Drive-In/Drive-Thru

Learning from ancient urban plazas – confluences of voids, market stalls, and city stages – the brief for this studio cross-breeds two automobile-reliant programs: i) a multiplex drive-in theater and ii) a 90,000 gsf food distribution center.

The 5 acre-site in north DTLA, just south of the State Historic Park known as the Cornfield, is a compelling location for the current reinvigoration of Drive-In cinema across LA county and throughout the country, and ii) providing enough urban space to address the alleviation of hunger providing drop-off and pick-up points for the food-insecure throughout the pandemic (… and, sadly, likely beyond …). An imageable node in a vehicular network, it houses cohabitating programs staged separately for day and night focing architectural frictions of plan to section to elevation to be smoothed out through the precise coordination of design and circulation, building-scale gestures, and human-scale movements. In this Drive-In / Drive-Thru multiplex, the movement of cars and people are elevated to equal importance, forcing the occupation and design of vast and variegated building sections to reside in a realm beyond landscape urbanism. That is somewhere between urban infrastructure, megaforms, and groundform buildings. The broad array of resultant project types signal a new kind of urbanism, one where land is transformed into ground and in turn into variants of Landform Urbanism.