As Found The Museum of Ordinary Forms in Los Angeles

Abstract

In his series of paintings, Course of Empire, the artist Ed Ruscha narrates the perpetual flux of warehouses in Los Angeles. Pairs of canvases, the first created in 1992 and the second in 2005, show the rise and decline of various box-like buildings, which house familiar and mundane functions: the trade school, the factory, the tire store, and the telephone booth. In Ruscha’s work, the ubiquity of ordinary architecture in Los Angeles becomes revelatory; the banal is seen as if never before.

This thesis embraces the utility of the industrial shed and considers it to be the ideal incubator for a new type of cultural institution, one which weaves together spaces for consuming, producing, and learning about art. Situated in a stretch of the Los Angeles River with a dearth of nearby museums, this edge connects distant areas of the city, north and south, and anticipates new connections, east and west, with a newly proposed Gehry/OLIN designed platform park, over the river, bridging a new point of confluence in the city.

Repurposing a set of known and recurring dimensions for local light industrial buildings and creating interiors based on existing plans, a new type of production space is generated as an arts campus. A table-like canopy above the shed structures allows for a vast zone of in-between spaces which promote novel heterogeneity and mingling of constituents. Sectional variation allows for the shed to evolve while still maintaining its tried and true appearance of prosaic consistency. Citing Alison Smithson, who coined the term ‘mat building,’ this project anticipates a “new and shuffled order, based on interconnection, close-knit patterns of association, and possibilities for growth, diminution and change.”