The Case of the Missing Water: Enacting a Hydrological Spectacle at Silver Lake


The Case of the Missing Water investigates what is missing from the visible landscape of Los Angeles: the vast infrastructure that makes its apparent abundance possible. Reimagining the Silver Lake Reservoir as both water infrastructure and civic space, the project makes the city’s hidden water systems and its underlying scarcity publicly legible. A functional system for harvesting, filtering, and storing drinking water becomes a didactic landscape, using architecture and spectacle to reveal the environmental networks that are typically concealed. Originally completed as a Cornell AAP thesis and awarded the Cornell AAP Richmond Harold Shreve Thesis Prize in 2018, the project was subsequently published in Missing issue of Cornell Journal of Architecture in 2026. This project was also named Honorable Mention for the Steedman Fellowship through Washington University in St. Louis.