Sevag Kourounian
Glossy Deadpan
Glossy Deadpan is a proposal for a parking garage that rests in the background of the San Fernando Valley.
In 1975 Williams Jenkins curated a photography exhibit titled New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. The photos displayed had a homogeneity among each other that captured the “stylistic anonymity” and objective form of the man-made landscape.1 Of the ten photographers, Lewis Baltz documented Southern California’s storage facilities and parking lots, calling attention to otherwise unnoticed urban conditions.
This thesis samples the “stylistic anonymity” of Los Angeles to reproduce its existing material palette. The most anonymous part of Los Angeles is the San Fernando Valley, where movies are made, materials are bought, and buildings are plain. In the valley, faux-brick walls, textured stucco, plastic signs, and concrete pavement are the patina flying past from the car.
The thesis begins by constructing material samples from these views through cropped photographic surveys. Each material sample is like a core sample: an object whose texture can be read as a slice through the long history of the valley. They do not speak yet they say so much.
In response, the thesis enlarges the material samples and presents them back to the valley as architecture. These giant flat surfaces serve as backdrops to their context. They function as signs and buildings but do not convey specific messages or programs. They are rendered blank. The samples are attached to a parking garage and then placed atop some of the largest, most frequented buildings in the Valley, like discount stores and supermarkets.
Inside are variations on the ‘butterfly’ parking garage organization, which allows for continuous driving in one direction until exit. Attached to the parking garage the material samples contain generic architecture with 30’ deep floorplates. These could be programmed to be anything from housing, offices, or self-storage.
The parking garage and the material sample meet to produce slight variations on the basic diagram resulting in straightforward yet slightly figural architectures. They are meant to be noticed but not memorable.
We may not find many remarkable features in the Valley, but we can build a deadpan monument to what's there.
Photo - Valley Driving Image