Austin Neumann

Squares

This thesis aims to look at what the historic idea of the public square would look like in a contemporary American city in order to place a renewed sense of value on public space, a value that has been lost in contemporary urban organizations. Culturally and historically, the square was understood as a public good; a place of human exchange where ideas and debates around public life took place. The square was produced as a remnant of master-planning logics of a city. In a city like Los Angeles, where public land has been consumed by parking lots, roads, private properties, and gated communities, there is an extreme scarcity of these kinds of public space.

Top view

In order to bias public space towards the everyday urban citizens that use the city of Los Angeles, this project is a proposal to place three public squares along Hoover Street in Los Angeles. This street is where the two city grids of Los Angeles meet, the 45-degree grid of the original colonial Spanish settlement, and the contemporary orthogonal grid. Hoover Street is also at the confluence of the Koreatown and Westlake neighborhoods, which are the densest neighborhoods in Los Angeles known to have the least amount of public space.

Plan View

The design of each of these squares employs a methodical step-by-step zoom-in approach. Starting with the careful and rigorous drawing documentation of all the existing context along Hoover Street from James Wood Blvd. all the way to the 10 freeway. A plan oblique drawing of this stretch of hoover street tries to capture the liveliness of the everyday activities along this street. Picking three intersections where there is leftover space from the two grids intersecting or where the space is awkward or prioritizing car parking, a square grid is placed down onto that intersection irrespective of the surrounding buildings. The square is being introduced into a city grid with concrete, urban logics that are already in place. These squares do not fit into the logic of the city grids, they have their own logics. Each square is pushed uncomfortably to fit into the context, and it must engage with its neighboring buildings and infrastructure.

Section

Pushing a square and dealing with the seams of how it meets the existing urban fabric case-by-case is a way to recapture the city for public good as it negotiates space down on the ground where the urban citizens are at rather than in the offices of city hall. These three squares are attempts at developing truly humanistic public space in Los Angeles.

Physical collage

This thesis aims to embrace the messiness of urban life. Cities are layers upon layers of differing logics intertwined to generate a self-sustained organism that serves all its inhabitants in a unique way. So, why would we approach the idea of urban planning from a top-down methodology to prescribe a specific way of moving through a city to a large majority of its citizens? This thesis advocates for a bottom-up approach to urban planning by designing public space as-you-go. It is not clean, it is not concise; it is messy, it is human, it is ongoing.