Malibu Ocean Front Overlay Zone
Cal Poly 5th Year Thesis Project
Advisor Emily White
Recognition_
Thesis Award
MORE TO COME_ UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Abstract
The beach is often perceived as a space of relaxation, good vibes, and fun times splashing around. To many people, however, the beach has been a site of violence, resistance, and segregation. This division of experience and perception of these beautiful places has historically fallen along racial lines and been reinforced through organizational systems as well as built form. People have historically laid claim to beaches, barring entire communities from these important sites of leisure. Systems of control such as zoning, building code, redlining, restrictive covenants, and physical boundaries are embodied in the built forms of seaside dwellings - attempting to isolate transient, ephemeral public spaces through absurdly fixed formal and programmatic barricades. Not unlike the way placing an umbrella in the sand creates an unspoken space beyond the shade under the canopy, private residences claim far more than their physical footprint as their own when abutting public spaces.
The construction of private spaces along public thresholds has the potential to create a local community by othering people without the means to access these private zones. Many neighborhoods along coastlines have organized and created policies in order to restrict non-resident access through transportation, fees, or harassment. Code and zoning have long been used as weapons to control these spaces as well, shifting and changing to creatively exclude non-residents from gaining access to public open spaces. Because owning land is a position of privilege, overwhelmingly maintained by wealthy white individuals benefiting from generations of inequity, the history and future of public coastal access is inherently a racial and socioeconomic topic. The histories of neighborhoods and failed Black beachside developments in Southern California highlight this connection and emphasize the significance of architecture's ability to impact access to the sand and water.
Aggressive exclusionism is evident in the stance of coastal architecture. Beach homes stand tall with their backs facing the street, firmly on the ground, arms crossed, creating a barricade. In order to imagine a future where beaches are inclusive and accessible we must reimagine the way architecture positions itself into a more relaxed, beachy stance. Anthropomorphizing architecture through a sort of “cloud watching” practice, encouraged by Jimenez Lai in his manifesto The Politics of Flatness, can help us revisualize existing architecture in order to foster companionship rather than ownership as well as imagine entirely new architectures that push the limits of public and private space through form and organization. Joseph Altschuler, in his work surrounding architectural companionship, asserts we can learn a lot about the way design impacts our world by flipping our typical subject-object relationship - considering built work as an architectural subject that has an impact upon human objects. By envisioning more relaxed architecture along our coastlines, our beaches can become more inclusive and accessible places for the whole public.
Laws, zoning ordinances, building codes, eminent domain, and redlining have all been tools to impact our built environment, racially and economically segregating beach access. It makes perfect sense to reclaim this tool of legal language in order to once again reshape, and reimagine built forms to embody a more inclusive and accessible coastline. This thesis proposes a new overlay zone in Malibu California, utilizing the ideas of posture, form, and characterization to create a new type of development for this unique condition, creating engaging public space alongside, through, and interwoven with private residences along the public beach.
The beach umbrella is not simply a tool to create shade, but a tool to delineate space.
The Umbrella has been a symbol of status and wealth since ancient times. One's ability to shade their skin from the sun portrayed a life of leisure and high status. In fact, until Coco Chanel accidentally got sunburnt on her boat in the French Rivera, sun-tanned skin had been a symbol of low-class status in Western culture. While the historical significance of umbrellas tends to center around cultural ideals of self-image, status, and wealth, I would like to inspect this normative artifact under a new lens - claim staking.
Bruno Latour, in his passage, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” gives us a description of a door. Latour encourages us to look at the hinges of a door as a lever - an incredibly simple mechanism capable of completing an immense task - think David and Goliath. The door hinge is capable of creating a hole in a wall and then sealing it again, without the need for demolition and reconstruction. In the same way, Beach umbrellas are the simplest form of privatizing we do on the beach. By performing the simple task of driving the pole into the sand, an umbrella user is quite literally staking a claim in the sand like planting a flag, claiming much more space than simply where the pole pierces the earth. Similar to opening and closing a door, very profound things happen when a simple task is completed.
