Project Description
This project was selected as a winner in the 2019 Residential Architect Design Awards
Affordable Housing, Citation
Local firm Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects (LOHA) designed the bright four-story MLK1101 Supportive Housing for an infill site on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in South Los Angeles. The 38,000-square-foot building provides 26 affordable apartments (from studios to three bedrooms) for the previously homeless. The L-shaped parti allows for abundant daylight and cross ventilation in every unit, reducing heating, cooling, and artificial lighting loads to attain LEED Gold certification. Exterior corridors, subtly different in plan on each floor, define the north and east edges of an elevated courtyard that provides a green gathering space for residents.
Two glazed, street-level retail spaces generate income to help subsidize the development, and a stair connects the sidewalk to the second-level courtyard, fostering social interaction with the broader Los Angeles community. A community room opens to the courtyard and provides residents with shared kitchen and dining areas to encourage both planned and impromptu gatherings. The courtyard features drought-tolerant plantings and edible gardens that allow residents to grow their own food.
LOHA designed the simple façades as an inexpensive combination of white metal panels with vertical fins and painted cement board. Metal handrails and screens keep the exterior corridors light and airy, sharing architectural affinities with Southern California predecessors like Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. MLK1101 demonstrates that good design can help affordable housing provide a good home.
This article appeared in the October 2019 issue of ARCHITECT:
The green roof that swoops down to the ground to invite entry has become a bit of cliché in contemporary architecture. But while the move has typically been seen in pricey cultural and institutional projects, it’s now trickled down to affordable housing. In South Los Angeles, it helps define the primary entrance to Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects’ (LOHA) MLK1101 Supportive Housing, which sits on an infill site along Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard. Located near Exposition Park and about a quarter-mile west of the Los Angeles Coliseum, LOHA principal Lorcan O’Herlihy, FAIA, describes the area as a dense neighborhood with mostly low-scale development, where two-story construction is the norm.
MLK1101 is a 34,000-square-foot complex with 26 affordable studio to three-bedroom apartment units, whose tenants include formerly homeless veterans, chronically homeless individuals, and low-income households. A stair between the green- and gable-roofed hexagonal glass pavilion and the volume of the apartment building proper leads to a second-floor plaza—it sits atop ground-level parking—that serves as a community garden. This shared public space is the heart of the project: Dubbed an outdoor living room by the architects, it includes raised planting beds where the tenants grow edible plants.
Creating community and connecting the residents to the neighborhood is important because they’re transitioning from homelessness to a home: “These buildings need to have a connection to the street,” O’Herlihy says, which isn’t typical of Los Angeles’s urban life. “Historically, LA has not recognized the street as a public realm. It doesn’t embrace the idea of public green space.”
The hexagonal green-roofed structure serves multiple purposes. “On the street level, it’s a retail component where we folded the roof down,” O’Herlihy says, noting that retail helps integrate the building into the neighborhood, provide employment opportunities for the tenants, and generate income to subsidize the complex. Its second floor opens to the plaza-level courtyard and houses a community room for residents.
Los Angeles’s mild climate allows for exterior corridors and open stairs that link the plaza to the second and third floors, and the units to one another; LOHA varied the widths of these spaces to provide more outdoor gathering space while enlivening the building’s exterior.
The simple façades are clad in economical white metal panels with vertical fins and painted cement board. The all-white expression is not atypical of LOHA’s work, and builds on a substantial body of classic LA architectural history, recalling Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, among others. “The color white plays a great role,” O’Herlihy says. “There are so many colors within that color, in how the sun hits it.” The shading and the shadows change over the course of the day, particularly since the architects have modulated the façades with subtle setbacks and chamfers that vary from floor to floor.
The complex’s construction is straightforward and economical. The single-story podium is concrete, which provides the required fire separation between the parking garage and the apartments, which are built using conventional wood-frame construction.
The L-shaped plan allows cross ventilation in each unit, lowering cooling costs while providing abundant fresh air for the tenants. The LEED Gold complex features high-efficiency heating and cooling through individual fan-coil units, a hot-water system that heats water using solar arrays on the roof, on-site storage for bicycles, EV charging stations for cars, and fewer parking spots than usual to promote the use of public transportation.
O’Herlihy notes that LA has long neglected multifamily housing as an important architectural type, preferring to honor the single-family dwelling. “I believe the new paradigm is larger scale infill projects like this,” he says. “It’s a shift that Los Angeles is experiencing, aided by a better public transportation system.” If so, LOHA’s MLK1101 proves that the type can be a desirable addition to the city, while helping mitigate homelessness. Those are difficult challenges met with high aspirations
and thoughtful execution.
