Los Angeles River Recreation Center
A 10,000 square foot recreation & community center located in Sunnynook River Park along the Los Angeles River in Los Angeles, CA. Required program spaces included two locker rooms, storage and rental facilities for bicycles and kayaks, a cafe with outdoor terrace and edible garden, administrative offices, and a small performance space.
Inspired by a variety of optical devices, including periscopes and cameras, my proposal stages a number of moments of gentle voyeurism or passive participation, allowing visitors to see a variety of activities going on throughout the complex, ranging from the banal (the feet of people using the showers in the locker rooms) to the exceptional (dancers practicing in the performance space, for instance). Careful thought was given to the lighting conditions required to make interior activities visible even in bright daylight.
Indeed, the daylighting program for the building is extensive, with many elements oriented to the cardinal directions to facilitate the choreographing of light in the building’s many monitors. The field of twenty-seven “periscopes” located above the reception and rental space serves the dual purpose of providing a constantly changing performance of light indoors and creating a playful, inhabitable roofscape. I brought this sense of play into the project documentation by using cartoons by Jules Feiffer as entourage in the drawings and renderings.
(Studio Project, M. Arch, U.C. Berkeley - SPRING 2016, Jay Atherton instructor)