BRINE RAMBLE
PROJECT: Advanced Topics Studio
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YEAR: Winter 2024, UCLA
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LOCATION: Owens Lake, CA
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At Owens Lake, this polygon features two BACMs - brine and tillage. The design of the building and landscape is directly tied to offering visitors a unique experience at every turn through varying perspectives of elevation and multiple meandering pathways, ensuring that you’ll never take the same path twice, even in one visit.
The experience by car is that of the “Lazy River,” with a main winding roadway which passes through the polygon, along the tillage, and curves around buildings and infrastructure which provides a multi perspective view of the building with varying landscape backgrounds and angles of tillage.
The experience by foot is that of the “Intimate Ramble.” A network of elevated undulating catwalks encourages visitors to experience as much of the variety of the brine landscape as possible. These meandering pathways go over, around, and sometimes are submerged in brine pools. With the redundant pathways you will never have the same experience and take the same path twice. On these pathways, visitors are able to view the landscape from a direct close up perspective. Located at various points on these catwalks are towers which allow visitors to experience the landscape from an elevated perspective.
Nestled in between two brine fields and tillage, where all elements of the landscape converge, the primary building on the site combines the public gallery/museum space with the various research labs to allow for guided public interaction and education of the private research conducted by the facility.
Within this building, there are also three towers which provide various elevated views of the brine, tillage, and the roofscape of the building.
