This project was executed at AECOM in 2015 under the direction of Peter Zellner, then the Studio Lead and Principal for the Los Angeles Studio.

The Los Angeles Arts District Master Plan envisioned large scaled urban redevelopment as a collective act. AECOM developed its concept for the 15 acre site with a group of local, national and international architects that included Monica Ponce de Leon, Neil Denari, Edwin Chan, Patterns, Brooks + Scarpa, Pentagon, Hitoshi Abe, Jimenez Lai, Paul Preissner, Lorcan O’Herlihy, Andrew Kovacs, Jennifer Marmon, Kevin Daly, Roger Sherman, Alfonso Medina/T38 Studio. AECOM acted as the site's curator, setting up street patterns and open space networks and creating unique blocks and zoning envelopes for each architect to work on. A key goal was to parcelize the development so that phases or even blocks could be entitled and sold individually with each architect or a group of architects attached. 

The architects were left alone to focus on their parcels while the team at AECOM dedicated themselves to designing a few set pieces including a tower, a museum, some housing and creative office space. The result was something like a collage or the application of the Dadaist concept of the exquisite corpse to an urban site. 

What we aimed for was to create a sort of archipelago effect, with the “fluid” being an urban environment capable of flexing to allow individual “islands” of architecture to stand alone while communing a bit with other staged architectural events.