Carlos Almaraz Chicano Art Center in Boyle Heights
Opportunities for Encounters Between the Artist and Her Community
Architecture Foundation Studio IV | 2022
Instructors: Jonah Coe-Scharff, Luis Pancorbo, and Ines Martin Robles
Situated in East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, a hub of Chicano culture, is currently facing issues of gentrification, displacement, and artwashing. The development of a new Chicano Art School aims to retain and celebrate traditional crafts and local modes of artistic expression. The program provides space for Chicano artists in traditional mediums such as murals, ceramics, and textiles in addition to spaces for community interactions.
The design is an amalgamation of different contrarieties: private | public, individual | collaborative, and messy | clean, creating spaces of these types that transition into or cross over each other. External public spaces wrap and surround internal workshops through ramps that provide vertical circulation. The internal workspaces, organized vertically from messy to clean, make use of shifting floor plates that create a sense of continuity within difference across workshop spaces.
Level 1 Plan
Level 2 Plan
Section Perspective B
Section Perspective C
This project addresses many small design goals that present an attitude about what affordances a community space should account for to produce a functional space; socially, culturally, and physically that serves the artists using the space, the larger community, and the possible interactions between the two.
