CYBERPUNK-PUNK: Hacking Downtown Los Angeles
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Stewart-alexstew-arch-march-2026-thesis.pdf
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160.75 MB
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a37c12e07fbeb0cd851462f5e6ff2823
Author(s)
Stewart, Alexander
Advisor(s)
Crosetto Brizzio, Rocio
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
In the 60s, the cyberpunk genre first weaved stories of everyday individual lives struggling against an impossibly organized and oppressive techno-commercialist system. Over time, it was absorbed into mainstream media and deprived of its teeth. But the subject matter that cyberpunk stories warned us about is now more pressing than ever, especially in Los Angeles. The largest population of unhoused people in the country seeks shelter mere blocks away from the financial district. Developments are either underfunded and in disrepair, or gentrifying and displacing. All of the hallmarks of the Second Gilded Age permeate alarmingly across Downtown, from the flashy LA Live to the ad hoc Santee Alley, from the unrealized Graffiti Towers to the bankrupt Skid Row Housing Trust. It is imperative that we bring a new, context-adaptive approach–a new cyber, and a new punk–to architecture. The ideas of the likes of Cedric Price, Kiyonori Kikutake, and Archigram must be assessed, authenticated, and adapted to a post-postmodern culture that is more fluctuating and more globalized than ever. This thesis tells the story of rebelliously designed alternative spaces tailor-fit to the nomadic, fluctuating needs of Downtown Los Angeles’s near-future “underbelly.” Sometimes covert, sometimes loud; sometimes intimate, sometimes public; CYBERPUNK-PUNK identifies ten key sites across the metropolis and proposes a two-pronged approach to engaging with them. First, an easy-assembly infrastructural framework is installed in the site. Second, a set of nomadic architectural products (each one collapsible, portable, and modifiable) is deployed onto the framework, programming the infrastructure for anything from temporary shelter, to greenhouse, to bathroom, to kitchen, to camouflage, to jumbotron. The parts of this kit may be switched out to better suit the needs of the community—as such, the infrastructural framework acts as a canvas to be painted and repainted as the users see fit, combining flexibility with accessibility. The result, this thesis posits, is a reappropriation of available technologies, resources, and real estate; an evening of the odds; a revitalized re-punking of America’s most cyberpunk city.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
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