Homeless housing | Creative solutions
Skid Row Housing Trust and Michael Maltzan's firm have brought a measure of optimism to the relationship between architecture and the city's homeless problem.
(Rainbow Apartments, located on San Pedro between 6th and 7th St)
By Christopher Hawthorne
Times Staff Writer
March 6, 2007
One afternoon last week, it was covered with plans and cardboard models of the New Carver Apartments, a drum-shaped, six-story building that will be constructed over the next year and a half in downtown L.A. Carver, which will hold 100 efficiency apartments on a site in the shadow of the 10 Freeway, a few blocks southeast of the L.A. Convention Center, is the second project Maltzan has designed for the Skid Row Housing Trust. The first was the Rainbow Apartments, an 89-unit building that opened in November on San Pedro Street, in skid row.
The distance separating the two sites — just two miles — belies the difficulty of the current effort to move the homeless beyond the circumscribed boundaries of skid row. As downtown continues its fitful evolution, with projects such as Frank Gehry's pair of towers on Grand Avenue moving toward realization, the pressure to "solve" that neighborhood's homeless problem, or at least disperse it, will grow only more intense.
Perhaps most surprising, in purely architectural terms it is among the most compelling projects in Maltzan's busy office, where the projects underway include a commission from JPL in Pasadena, a state historic park near Chinatown (with Hargreaves Associates) and a house for Michael Ovitz. It suggests that once the budget gets tight enough, architecture in its most basic sense — the straightforward arrangement of space and light — is really the only thing that can allow this kind of project to succeed.
Read the full article over here.
To check out future Skid Row Housing Trust property developments:
visit Skid Row Housing Trust- Map of Properties
(Rainbow Apartments, located on San Pedro between 6th and 7th St)
By Christopher Hawthorne
Times Staff Writer
March 6, 2007
One afternoon last week, it was covered with plans and cardboard models of the New Carver Apartments, a drum-shaped, six-story building that will be constructed over the next year and a half in downtown L.A. Carver, which will hold 100 efficiency apartments on a site in the shadow of the 10 Freeway, a few blocks southeast of the L.A. Convention Center, is the second project Maltzan has designed for the Skid Row Housing Trust. The first was the Rainbow Apartments, an 89-unit building that opened in November on San Pedro Street, in skid row.
The distance separating the two sites — just two miles — belies the difficulty of the current effort to move the homeless beyond the circumscribed boundaries of skid row. As downtown continues its fitful evolution, with projects such as Frank Gehry's pair of towers on Grand Avenue moving toward realization, the pressure to "solve" that neighborhood's homeless problem, or at least disperse it, will grow only more intense.
Perhaps most surprising, in purely architectural terms it is among the most compelling projects in Maltzan's busy office, where the projects underway include a commission from JPL in Pasadena, a state historic park near Chinatown (with Hargreaves Associates) and a house for Michael Ovitz. It suggests that once the budget gets tight enough, architecture in its most basic sense — the straightforward arrangement of space and light — is really the only thing that can allow this kind of project to succeed.
Read the full article over here.
To check out future Skid Row Housing Trust property developments:
visit Skid Row Housing Trust- Map of Properties
posted by bowen at 4:29 PM
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