Channel, the project from which this folio is drawn, considers the site of the Los Angeles River, describing a place where nature has become preternatural. The natural river is a cyclical body of water, surging with snowmelt and late-winter rain, that forms in the San Fernando Valley. Its alluvial plain shaped the land over which Los Angeles now sprawls. Its counterpart is a concrete river built by engineers beginning in 1938 after a series of devastating floods. The flowing river is perennial and elemental, charting geological time. The constructed river is vulnerable and finite, a fossil of the future.
