Interchange

There’s something that’s very grand about freeway interchanges in the US. It’s the scale combined with the overlapping planes and the curving shapes, and the motion of the vehicles. Actually, I think even if you took the vehicles away they’d still work well… maybe even better because you’d have some silence instead of constant traffic drone. These ramps and interchanges are very photogenic, as you’ll find in this flickr group on Highway Overpasses and Ramps.

I was doing some research the other day at work on the development of city forms, and I came across this image in Gallion & Eisner’s The Urban Pattern.

I had never seen a diagram that broke down the different type of interchanges, so I thought the image intriguing. Doing a web search after that pulled up several other images that are pretty great. This site has aerial images of Los Angeles interchanges.

LA's "Steel Cloud" (1988)

Back in 1988, Los Angeles had a competition to build a $33-million monument sculpture over the Hollywood Freeway between Olvera Street and the Civic Center.

It was supposed to rival New York's Statue of Liberty and St. Louis' Gateway Arch. The selection committee chose the "Steel Cloud" entry by New York architects Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture (now of Asymptote).

The glass-and-steel structure was to rise up to twelve stories above the Hollywood Freeway in
downtown Los Angeles and was to be linked by bridges to the city's ethnic neighborhoods. Passersby wouldl peer at 140-ft.-high aquariums and view scenes from Hollywood films projected on large silver screens. Asymptote's website describes it:

"The Steel Cloud, a monument to Pacific Rim immigraionto the United States, occupies a zone directly above the median strip of the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles. In an attempt to situate the monument in the context of the late 20th century an episodic architecture is proposed that is inspired by the optical phenomena, surveillance technology, telecommunication advances and the proliferation of information. This is a living monument, accomodating galleries, libraries, theaters, cinemas, parks, and plazas that are intersected by the fluid and transient spaces of the city."

Asymptote offers some model photographs as well:





Maybe Frank Gehry's billowing metal Disney Hall drew some inspiration from this idea?