Drawings/Renders
Model Photos
Process/Conceptual
Conical Conglomerate
Project Information
Year 2019
Term Winter & Spring (Year 4)
Professor Stephen Phillips
School Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo
Studio LA Metro
Site Westside Pavilion, West Los Angeles, CA
Description
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.