RoTo Studio Overview

The Overview

Downtown Los Angeles has been the government, business, and cultural core of the greater metropolitan area. Like many city centers, many people worked  here but very few lived here.
This began to change 10 years ago after a generation of many empty buildings and 500 acres of parking lots. People are coming to Downtown LA to live in numbers that are unprecedented in the west, transforming the city center into a substantial human settlement that will continue to grow by addition (vacant land/ parking lots) and subdivision (within existing buildings) for many years to come. New developments are primarily conceived, with exceptions as financial models. The scale of many of the developments is in proportion to the scale of the financial instruments facilitating these developments. The contemporary growth of cities is predicated to a great degree on investment strategies and to a small degree on social strategies. Among the critical questions we are now asking I would like to explore several in particular,

___“are cities being for investment or for people.”

___“can growth as an operative term replace development to accommodate the concepts of scale, variability, and adaptive flexibility to adjust to human needs and interests as well as changing market forces”

___“can social modeling be given equal status to financial modeling”

The problem
an existing 20,000 sf  2 story volume, on 6th and main will become an incubator  for social, economic, and environmental entrepreneurs. Many are re-inventing their lives in public, so to speak, in conjunction with new and sometimes unprecedented business models.
The space types, interactions, support facilities, etc. will be a hybrid of all of the
social, learning, working, cultural play spaces you already know about.

The imagined new world
Fast forward 10 years –
What was conceived in the HUB incubator across the street now occupies a complex of buildings
on the vacant land ( 4 acres) directly across the street.

To be continued.

m.Roto