LOS ANGELES ARCHIVE

Wedged between the silent weight of an ancient oil field and the unseen depths of a groundwater basin. It lingers beside the hollow spine of the Los Angeles River, a concrete ghost of what once flowed, while the 110 hums in restless motion, a pulse never still. To the east, homes scatter along the disruptive terrain, to the west, industry stands in rigid formation. This is LA, a city caught between stillness and motion, memory and momentum, a landscape forever on the verge.

After cutting into the ground the space in between becomes my site. Etched into the earth, where the ground bears the weight of its past. A void lingers carved by extraction, suspended between oil and water, between what fuels and what sustains. Oil feeds industry, water extracts oil; oil moves water, yet taints its source. One is substance, the other its vessel— water upholding life, oil upholding a way of life. A wound in the land, a fracture in the city, where they collide, the scars remain.

Born from the meeting of two grids, where the residential and industrial collide, their volumes staggering in section, complementary yet distinct. In plan, they overlap, one shaping the other, walls dissolving into neighboring space. Between them, an opening emerges— a thread of connection, a passage of sight, each space confronting the next, held in tension, bound by view.