Stacking the Suburb

IRVINE, CA is a quintessential master-planned community, with 52 villages located in the valley surrounding the San Joaquin Hills and Lima Ridge in South Orange County. It was planned and built beginning in the 1960s, based on principles of the Garden City movement, and envisioned as a model for Southern California’s bright future. The Irvine Company has played a significant role in the evolution of the city, adding to the ‘village’ idea with many provisions towards open space preservation and housing, office, and retail developments. Irvine is commonly known for its identity as a traditional suburban landscape, though its diverse immigrant populations have long revealed Irvine’s identity through different appropriations of space and contributions to the success of the city. 

Irvine will continue to densify, diversify, and tackle all-encompassing challenges of post-pandemic realities, including: diverse models of living and working, climate change, multi-cultural demographic, social inclusion, changing commuter patterns, and multi-faceted modes of infrastructure in a densifying sub-urban context. Irvine is a unique testing ground for new hybrid conditions of living and working. It's many existing office parks, shopping centers, and parking lots will offer sites for speculation. With ‘community’ as the focus of interventions, students will revisit Irvine’s history, analyze existing qualities of the built fabric, develop alternative strategies for land use as mixed use, and speculate on new ways to incorporate living, working, and leisure. Students worked to develop high-performing frameworks and landscape-based strategies that support plural natures and human-centered environments. 

Some key driving questions for this studio include:

• What does the term 'work' mean to you?

• How does culture, work, and home tie together?

• What kinds of creative industries do you imagine might emerge in the upcoming generations or young entrepreneurs?

Elevating Wellness

Bonnie Wong, Vivian Wu, Jonathan Islas