Man Made Nature:
Southern California Flower Market

Project team: Genki Matsukawa, William Maya.
Elena Manferdini studio. 
Southern California Institute of Architecture (Sci-Arc)

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Studio Premise: Topiaries against types.
For the approach to the development of the Southern California Flower Market, we were interested in a reinterpretation of the relationship between man-made and organic nature, more specifically, we approached this relationship from the idea of the topiaries, in which flowers, shrubs or threes take onto well-defined shapes, creating a sense of controlled nature in its formal appearance.

Our architectural proposal embraces formal ambiguity both in terms of our tectonic approach as well its massing strategy. The Simple platonic shapes are positioned in a way that makes them be perceived as dislocated and unstable, yet the linearity of the form and directionality reinforces its stiffness and platonic formality. The use of various reflective, refractive, opaque and shiny materials, like colorations of glass and steel, and iridescent and dichroic glass broadens the ambiguity of the acute geometry deceiving the senses and tricking the user and its reading of the architectural project. This project presents new interpretations and multiple architectural manifestations by embracing optical effects in its composition, which are able to generate different readings through the different views along the architectonic project

Plans:

Elevation and Section: