Comprehensive Design Studio

This year’s Comprehensive Design Studio: Elevated Porosity continues to expand its traditional programmatic focus from the scale of the single-family house primarily conceived in steel-frame tectonics to that of a mid-sized, elevated campus building. Students explored how steel, in its various guises, organizes and establishes a gradient across a swath of university campus fabric – an urban microcosm – in, say, porous squares, rhythmic serial passages, or terraced semi-enclosed rooms that animate the inner life of a building and put it into play with its broader context (including spatial sculpture and designed landscape.)

By setting elevated porosity as the common thematic for studio-wide projects, on a site approached from various levels, a deliberate pedagogical constraint brings all organizational components together in potentially novel ways. Mostly set above ground, the building elicits dynamic relationships between plan, ceiling plan, roof plan, circulation, section, and elevation.

The SOAA Innovation Center on UCLA's campus is a building that robustly embodies elevated porosity. A universally accessible, community-based hub whose primary purpose is to facilitate and make available a variety of flexible and reconfigurable spaces for interdisciplinary collaboration and entrepreneurship, it is administered by a diverse group of representatives (students and faculty) from each of the SOAA's schools. A lively think tank, it is also a nexus for hosting formal and informal campus gatherings, special events, and various media functions.