Solbok Yi

Ever since the start of urbanization, the two types of built environment—architecture and infrastructure—have been in a close binary relationship to form urbanity. They compete, compromise, or even unify with each other to create various urban moments and extensive urban fabrics.

However, it is seemed that many American cities, especially the city of Los Angeles, lack that variety of infrastructure-to-architecture relationships in urban conditions. They only compete with each other for space, and it often goes in favor of infrastructure, especially the freeways. The urban planning and the constituent building types of this city require dense freeways, and yet there’s a complete lack of design that addresses both housing and infrastructure as a unified architectural project.

The concept of merging infrastructure and housing was explored for a long time and was tested by a number of architects. Raymond Hood drew the Skyscraper Bridge in 1929, Paul Rudolph designed the Lower Manhattan Expressway in 1972. In 1982, Steven Holl designed the Bridge of Houses for Melbourne and New York, with the latter turning into the now-famous High Line.

However, all these precedents share one limitation in common: They all have infrastructure preceding the architecture; architecture follows the heavily engineered, purely utilitarian language of infrastructure.

With this thesis, I suggest a project that shows an inseparable bond between the infrastructure and the architecture, more specifically the motorway and the housing—the two most needed yet conflicting urban entities in Los Angeles. Instead of bringing architecture into the type and language of the preceding infrastructure, the project is an attempt to establish a new impartial type and language as an architectural project.