For M.AARS students, Koreatown becomes a living laboratory to explore equity and sustainability with a goal of zero waste.

USC School of Architecture students in Julia Sulzer’s Adaptive P/Re-Use summer studio had eight weeks to fulfill a mission — design and build a temporary intervention in Koreatown responding to the needs of the community and using solely repurposed, recycled and reused materials.

After fieldwork and research, material mining and a collective design process, that mission was realized when students assembled a pop-up structure in front of the Koreatown Youth and Community Center (KYCC) on July 18. The wooden booth had four words displayed at the top of each side: RECYCLE, FOOD, LEARN, GAME.

Responding to the Los Angeles neighborhood’s lack of sufficient community gathering spaces, affordable fresh food and smart recycling management, students created the mini community center as an invitation to play games, try new foods, recycle and even get homework help.

It was a lively scene that afternoon as the public accepted that invitation: While two teens contemplated a chess board, two younger boys played ping pong. A little girl stood on tiptoe to talk with a student and choose a snack from an array of food and beverages offered in exchange for bottles and cans for recycling.

For Master of Advanced Architectural Research Studies (M.AARS) students, the summer studio marked the culmination of three semesters of post-professional graduate study using Los Angeles and Koreatown as a living laboratory for examining global contemporary urban issues.

“The summer studio, like the M.AARS program itself, addresses questions of sustainability, equity and inclusion,” said Sulzer, lecturer in the USC School of Architecture. “I’m very interested in working from the bottom up, talking to the community, sending the students out into the neighborhoods documenting social and urban life, and ultimately coming up with their own proposals to deal with the identified challenges.”

With a goal of addressing real-world issues with innovative approaches, the M.AARS program engages students in exploring ideas for radically re-thinking the ways in which we design, inhabit and build in the 21 st century.

The 2024 summer studio brought together students from both degree concentrations — City Design + Housing and Performative Design + Technology — as well as architecture undergraduates, graduates and students from the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program.

Riffath Sultana Hidayathullah ’24, a post-graduate of the M.AARS PD +T concentration interested in designing disaster-resilient and humanitarian architecture, took part in the summer studio. “The most significant insight I gained from this project was the importance of collaboration and how different perspectives can lead to better and more creative solutions,” she said. “Working with a diverse group of people helped me see problems from various angles to enhance the overall design of the booth.” 

Being there on July 18 was also eye-opening. “It was fulfilling to see how our efforts made a difference and hear from the community directly about how the booth was meaningful to them,” she said. “It made me realize the profound effect that thoughtful, community-centered work can have.”

Zero Waste, Zero Money

The first semester of the M.AARS program investigated systems of city design, which involved field work and research in Koreatown. The second semester focused on affordable housing options for the neighborhood.

The third semester (summer studio) had two parts. First, the students developed a report on the research and design work they did in the previous two semesters and conducted additional research as necessary. For the second half of the semester, they used their key research findings to create an intervention, which resulted in the booth proposal for Koreatown. However, the design process was reversed because they focused on finding materials before coming up with a final design.

“In the traditional approaches to design, we come up with a design and then buy the materials from a supplier,” Sulzer said. “In this studio, we start with the materials. Students visit local businesses to find materials; we call it material mining. They collect, measure and document the materials in a digital catalog, using software like Grashopper and Rhino. Then they start the design process using only the materials they have available.”

One of the biggest sources of leftover materials in Los Angeles is the movie industry, Sulzer said. “I’m curious to explore this connection between architecture and the movie industry in terms of materials that could be introduced into another life cycle.”

The goal is zero waste, zero money. And Sulzer takes sustainability one step further by asking the students to design an intervention that is easy to assemble and disassemble so the materials can potentially be reused yet again.

Though each concentration in the M.AARS degree has a unique from of inquiry, both are bound by common goals of justice, resiliency, sustainability and innovation. These goals not only align with the mission of the USC School of Architecture, but also with the strategic goals of the University at large. Those include leading through impact, developing solutions for the intractable problems of our citis and the world, improving people’s lives and embracing the promise of a better built environment.

“As professionals and educators, we must take a fresh look on how cities are designed in a socially and environmentally just manner,” said Assistant Professor Sascha Delz, who coordinates the CD+H programs. “The M.AARS program offers students a unique opportunity to explore ideas beyond common notions of city-making and housing: at the urban level we do not strive for preconceived top-down solutions, but develop our own multi-scalar proposals deriving from bottom-up fieldwork, community engagement and critical data analysis.”

“Further, we counter the notion of housing as a profit-seeking urban development vehicle by investigating models of affordable, non-speculative and collective ownership that promote housing as a right and boost architectural innovation. Ultimately, these positions lead to what one could call a ‘reverse design policy’: we start designing ideas and processes before we design physical proposals, we design with available and repurposed materials before we think about the usual ready-made components, and, rather than only reacting to predetermined frameworks, we see design as a pro-active agent that can shape our cities towards more equitable and sustainable living environments.”