UCLA Art School Expansion (2024).
        Our design for UCLA Arts DTLA centers around the concept of a public park - a community refuge that is creative, playful, open, and inviting to all. Like public parks, this building serves as a sanctuary for diverse groups, including students and the greater Los Angeles community. Formal features like overhanging masses, skybridges, and varying elevations instead of walls create a sense of openness, transparency, and flow. The lobby transforms into a park-like space with freestanding tree-like columns, terraced hills, and a flowing riverbank for working, lounging, playing, and gathering. Nooks along the entrance ramp's beams, a communal kitchen, donation center, community lawn, and public restrooms support the local unhoused community.

        The openness and spectacle reflect not only the park typology as a refuge but also the refuge found in art and creativity, akin to our precedent, Lina Bo Bardi's SESC Pompeia community center. A path guides visitors from the ground floor entrance through the hanging public gallery and cafeteria, with vantage points overlooking the creative community below. The inclined plane leading public visitors into the second-floor gallery entrance, along with the hanging masses that form the building program and the ramps negotiating between floors, make the act of circulation conscious, engaging, and playful.

        Student volunteers work in shared spaces like the kitchen and "Community Shed," sorting donations of food, necessities, and art supplies while hosting community craft events and mutual aid efforts on the outdoor lawn. Commuter bed and storage pods along the hallways provide convenience and proximity to living and working amenities. The integration of different groups - students and public visitors, commuters and long-term residents, housed and unhoused LA residents - ensures creativity and community are accessible to all.

As a space for art and learning, elements like the river, tree-like poles, and terraced hills create tranquil pockets for leisure, reducing stress and fostering creativity. By blending living and working spaces, with commuter areas and student workspaces nestled above studios, the design reflects a holistic, open approach to art and life. Acknowledging the local context of unhoused displacement through inclusive spaces like mutual aid assembly lines establishes a welcoming, socially responsible environment that challenges the often hostile public architecture of Downtown Los Angeles.