Processes + Theories; Ideas + Prototypes; B-Sides + Outputs
Video, by LA Times
Here is the latest prefab urban project, the Palm House, in Venice, California, by the architects Marmol Radziner and associates. The house will be open to visitors and Leo Marmol will speak on the prefab process and its role in today’s housing market. This is also a nice opportunity to see the Vienna Way residence which sits right beside. Please see their website for more information. The Palms House is located at 734 Palms Blvd. in Venice, CA. Enjoy!
A little bit more informations for our research on the Image, Identity and Integration in the Los Angeles housing development… I found these two videos about the Rainbow Apartments; a significant project, designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture, for the homeless community in Los Angeles. According to the Institute for the Study of Homelessness, an estimated 254,000 men, women and children experience homelessness in Los Angeles County.
As you will see here, this building goes well beyond the kind of project that would be developed for this kind of community - the homeless. With this project Michael Maltzan breaks the traditional paradigm of what affordable houses are and changes its dynamic. “The Rainbow apartments set up a new model not only for a building, but for an entire combination of social enterprises, and not only produces a new paradigms just for Los Angeles, but the possibility of creating a new national model,” says Maltzan. Besides, the project addresses how to counteract the insularity and hermetic nature of the inhabitants’ daily lives and concerns over safety and security, introducing openness, social spaces, and enabling a reintegration of their lives into public life as a whole. Arranged in a partially open U-shaped configuration, five floors of residential units cradle a central courtyard on top of a socle of parking and administrative functions on the ground floor. A chain of public spaces and exterior gathering areas are carved out or extruded from the mass to erode the building’s apparent solidity, creating varying depths of connection and views between the internal life of the courtyard and the world outside.
Few months ago, I got the chance to interview the architect Lawrence Scarpa, principal of Pugh+Scarpa, on the impact of sustainable design on the figure and integration of his own house, the Solar Umbrella, in Venice. Inspired by Paul Rudolph’s Umbrella House of 1953, the Solar Umbrella provides a contemporary reinvention of the solar canopy—a strategy that provides thermal protection in climates with intense exposures—using photovoltaic panels to provide 100% of the home’s energy needs.
Today, with the Cherokee Lofts, Pugh+Scarpa pushes “Green” edge design to a superior level and breaks ground with another green mixed-use housing project. For these architects, sustainability is always considered a top priority, with the goal of building responsible living for the 21st century. The architect, Pugh+Scarpa, is a leader and pioneer in green building, an unprecedented two time winner of AIA Top 10 Green Building Award plus 100 other awards and accolades.
Continue reading ‘Cherokee Lofts Breaks Ground?, Pugh+Scarpa Architects’
Stockman Residence, © Roger Kurath, Designer
Located in Santa Monica, the Stockman Residence sits on a tight corner lot, at a very busy street intersection. The house is surrounded by tall apartment buildings on the south side and a modest park with dense treed areas on the east side. “Within this context, the traditional house typology with front yard, front porch and back yard is ill-suited and demands to be re-imagined so to better respond to its surrounding,” says the designer, Roger Kurath.
Continue reading ‘Stockman Residence, Los Angeles’
CAR CULTURE IN LOS ANGELES
In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the image and identity of the architectural landscape is not only associated with the diversity of cultural influences, but also defined by the complex, extensive freeway networks that criss-cross the still fast-growing region.
POPULATION GROWTH VS HOUSE TYPOLOGY
Los Angeles continues to increase in density and there is now an urgent need for more people to find a place to live inside the city. However, the desire of the inhabitants who already live within the urban areas is to continue keeping the current low density which resembles that of a suburb. Consequently the results of this tension disturb not only the form of the urban landscape of LA, but also begin to severely transform both the shape and identity of its domestic typologies. Roger Sherman of Roger Sherman Architecture + Urban Design states that today “Los Angeles needs to build more within its existing size, within its existing footprint.”
Continue reading ‘3-in-1 House (Schab-Sherman Residence)’
In the summer of 2005, I got the chance to visit the Solar Umbrella House during the AIA Venice Home Tour. I was very interested by the way the architect and owner, Lawrence Scarpa, integrated a new addition to an existing 1920’s one story bungalow. Soon after, I contacted him to discuss on the image, identity and integration of his house.
Here is my interview with Lawrence Scarpa of Pugh + Scarpa Architecture
Pictures of the house by Marvin Rand
Continue reading ‘Solar Umbrella House, Pugh+Scarpa Architecture’
Existing house
The Box House replaces one of several California-modern homes built in a 1950’s planned development in Portola Valley, California. This neighborhood was laced with walking trails and mature landscape that helped separate the closely sited dwellings that were based on a style celebrating inside/outside qualities of living. Within this constructed environment, fabricated on conventional mid-twentieth century notion of “modern living,” the house found itself in direct dialogue with past and contemporary notions of landscape, dwelling, and the functions of the “modern” home.
Continue reading ‘Box House’
Located on a corner site at 17th and Hope streets in downtown Los Angeles, the project proposes a 6-story apartment building that includes approximately 87 efficiency units of senior affordable housing, community recreation room, communal dining room, kitchen, laundry, and administrative spaces. The site is adjacent to a freeway on-ramp connecting to the 10/110 Freeway interchange and is within blocks of the Staples Convention Center to the west and the California Hospital Medical Center to the north. The transitional character of its location at the edge of downtown and adjacency to the freeway requires the project address environmental factors such as safety, noise, and privacy.
Continue reading ‘New Carver Apartments’
THE EVOLUTION OF LOS ANGELES
The image and identity of Los Angeles architecture, especially its housing typology can best be understood through the evolution of the city as a cultural entity.
Los Angeles always has been a metropolis with great distinctions and as Michael Webb has stated: “Los Angeles has lured the struggling and the ambitious from all around the world.” For architects, the city is a unique territory to test news forms, programs and arrangements as well as to explore audacious and eccentric building design.