This is a study for a corporate campus and basketball training facility for a professional basketball organization located in West Los Angeles near LAX.
This facility is designed to support the interface of business and basketball operations with public entertainment/exhibition programming. A “Basketball Centric” organization of program around the practice courts promotes organizational transparency, while internal courtyards and large open air spaces allow users to take advantage of the agreeable Southern California climate. The project provides a several public basketball courts that double as public parking.
A “Magic Box” strategy was employed as a means of enclosing both quotidian and expressive interior elements within an unassuming, glazed transparent envelope to produce an economical, flexible design. Our architectural approach brings together all of the building users (players, trainers, managers and fans) under one enormous 290’ wide 384’ long saw toothed warehouse. This super urban object presents a luminous architectural icon to the city; highly visible from landing aircraft at LAX, from the 105 Freeway and from the Metro Green line station nearby.
The long span structure consists of a series of steel framed 15’ deep trusses over steel columns set on a 30’ x 30’ grid. Interior elements will be largely detached from the long span warehouse structure. The gaps between the interior elements produce indoor/outdoor spaces, gardens and circulation zones. The project takes some of its formal cues from the historic long span structures for aviation and aerospace that once served Southern California. It attempts to materially, structurally and formally distinguish the fixed architecture of the steel and glass supra-structure from a set of unmoored expressive interior elements.
The analogy for the project, a box full of objects, is deployed here to produce a sense of regularized structure, containment and spatial rhythm strategically contaminated by a set of unusual architectural figures. These unique figures will operate like spatial non sequiturs, mixing programmatic instability with nearly theatrical specificity.