I heart LA √ UP DOWN Athletic Club - upgrading downtown Prelude
This project is an extension of the Los Angeles Athletic Club located in downtown Los Angeles.
The extension introduces three new programs as climbing, deep diving and a golf driving range.
With the knowledge that programs possess inherent spacial and therefore specific atmospheric qualities, the focus of this exploration was to seek out unexpected spacial and atmospheric occurrences. Sudden Atmospheres √ affective disorder
In contemporary architecture 'nature' has diverse implementations, there is the phenomenal, the literal and the process related. The phenomenal creates natural effects, without actually imitating organic aesthetics, which the literal translation of organic forms evolves from. The intention is to challenge the pre-established notion and categorisation of cultural construct through desolving border conditions which would create artificiality in terms of atmosphere and effect rather than in terms of imitation of the natural . Atmospheres created by transparency, interference and the dissolving of border system. Program + Architectural Topic
In the traditional 1920s Athletic Club, the program is stacked on top of each other. Every level is like a different world you enter. In terms of atmophere, the traditional athletic club is a rather peculiar place. The observed is a artificial world, a replica based on culturally constructed images of human nature and body culture. Since the human activities differ from what the human body was constructed for, there is a need for 'nature' in our every day live. The athletic club imitates natural conditions of human activity and locates them in the urban context.
Rem Koolhaas described 'Downtown Athletic Club' as a machinery of body culture, the ideal home for the only desirable status of metropolitan life, the bachelorhood.
Today, there is a tendency towards a place to spend the small amount of leisure time as recreational, socially precious and private as possible. My Attempt is to emphasize the borders between the zones, articulate them and make them apparent and to create artificial scenarios through spacial layering and interweaving.
With the introduction of the new program, there is a potential of the multiplicity of architectural qualities that occur from the different athletic spaces. There are two main categories movement. The 2d movement which is surface based and the 3d movement which is volume based, volume that in case of a pool could be interpreted as mass or in case of an climbing hall as void.
Hence, curious situation of programmatic interlocking appear, the different climes existing next to each other are always in a closed system though the devices of separation start to become diffused through nesting into each other, structurally supporting each other. | 
