Sepsis

Sepsis

Work by Catherine Deal, Audrey Willey, and Camila Gomez (All BA '25) for “Studio III”, an Undergraduate Studio taught by Ben Freyinger. This studio tackles adaptive re-use of a hypothetical 6-story commercial “blank” in downtown Los Angeles to create a 60,000-sf co-living and learning facility. Through precedent grafting and orthographic techniques, students reconcile misfits between deep floorplates, structural grids, and new communal living arrangements.

Project Statement:

Sepsis intends to strike a balance between unnatural, odd, and almost untamed forms and very regular modular structures—maintaining a strict sense of programmatic and formulaic logic despite simultaneously exhibiting highly irregular and deformed wall types and spaces.

The “squiggle” or “infection” attempts to produce unique spaces of solitude that provide occupants with the necessary privacy they require during sleep, despite residing within a space designed for mass cohabitation. Designed specifically for commuters and not for permanent residents, the strange fluctuation and looping turns of the wall dictate the location of each bed, where the regular “comb” structure—which has since been taken over by the infection, but which leaves behind varying remnants—services kitchens and bathrooms.

Comparatively, the highly normalized “comb” structure exists for more permanent residents, containing regular 3-person dorms, in-residence faculty units, and family units, all of which are lofted so as to give residents a more complete studio-adjacent space. Outside of the comb’s distinct cells lie the general utility necessary for collective living, such as mailrooms, laundry rooms, bathrooms, vending, kitchens, and more. But despite this regularity, the dislodging of two of the bars—thus transforming them into sloped ramps and stairs rather than floors as they act everywhere else in the project—generates spaces with misbalanced heights and entrances.

Bridging the gap between these two disparate structures is the bridges and platforms that span the building’s center and which are dedicated to the more artistic and productive needs of the students, boasting workshops, studio desks, a photo lab, and more. The bridges themselves work to distribute people within the building, often forcing a somewhat disorienting experience on the user as some bridges access multiple floors and rely on varying floor and stair heights to produce unique spaces. Furthermore, the infection makes its mark on some of these platforms by projecting onto the stairs where the bridge’s apertures allow for residents to become voyuers, watching the work occurring within.

Finally, this project is centered around the lives of in-residence faculty member Jen, undergraduate fine arts student Don, and graduate sculpture student Brandy as they prepare for their final exhibition, GRUMBLE, which will take place in the structure’s exhibition space. Although their days start in different locations–as Jen resides in the faculty studios, Don slept in the commuter dorms, and Brandy lives in a family unit–their paths continually intersect as the GRUMBLE approaches.

Studio III

BA '25 Undergraduate Studio instructed by Ben Freyinger

In 1930, the Swiss Foundation directed the team of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret the project of solving the problem of the accommodation of Swiss students, traditionally housed in poor quality studios in the Latin Quarter of Paris. This project would not only provide access to decent housing and food at reasonable prices, but also the working, cultural and sports facilities of the emerging International City University of Paris (CIUP).

This project represents the conceptual root of our work throughout the quarter, except that our site is downtown Los Angeles, and the moment is now, with universities including, among others: UCLA, USC and the University of Arizona who are rapidly acquiring and repurposing existing real estate.

As such, this studio is focused on the adaptive re-use of commercial buildings for newly designed co-living arrangements. It is organized around a problem: how to fit new arrangements of people into old buildings? Cohabitation is defined simply as: The state or fact of living or existing at the same time or in the same place.

Our work will begin with precedent analysis, a common model underlying many architectural projects. We will carefully analyze existing, seminal cases, which can be hybridized or combined to achieve better co-living outcomes. These experiments – mostly in plan - will be fit to an existing commercial building, which for our purposes will be treated as a “blank,” stripped of the building envelope and all its significations, leaving only a highly ordered tectonic stack. Our site is a hypothetical urban infill lot consisting of an existing 6-story concrete building with two flanking neighbors of equal or higher size and a zero lot-setback to the front and rear. The intended program is a 60,000 square foot cooperative living dormitory and learning facility for an off-campus UCLA Art School expansion, with approximately 200 beds—roughly 30% is designated as communal space.

The fitting of these plans into the blank will give dimensional and formal specificity to our more general problem of fitting new arrangements of people into old buildings. Simply put, the plans won’t fit. Spatial bays will be too big or too small. The structural assumptions of the precedents will collide with the realities of the existing steel frame. And the depth of the existing building’s floorplate will be far too deep to allow sufficient light and air into the interior. To solve this problem of fit, we’ll work on making relationships between the section and elevation. This allows for the possibility of rethinking the urban edge not as a barrier between conventional internal organizations and isolated interior voids, but rather opens the possibility of a specific reciprocal relationship to ground squeezing out at the level of entry and street and the possibility to imagine new ways of occupying the entire edge of buildings from the limits of elevation deep into the core of section.

We will follow a linear process grounded in techniques of representation. We will move between model, drawing, and back again to model to simultaneously produce the compositional framework of a drawing as well as the supporting graphic features necessary to represent and simultaneously interrogate architecture – i.e., this necessitates a non-hierarchical, reciprocal thinking around representation. The conventional orthographic drawing is both derivative of this process as well as playing a generative role in the final outcome of the project. We’re going to be using orthographics as a means to graft the precedent onto an existing, found problem, as a productive mash-up of sorts. The result may be strange, even appear misshapen; however, interrogated against the values and disciplinary conventions of architecture, it fits the bill: ambitious and blind to associations of style and classification among the previously existing.