Guide to Sunset: BLOCK 12
final spring quarter project for ucla’s architecture and urban design 133: modernism and the metropolis. spring 2009
prompt:
“Final Project - Guide to Sunset Boulevard: A Slice of LA
When Ed Ruscha shot the photos for Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) from a motorized camera mounted on the back of the pickup truck he was driving, he offered up a deadpan portrait of the boulevard. By capturing a landscape that would not typically merit a photograph, the two and a half mile stretch of Sunset seems ironically mesmerizing. Every Building presents the visible surface; this project asks you to dig deeply into two blocks of Sunset to render the rest. Like Ruscha’s photo series, our project holds encyclopedic pretensions.
For your final project, you will create a two-block (approx) “chapter” for our Guide to Sunset Boulevard. First, you will be assigned a unique segment of the Sunset Strip, somewhere between Doheny and the Hollywood Freeway. You will dissect your piece of Sunset, to tell at least five urban stories in words, diagrams, photos, and drawings. Below are lists of required and optional tools for the dissection. While you must analyze and document your piece of Sunset using the three required perspectives, you can choose any two categories for analysis for the optional tools so long as we have covered them in the course, or you’ve gotten my permission.
Required: historical transformation; design (urban, architectural, graphic); social life of the street (a la Koolhaas, Banham, Rudofsky, Jacobs)
Optional examples: overlapping regulatory and political maps; infrastructure (sewer, storm water, transit, electrical, etc); spatial typologies; suburban ideal/reality; spectacularism; other.
Each of the five stories about your part of Sunset can be documented in 1-2 pages (total: 7-8 pages), organized as a guidebook for the well-educated urbanist and architect, We will invent a simple graphic device to maintain consistency among all our chapters.”
