mdl design

Towards an Architecture of Social Infrastructure

Location: Los Angeles, California
Advisor: Devyn Weiser
Course/Year: SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis/ Summer 2025

Video of Graduate Thesis Review

Towards an Architecture of Social Infrastructure

Los Angeles is a city of contradictions. The spatial logics of Los Angeles are often in opposition to a city with high social capital. A space teeming with community and collective civic spirit. These spaces can be engineered but the interactions themselves are impromptu. These spaces, social infrastructure are the backbone of civic life in cities. Los Angeles is often a city of vast concrete monoliths of freeways, head-scratching iterations of café seating set against an eight-lane thoroughfare, and the grand architectures of billboards tilted to the motorist. But too often to be incidental throughout the city the dominant reality is fractured; by a street with no cars stretching up and over a hillside. Informal, improvised, unremarkable; these acts are the bedrock of urbanity.

Of/In/On calls for a reimagined and refocused practice. Taking from the tradition of the research studio, to prioritize research above all else. From an ethnographic, architectural, and historical study of social infrastructure in Los Angeles. This study engages with different spaces vital to our cities prioritizing a study of the streets, public spaces, and domestic spaces. Utilizing this deep study to reconsider how it has been done, from the single-family home to the automobile. They and we have failed ourselves, our environment, and the future. Asks for a street where the pedestrian is prioritized. The street itself is a social infrastructure which is not so rigidly segmented away from home but exists collaborative with the spaces of home. Ask for spaces prioritizing, invigorating, stimulating social capital to develop to be held in the highest regard and are treated equally to hard infrastructure (bridges, sewer lines, telecommunication networks).

Of/In/On, an architectural ethnography studying social infrastructures, uncertain spaces, and domesticity through the lens of urban histories of Los Angeles.

Towards an Architecture of Social Infrastructure