AIA LA Merit Award 2022

Down the Block is a permanent, ninety-foot-long artwork in the lobby of the recently renovated MRT Behavioral Health Center in Willowbrook, south of central Los Angeles. The installation highlights the multi-decade links between the local community and the six-story Health Center, which looms large in the primarily residential Willowbrook neighborhood. 

 For twenty years, Silver Threads, a quilting circle with a long-standing history in the local community, has sewn hand-made quilts and donated them to patients in need at the health center. These quilts are emblematic of the warmth shown by the community toward those in need at MRT and the healing process that new patients will be embarking on in the renovated facility.

Down the Block stitches together digital photographs of three sets of homes from the local community, while approximating a traditional “broken dish” quilt block pattern (a particular layout of half-square triangle blocks). Suggesting that digital imagery is the fabric of contemporary culture, the resulting composite streetscapes construct a tentative set of residential typologies in the Willowbrook community while also revealing the differences and idiosyncrasies of the neighborhood’s architecture.

Willowbrook’s architectural landscape is composed primarily of modest, well-cared-for homes—a local point of pride. For Down the Block, FreelandBuck selected images of colorful houses with distinctive landscapes and architectural features that would produce a vibrant and vibrating composite image.

 The layered images that comprise the streetscapes are alternately distributed onto two surfaces of a deep lightbox. The artwork utilizes the repetitive geometry of the quilt pattern to produce a parallax effect, causing the image to visually vibrate as the viewer moves along the length of the installation. The repeated swatches on the front and back surfaces collapse into a single 2d pattern when viewed in elevation, but a glitch-like repetition emerges from an angle.

 The light box is constructed with an aluminum frame and skin with recessed LED lighting to create a luminous interior that is balanced with the light of the lobby. The back layer is printed on dibond panels, and the front layer on large, ship-lapped polycarbonate panels.

In this way, Down the Block’s glowing, patchwork images of local homes emanate through the lobby, reflecting the supportive and tight-knit relationship between the MRT Behavioral Health Center and the community that surrounds it.