Los Angeles, California, USA
Led by Matt Ducharme West Coast Design Leader at Woods Bagot, the firm’s “Re-Charge LA” proposal uses an electric mobility hypothesis as an opportunity to reinvigorate and re-energize the future of our infrastructure and create high-quality and evolving community-oriented places.
To look again to the potential for inspiration and create a cultural currency better suited for the sustainable future of Los Angeles.
Known as Re-Cost LA, the undertaking imagines how electrical car charging stations might turn out to be customer locations for Downtown Los Angeles doubling as an electric vehicle charging station or a drive-in cinema.
The design came to fruition during the Pump to Plug, a symposium designed to solicit and analyze creative responses to the challenges and opportunities posed –– in urban, architectural and environmental terms –– by the transition from fossil-fueled cars to electric vehicles.
Christopher Hawthorne, Chief Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles, in collaboration with the 3rd LA public-affairs series at USC’s Academy in the Public Square and the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator organized the event.
Woods Bagot‘s first study was for the design of electric charging stations, with a focus on their urbanism and potential landscape and community-serving elements.
The second study was for planning how the city should approach the future of gas station sites, with a focus on remediation, environmental justice, and potential conversion to housing.
Gas stations and automobiles hold a particular place in the West’s cultural imagination.
They were technology and infrastructure that once spoke to freedom of movement and invoked an excitement around future potential and a change to our daily lives.
However, the impact on our urban fabric and natural environment has been dramatic, unexpected and has not lived up to our original dream.
Specifically, the proposal addressed how these charging stations be representative of their local communities.
Further, how to promote the incredible forms of expression and cultural identity through a new type of automobile.
And finally, do we create an adaptable and embedded infrastructure that has different lives throughout the day and over time.
Matt Ducharme envisions a digital display screen that might be lowered to kinda cover for the automobiles beneath throughout daytime, then raised in the evening to turn out to be a cinema display screen the place individuals might watch movies from their automobiles.
At weekends, meals vehicles might be parked on the forecourt to create an avenue meals market.
“As a result of it could actually take as much as an hour or extra to completely cost an electrical car, the charging locations ought to fulfill a broader set of calls for than simply the cost itself,” mentioned Woods Bagot.
Project: Woods Bagot Re-Charge LA-1
Architects: Woods Bagot Pty Ltd.
