public plazas
April 2024
public art conceptual design
public art conceptual design
digital designer (ArcGIS Pro, Rhinocerous 3D, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop;model made with 3D printed PLA and laser-cut plexiglass
In my sculpture seminar, we were asked to propose an imaginary monument in a specific real site of our choosing anywhere in the world. My public monument, “Public Plazas,” features a landscaped series of engraved benches located in the only “public” green space in Koreatown, Los Angeles
Given the flexible guidelines of our assignment, I wanted to choose a site of personal and political significance that I posessed lived knowledge of. Having grown up as a Korean-American in Los Angeles, California, I chose the neighborhood of Koreatown, Los Angeles as the site of my intervention.
Koreatown is a neighborhood in central Los Angeles, encompassing around 115,000 inhabitants within its 2.9 square miles area-- which makes it the densest neighborhood in Los Angeles County. Demographically, Koreatown is a historically underserved area with a racial makeup mostly composed of individuals of Hispanic and Asian origin and a median income hovering at around 43,000 a year. At the built environment level, the historic underinvestment in the neighborhood of Koreatown has manifested in a severe lack of public amenities and green space. Despite Koreatown’s high population density, there is only one public green space in the entire neighborhood-- yet in my most recent visits to Koreatown, I have noticed that even the “public” nature of this park, named Liberty Park, has been contested.
I decided that I wanted to design a public monument for this contested public green space in Koreatown, Los Angeles. In addition to thinking about how to enrich the environmental liveability of the space, I wanted my monument to also uplift the historic character of Koreatown, Los Angeles. In the past decade, I have observed how gentrification has transformed the perception of Koreatown from an undesirable space into a trendy neighborhood. These processes have begun to threaten the livelihoods of the existing working class and immigrant populations. With my monument, I wanted to question and respond to these phenomenon, by creating a piece that uplifted and honored the working class and immigrant public of the Koreatown neighborhood.
I thought about what form of visual representation could speak to the existing character of Koreatown, and looking back at my memories, I thought that this character was perfectly represented in the strip malls that saturate the Koreatown neighborhood. Named “plazas,” these strip malls are commercial lots with a parking lot in the center and a single-story or two-story line of continuous buildings of multiple units with small immigrant businesses occupying each unit. Furthermore, when I was researching the specific site of Liberty Park, I found that it was located on a corporate “plaza.”
My monument, “Public Plazas” is a series of landscaped public benches that reclaim the green space of “Liberty Park” as a public space while also honoring the small businesses that make Koreatown the vibrant community that it is.
I used Google Street view to inventory and screen capture every single one of the fifteen strip mall plazas in Koreatown. I then used ArcGIS Pro to map out these plazas within the area of Koreatown. Next, I translated thse data points into a formal architectural language. I used Illustrator to turn the plaza signage into public bench designs and I used the mapping data to dicate the landscaping of benches within the grass park. The vibrant color and materiality of the benches reflect the playful nature of the concept (plazas on a plaza)-- and these also match the colors of the Korean flag.