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Overview

California Dreamin’ - A Billboard Housing Prototype

Exploring the confluence of social and urban forces in the Golden State and transforming the billboard into a scaleable living space.

Instructor: Peter Suen, ARCH 100D (Senior Studio)

Discipline
Architecture

Timeline
January 2023 - May 2023

Tools
Site Analysis, Rhino 3D, Physical Modeling, Materials Research

Role
Architect

The Problem

What is the California Dream? Is this still a viable dream?

This studio explores the typology of the billboard; as both a representation, an advertisement, and now an inhabitable space in a way that relates to an individual understanding of the California Dream.

What is the experiential aspect of architecture? How do we take an individual experience and scale it to multiple people?

Initial Research

Based on an assigned reading by Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” I set out to explore the urban environment and take notes about my experiences on my own sort of dérive (drift).

The dérive focuses on journeying through the urban landscape without a particular goal in mind, just to observe everyday reactions to a social environment; wherein it’s not necessarily about the physical objectivity of something but the sensation that physical objectivity evokes. (For example, a tree. A tree provides shade, can feel rough to the touch, and generates noise.)

My dérive ended up developing into a study of boundaries - both physical and metaphysical. By exploring the Bay Area’s urban landscape, I found myself crossing different forms of thresholds created by man or consequence. As a result, the three boundaries I studied were material, geometric, and boundaries established by scale. ↓

Developing the Boundaries

Experiential Concept

The next task was establishing an iterative sketch of the project; we established three required “zones” within each housing unit for contemplation, sleep, and storage. In addition, we began to conceptualize habitable space needs like light, circulation, views, materials, and safety.

Given that we were using the billboard as the foundation for the project, we were limited to the dimensions of a 24’ x 12’ x 8’ billboard structure to design within.

Urban Context

As with all good design, we needed to relate our ideas to the context. I visited the site in the late afternoon and spent a few hours climbing stairs and running through empty parking lots. The area surrounding our chosen site is harshly sloped and placed behind a venue that hosts a flea and farmers market on the weekends.

As architects, we also considered local transit lines to the location, the site topography, and the general urban context of the site.

Initial Synthesis

If you’re not familiar with architecture education, instead of midterms students will have a midreview — a less formal presentation to architectural instructors about the progress on the project so far.

The midreview can be considered the first formal iteration of the project; at this stage, design revisions can still be made and critical feedback is crucial to developing the project even further.

Our studio’s midreview centered around the individual billboard housing prototype before we began to aggregate it. →

My billboard housing situated itself as low-income, single-occupation housing for an influencer. The work and role of an influencer began quite recently; through the new ways that humans use technologies to connect, some social media users become popular in the public canon and become influential enough as internet personalities to achieve some level of fame. I felt like the dream of the influencer relates closely to the California Dream, where many promising folks flock to big cities in NorCal and SoCal in the hopes that they’ll find success. The use of social media and influencers are the newest type of advertising and marketing — so I thought it would fit perfectly within the schema of a billboard.

Based on the natural materials of the billboard being wood and concrete, I also thought it would be interesting to incorporate a different dynamic by using a fiber to weave the overall form together. It’s a rough evolution of my original boundary studies; depending on how the weave is used it can create geometric boundaries, split material boundaries, and create variances of texture and privacy.

The fiber in my project is represented by the multitude of line hatches in my orthographic drawings. ↓

Final Review

The culmination of the project is at the final review, where an architecture student can be expected to pull numerous all-nighters and encounter multiple problems in the final stretch.