A Compound of Four Loosely Planned Structures for Two Artists
The LADG (The Los Angeles Design Group)
A multifaceted art studio and residential compound designed by the Los Angeles Design GroupThe LADG is flipping the stereotype of suburban living in the City of Angels on its head. Los Angeles 1 was built for a pair of professional visual artists, a painter and a photographer.
Situated in the middle of a residential block in Los Angeles’s Highland Park neighborhood, the compound’s four structures are joined to the street by a long drive and scatter fluidly across the expansive half-acre hilltop lot, redefining traditionally compact, front-facing suburban architecture across Los Angeles. The project comprises an addition to the clients’ existing mid-century home, a guest house that provides studio space for their work, and dedicated structures for exhibitions and events.
“Our project defies and reorganizes some of the architectural tropes associated with LA suburbia,” says Claus Benjamin Freyinger, co-founder and co-principal of The LADG. “It’s not a single house with a unified program, meant to contain a sleeping family at night, who commute off to work and school lives in the morning. It’s a collection of buildings that integrates work, living, and communal activities around the livelihoods of two artists.”
Visually, the various structures are connected by a collection of freestanding walls that were inspired by the site’s existing ranch house.
The extreme looseness of the plan is the defining feature, turning the entire site into a series of rooms that stand alone between a smattering of walls, unbound by roofs and disconnected as if standing in a field. As a result, reciprocal relationships emerge between spaces that may be out of view of one another, on opposite sides of a wall. The crenellation in a wall for the bathroom sink and vanity in the studio building, for instance, could be used as a shelf for garden tools when considered from the courtyard side. This reciprocity exists throughout, with little jogs in the compound’s surfaces serving a mundane, programmatic function on one side, and some kind of sculptural, more spontaneous role on another. This versatility responds to the specific desires of the clients for a casual indoor-outdoor lifestyle to which Angelenos aspire.
“While much of the conversation about contemporary architecture has shifted to Downtown Los Angeles, we think there is a role for the suburbs in setting the agenda for progressive design,” says Freyinger. “The single-family home has helped define what it means to be an Angelo.”
Project: house in Los Angeles 1 / Location: Los Angeles, CA / Architect: The LADG (Los Angeles Design Group) / Project team: William Adams, Lori Choi, Anthony Chu, Kenji Hattori, Thomas Po / peani, / Jonathan Rieke, Morgan Starkey, Trenman Yau / Structural engineer: Kwesi Asamoah / Lighting designer: Alex Babiani / Civil Engineer: Daryl Kessler, KES Technologies / Contractor: T.R. Wurster Construction Company Inc. / Geology and Soils: Christina Clark, Irvine Geotech / Site area: 28,000 sf lot / Bldg. area: approximately 2,000sf enclosed area in new construction / Important manufacturers / Consultants: Lighting – GE Porcelain base, Juno Theatrical Lighting, Hubbell Vaportile; AC – samsung ceiling cassette, Mitsubishi wall unit; Wall surfaces – drywall, exposed studs, reinforced plastic sheathing (interior), elastomeric smooth trowel stucco, asphalt shingle, boardform CIP concrete; Roof – custom-bilt standing seam metal roof / Design: 2015 / Completion: 2019 / Photograph: Injinash Unshin, Saam Gabay
