title

type

year

credits

Anytime, Anywhere.

design thesis

2024-2025

John Palmesino (tutor)

Ann-Sofi Rönnskog (tutor)

Shuhang Cao (joint-project)

Film studios, once laboratories calibrating sunlight, space, and imagination, transformed Los Angeles into a global dream factory. Today, fires sprawl inside Los Angeles. Simultaneously, a desert-born technological transformation is advancing a net-zero promise, revealing a new figure with a magnitude of cities. It is another déjà vu of California losing its outside – an illusion of neoliberal energy flows consolidating an established order within enclaves. Current strategies for confronting climate disruption, reliant on mere substitution, prove inadequate against escalating disasters, leaving settlements vulnerable. A ‘solar economy’ reveals an energy abundance – Georges Bataille’s ‘accursed share’ – that can enrich the biosphere: its integration with Earth’s metabolic systems fostered through territorial intensification rather than expansion. An illuminating model for such a transformation is found in the historical trajectories of film studios.

Thomas Edison. The Black Maria. The world’s first film studio, 1893.

Thomas Edison. The Black Maria. The world’s first film studio, 1893.

Pathé Studio, Montreuil, France, 1907.

Kalem “Airdome” Studio, Glendale, California, 1912.

Behind the scenes. William A. Wellman, The Next Voice You Hear, 1940.

Behind the scenes. Sunset Boulevard. Billy Wilder, 1950.

Virtual Production, 1899, Netflix, 2022.

Virtual Production, 1899, Netflix, 2022.

The film studio originated as a laboratory, with Thomas Edison’s Black Maria serving as a sophisticated architectural device for mediating the relationships between light, space, and imagination. This logic evolved as the industry migrated to Los Angeles, first drawn by the region’s idealised natural light before retreating into the controlled darkness of the soundstage: a process that transformed the city into a global dream factory where technological innovation and urban configuration fuelled one another. Today, this trajectory culminates in Virtual Production, where actors perform against vast, interactive LED screens. While this technology promises filmmaking ‘anytime, anywhere,’ it achieves this freedom by deepening the detachment from externality – a moment when figure and ground are separated. The world no longer appears as something to be encountered, but as a surface to be rendered and managed.

Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Royal Saltworks of Chaux, 1773–1775.

Frederick Law Olmsted, The Leland Stanford Junior University, 1888.

BIG & Heatherwick Studio, Google Bay View. Mountain View, California. Google Earth.

Foster + Partners, Apple Campus 2. Cupertino, California. Google Earth.

Frank Gehry, Meta Menlo Park Campus. Menlo Park, California. Google Earth.

Gensler, NVIDIA Headquarters. Santa Clara, California. Google Earth.

Alongside this technological shift in cinematic production, the apparatus of filmmaking begins to operate as a transferable spatial mechanism. Virtual Production collapses traditionally discrete stages of production, foregrounding an in-camera synthesis of the real and the unreal. This shift alters not only cinematic aesthetics but also the very organisation of labour, resources, and perception within enclosed, highly calibrated systems. In parallel, corporate spatial programmes indicate similar logics: workplaces designed around seamless technological mediation and managerial scripts that shape visibility and interaction within a self-contained environment. From Buckminster Fuller’s whole-system thinking and countercultural communes, Silicon Valley inherits the fantasy of space as a laboratory for social reprogramming; yet, the experiment is conducted under sealed conditions. The failed promise of openness is now rendered as an architectural imaginary. Over the past decade, Silicon Valley’s tech giants have raced to build new headquarters, such as Apple Park and Google Bay Views, whose most decisive gesture is the production of an absolute interiority: a total environment that promises openness and connectivity while withdrawing from the frictions. The gesture is not unprecedented. It reactivates a certain spatial genealogy: from Ledoux’s Chaux and Stanford’s original campus plan to postwar corporate architecture like Bell Labs and the Ford Foundation. Designed for autonomy, these self-referential spaces explicitly reject contact with external heterogeneity, exacerbating spatial segregation rather than fostering resource integration. Consequently, a contradictory spatial politics emerges: an architecture that symbolises global connectivity, systemic thinking, and transparency, yet simultaneously constructs a closed, self-contained, and militarised inaccessibility.

