PIXEL LIFE

MID RISE/ HIGH DENSITY HOUSING

2014 Fall

Instructor: Carlo Aiello

722 E Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

This project is designed to confront, by means of pixelation, the relationships between solid and void, and between private and public space. The housing aggregation idea is formally inspired by a checkerboard, which depicts the basic pattern of solid and void. In this way, residents would be able to enjoy both solid space (private) and void space (public) in this high density residential housing.

This project also aims to explore the potential of housing to meet the spacial needs of increasingly crowded cities, and to provoke a discussion about how to facilitate and nurture balanced relationships between human and high-density living environment. 

With the growth of population density in cities and development of people’s living standards, urban sprawl has now become an increasingly serious social issue in modern society. One major problem is how urban density affects and alters our living conditions. It is one of the architect’s responsibilities to deal with the living problems brought by the rapid progress of urbanization and gentrification. With the growth of urban density, housing units become more like pixels. Hence, this project proposes a housing idea of such "growing" units, like pixels, to echo with the growing condition of the cities. By means of the checkerboard pattern, this project has the potential to “self-grow” vertically, which would be practical in many crowded metropolises such as Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Tokyo.