BREAKING SMASHING CARING
a proposal for renovating Crenshaw Discount Store in Leimart Park
Instructor: Matthew Au + Mira Henry
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Date: 2021
Crenshaw Discount Store
Located on the western edge of Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Crenshaw Discount Store occupies the shell of Victor Gruen’s first built project in Los Angeles. The front and back face of the store demonstrate the shifting occupants of the building and demographics of the neighborhood over the past 80 years. Remnants of Gruen’s elaborate storefront gestures are painted and plastered over numerous times by the changing occupants. The graphic aesthetic of thin metal sheets and layers of paint are signage strategies attached and applied on the façade, building up uneven layers of surfaces. The project embraces the carefree gestures of past occupancies and amplifies the improvised tectonics of layering. The reimagined portraits capture the novel banality of ad hoc spatial practices, prompting an on-going dialogue between the external layers of a building’s identity and its internal occupancy — a convenient store during the day and an event space a night.
The Party
The act of breaking, smashing, and caring draws inspiration from two dance cultures: Flex and Lion dance. Through facial and body contortions, flexors form a community, expressing and sharing stories of inequality, poverty, violence, and hopelessness. Flex dance confronts issues of social injustice through the exploration of personal narratives that often transmute into joyful artistic expression. Performed on a crowded pedestrian street or in an intimate narrow motel corridor, flexing is a modern street dance that distorts and challenges the perception of bodies in relation to space. On the other hand, lion dance is an ancient ritual, performed during celebratory events. Lion dancers perform the ritual wearing a colorful, elaborate lion headdress, “a shapeshifting second skin” as Andrew Thomas Huang put. The construction of the headdress is an artistic craft. Using cheap and affordable materials, like thin bamboo sticks, papier-mâché, glossy prints, furry accessories, strings, and metal clippers, the exterior of the headdress is hyper elaborate, but the tectonic construction is exposed on the interior.
The Centerpiece
The lion headdress inspires the party’s centerpiece to be extremely colorful and elaborate, assembled with materials that can be found in the Crenshaw Discount Store. Tablecloths are sewed and stitched with zippers and strapped with Velcro to be easily assembled and lifted with pulley system for the party, then cleaned, disassembled, folded, and stored away after the party. The convenient store’s floor and shelving units are carefully covered with sewed tablecloths to protect the facilities during the party. Underneath the centerpiece, an arrangement of fruits awaits to be smashed.
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Date: 2021
Crenshaw Discount Store
Located on the western edge of Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, Crenshaw Discount Store occupies the shell of Victor Gruen’s first built project in Los Angeles. The front and back face of the store demonstrate the shifting occupants of the building and demographics of the neighborhood over the past 80 years. Remnants of Gruen’s elaborate storefront gestures are painted and plastered over numerous times by the changing occupants. The graphic aesthetic of thin metal sheets and layers of paint are signage strategies attached and applied on the façade, building up uneven layers of surfaces. The project embraces the carefree gestures of past occupancies and amplifies the improvised tectonics of layering. The reimagined portraits capture the novel banality of ad hoc spatial practices, prompting an on-going dialogue between the external layers of a building’s identity and its internal occupancy — a convenient store during the day and an event space a night.
The Party
The act of breaking, smashing, and caring draws inspiration from two dance cultures: Flex and Lion dance. Through facial and body contortions, flexors form a community, expressing and sharing stories of inequality, poverty, violence, and hopelessness. Flex dance confronts issues of social injustice through the exploration of personal narratives that often transmute into joyful artistic expression. Performed on a crowded pedestrian street or in an intimate narrow motel corridor, flexing is a modern street dance that distorts and challenges the perception of bodies in relation to space. On the other hand, lion dance is an ancient ritual, performed during celebratory events. Lion dancers perform the ritual wearing a colorful, elaborate lion headdress, “a shapeshifting second skin” as Andrew Thomas Huang put. The construction of the headdress is an artistic craft. Using cheap and affordable materials, like thin bamboo sticks, papier-mâché, glossy prints, furry accessories, strings, and metal clippers, the exterior of the headdress is hyper elaborate, but the tectonic construction is exposed on the interior.
The Centerpiece
The lion headdress inspires the party’s centerpiece to be extremely colorful and elaborate, assembled with materials that can be found in the Crenshaw Discount Store. Tablecloths are sewed and stitched with zippers and strapped with Velcro to be easily assembled and lifted with pulley system for the party, then cleaned, disassembled, folded, and stored away after the party. The convenient store’s floor and shelving units are carefully covered with sewed tablecloths to protect the facilities during the party. Underneath the centerpiece, an arrangement of fruits awaits to be smashed.
