Off the trailNumber 03Visual design

Library of 4 Ecologies

Four towers on the old rail pylons of the Los Angeles River, one for each thing the river is made of.

Kind: Architecture, digital art
Site: The LA River, on the concrete pylons of the old Red Car line
The four: Flora, Water, Fauna, Geology

A wide grey elevation of four tall, loose steel towers standing on concrete pylons over a river, with palms behind

Visual design

Drawings, renderings and stories from architecture school: speculative buildings and the worlds they sit in.

A library that wants to be reclaimed by the landscape it sits in. Each tower holds the books for one ecology of the river, and teaches it by demonstration.

Early in the twentieth century the Red Car line crossed the river on concrete pylons, joining the two banks. The rail is gone; the pylons are still there, with a park on each side. The library sits a steel structure between those pylons, so steel and concrete carry each other, and runs circulation ramps through each tower's core so the two parks are joined again, through a sequence of reading gardens.

Grey rendering of a tower with a water tank on top and pipes arcing down its side to the river — Water. It filters river water and sends it to the south face, where most of the planting grows.

Grey rendering of a tower of stacked tilted decks on thin stilts, birds circling above — Fauna. Balconies at different heights for watching low and high birds.

Grey rendering of a tower of shifted horizontal volumes with a long ramp climbing it — Geology. Rocks from the region are set through its shifting strata, changing in mineral type as you climb.

Grey rendering of a tower overgrown with trees and hanging plants — Flora. The tower the planting takes over.

The towers depend on each other the way the river's ecologies do. You can follow the water from the Water tower to the plants in Flora, and see how irrigation works by watching it happen.

Dark rendering of the four towers at night, lit from within, reflected in the river — At night, from the water.