However, it is important to distinguish between doors and umbrellas. As Latour explains, doors are a point of access. Without the door what use is a room? Umbrellas are, no matter how incredibly simplistic, a device of demarcating private territory. By placing a pole at a singular point in the sand, you are limiting others' access to the space in the immediate vicinity. Privatizing public spaces via umbrellas is a violent and territorial act, whereas the creation of the door removes the need for violence to open the wall.
My discussion of umbrellas aims to highlight a mundane artifact and give context to introduce the topics and the site this thesis investigates. While umbrellas are far more simplistic than buildings, for many reasons, it is important to recognize the broad impacts of claiming a point and what kinds of spaces experience an umbra of privacy beneath, around, or within several miles of the site of action.
Posture, Form, Character, and Stance
While there has historically been a push for homogeneity on the sand, it would be very difficult to claim that there is a cohesive “beach” typology. It makes far more sense to argue there is a beach posture. Similar to the way John Hejduk explores ideas of architectural masque and views structures as characters in a profoundly allegorical play, I would like to analyze the stance and posture of coastal architecture as creatures rather than objects. Anthropomorphizing existing structures through a sort of “cloud watching” practice can help us to revisualize existing architecture as well as offer new ways to represent potential futures. Jimenez Lai elaborates on this idea of imagining traits in his treatise The Politics of Flatness:
“We were born with the innate ability to differentiate the very nuanced proportional distinctions between a smile and a smirk. Humans are so accustomed to identifying friends, foes, and potential mates that even large clouds or rocks with peculiar shapes can evoke sensational misreads.”
Ideas of characterization can help us understand the role architecture has in impacting human experiences. Joseph Altschuler outlines in his essay, “12 Reasons to Get Into Character,” that by viewing architecture not as inert objects being impacted by human subjects, but as architectural characters capable of impacting human “objects” we can flip the script of a typical object, subject relationship.
Altshuler's essay directly responds to Robert Somol’s work “12 Reasons to get into shape”. Integral to how I have analyzed coastal architecture, Altshuler disagrees with Somol’s explanation of the graphic nature of shapely architecture. Arguing that Shape’s graphic immediacy doesn’t engage with the temporal nature of human subjects. Flat - Graphic architecture should be transformed through hinging, rotating, and bending in order to respond to dynamic subjects.
In Iman Fayyad’s publication, “On Flatness: The Virtual Turn,” she explains that when we represent architecture in a flat manner we lose information, intentionally obscuring information from the viewer. When we manifest flatness in built work, beyond it being a limitation of our representational tools, we force a building to be experienced in only one way at only one time, excluding non-residents from any sort of engagement with the space between the beach and the street. The current organization of beach houses has created a flattened condition, reflecting the values of the residents - privacy and exclusion - denying information of what is in-between or beyond.
Code as a Tool
My analysis of broad organizational issues leading to “barricades” in several sites including Malibu and Virginia Beach, has led me to question code as both a system that has been manipulated in the past to create inequities as well as a tool to radically reframe potential futures. This thesis imagines a future in which built form on beaches embodies the ideas of relaxation, leisure, and transience often associated with that place, creating a more accessible and inclusive public space intertwined with private residences. By using code as a strategic weapon for contorting and loosening these barricades along the beach - restrictions and requirements can push architecture into a more welcoming posture.
Final drawings of a potential outcome of the Malibu Ocean Front Overlay Zone
I would like to invite you to view the full thesis statement if you would like.
Selected Process Work
Some space for the images I wanted to have a use for, but really don’t belong here.
Thankyou to Emily White, and all of my peers for pushing me to explain, investigate, and move beyond a preconcieved stopping point.
Relavent / Influential Works
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Dilip da. Cunha. “Section-led Imagination.” Hearst Lecture Series, Guest Lecture at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA, October 7, 2022.
Fayyad, Iman. “On Flatness: The Virtual Turn.” Log 51 (2021): 119-130.
Galison, Peter, and Caroline A. Jones. “Unknown Quantities.” Artforum International, 49, no. 3, (2010) 49–51.
Hearn, Millard Fillmore. Ideas That Shaped Buildings. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003, 1-21.
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Skindrud, Erik. “Huntington Beach and the Black Beach Club Erased from History,” February 24, 2021, California Historical Society. https://californiahistoricalsociety.org/blog/huntington-beach-and-the-black-beach-club-erased-from-history/
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