Revitalizing the L.A. River

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Each piece of program is a charm on a bracelet.  Instead of being clasped, the bracelet has been unraveled along the contours of the river.  The boundary between the river’s edge and the surrounding context is blurred by the physical objects as well as the imprints that demarcate the unraveling process.  These imprints consists of graphic overlay and landscaping and help link the objects to the site.

This project lives in the river, allowing people to inhabit the river and have agency in its activation.  The project is also temporal.  Certain program is fixed while other program moves according to user’s needs.  Some of the program may relocate due to flooding or simply be flooded over, becoming treasure that will reappear once conditions are better.

Hejduk’s Victims project set the precedence for this project.  Just like his proposal, this is one iteration of many.  The site is populated with objects that are activated by users themselves.  The unraveling process, which is documented on the site, allows a multitude of possible program placement.  The concrete channel provides no indication of how much the river’s extents have changed.  Thus, the documentation of the proposal’s making facilitates a reading of the site that the channel neglects to do for the river.  The proposal is rooted yet projective.

There is potential criticism that this proposal does nothing to naturalize the river or restore it to what it once was.  However, even a naturalized approach is heavily engineered, and the reality is that the river will never be what it once was.  Additionally, returning the river to its natural state would mean displacing the surrounding community.  Instead, this proposal exploits the river’s waterfront quality by utilizing a landscape urbanism approach to program a large portion of the river.

 

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