Forty years after "Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles" another architect with the gaze of the foreigner takes us on a ride through the City of Angels, or as the Turkish architect Orhan Ayyüce likes to refer to it: "La Citta Capitalista". [...]
An ‘exclusive industrial town,’ Vernon borders on the cosmopolitan downtown of Los Angeles... Are alternative forms of housing, agriculture, and nature imaginable in a town that relies solely on industry and transport?
— IABR
Los Angeles architect Orhan Ayyüce takes a weekend drive through a vacant Vernon, in the following short film for the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. Submitted by the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design and run by Ayyüce, The Vernon City Project is being featured in IABR's main exhibition, "Urban By Nature".
Watch The Vernon City Project below.
4 Comments
Let's say, I am an architect who is mostly Turkish, grew up mostly in Izmir and live and work mostly in Los Angeles. Also "la citta capitalista."
Really interesting, Orhan.
Vernon is such an atypical case politically, economically, and in terms of governance, as well as architecture, urbanism and environment.
Vernon is a municipality, which is one reason for its unusual development over the last century. The state wants to dis-incorporate it to become one more island of unincorporated LA County, which would probably remove any political structure or will to do major improvements there. Figure an economic(al) means for redevelopment there, and the locally-empowered governance is already in place. Yes, major reform is needed; but release that 5 square miles into county control, and opportunity for major change is lost forever, it would seem.
On the economics note, do you know if the soil has been studied on any of these sites proposed for housing and recreation? Toxic clean-up costs could be astronomical in many places... far more than the costs for public services needed to accommodate a new residential population, I'd wager.
An intriguing urban problem to highlight... thanks for posting your clip.
Citizen, we are pretty much deeply aware of all those issues. In our diagrammatic model we build hardly penetrable wall around Vernon to represent its oligarchical structure and red dots represent toxic sites. We have applied off the ground modular capsules for living units with minimum disturbance into toxic soil. There are many more mitigative moves in the projects. It is a 5 sq. miles of difficult terrain and LA River cutting through it. The work will continue indefinitely.
That's a great project.
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