NEXUS CENTER
DS1031 FIELDS FIGURES FLOWS
L ocation: Tartu, Estonia
Instructor: Ramiro Diaz-Granados
Type: Cultural Center
Team: Nicholas Maclntyre
Nexus Center - A Proposal for Tartu’s Cultural Center in Estonia undertakes an intellectual exploration of architectural form, examining the notion of difference as a guiding principle. The proposal advocates for the analytical disaggregation and subsequent reconfiguration of a building’s constituent elements, each reimagined as an autonomous entity imbued with distinct characteristics. This approach conceptualizes architecture as a complex, multilayered language, compelling a re-evaluation of spatial organization, where the delineation of space transcends the conventional reliance on walls as primary dividers.
DS1040 POSITIONS
PARALAX 02
L ocation: Los Angeles, California
Instructor: Russell Thomsen
Type: Sci-Arc Extension
Parallax explores the deliberate weakening of the SCI-Arc building’s structural rigidity by bending and folding its linear form into itself. This process disrupts the building’s inherent order, creating moments of stress, distortion, and overlap that challenge conventional notions of stability and strength. The resulting formal language embodies architectural misbehavior, where the structure defies its original intent to produce dynamic spatial relationships, a constantly shifting sectional figure, and a sense of instability. By embracing deformation as a design tool, the project critiques rigid architectural norms and demonstrates how fragility, misalignment, and evolving sectional forms can provoke new experiential possibilities.
DS1011 OBJECTS II
OBSIDIAN
L ocation: China Town, California
Instructor: Angelica Lorenzi
Type: Dance studio/Market
Obsidian is a project that seamlessly integrates a dance studio and a market, creating a dynamic interplay between movement and commerce. The design embodies the blending of these two programs by establishing spatial and visual connections where the market opens up to the dance studio, allowing the activities of each to influence and enhance the other. This interrelationship fosters a unique environment where the rhythm of the market’s energy complements the fluidity of the dance studio, creating an architectural expression that celebrates the overlap of functionality, activity, and form.
AS2509 DETAILS DETAILS
LINEARITH
Instructor: Dwayne Oyler
Type: Hand Rail
Team: Mohamad Al Sharif
Linearith is a handrail design that explores the aesthetic interplay between linear and monolithic elements, achieving a formal language of harmony and balance. Using wood to embody the monolithic quality and steel to represent linearity, the project creates a dynamic relationship where the two materials converge and complement one another. The result is a seamless integration of contrasting forms, with the solidity of the wood and the precision of the steel working in concert to produce a functional and visually striking architectural element.
DS0525 VERTICAL.1
SCAFFOLD.0
L ocation: Los Angeles, California
Instructor: Michael Rotondi
Type: Incubator/Civic
Scaffold.0 is conceived as an architecture that does not wait for completion to acquire meaning. It begins from the political condition of delay where construction is suspended and buildings remain exposed unfinished and naked and treats this state not as failure but as a precise architectural reality. The scaffold is no longer a temporary instrument but becomes the project’s permanent order a rigid and legible structure that holds space in suspension. Within this fixed framework programmatic volumes are inserted and compressed including community spaces open to the public alongside rentable rooms such as media labs production studios and incubators. These volumes do not resolve the building and remain contingent inhabiting the scaffold rather than completing it. Architecture here is not a finished object but a condition of coexistence between structure and use permanence and incompletion. The project accepts delay exposure and abandonment as formal and spatial forces allowing architecture to express its own process while maintaining discipline clarity and resistance.
DS1040 VERTICAL.2
HOUSING FOR VETERANS
L ocation: West Los Angeles VA
Instructor: Anna Neimark
Type: VA Campus
This project rethinks veterans housing not as a single structure but as an urban condition composed through separation and proximity. Privacy and distinction are produced through non linear organization where spaces repeat similar conditions differently rather than uniformly. The project is explored through ideas of shivering shifting and tracing which generate irregular distances between units and prevent fixed alignments. Housing sits above a continuous stepping ground that operates between public and private allowing movement gathering and retreat to overlap. Architecture here is not an object but a spatial field where proximity is negotiated rather than resolved.
