Soft Urbanism
2023 Spring
Los Angeles, CA
Extraodinary Extra-ordinary: A transferrable K-town in Los Angeles
The SOFT CITY aims to address Koreatown’s fragmented nature by intensifying and rearranging potential existing experiences brought by immigrants, creating culturally vibrant and socially active spaces. It promotes shared relations within a micro-urban ecosystem by emphasizing urban surfaces and light building frame. These reversible interventions invite users to interact with their formal, spatial, and material qualities, transforming previously underutilized spaces in Koreatown into vibrant hubs of social interaction and cultural exchange.
It's a redefinition of the urban surface as a tabula rasa, to inscribe or re-inscribe simple building frame and modes of the surface that can radically redefine spatial conditions by means of ground materials, topography, signage, events, etc.
This universal application proposes a flexible and open to change framework, a system, to create and foster new relations, new spaces and conditions for a possible future. It will aim not simply to resist but to change, not to solve but to imagine, to discover and reveal the latent potential already existing in front of our eyes with simple but powerful operations.