Property Ownership. Tahoe Reno Industrial Centre, Nevada. Google Earth, 2025

Today, in the high desert east of Reno, a rapidly transforming territory is giving rise to a spatial mutation: corporations fleeing high taxes and regulation for jurisdictional emptiness. Inside Tahoe-Reno Industrial Centre (TRIC), architecture becomes logistics, managed by codes and algorithms. In terms of magnitude, TRIC reads as a new metropolis without citizens, organised around throughput rather than integration and adaptation. It externalises resources, labour, and hazard while promising uninterrupted, low-friction operation at a distance from uncertainty. The emerging spatial transformation is marked by the absence of intention, replaced by the overwhelming force of protocols, technologies, engineering, and financial imperatives. Such space is authored less by design than by compliance: zoning codes, security clearances, data latency, insurance premiums, tax arbitrage, until it reaches a zero-degree of expression. There is no entrance in the civic sense, no public legibility, no shared time; only access, throughput, and uptime. Its borders are drawn in legal, fiscal, and infrastructural terms, rather than through legible spatial form. Yet this apparent autonomy is parasitic: it imports electricity, water, and materials to maintain logistical continuity, while exporting heat, emissions, waste, and hazards into a diffuse territory, rendering it an ‘outside’ onto which risk is offloaded.

Renewables, Kern County. Multi-temporal Image, 2004-2024, Landsat 5-8.

California has historically been shaped by technological transformations: from oil fields to Central Valley water projects to the dream factory in Hollywood and the technology boom of Silicon Valley. Today, outside California’s major cities, a new transformation is underway. Its territory is being reorganised with massive renewable energy infrastructure, aligning with the state’s net-zero goal by 2045. Solar arrays, wind farms, battery storage facilities, and the electrical grid are reconfiguring California’s territory. The desert-born transformation is advancing a net-zero promise, revealing a new figure with a magnitude of cities. There is a prevailing optimism that the state will indeed achieve its energy transition. Technology is the answer, but what was the question? Current renewable planning is rooted in a logic of spatial detachment. Utility-scale solar and wind farms are often located in desert enclaves, framed as unavoidable matters of fact through quantifiable parameters such as radiation, wind speed, and land value, and justified by metrics of efficiency and cost. Cities import electricity through long transmission lines, externalising ecological impact and risk beyond the metropolitan field. This centre–periphery configuration already exposes a latent contradiction: an energy system built on abundance yet governed by instability. Intermittency produces curtailment and the persistence of fossil-fuel backup. What emerges is not scarcity, but systemic incapacity to integrate abundance. In this sense, the question silently shaping the energy transition is no longer how to produce more energy, but how to distribute surplus.

The Sun. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre.

A solar economy begins from a different premise: the sun provides more energy than any organism requires for survival. Georges Bataille termed this surplus the “accursed share.” This excess cannot be fully stored nor endlessly redirected into productive use; it demands expenditure. Historically, human societies have developed diverse outlets for this expenditure, ranging from art and luxurious monuments to destructive warfare. This cognitive shift reframes the challenge of the current renewable transition. The challenge is not energy scarcity, but logistics: how excess is distributed and organised. What is at stake is a spatial reorganisation capable of integrating surplus into Earth’s metabolic cycles, allowing human settlements to operate less as figures of extraction and waste, and more as active participants in biospheric regeneration.

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Bay Area, Multi-temporal Image, 2004-2024, Landsat 5-8.

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Las Vegas, Multi-temporal Image, 2004-2024, Landsat 5-8.

Los Angeles, Multi-temporal Image, 2004-2024, Landsat 5-8.

Cities operate in distinct logics. Silicon Valley exemplifies a model of networked expansion, extending its global influence by pushing its enclaves ever outward, often beyond regulatory reach. Las Vegas represents the ultimate expression of this paradigm, defying its resource limits, transforming from nowhere into everywhere. Distinct from this outward drift, Los Angeles historically developed a logic of intensification, harnessing cinematic operation to magnify its local geography and project influence worldwide. Intensification here is not as densification, but as integration: the strategic calibration of material, energy, information, and perception through spatial means. In Los Angeles, this intensification was historically institutional as much as architectural. The studio system consolidated production, distribution, and exhibition into an integrated, self-reinforcing apparatus. At the metropolitan scale, labour regulations such as the Thirty-Mile Zone formalised a governable geography of filming, facilities, and per diems, binding light, land, labour, and logistics into a single managed field. However, as production becomes increasingly platformed, modular and node-based through data centres, remote workflows, and algorithmic commissioning, the older integrative apparatus begins to lose its agency. What once intensified the city through shared infrastructures and legible industrial systems is progressively recast as proprietary protocols: real estate, security, and regulated environments that privilege uptime over urban reciprocity.

Main Street in Culver City, California, 1920s.

Selznick International Pictures Studio. Culver City, 1935.

Goldwyn Studio, Culver City, California, 1919.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Culver City, 1930s.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Culver City, 1930s.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Culver City, 1930s.

