Patrick Tighe Believes the Future of Los Angeles Is Affordable
From his office near the Culver City Arts District, the architect challenges ideas about how low-cost housing should look.
From his office near the Culver City Arts District, the architect challenges ideas about how low-cost housing should look.
Since as far back as the days of Garbo, Bogey, and the old Red Car trolley line, affordable housing in Los Angeles has typically meant one thing: new houses, most likely built in some previously undeveloped patch of dust and chaparral. There have always been apartments, of course—in particular the midcentury "dingbat" type, hoisted atop thin pilot is—and here and there a smattering of postwar public housing projects. Yet by and large, the area has remained the poster child for all-American sprawl, countering rising real estate costs by letting private developers follow the freeways, littering single-family homes along the way.
Architect Patrick Tighe displays models for some of his higher-density housing projects in his L.A. studio. Though his practice spans from mixed-use and commercial developments to high-end single-family homes and co-living communities, his portfolio has always included affordable housing.
Photo: Ye Rin Mok
Those days are over. "There are so many incentives at this point for developers to build affordable multiunit projects," says L.A. architect Patrick Tighe. With its geographical expansion slowing, and with once low-rent neighborhoods rapidly gentrifying, the city is intensifying efforts to create subsidized apartment buildings wherever room can be found to put them.
Tighe’s 50,000-square-foot La Brea project in West Hollywood provides 32 apartments designed to help people who formerly lacked housing as they transition back to domestic life. Its semi-enclosed balconies are shielded by a dramatic lattice that opens into flowing ribbons at the building’s southeast corner. "We had this idea of creating spaces connected to the city and to the street, but also protected and safe," Tighe says.
Photo: Ye Rin Mok
The trajectory of Tighe’s practice is symptomatic of this shift. While the firm still designs some single-family homes and other types of projects, Tighe Architecture has also focused on higher density housing, from multifamily to accessory dwelling units. Over the last decade, it has been increasingly involved in the affordable sector, designing buildings in which all or a portion of the units are available at below-market rates. "We don’t discriminate between a wealthy client and a nonprofit," Tighe says. As L.A. looks to build a more equitable future, Tighe and company are showing what that future could be.
Also in West Hollywood, Tighe’s Sierra Bonita development features 42 affordable one-bedroom units. The five-story structure wears its sense of social mission on its sleeve, with a large photovoltaic array creeping ivy-like up the western facade and over the top, where it forms a sunshade for the terraces on the roof. "It also had the first graywater system in the city," Tighe says. The cyclical plumbing system greatly reduces Sierra Bonita’s dependence on the region’s overtaxed resources.
Photo: Ye Rin Mok
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