Six Radical Proposals For How We Might Live in the Los Angeles of the Future

The A+D Museum's first show in their new Arts District home imagines what a future Los Angeles might look like along the LA River or on Wilshire Boulevard by the new LACMA campus. Entitled Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles, the exhibition offers speculative designs for those two pockets of LA from participating architecture firms—wHy, PAR , MAD, Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects, LA-Más, and Bureau Spectacular—that take into account LA's "increasing density, decreasing buildable land," new rail lines, and environmental hurdles like water scarcity and the drought, says a release from the A+D Museum. The resulting hypothetical designs, which include a 930-foot-tall tower, a mini-city above Wilshire Boulevard, and building granny flats along the LA River, paint a picture of what LA might look like someday.

↑ wHy's Un\Folding Wilshire uses public space alongside the Purple Line on Wilshire Boulevard to create a "mini-city" that is inspired by the shared economy and the future of automobiles, like self-driving cars.

↑ PAR reimagines high-rise residences in this "930-foot-tall stack of individual houses." Each "house" in 6030 Wilshire has a direct connection to green space via a terrace and offers a decidedly unique environment, both things that PAR says are often lacking in the traditional high-rise living situation. The tower would also be right next to the future Fairfax Purple Line station.

↑ Seeking to keep the activity of Museum Row bustling after the cultural institutions shutter at night, MAD's Cloud Corridor, a "vertical village," features nine towers connected by bridges and landings, and with "floating garden patios." The towers sit on an "undulating podium" that acts as a community space.

↑ Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects (LOHA)'s WATERshed focuses on marrying densification with water-consciousness. The end result is public space and living space that also functions as a vehicle for capturing and eventually returning water to the water table and LA River.

↑Backyard Basics: An Alternative Story of the Granny Flat by LA-Más considers a resident-owned, low-rise, high-density housing movement as a way to support affordable housing and mixed-uses without feeding into developer speculation or stoking gentrification fears. The plan involves envisioning auxiliary dwelling units (aka granny flats) as "a collective development area" that could hold a studio or one-bedroom apartment and engage the community in the development process.

↑ Bureau Spectacular's Five Normal Houses: The L.A. River Story examines what a "normal" house is along the river's shores. After doing some field research on the area, they noted several common threads running through area's architecture, including "the asymmetrical mash-up of Spanish Styles or Queen Anne" and the dingbat.
· Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles [A+D Museum]
· First Look Inside the A+D Architecture and Design Museum's New Space in the Arts District [Curbed LA]