serial consign

[proposed los angeles times editorial facility, north-east view]

Movable Parts was my M.Arch thesis project at al&d at the University Toronto and delivered a design proposal for a new editorial facility for the Los Angeles Times. The project used the crisis facing newspaper production and distribution as an opportunity to speculate potential spatial solutions as well as new business models. The work drew from the historical role of the newspaper in American life and attempted to revitalize the spatiality of the press. The goal of this project was to export the arena for discourse and participatory politics from paper space into public space reconstituting the newspaper as a town hall for the 21st century.

This infographic illustrates the distinction between contemporary news gathering and citizen journalism, on the left and right respectively. The diagram on the left is a model of information gathering familiar to us all: it reads from top to bottom and begins with a series of hypothetical “news events” occurring across space. These events are evaluated by editors (blue) and their judgement determines how much reporting labour (orange) will be dedicated to each event as well as the amount of editorial space dedicated to the story. In this traditional model, the editorial staff essentially act as gatekeepers between the public and news environment, and it is characterized by a one-way relationship between the readership and content.

The diagram on the right explores participatory journalism, where readers (yellow) aid in the selection and reporting of content. This model capitalizes on reader expertise by allowing readers who are very familiar with specific issues (i.e. hyperlocal neighbourhood affairs) to improve the quality of reporting and participate in the journalistic process. It also renders the editorial process more democratic by allowing readers to select content. This model would allow for a reduction in reporting staff, particularly at the municipal and regional scales. In this scheme, the editorial staff can act more like curators or stewards of content whereby they facilitate flows of user contributed content while still allocating reporting manpower to more substantial issues. [click for more information on this infographic]

Examinations of program led to the decision to focus on a new type of editorial facility, one which allows public space to interface with the creation of content. The design proposal was to be sited at the location of the existing Times facility at the intersection of 1st and Spring in the core of the downtown Los Angeles civic district. This facility would provide the burgeoning downtown Los Angeles population with a destination for brokering information, networking, and education. It would also provide journalists with the opportunity to interact with a wider breadth of related municipal protagonists (e.g. bloggers and community leaders).

The renderings above illustrate the interior of the building in which a large public atrium bridges editorial space and a public plaza (the threshold of this division is a hyper-articulated structural frame). The editorial space can be read vertically as having a gradient where the lowest levels are public, and increasingly sensitive departments (e.g. the multimedia lab and executive editorial offices) are housed on higher semi-public or private floors. The lower of the two images displays a view from within the "city-space" which riffs on the traditional idea of the city room in newspaper culture (the nerve centre for the entire city). In this proposal city space is completely public and municipal editorial content is prepared and generated alongside a variety of public functions opening up the process of journalism to not just scrutiny, but participation.

[full project credits]

[program diagram illustrating organization in longitudinal section and indexing potential users]

[image: north portion of east facade]

[axial section looking north]

[south elevation]