Chinese firm MAD Architects has proposed a futuristic housing scheme for LA that features sculptural towers wrapped in gardens and connected by sky bridges.
Called Cloud Corridor, the conceptual design calls for nine residential towers that would rise from a single podium.
The advancement would be located on a 9,000-square-meter web site along Museum Row – an spot in downtown LA with 4 major cultural institutions, including the LA County Museum of Art, which Peter Zumthor is redesigning.
MAD conceived the housing scheme for the exhibition, Shelter: Rethinking How We Dwell in Los Angeles, which is on view at the A+D Museum by way of 6 November 2015. The exhibition coincides with a boom in architecture tasks in LA, with key new buildings by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Renzo Piano and Frank Gehry.
Cloud Corridor by MAD
The skyscraper scheme represents company founder Ma Yansong’s concept for “shan-shui city”, a large-density urban improvement inspired by traditional Chinese paintings of mountain ranges.
“Cloud Corridor addresses the concern of sprawl in cities and presents a typological substitute: the large-density vertical village,” mentioned the studio.
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“By reorienting the streets vertically, 9 interconnected residential towers redistribute the urban material to cohere disparate neighbourhoods into a vertical village with public spaces and gardens in the sky,” added the architects.
The complicated would rise 167 metres at its highest stage. The design “reconsiders modernism’s residential tower typology” by integrating components that emphasise nature, explained the company.
Street view
The slender, sculptural towers would be wrapped in bands of greenery, with each floor plate obtaining a lush backyard. Sky bridges would allow occupants to move among the substantial-rise buildings.
“Proposed as an urban landmark, Cloud Corridor expresses a devotion to nature,” mentioned the firm. “Elevated corridors and multi-degree garden patios shape the city skyline and offer viewing platforms for residents to overlook the bustling exercise below and the all-natural landscape past.”
The towers would be anchored to a ground-level podium that serves as each a public park and transit hub. This base would feature a grassy lawn and trees, with a form that suggests rolling hills.
Concept diagram
“Simultaneously, the podium lifts away from the ground to reveal the two a private-entry lobby for tower residents and entry for metro station patrons,” stated the company. “Merging infrastructure with nature, Cloud Corridor’s podium blurs the boundary amongst urban landscape and normal scenery.”
MAD was founded in 2004 by Chinese architect Ma Yansong and right now has offices in Beijing and LA.
Other schemes by the studio that investigate methods of fusing urban and normal typologies incorporate a “hilltop village” proposed for a site in Beverly Hills – the firm’s 1st US undertaking – and a task to insert tree-covered terraces into a Rome office block.
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