These Winning Low-Rise Designs Are a Blueprint for Better Housing—and Better Living—in Los Angeles

The City of Los Angeles has announced the winners of its latest design contest, which crowdsourced innovative housing solutions that are sustainable, affordable, and equitable.

May 17, 2021 - 23:17

These Winning Low-Rise Designs Are a Blueprint for Better Housing—and Better Living—in Los Angeles

The City of Los Angeles has announced the winners of its latest design contest, which crowdsourced innovative housing solutions that are sustainable, affordable, and equitable.

This concept by New York–based architecture firm ROART came in third place in the (Re)Distribution category. Called Constellations, it imagines an array of designs configured across the city, as if the stars had fallen to create a map.

Amid Los Angeles’s ongoing housing crisis, the city and its chief design officer, Christopher Hawthorne, have announced the winners of Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles, a $100,000 design challenge to promote affordable and sustainable models of low-rise, multifamily architecture.

"The wide-ranging expertise on the jury—and the requirement that all entrants watch the community-engagement listening sessions—has produced results that are noticeably different from a typical design competition, which was very much our hope," says Hawthorne.

Frogtown Four, a design by Los Angeles–based architect Bestor Architecture, took second place in the Fourplex category. The arrangement, which provides four new units under a common roof, is meant as a low-key intervention that don’t disrupt the existing streetscape.
Courtesy of Low-Rise Design Challenge

First-place winners were chosen in each of the contest’s four categories: Los Angeles locals Omgivning, along with landscape architects Studio-MLA, took first in the Fourplex category; Green Valley Housing won out in Subdivision; New York–based multidisciplinary design firm Vonn Weisenberger took first in Corners; and Arts + Creatives Designs Ltd., from the UK, won for (Re)Distribution. Each firm was awarded $10,000.

"These winners offer a really comprehensive set of ideas and solutions for new housing options," says Hawthorne, "rather than design experimentation for its own sake."

Launched in November 2020 as part of a larger research initiative supported by the James Irvine Foundation, the design challenge builds on Los Angeles’s ongoing efforts to crowdsource design solutions. The contest take cues from the Case Study Houses program, which commissioned inexpensive architectural designs from midcentury greats like Richard Neutra, Eero Saarinen, and the Eamses.

Bureau Spectacular’s entry, a runner-up in the Subdivision category, proposes pre-approved construction sites and permitting to keep costs low from the start.
Courtesy of Low-Rise Design Challenge

Unlike the Case Study Houses, however, the winning Low-Rise proposals have been evaluated on a wider set of criteria beyond aesthetics and affordability to include considerations of climate change, healthy post-COVID living models, and the history of racism and environmental injustice in Southern Californian housing policy.

While the city has yet to address these broader issues head-on due to stalled policy debates, competition organizers view the design challenge as at least a "single step" toward opening up the conversation about practical solutions.

"They will set the stage for a process of reengagement with L.A.’s low-rise neighborhoods—one that will be well timed to inform the ongoing updates led by the Department of City Planning," reads a statement by the Low-Rise contest organizers. "They will be part of a larger process to reimagine what it means to live the good life in Southern California—and to understand the ways in which the good life, to be good for everyone, must also be sustainable and equitable."

Fourplex Category Winners: Omgivning and Studio-MLA

Titled Hidden Gardens for its emphasis on indoor/outdoor connections, the winning Fourplex proposal implements three individual two-story housing blocks on a 50-by-150-foot lot. Adaptability, community, and sustainability are the main themes of the garden-filled model, which advocates for a flexible design that can adapt to various user needs, including multigenerational living within different units on the same lot.