Archiving Los AngelesWhen archiving Los Angeles, a geological protagonist inserts itself as a contributing factor to the city’s urbanism: fault lines and their accompanying earthquakes. The formation of these natural scars occur in temporalities far more expansive than that of our own. To understand these configurations, one must transcend the scales typical to the architectural; the result is a superliminal perception of landscape which humanity takes for granted.
Design IV Studio | Fall, 2023
Instructor: Diana Agrest
Los Angeles is a fallacy to the true horrors of nature. The natural systems that creates the city produces a fervently ignorant life where the inhabitant cannot comprehend the scales of time which the geological operates on. Earthquakes expose these scales of varying temporalities to consequently expose the fragilities of the built environment. A section through the earth reveals the sublime scale of the planetary operations occurring deep beneath the surface and how their projections reveal eons of movement.
The transcendence of geological scale is not isolated to the planet, but exists within the limits of the sprawling metropolis. A section through Northridge’s 1994 6.7 magnitude earthquake demonstrates the terrific spatial dimension earthquakes inhabit and how these bursts of energy relate to occupation of a city’s geophysical conditions. The Santa Monica and San Bernadino mountain ranges which encapsulate the San Fernando valley are direct descendants of these slippages of tectonic pressures, being at their will for millions of years.
