Conical Conglomerate

Project Information

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Year 2019

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Term Winter & Spring (Year 4)

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Professor Stephen Phillips

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School Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

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Studio LA Metro

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Site Westside Pavilion, West Los Angeles, CA

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Description

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Located at the site of the existing Westside Pavilion in West Los Angeles, Conical Conglomerate is a mixed-use housing, commercial, and retail complex intended to alleviate the area’s housing shortage.  At the same time, the project will act as a kind of cultural gateway to West LA and UCLA which transforms the local building aesthetic and becomes an easily identifiable landmark.

This is achieved through the project’s unique architectural expression.  A loose collage of conical masses occupies the site - each deformed in such a manner that they retain the general shape of their conical primitives while generating a distinct character through slipping, breaking, scaling, and recombination.  This strategy results in a few different massing types; some more haul-like with gentle curvatures, and others more gestural with more extreme curvatures and jagged intersections.  

For the most part, the haul-like forms are used for housing - being more compatible with regularization and modularization.  Meanwhile, the more gestural forms house the more accommodative retail and commercial functions.  Fenestration, too, is indicative of different programs; where there is housing, the windows are smaller in scale and spaced at lesser intervals; and where there are office spaces and commercial functions, the windows are longer and spaced at greater intervals.