COMPRESSION : TENSION :: NATURE : MANKIND

They're expecting X but you give them Y.
The general walkthrough of a truss steel bridge is expected to be a straight walk with parallel planes of truss – triangular supports that guide you down the path.
Unexpectedly at mid path
You are curiously faced with a decision. Another option presented to you, a choice given
Should you follow your curiousity you will continue on the diamond metal ground and become confronted by a path downwards.
Three four five steps down you begin to acknowledge that the familiar trusses along your path is gradually becoming extended
Or are they seemingly taller because you have gone down a few levels?
Suddenly a vast and extraordinary view is in front of you
At this moment is when it becomes apparent that you are standing at the center point in between two forces that dominate the issues of modern day development:
The natural and the manmade.
The steel bridge and the reminants of the LA river habitat. The sounds of trafficking from freeways and the just as aggressive sound of falling water. The chirps from bird conversations and honking vehicles from human anxiety. A dispute between one’s dominance over another. The capacity and tension of one’s endurance over another. A dance between very different scales and time perceptions in two worlds living inside of one los angeles.
It’s a relationship that Humans feel guilty and morally responsible for. Yet nature manages to seep into the cracks of concrete and unoccupied spaces. Areas where man neglect to maintain or fail to domesticate.
Another flight of stairs await for you to travel downwards
It becomes apparent to you that the steel trusses were indeed growing taller and larger
To the point where it managed to grow and extend into a tensile structure – and then a shelter
Each supporting one another through its forces of tension and compression
– much like systems in nature, humanity and the will to survive amongst all Life forms.
As you enter the structure, the shelter interacts with you through its many long shadows – some hiding as you walk near – others touching and projecting onto you.
At the center of the shelter is a more intimate private space with thicker and multiplied steel rod tensiles. The trianglular shapes created by the structure support the geometry of your bicycle. A small vector diagram suggests that you hang your bicycle onto the structure – as if you’re helping to create a bicycle installation. “The structure can probably support about 30 bicycles if hung,” you think to yourself.
You are comforted by a lowered ceiling, an opening protected by trusses and shadowed by the bottom of the Sunnynook bridge. Here you rest, contemplate, meditate, and reflect upon your history and forecast the possibilities of the future.

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