Other Walls/V.I.F.

Los Angeles, California - Speculative Project

William Pereira’s 1973 Los Angeles Times Building is used simultaneously as a case study and a canvas to reconfigure the news building at both an architectural and programmatic level. The project speculates a mixed architectural typology that integrates public participation into news production. While examining the possibility of the emergence of a new civic building through the concurrence of a news center and fact-checking institution. A thorough investigation of the building was conducted in order to gather an ongoing archive of materials, interviews, and plans that allow for an understanding of the building on multiple levels. Interviews with reporters from the Los Angeles Times and historians specializing in William Pereira were conducted as a means to understand the building and the user’s daily interaction, as well as aspects relevant from a preservationist standpoint. The building becomes the subject of a contemporary adaptive reuse project. Specific rooms are selected, reconstructed, and then altered through demountable physical models – interacted with like stage sets. Each set is filmed, allowing for a recording of alterations, layering and editing to the existing layout. The question of the role between the tabula rasa and tabula scripta arises in where and how to alter the building. Material layering and the movement of building elements allow for certain effects to take place in the physical models that serve as a guide for alterations in the overall project. Transparency through pattern and movement, layered accumulation, atmospheric build-up, and impermanence are the basis of such experiments in effects, while Reyner Banham’s theory of the Kinetic Icon, Andrew Holder’s Sufficient Density, and Hilary Sample’s Maintenance Architecture function as backdrops to the resolution of the exterior and interior convergence.