Santa Monica Beach Facility

The design responds to a contradictory spatial demand: it must remain enclosed, quiet, and sheltering on the exterior while creating the greatest possible openness, brightness, and connectivity within. The building is therefore treated as a protective shell—presenting a restrained, opaque edge when seen from the street, filtering out the surrounding environment—yet once inside, the space opens up, allowing light, sightlines, and human activity to flow freely throughout the interior.

The scheme generates the shell's form through reverse-engineered modeling and an origami-derived logic, so that the building reads as a single, continuous folded skin. Its concept lies not in simply producing a sense of enclosure, but in establishing a tension between the apparently closed and the actually open: the exterior forms a clear, defined interface, while the interior unfolds into an unexpectedly open setting—letting occupants feel enveloped and, at the same time, attuned to lightness, brightness, and spatial continuity.