Ruilin (Emma) Zhang

My thesis is concerned with an architecture that captures entropic change.

When we encounter a ruin, states of uselessness and slow decay embody a more profound sense of the passage of time; our sense of mortality is brought to a conscious level, provoking contemplation beyond the immediate object of our gaze.

Beyond the architecture of the ruin as object, my thesis asks how architecture might work to frame and reorient our everyday experience of a place, moving it from one timeframe into another. For example, how might an act of architecture enable us to see a place no longer in the context of quotidian or cultural time, but instead in a context of ecological time.

All of this then begs the question, what might architecture contribute making an opening, to make visceral an enlarged awareness of the accelerating change and decay that progressively threatens the natural world?

The Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, located in the Sepulveda Flood Basin of the San Fernando Valley was built in the 1980s. As one of the first infrastructural acts, it shifted our awareness from the dream built on a seemingly endless supply of water (stolen from the Owen’s Valley to the north) to the reality that our natural resources are in fact quite limited. While it appears to solve a problem, it can also be seen as one of the first acts of environmental activism. (briefly describe situation, surrounding freeways, Japanese Garden, visitors center).

Today the plant is quickly becoming obsolete, begging the question, what shall be done with it?

Enclose the perimeter of the existing grounds with a 40’ high berm of ground, covered in boulders. The perimeter effectively cuts off all access to the interior, leaving the abandoned plant to ruin.

Within the perimeter mass of the boundary, insert a linear path that choreographs selected views into the environment of the interior territory. The different, framed views allow for scenes of the larger space without letting the visitor to understand the whole. Instead of experience, visitors will now ‘bear witness’.

Multiple entries and exits mean there is no, single, correct way to experience the place. While you cannot occupy the interior, the long perambulation around it provokes one to contemplate it.

Isolated from the everyday time of quotidian life, the interior will change and re-wild at a different rate than the world surrounding it, at the rate of ecological time. The perimeter as well as the more vast surrounding territory of the valley will also change, but according to a different rate of anthropocentric time. Entropy is a cruel reckoning.