Freeway, 2024
Quikrete, concrete, and plywood, installed at Los Angeles State Historic Park
48 inches by 96 inches by 33 inches
In public parks, as in controlled-access highways, regulation manifests as gradients of the intolerable. Communities that have been walled in by freeway projects live daily with the realities of toxicity, subdivision, and displacement; their green spaces are traded for miles of cement and blacktop, as is true of his neighborhood, shadowed by the 710. This cross section of a freeway overpass rescales and compounds symbols of hostile architecture; it is a bench unable to be sat upon in a park bare of shade structures. Rendered essentially nonfunctional as seating, it invites the creative placemaking modeled by the people who repurpose the space beneath or above freeway stack exchanges as a commons, whether as shelter or protest.
Concrete is embedded into the visual texture of Los Angeles, having been embraced by architects for its pragmatism, its economy, and its allusion to power and progress in the West in the 20th century. The city’s decentralized spatial identity, largely dictated by automobile-driven sprawl, reveals concrete’s instrumentalization in architected principles of demolition and construction as inextricable from its model of reorienting and ordering bodies in space.
The channelized river and the freeway system are two public works projects that have come to dominate the lived and symbolic realities of our urban landscape. The river’s courses, for millennia undefined across the basin’s natural floodplains, were straightened and concretized by the US Army Corps of Engineers to protect the industrial capital investment flanking its embankments from flooding, the consequences of which continue to affect the relationship between life and access to the river. The freeways, similarly funded by tax-payer dollars, outline socioeconomic disparities by partitioning upperclass neighborhoods from working-class communities that are routinely subject to right-of-way displacement and coercion in their perpetual extensions. These projects beget an architecture of containment whose configuration relies on the equation of human life and ecology as material that systemizes the fracturing of communal networks.
Freeway, in conjunction with 3 other artists in Por el Rio, uses the conceit of a public park bench to broach the possibilities of people-forward civic design, filling a dearth in a park where few opportunities for shade, seating, and gathering exist. In doing so, they participate in a tradition of interventions by marginalized communities, adapting infrastructure to suit their needs for survival and mutuality. In this project, the utility of the bench is contorted and stretched to the limits of signification; the four benches’ contours amalgamate, each infused with the personal references of its designer. They are, however, united through a dialogue with materiality, wherein the materials become willful actors in the conceptual and corporeal lives of these structures. Concrete becomes a core anchor, either by way of direct reference or physical implementation, hinting at its inseparability from an Angeleno psychology.
Quikrete, concrete, and plywood, installed at Los Angeles State Historic Park
48 inches by 96 inches by 33 inches
In public parks, as in controlled-access highways, regulation manifests as gradients of the intolerable. Communities that have been walled in by freeway projects live daily with the realities of toxicity, subdivision, and displacement; their green spaces are traded for miles of cement and blacktop, as is true of his neighborhood, shadowed by the 710. This cross section of a freeway overpass rescales and compounds symbols of hostile architecture; it is a bench unable to be sat upon in a park bare of shade structures. Rendered essentially nonfunctional as seating, it invites the creative placemaking modeled by the people who repurpose the space beneath or above freeway stack exchanges as a commons, whether as shelter or protest.
Concrete is embedded into the visual texture of Los Angeles, having been embraced by architects for its pragmatism, its economy, and its allusion to power and progress in the West in the 20th century. The city’s decentralized spatial identity, largely dictated by automobile-driven sprawl, reveals concrete’s instrumentalization in architected principles of demolition and construction as inextricable from its model of reorienting and ordering bodies in space.
The channelized river and the freeway system are two public works projects that have come to dominate the lived and symbolic realities of our urban landscape. The river’s courses, for millennia undefined across the basin’s natural floodplains, were straightened and concretized by the US Army Corps of Engineers to protect the industrial capital investment flanking its embankments from flooding, the consequences of which continue to affect the relationship between life and access to the river. The freeways, similarly funded by tax-payer dollars, outline socioeconomic disparities by partitioning upperclass neighborhoods from working-class communities that are routinely subject to right-of-way displacement and coercion in their perpetual extensions. These projects beget an architecture of containment whose configuration relies on the equation of human life and ecology as material that systemizes the fracturing of communal networks.
Freeway, in conjunction with 3 other artists in Por el Rio, uses the conceit of a public park bench to broach the possibilities of people-forward civic design, filling a dearth in a park where few opportunities for shade, seating, and gathering exist. In doing so, they participate in a tradition of interventions by marginalized communities, adapting infrastructure to suit their needs for survival and mutuality. In this project, the utility of the bench is contorted and stretched to the limits of signification; the four benches’ contours amalgamate, each infused with the personal references of its designer. They are, however, united through a dialogue with materiality, wherein the materials become willful actors in the conceptual and corporeal lives of these structures. Concrete becomes a core anchor, either by way of direct reference or physical implementation, hinting at its inseparability from an Angeleno psychology.