development of a bio-lattice. This exoskeleton, the formal result of a bio-refinement process which the crude oil undergoes, serves as an ecological habitat for honey bees and seed-plants. The tower is literally a pollen factory. An attempt at re-programing outdated oil towers for the sake of food security. 

This project intended to take surfaces generated in Maya’s nDynamics package and, through a series of grasshopper scripts, articulate them to be responsive to local climatic conditions. The generative process for the overall form of the nested shells was based upon the constraints exhibited within the diagram for Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. A software suite including three different modelers, two engineering packages, a number of custom built scripts, and several post production programs was utilized in order to develop the final product. Each step was catalogued and turned into a comprehensive presentation which was then given at the Design Factory at Aalto Univerity in Helsinki, Finland in the Spring of 2010. This project was particularly interested in the intentional misuse of various softwares in order to generate surprising and unexpected formal results.

Instructor: Kivi Sotamaa

Formalized Materiality: In the spirit of creating a soft, supple form to stage exhibits, we experimented with felt sheets that could tolerate gentle curvature. These explorations attempted to infuse the material logics that are inherent within the felt into our final formal and massing strategies. The design intent was to develop a formal approach which operated successfully within the constraints of the site and programmatic requirements. Toroidal masses were found to work well in an aqueous environment as their radial surface geometry resists the homogenous upward pressure exerted by the water and accomodates a spatial diagram where visitors circulate around an activated center. Visitors travel tangent to the surface of each module, allowing for a continual unfolding of experiences as each scene is cinematically revealed from behind the natural curvature of the form. 

Synthetic Materiality: The main pavilion is the focus of our research on synthetic material applications. We chose to consciously treat the exterior of the pavilion as an unadorned monolithic shell absent of color or other forms of embellishment aside from a fenestration system and low-res panelization that runs across its surface. This articulation follows line-work derived from the underlying structural logic of the shell and the coarse sensibility of the exterior shell is further highlighted as sunlight casts hard shadows along the facets. This approach to the exterior stands in stark contrast to the treatment of the interior surfaces. As visitors enter the pavilion, they are treated to a much more exotic and dynamic environment, one which is unexpectedly soft, supple, and saturated. The ceiling of the expansive exhibition space is lined with bulging protrusions that are tentacle-like in their arrangement and formal expression, serving to thicken the atmosphere with color and texture, dampen sound, and modulate scale in an otherwise vast space. The soft, furry geometries swirl around each aperture so that light filters in mysteriously through dense collections of material. Reveals of color flicker through the dense bunches of material, engaging time as a critical dimension of experiencing synthetic materiality in an animated realm.

Heather Roberge

 Blake Bethards, Haila Adamo

Despite its ubiquity, the standard canopy-style tent has a very limited set of applications. It's good for 'farmers market' type uses, but for programs which require much larger swaths of covered space (concerts, lectures, exhibitions), using these tents is completely unfeasible. This project literally flips the canopy-style tent on its head; altering its construction and allowing it to transform from an individual pavilion to a cell within a much longer-span structure. When the peaks of each cell are connected together via tension cables, this ‘flipping’ technique creates a space frame; effectively increasing the truss depth from 18 inches to 60 inches. This new structure creates the kind of tall, column-free spaces appropriate for performance based programs. Furthermore, this system allows for a hybridized deployment of the cells - using some for long-span spaces, others for individual pavilions, and others set directly on the ground and used as a sort of urban ‘sofa’.

Design Team:

Blake Bethards - Architect / Designer

Drew Pusey - Architect / Designer

Joe Taylor - Engineer

John Becker - Artist

This project is for the proposed re-development of a large urban area located in the Koreatown district of Los Angeles. The program called for roughly 100,000 sf of housing, 40,000 sf of commercial space, and 45,000 sf of outdoor plaza/park space. The three towers, two of which accommodate the housing component and the third which is subdivided into office, retail, and restaurant space, frame the plaza at the center. The project seeks to produce a new icon for the quickly gentrifying area surrounding the site. Spanning between each of the towers is a steel and ETFE canopy which both shades the outdoor space and operates as a literal gateway to the district. Automobiles and pedestrians are meant to circulate underneath this canopy in order to access each tower. The placement of these high-rises creates open-enclave mixing zones between each tower. This space is adaptable for a number of uses including farmers markets, concerts, community events, etc. 

 Kivi Sotamaa

A proposal for a popular (but noisy) coffee shop in Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood.  This acoustic ceiling made up of repurposed shipping pallets and dyed felt serves not only to quiet the interior of the shop, but to also reinforce the branding of the space through color, graphic, and texture.  

This project was a collaboration between the UCLA Dept. of Architecture, The Design Media Arts Lab, Ball-Nogues Studio, and the Herb Alpert School of Music. It addresses the issues of material life-cycle and reuse in installations, while also exhibiting a concern for the pragmatics of fabrication and production of an installation. The design calls for a thickened droop net, the underside of which is sculpted to allow for different types of music performances. Materially, it is designed to be constructed of recycled vinyl billboards, each of which has been designed as an advertisement for the installation itself. As each billboard is taken down, it is recycled into the installation’s “ceiling”. Prior to this, the vinyl is perforated to allow for the gradual “de-thickening” of the droop net. This is imagined to occur as the spatial requirements of the space evolve. This removal of the installation’s layers slowly re-sculpts the space. As this occurs, the audience is given the opportunity to literally take a piece of the project home with them. 

 Ben Ball & Gaston Nogues

Project Team: Blake Bethards, Kris Hedges, Drew Pusey

A proposed tower for the coast of Abu Dhabi in the year 2045. This project imagines a new paradigm for eco-friendly / energy efficient architecture. Rather than harnessing and converting external energies such as solar or wind to power the building, the tower is imagined to operate as one of several nodes within the smart grid. Currently, utility companies are not able to dynamically and efficiently control their output of electricity. Therefore, energy that is produced is not always used. Conversely, at times of peak demand, utility companies are often not able to satiate consumer requirements. This project proposes that at times of energy abundance, cheap electricity is utilized to pump water into bladders located within the tower’s floorplates. At moments when the electrical grid calls for an increase in energy, the bladders are emptied, sending water through a series of turbines which in turn supply the city with additional power. As this occurs, the floorplates expand and contract. The tower dynamically re-organizes itself and the building can be observed as a literal diagram of current energy consumption for the city. 

Instructor: Jeffrey Inaba

Project Team: Blake Bethards & Drew Pusey

A series of motion graphics produces for the band Faded Paper Figures' stage show. Each animation is projected on large screens behind the band as a part of their live performance.

This project, a design for a performing arts center in Los Angeles, was developed as a flexible hub for the surrounding community. Various programs, including retail, restaurants, gallery spaces, and two theaters are arranged within the building to allow for controlled amounts of intermixing between patrons. An articulated roofscape which subdivides into elevated catwalks at the interior, allows for a hierarchy of circulation and shortcuts through the space. Located at the intersection of Vermont and Wilshire, one of the city’s most heavily populated pedestrian areas, the building maximizes its presence at the street and provides for a large urban plaza at the street corner. The roof is accessed through a series of ramps at both the interior and along the exterior facades of the building. During the day, this space operates as an adaptable zone for the program beneath. Restaurants have a presence as food carts, the grocery becomes a farmers market, and the gallery presents itself as a vendor’s booth. 

Craig Hodgetts