Home Away From Home
Featured Building: The Sacred Work and Exhibition Center. (Lead Designer: Roman Huante)
Studio Work. Fifth Year. Group Project
Program: A Community Center that Serves the Native, Central, and South American indigenous Communities of Los Angeles + A workspace for the nonprofit organization, Cielo.
Team: Architects: Roman Huante and Lawrence Gieszl + Landscape Architects: Grant Geipel and Daniel Jacobs
About Home Away From Home
Home Away from Home is a community center that aims to uplift the indigenous communities of Los Angeles by creating spaces that celebrate their culture, offer a sense of community, and make their presence heard. To create spaces that celebrate their culture, the buildings and landscapes are informed by ideologies and symbols of indigenous culture. To offer a sense of community, these spaces provide communal activities like language centers, ceremonial spaces, and flexible event spaces for a variety of activities like art exhibitions or lectures. To make their presence heard, these buildings aim for iconic design with a bold presence on the surrounding streets.
Us four students worked together to shape this image by creating interconnected buildings and landscapes that supported one another. The process was a back and forth effort of proposing individual designs to inform the site plan, and the proposing of site plan designs to inform the individual designs. The result is a village so to speak, where each building is rich with identity yet interconnected with one another.
The Sacred Work and Exhibition Center
Lead Designer: Roman Huante
The building featured in this post is the Sacred Work and Exhibition Center. The vision for this section of Home Away from Home is to connect children and the indigenous migrant population of South LA to themselves, their culture, and their future, bringing forth the indigenous ideology of the sky representing spiritual identity and time. The building offers an inviting flexible event space at the ground level and a work space for Cielo on the second floor.
The Sacred Work and Exhibition Center draws attention to the sky with its large central oculus and conical skylight volumes in the periphery. The central oculus provides a focal point for the space, an area around which events are centered, while the skylight volumes provide intimate experiences with smaller exhibits. Ascending like the trees, the second floor is covered with a delicate facade inspired by the leaves of the sacred Montezuma Cypress tree.
Large openings of expansive glass on the ground level welcome visitors to walk seamlessly from the surrounding landscape into the building, creating an experience that feels connected. To the South, the building engages the river to rail corridor. To the West, it engages Figueroa street. To the North, it opens up into a quiet plaza. Finally, to the East, it frames a grand entrance to the central garden space, The Pillars of Tradition.
