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Imagining LA's future skyline with a car-free geometric village

Imagining LA's future skyline with a car-free geometric village

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Los Angeles is a city for cars and drivers, but one architectural concept from the 2014 eVolo Skyscraper Competition wants to fight that deeply ingrained culture. Ziwei Song‘s Skyvillage connects the city's four major neighborhoods —Downtown, Chinatown, Echo Park, and Temple Beaudry — with a sprawling, geometric giant of a structure. Currently there are 27 acres of unused land around the freeways that connect the neighborhoods, leaving enough room to build a structure that's described as an "architecture organism."

Skyvillage wants to encourage a car-free lifestyle by putting anything and everything LA residents could want inside this mammoth, translucent structure. While acting as a floating city with space for apartments, schools, restaurants, and shops, the building is also designed with "green filtration space" to clean the air surrounding the freeways. It might seem like an isolating design at first, but the proposal notes that the structure could bring the disconnected neighborhoods together by making it easier for residents to walk through Skyvillage to another part of the city. It's important to add that this is just an ambitious idea: there's no indication as to how residents would enter or exit the structure, or at the very least, how the building would be funded.