Carlos Martin

Exaggeration/Extension/Expression/Amplification of Null Spaces

This thesis is about augmenting one of the most destructive urban edges that separates, divides, and arbitrarily zones the city of Los Angeles reimagining it as new architecture. Highways in Los Angeles cut through neighborhoods, kill street life, and claim massive amounts of land for a single use. That is not enough.  

This is a direct strike against the single-use infrastructure that defines Los Angeles, taking their foundations and reprograming them by building on, below, and above the existing structure. Bring in pedestrian networks, rail lines, housing, commercial activity, and civic spaces; multiplying the connective corridors. The goal is to erase the highway as a dividing line and transform it into a stitching structure; re-centering fractured neighborhoods. To reunify the city the highways must become neighborhood facilitators; no longer simply a means of getting from place to place but for itself to become a place; a destination. 

The city is defined by enormous works of civil engineering which aimed to solve their original technical goals of transit and efficiency, now though they have reached their limits in functional use. These structures have become forgotten landmarks in the backdrop of the city, ones that loom over many of our interactions.  

This project multiplies the purposes of infrastructure, using the highway as the structural and spatial foundation for new forms of building, habitation, and public life. It redefines Los Angeles by strategically re-associating the neighborhoods it has historically divided. This vision is a belief that infrastructure can be more than utility; it can be the backbone of urban life.  

This project redraws the map of the city. Not simply extending highways vertically but actively engaging with the neighborhoods adjacent to them. This thesis is a demand to see infrastructure not as a forgotten and untouchable site, but as a platform for human life, movement, and connection. The future of Los Angeles can be built on what already exists.