DESIGN STUDIO

Location: US Bank Tower, Downtown Los Angeles, California, USA

Studio brief: A BUILDING FROM THE FUTURE…
The project for the second semester was to demolish and rebuild a new tower in Downtown Los Angeles. The proposed tower is made up of eight different parts; Ground connecting the Library tower across the street, Hope street at the rear which is at a higher altitude than the front, Left bottom tower for offices, Right bottom tower incorporating Nature internally and bringing more green spaces into a dense cityscape, two cantilevers above which connect the bottom two towers. The middle plinth creates an additional space which incorporates entertainment features within the building such as a theatre, arcade, restaurants etc. The two vertical towers above feature the main hotel in which individual rooms connect to the main core like a branch connecting to the main tree trunk. There is also a cantilever between the two hotel towers acting as a giant air filtration system with a digital billboard on the outside. The sustainability approach for this project was to include a black and grey water filtration system which would recycle the waste water from the building and could be used for irrigation in the nature tower. The same water running through the pipes also could be used for cooling the data centre in the office tower.