A Polyphonic Archipelago along the Faulted California Coast

Abstract

White Point projects off a peninsula that was once part of the Channel Island Archipelago. Descending from hill to sea within the San Andreas Rift, its 140 acres hold seemingly irreconcilable landscapes and uses. Traces of the Native Kizh people, Japanese farmers and fishermen, Spanish Rancheros, the US Military, and our world’s rarest butterfly species overlap in layered entanglements. These multiple legacies are all but indistinguishable, however, in the site’s current condition where fenced-off military infrastructure fragments nature preserve. This dominant, reductive reading of White Point is a product of our tendency to rely upon linear narratives to explain place. Such narratives invariably prioritize “culminations,” therefore burying manifold spatial histories. My thesis asks how architects might engage and reveal the complex interdependence of cultural, agricultural, ecological, and geological histories often culled from contemporary spatial narratives. By replacing linear history with polyphonic tableau, this project at White Point delivers the physical means by which the public may hold multiple timescales, voices, and truths in concert through a public landscape. A matrix of pathways ties together the archipelago of architectural interventions, offering explicit entanglements across several registers–from small scale tactility to overall site choreography. Existing built histories are harmonized with another spatial voice. In one instance a Cold War era artillery shed transforms into a band stand where habitat for the Palos Verdes Blue butterfly encircles the dance floor. In another, one gazes across coastal landslides while simultaneously watching a high school baseball game. In short, separate, incomplete histories overlap to form a constantly evolving, tentative “whole” for communal history.