The Culver Studios. Culver City, Los Angeles County, Google Earth, 2005.

The Culver Studios. Culver City, Los Angeles County, Google Earth, 2025.

It is within this structural shift that the historic infrastructure of the Hollywood Studio System is now being taken over by Silicon Valley capital, a transformation most visceral in Culver City. Once celebrated as ‘the heart of screenland’, the district is being re-scripted through streaming platforms. Tech firms such as Amazon and Apple are acquiring storied studio lots and adjacent properties, converting them into hermetic corporate campuses. This takeover exceeds economics. It marks a fundamental spatial reconfiguration of the city, as algorithm-driven production logics reshape Los Angeles’s physical infrastructures into a closed operational interface for global data consumption. The former urban apparatus of cinematic intensification is thus displaced by a platform regime that privileges efficiency, enclosure, and scalability over metropolitan reciprocity.

Lakewood Park Grading, Los Angeles County, 1950.

House Frames, Lakewood Park, Los Angeles County, 1950.

Skeletal. Lakewood Park, Los Angeles County, 1950.

Shell. Lakewood Centre, Los Angeles County, 1950.

Lakewood Park, Los Angeles County, 1950.

Lakewood Park, Los Angeles County, 1950.

Foothill Freeway (I-210), La Cañada, Los Angeles County, 1972.

Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange, Los Angeles County, 2009.

The 1946 Zoning Code formalised a Euclidean grammar of separation in Los Angeles, consolidating land-use regulation into a comprehensive plan whose operative baseline was low-density, single-family residential expansion. Synchronised with the postwar build-out of freeways, this regulatory grammar became a mechanism of spatial replication: the highway did not merely connect districts but replicated them, extending a repeatable spatial pattern across the basin. Through this dual regime, Los Angeles grew through horizontal expansion. The city’s edge was repeatedly pushed outward, increasingly into the wildland–urban interface, where housing expansion enlarges the zone of ignition, exposure, and evacuation. What appears as an urban preference thus hardens into spatial inertia, as the pursuit of ‘more’ available land substitutes for spatial complexity and integration.

California Fire Perimeter (Data Source: CAL FIRE)

Sentinel-3. Los Angeles Fire, 9 January 2025.

Before Fire. Palisades, Los Angeles County, California, Google Earth.

After Fire. Palisades, Los Angeles County, California, Google Earth.

Before Fire. Eaton, Los Angeles County, California, Google Earth.

After Fire. Eaton, Los Angeles County, California, Google Earth.

In January 2025, wildfires encroached upon the Los Angeles basin, burning more than 38,000 acres and destroying over 16,000 structures across Southern California. The devastation does not feel real; it feels like a disaster movie. The cinematic image has become the lived reality. This incident is not an anomaly, but the consequence of a century-long policy of fire exclusion, combined with a zoning–freeway regime that multiplied timber-framed housing deep into fire-prone interfaces. Together, these forces produced a built environment that treated the surrounding environment as an inert backdrop and a fixed boundary. Under intensifying climatic disruption, rebuilding in the same way proves insufficient; it calls for a fundamental spatial reorganisation. The fires make visible the terminal condition of expansion: an urbanism that lives through the ongoing production of an “outside” yet repeatedly loses it, thereby pressing intensification as re-integration. Drawing upon Indigenous epistemologies, fire enters the project as a regenerative technique and as a necessity for biospheric metabolic cycles, enhancing the city’s capacity for climate adaptation. To build with fire rather than resist it dissolves the premise of stable conditions of inhabitation. What was once externalised returns as temporal infiltration: fires, fuels, biomass, and maintenance cycles recirculate through anthropogenic settlements. Meanwhile, a solar economy frames energy as persistent surplus and foregrounds abundance as a condition, shifting the challenge from supply to distribution. Intensification responds to these two conditions as an opportunity for reintegration, achieved through spatial reconfiguration. It does not extend territorial footprint in search of a new frontier, nor treat disruption as an exception. It works with complexity as an essential condition for innovation and adaptation, where biospheric processes intensify through penetration and regeneration, and the technosphere intensifies through higher-frequency dispatch, transmission, and feedback enabled by surplus. Such re-territorialisation produces a spatial logic of overlap. Diverse regimes and entities inhabit the same ground, as risks and resources circulate across different temporalities. Space becomes a continuously negotiated set of conditions, organised through ongoing calibration and reconfiguration. In this sense, architecture comes to be reinvented as a cinematic device, working through time and imagination to calibrate how energy, material, space, and information become mutually legible. It shifts our settlement away from the stability promised by settled matters of fact toward matters of concern that persist through time. Research Atlas Technical Study Extended Reading

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