CYBERPUNK-PUNK: Hacking Downtown Los Angeles

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As Los Angeles continues to transform into the metropolis that cyberpunk media warned us about for decades, this project responds not by solving this condition but by designing for it. Drawing on Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's Undercommons and the speculative traditions of Yona Friedman, Cedric Price, and Archigram, CYBERPUNK-PUNK challenges architecture as a discipline to design for decay and delinquency — imagining a fantastical future in order to cultivate heterotopian hope.

The project follows a fiction: fLAtpak, a startup manufacturing deployable shelter units, finds brief success before going bankrupt, leaving hundreds of abandoned units — rebranded RAtpaks — scattered across the city. Downtown LA's near-future undercommons reclaim them, taking a scrappy approach to hot rodding their conditions and staking their claim at ten key sites around the metropolis, each one a unique typology to worm into, to occupy, and to leverage.

The ten typologies across DTLA that this project tackles are the Jewelry District (billboard as bunker), the Westin Bonaventure Hotel's pedways (transit as terminus), Union Station (silo as solace), the UP Freight Station (freight as freedom), Grand Park (parasol as protest), the Graffiti Towers (ruin as residence), the Fashion District (runway as reclamation), the LA River channel (viaduct as village), Spring Street Park (margin as market), and the Four Level Interchange (overpass as organism).

Each site follows the same two-phase construction logic. First, a lightweight, easy-assembly infrastructural framework is anchored into existing urban conditions — rooftops, parking garages, bridge undersides, freeway pillars. Second, hot rodded RAtpak modules are deployed onto the framework: kit-of-parts units small enough to transport by truck or by hand, outfitted with customizable modules and water and power hardware, and capable of linking to each other to scale in size.

Site-specific strategies vary the assembly: rooftop interventions jack into solar and rainwater systems, freeway sites use existing concrete infrastructure as primary support, AND an abandoned railroad sees the retrofitting of old rail cars with generators and septic systems. Across all ten sites, the strategy favors adaptive reuse and high-tech guerilla architecture, treating the city's neglected infrastructure as the project's primary toolkit.

The Jewelry District's micro-economy is made manifest in the International Jewelry Center—16 stories, 400+ tenants, the largest jewelry building in the western US. Across the street, nomadic RAtpak panels crown neighboring pawn shop rooftops as a shining billboard facade, concealing a small rooftop community behind. Solar collection, rainwater harvesting, and tapped rooftop systems power this post-postmodern trojan horse.

John Portman's Westin Bonaventure, featured in the dystopian sci-fi film Strange Days, is well-known; its pedways are not. These skybridges—remnants of the utopian 1970 "Concept Los Angeles" vision of elevated walkable streets—see almost no foot traffic today. A scaffolding infrastructure wraps them, hosting a weather-responsive row of screen-and-speaker RAtpaks that double as coverage and art installation—finally directing eyes upward, prioritizing movement over luxury.

LA's Union Station—a renovated Spanish Colonial Revival landmark and Blade Runner filming location—is also where hundreds of unhoused people are expelled nightly. Between midnight and 3AM, it hosts the city's highest concentration of unhoused residents. A vertical infrastructure inserted into an adjacent parking ramp lets people hang RAtpaks at multiple levels, creating a below-grade pop-up shelter that gets people off the streets by going below them.

East of Downtown, century-old rail lines have steadily fallen into disuse—among them the defunct UP Freight Station corridor, abandoned as modern logistics shifted to truck service. Here, salvaged subway and train cars are cobbled together and outfitted with RAtpaks, solar panels, generators, septic tanks, and living quarters. Each RAtpak becomes its own car: shelter, power source, and locomotive wrapped in one.

Gloria Molina Grand Park—Downtown's largest, anchored by City Hall—hosts public events, installations, and protests across its open lawns. This intervention deploys a weather-responsive RAtpak canopy across the park, doubling as shelter from the sun and subversive broadcast platform. Its screens, visible from City Hall above, are hacked to display rebellious messaging: shade and dissent, delivered simultaneously.

Oceanwide Plaza—an ambitious residential complex that broke ground in 2015, stalled in 2019, and was spectacularly graffitied in 2024—became the Graffiti Towers. In the near-future, squatters finish what the developers couldn't: claiming floors, throwing parties, stringing pedways between buildings, and installing screens that compete with LA Live's neon glow across the street by mockingly projecting it back.

The Fashion District's Bendix Building, with its galleries and studios, anchors a community of artists and immigrants whose fashion-driven market economy is increasingly threatened by immigration raids. In the interstitial spaces between buildings, a RAtpak backlot emerges: light shows, runways, celebrations tucked away from prying eyes. Fashion and self-expression become acts of resistance, empowering targeted individuals by enabling the reclamation of their identity.

The LA River channel—a giant concrete tear through eastern Downtown and the site of several classic movie scenes—remains largely barren despite several revitalization campaigns. The 7th Street Viaduct crossing the channel is technically two bridges; the upper still in use, the lower abandoned for nearly a century. Infrastructure installed across the latter’s floor and along its underside, leveraging massive columns for support, hosts a RAtpak commune: enabling shelter, rest, and play.

Spring Street Park's bordering Harlem Place terminates in a fenced-off, untapped alley. To resolve this tension, scaffolding and RAtpaks, initially disguised as facade maintenance infrastructure, are squeezed into the alley to create an intimate multi-level market, stitching together previously disjointed ends of the byway. Tiny restaurants, retailers, and vendors cycle through chaotically, punking up the neighborhood's commercial atmosphere.

The Stack—LA's iconic Four-Level Interchange—feels like a concrete playground. This proposal leans into that. Tucked between pillars and beneath overpasses, a rogue infrastructure takes hold: RAtpak platforms, screens, and speakers carve out a venue of concrete and steel. Delinquents converge. Music fills the freeway. The city's most transited intersection becomes its most illicit party.

CYBERPUNK-PUNK is not an architectural proposal as much as it is a story. It calls on our discipline to practice imagining fantastical futures to design for again, and in doing so, dream of a utopia within the dystopia. In an age of constant trend cycles, CYBERPUNK-PUNK calls for a re-embrace of futures past—because the stories we tell in our ideation now are vital to guiding the choices we make in our work in the future, to cultivating hope when it seems there's none left.