Project Credits
Project: MLK1101 Supportive Housing
Client: Clifford Beers Housing
Architect: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, Los Angeles . Lorcan O’Herlihy, FAIA (principal); Santiago Tolosa, Nick Hopson, Ghazal Khezri, Chris Gassaway, Christopher Lim, Dana Lydon (project team)
General Contractor: GB Construction
Landscape Architect: LINK Landscape Architecture
Structural Engineer: John Labib & Associates
Civil/MEP Engineer: SY Lee & Associates
Size: 34,000 square feet (with 4,000-square-foot park space)
Cost: Withheld
Materials and Sources
Acoustical System: Pliteq (GenieMat PMI-05 Type R rebonded recycled rubber perimeter isolation strip)
Appliances: Maytag (MAT14PD washer in white; MDE/MDG25PD dryer in white)
Bathroom Fixtures: American Standard (2391.202 tub in white; 8336.230 toilet paper holder in polished chrome; 1662.214 shower kit in polished chrome; 2064.210 towel hook; 2064.018 towel bar; 0610.000 bathroom sink in white; 1660.613 shower head in chrome finish; T010500.002 tub volume control; 888.086 tub spoint in starlight chrome); Bobrick (B-4288 toilet paper holder; Bobrick B-4221seat cover dispenser; B-4112 soap dispenser; B-4262 paper towel dispenser); Kohler (K-99890 medicine cabinet; K-3519 water closet in white)
Carpet: Shaw Floors (XV442, Windy City)
Cabinets: solid wood plywood, white
Countertops: Formica (plastic laminate); Wilsonart (solid surface)
Exterior Wall Systems: Metal Sales (T16-E Wall Panel); James Hardie (high-density fiber cement board, painted white)
Flooring: Marmoleum (Walton linoleum flooring in Uni-Black); Cali Bamboo (Fossilized)
Kitchen Fixtures: Frigidaire (FFET1222Q, FFHT1831Q refrigerator/freezer; FGM0205KF microwave in stainless steel; FFGS3025PS oven/cook top in stainless steel; FDB2410H dishwasher in stainless steel); Summit (WNM6307DFK oven/cook top, in white); Minka Aire (F833-WH ceiling fan, in white); Air King (ESZ303ADA range hood, in white); General Electric (GFC1020T food waste disposal); American Standard (4931.300 kitchen faucet, in chrome finish; 24DB.332211.290 kitchen sink, in stainless steel)
Lighting: DMF (DRD2 recessed LED downlight; DEL40 LED low-profile emergency lighting; DLS62 architectural LED edge-lit exit sign with battery backup); LA Lighting (LED strip light, 1-STR220 Series); GlobaLux (LED Premium High Bay); RAB Lighting (VXBRLED13NDG); AFX (Algiers LED Vanity ALV Series); Progress Lighting (52” ceiling fan with light kit)
Metal: Construction Specialties (RS-4300 storm-resistant fixed horizontal louver)
Paints/Finishes: Dunn Edwards (DEW338 “White Heat,” in eggshell and semi-gloss)
Roofing: Carlisle (Sure-Weld TPO reinforced membrane)
Site and Landscape Products: Hydrotech (green roof)
Windows/Doors: VPI Quality Windows (Endurance Series, vinyl); Arcadia A450 Series, AFG451 Series storefront)
FROM THE ARCHITECTS:
LOHA's design for MLK1101 supportive housing aims to create an environment that encourages health and community, acknowledging that successful social spaces come through a variety of planned and organic strategies. LOHA implements several design strategies that open the building towards the street and foster a sense of community within the neighborhood. LOHA capitalizes on a requirement for on-site parking to create an elevated community garden and social hub for residents and neighbors.
LOHA’s design will further integrate the building into the community by establishing a street presence through a storefront space and a widened staircase that connects the street to the community spaces one level up. this stoop is a gathering space and a public gesture, encouraging the types of resident and neighborhood interaction often missing in supporting housing. responding to an urgent need in Los Angeles for housing catered to formerly homeless veterans and chronically homeless and low-income households, LOHA is collaborating with Clifford Beers housing to transform a vacant, unimproved lot in south LA into a 100% affordable multi-unit housing community for 26 individuals and families.
All the units for MLK1101 supportive housing are accessed through exterior walkways. While the unit layouts are efficiently identical on each floor, the walkways vary in width for a more dynamic, staggered elevation and to create informal gathering spaces and opportunities for residents to socialize.
Further advancing previous experience working with Clifford Beers housing and other supportive housing organizations like the skid row housing trust, LOHA’s design acknowledges the successful track record these housing complexes have had with bringing supportive services in-house. MLK1101 supportive housing will feature supportive service offices and community spaces, including a rooftop patio, outdoor green space, laundry and shared kitchen facilities, a community garden, and various other amenities. this project is seeking LEED platinum Certification and recently began construction.