Project 07, 2nd Edition Modern Construction Case Studies - Precedent: Witney Museum, NYC designed by Marcel Breuer
Performing the Urban Future: Project 07 as Speculative Vessel
Project 07 is an entertainment center located in Los Angeles that refuses the traditional typologies of the standalone icon or the passive container. Instead, it emerges as a speculative architectural vessel—a dynamic, performative framework designed to provoke, enable, and accommodate emergent urban life. The project engages directly with the legacy of experimental architecture, drawing from radical thinkers like Cedric Price and Lebbeus Woods, who challenged architecture's disciplinary boundaries and reimagined it as an agent of transformation rather than a fixed object of permanence.
At the edge of a fragmented urban condition—adjacent to an arena and surrounded by large-scale developments lacking urban coherence—Project 07 confronts disconnection with formal defiance and programmatic invitation. Its prow-like extension, projecting assertively into the city, is not simply a sculptural flourish. It is a performative device, an architectural limb reaching outward to destabilize the inert fabric around it. In the tradition of Woods, this gesture is a “rupture”—a calculated interference that creates space for alternative narratives, temporary interventions, and spatial instability. It marks the building not as a resolution, but as a question posed to the city.
Beneath this prow, the project introduces a publicly accessible void, conceived as a programmable interstice—a zone of indeterminacy intended to host temporary, adaptive, and spontaneous activities. Drawing directly from Cedric Price’s Fun Palace (1961), this space is understood not through its architectural form alone but through its potential for use, transformation, and reinvention. As Price famously argued, architecture must be "anticipatory"—a support system for life as it unfolds, not a fossilized blueprint of intention. Project 07 adopts this logic fully, providing infrastructure without dictating use, form without closure.
Internally, the building houses a range of entertainment functions—gaming rooms, cinema spaces, sports halls, and hospitality areas—all folded into a continuous vessel-like form. Yet this enclosure does not seek totality or control. Instead, the design embraces ambiguity and openness, allowing for interstitial zones, overlaps, and moments of spatial negotiation. This resonates with Lebbeus Woods’ call for an architecture of resistance—one that thrives in instability, encourages appropriation, and finds its meaning in use, not prescription. Architecture, in this sense, becomes not a backdrop but an instrument—always in flux, always in play.
The vessel metaphor, central to Project 07, echoes earlier precedents such as Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum (1966). While materially brutalist and formally autonomous, the Whitney engaged the city through its layered entry conditions and sculptural civic presence. Yet where Breuer’s vessel stood apart, Project 07 seeks to reconnect, using its form to facilitate interaction rather than monumentality. It bridges rather than isolates, acting less as an object in the city and more as an urban prosthetic—an extension of public life, desire, and possibility.
In this way, Project 07 positions itself within a lineage of speculative architectural thinking—not as an aesthetic proposition, but as a critical provocation. It interrogates what a building can be when it is designed not to symbolize completion, but to catalyze transformation. As the boundaries between architecture, event, and performance blur, the project offers an open-ended structure that resists closure and encourages appropriation. It is not a singular object but a temporal field, where design becomes a tool for negotiating futures rather than preserving the past.
In an era where architecture is increasingly commodified and hyper-programmed, Project 07 reclaims the radical potential of space: to act, to change, and to speculate. It is not merely an entertainment center. It is a performative vessel for urban futures, grounded in the experimental legacy of those who believed architecture could—and should—do more.
References
Kolarevic, B., & Malkawi, A. (2005). Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality.
Hardingham, S (2016) Cedric Price Works 1952–2003).
Woods, L. (1992). Radical Reconstruction.
