Chuwei Ni
Grafting on Depavement
This thesis uses the Van Nuys Civic Center as a prototype to advance a three-part method—Depaving, Reuse, and Grafting—for converting Los Angeles’s over-paved, under-shaded leftovers into accessible, cooler public ground. Rather than add objects to a broken substrate, the project begins by subtracting asphalt and introducing porous micro-topographies that manage water and lower mean radiant temperature. It then grafts lightweight, reversible assemblies—kinetic shade, plug-in ramps and walks, planting “weeds” kits—onto curbs, façades, parking decks, and bridge undersides to stitch a walkable, shaded network. Reuse recirculates salvaged components through a modular parts library, keeping costs low and materials in play.
Depaving explicitly contests the inherited street-and-parking logic, carving out new civic sites for programs that serve people rather than cars. Grafting infills the voids created by depaving and multiplies connections, so that shade, circulation, and social life can propagate across parcels and rights-of-way. Through this ongoing swap of subtraction and accretion, both authorship and the character of space remain fluid, traded among designers, residents, and the evolving material archive. The approach is framed as a replicable recipe—not a singular form—so it can scale across LA County. Validation occurs through two chunk models—(1) a street-surface depaving + shade graft and (2) a building-interface graft—and one large site drawing mapping ground texture, plants and soil .
This is not about beautifying asphalt; it is about returning the ground to public life. Treat shade as a civic right, walking as infrastructure, reuse as default. Let us use public space as the bridge back to land—to soils that absorb, plants that cool, and streets that invite staying. In the gaps we depave, we will seed. Along the seams we graft, we will gather. Let it be rough, let it grow. Block by block, we can transform heat sinks into commons, and rebuild a city where the coolest places belong to everyone.
