Lymph- tonic
Overview
Fitness floors and a data center, stacked into a single thermal system.
Site
Where
It Sits
A corner lot at 6th and Hope in the Financial District, hemmed in on every side. That constraint is why the section stacks fitness floors over a data hall: the only direction available is up.
Concept: Thermal Logic
"Fitness and data infrastructure make the same demands on a building: heat rejection, controlled air, continuous circulation. The section stacks them rather than separating them."
The section does not separate these programs. It forces them into a single structural frame where the exchange between them becomes the architecture. The pool sits directly above the data center: water becomes a ceiling, filtering light into the fitness floor while thermally separating it from the server infrastructure below.
Site Mapping
Downtown
LA 6th Hope
Diagrammatic exploration of spatial flows, density, and site boundaries to inform the building's orientation and massing. The site sits at a major convergence of transit, infrastructure, and pedestrian flow in downtown Los Angeles.
The site analysis radiates outward from the building's footprint, mapping sun angles, pedestrian desire lines, and program adjacencies across the urban block.
Form Extraction
From 2D
to 3D Mass
Conceptual volumes generated through translation and rotation of movement data into architectural gestures. The massing model begins as a cube, the most neutral container, which is then carved by the profiles of athletes in motion.
Final Drawings
Final board 1 · Plan
Final board 2 · Section
Final board 3 · Axonometric
Final board 5 · Exploded view
From the Film
Inside
the Building
A moment from the short film, inside the building.
Final board 4 · Sectional Axonometric
Suspended
at Contact
The building touches down at only a few points, spiking through the suspended pool. The slight curves, still representing the inevitable movement of athletes, meet at sharp corners, forming both the massing and the water that flows through it continuously.
Midterm Model
Reconfigured
Cube
Starting with a cube with ranging pieces that interlock and slide into each other, to reconfiguring and morphing it into a new, complex massing model. The physical model makes the logic of subtraction tactile: you can see the voids left by athletic silhouettes.
Midterm Model, Another View
Kinetic Inspiration
Motion
into Form
Photographic abstraction of motion and performance used as formal inspiration for the building's tectonics. Athletic movement, the stretch, the pivot, the suspended moment, is translated into architectural gesture.
Beginning with moving sports figures, morphing them into abstract shapes became a method of cutting into one singular cube, forming new three-dimensional shapes from the original 2D silhouettes.
From the Short Film
Moving
Through
Short Film Views
Three
Atmospheres
Rendered in Unreal Engine 5, the short film moves through the building and around it: the pool surface seen from below, then the building from outside, over the pool and under its body.
