Labored Living

Infrastructure, Domesticating, Urbanism

The Port of Los Angeles is America's Port, the nation's premier gateway for international commerce and the busiest seaport in the Western Hemisphere. Over 1500 people are employed with the Port of Los Angeles including 300 Longshoreman, 300 Port Police, 200 Construction and maintenance, and 200 warehouse workers, as well as 14,000 truck drivers operating throughout the complex daily. Located in San Pedro Bay, 25 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, the Port encompasses 7,500 acres of land and water along 43 miles of waterfront.

The port sits nestled into the Harbor channel, relieved from the Pacific Ocean claiming cargo space for approximately 20% of the cargo arriving in the United States. The port has 25 cargo terminals, 82 container cranes, 8 container terminals, and 113 miles (182 km) of on-dock rail.

Labored Living is dedicated to emerging multiscalar experiences of Port necessity at a global scale, while creating domestic spaces for the laborers living at the Port and the community visitors at an intimate, local scale. The Port’s specialized Port Pilot Station is the gatekeeper of the Port. Every vessel meets a port Pilot that safely tows the vessels to the Port. These Seamen work and live at the Port amongst the infrastructural gigantism of the Harbor edge.The sustainable design approach maintains the Port’s historical means as a global consumerism hub while its visual demands are integrated with aspiring social needs of the community, and emerging from otherwise Harbor pressing challenges.

The project will turn to adaptive, reuse and social construction solutions to expand relationships between the harsh developments of the harbor seafront’s working demands and San Pedro’s local community by pedestrian, informal shared spaces. Conditions of the Port inform the material objectivity of the project, thus reimagining the identity of the Port, who and how the people at the Port occupy the Port. The diverse approach aims for inclusion of fundamental Port’s physical commitments to the water’s edge and social entanglements of materializing the local community of the several challenging roles the Port of Los Angeles serves.

Informal social and suggested spaces for gathering emerge from Harbor infrastructure that border the water. These otherly surfaces materialize at oceanfront edges to foster social and marine experience while breaching neighboring global cargo operations. Sustainable design bridges the infrastructure and city with an undulating landscape that mirrors the ocean seafront with Port Pilot scope in the forefront. The housing clusters serve the Pilot Station who work and live on the Port who are swallowed with Port infrastructure operations. Social space and housing organize Port exploration between the communal and infrastructural margin to reimagine Port gigantism and community sustainability in a consumer centric hub.

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Angelina Castagnola

Labored Living

Infrastructure, Domesticating, Urbanism