Columbia’s C-Lab recently published an essay by the LADG’s Andrew Holder on their COLUMN page. The following is an excerpt.
You may read the entire article here.
In early November 2010, The Los Angeles Design Group (LADG) receives a commission to renovate the lobby of a residential loft building in Downtown Los Angeles. The client is new to us, a respected regional developer, and we are eager to impress. The brief is both open-ended and severe: make the building desirable to prospective tenants, adhere to a strict budget. Built in 1906, the structure has changed ownership and use several times. Each new owner, confronted with the problem of how to bend the building to a new program, added more walls, but only added walls. There is now an absurd number of subdivisions. The lobby, for instance, is roughly a 20 x 30 foot rectangle composed of twenty different vertical surfaces (a conservative accounting). There are now so many walls that it’s impossible to trace the genealogy of any particular one. Each wall is the result of necessity (fireproofing around columns), program (enclosure around private stairs), or whim (separation of the elevator vestibule from the rest of the lobby). Untangling the use value of each wall would be almost impossible, so we quickly settle on retaining them and restricting our intervention to a graphic with some supporting built material at the scale of furniture. The scheme we concoct uses a large number of slightly tapered parallel stripes. Viewed frontally the stripes look like shading on a flat surface. Viewed obliquely the stripes and the wall blur into a fog. It looks like you can touch cloudiness… (Continue Reading)
