Aram Radfar
A SHEEP IN WOLF’S CLOTHING
Architecture’s capacity to produce representations of the world through the built environment remains its most radical tool of political and cultural power.
A new high school for the arts situates itself atop the last of the lost hills of Downtown Los Angeles. A series of twentieth century megastrustructal projects has dismantled its geologies. Bunker Hill was grazed down and replaced with infrastructure. The Chavez Ravine has been filled in. What remains of Fort Moore Hill—the site of Coop Himmelb(l)au’s Central High School #9—is the last standing visual remnant.
This hill is the north bookend of Grand Avenue, the city’s cultural ‘Acropolis’— and Downtown’s forced civic centrality—a street of trophies that provides a playground for global architecture.
In this serious game of make believe, a megastructural project is reenacted one last time on what remains of Downtown’s last remaining hill. Bunker Hill’s complex network of underground infrastructure is reconstructed as a clumsy stack of sticks produced through exacting geometric procedures. The high school sits above on its redefined hilltop vista.
By working through Roy Lichtenstein, this project looks to engage methods of critique and abstraction usually reserved to other art forms. Like Coop Himmelb(l)au’s winning competition entry, this project starts with a masterplan developed for the site by AC Martin. Here, Coop Himmelb(l)au’s interventions—to perforate the confederation of boxes and place polyhedra on top—are taken to the Nth degree.
The resulting object and pedestal are wrapped in graphics to produce erroneous representations that weaken their ability to be read in three dimensions, allowing the arrangement to slip between flat and spatial, freezing somewhere in between. At risk of lingering in the abstract, this project searches for methods that engage material and tectonic specificity without sacrificing its graphic legibility.
Photomontage of project from The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
Photomontage of project from The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
Diagram of Bunker Hill (left) and its reconstruction by using tangent curves (right)