I love interstitial and/or unusable spaces - a running joke in architecture school was to include an 'inaccessible void' somewhere in your plans and sections (IIRC the idea dates back to a project by Peter Eisenman).
As a friend looking for area real estate is finding, there are a lot of hillside properties around Los Angeles with various catches and restrictions - cheap real estate that apparently passes between speculators periodically without any real hope of conventional development.
>> there are a lot of hillside properties around Los Angeles with various catches and restrictions - cheap real estate that apparently passes between speculators periodically without any real hope of conventional development
You could probably teach a great design studio around real-life cases like that, assigning legally and topographically difficult sites around Los Angeles, based on actual restrictions, for students to figure out how "architecture" can take place there. Would be both speculative/pie-in-the-sky and, with no small irony, excruciatingly practical.
August 02, 2015 7:54 PM
[Image][Image: A sidewalk corner in Los Angeles, albeit not the one for sale; via Google Street View].
If you've been longing for a way to satisfy your inner Gordon Matta-Clark—the artist who, among many other things, once purchased an interstitial empire of "odd lots" throughout New York City, including the spaces between buildings and other "unusably small slivers of land sliced from the city grid through anomalies in surveying, zoning, and public-works expansion"—then now might be your chance.
Los Angeles is auctioning off a chunk of odd lots: "Offerings include transferable 'air rights' and, in one case, the corner of a sidewalk," the Los Angeles Times reports, among what they describe as "tiny bits of land that were left over from big real estate developments, set aside like scraps of cloth cut from a garment."
The properties for sale include a collection of oddly shaped and awkwardly encumbered lots acquired during decades of efforts to help developers build in blighted neighborhoods. A few of the parcels, though, are under name-brand Los Angeles institutions, such as the ground under the historic Angels Flight funicular railway on Bunker Hill and the land occupied by the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, site of the Academy Awards.
You can peruse the full list of sites here. In all honesty, they are not immediately compelling. However, they do include an archipelago of air rights throughout the city; one property is only 26 square feet; and another appears to be the small strip of land located outside 1013 E. Adams Boulevard.
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Close this window Jump to comment formI love interstitial and/or unusable spaces - a running joke in architecture school was to include an 'inaccessible void' somewhere in your plans and sections (IIRC the idea dates back to a project by Peter Eisenman).
As a friend looking for area real estate is finding, there are a lot of hillside properties around Los Angeles with various catches and restrictions - cheap real estate that apparently passes between speculators periodically without any real hope of conventional development.
August 02, 2015 7:24 PM
>> there are a lot of hillside properties around Los Angeles with various catches and restrictions - cheap real estate that apparently passes between speculators periodically without any real hope of conventional development
You could probably teach a great design studio around real-life cases like that, assigning legally and topographically difficult sites around Los Angeles, based on actual restrictions, for students to figure out how "architecture" can take place there. Would be both speculative/pie-in-the-sky and, with no small irony, excruciatingly practical.
August 02, 2015 7:54 PM