Location: Los Angeles, CA
Date: 2022
Category: Mixed-Use

About this Project:

• Scope: Architects and Interior Architects 

• 200 Live Work Units

• 64,000 sf of Art and Production space and underground parking 

• Renderings: Kink Studio

The eight-story, mixed-use structure at 1100 E 5th Street sits at an entrance threshold to Los Angeles’ Arts District. It is designed, in turn, as a thickened and inhabitable art wall. It coheres the qualities of its contexts and presents them in an architectural greeting to the neighborhood. A play on the local vernacular, it relies on the creative configuration of industrial form and materials. Made up of two conjoined box volumes, it is a strong and simple massing wrapped in sheet metal cladding. And yet, the rectilinearity is not pure; it is split open in a rhythm of vertical and diagonal seams that peal back into protected balconies for a select percentage of the 220 live-work units within. The otherwise utilitarian envelope, then, is perforated in a painterly gradient that flows along the bends and folds of the articulated façade. At the ground level, the warehouse interpreting shifts from the exterior to the interior. There, storefronts, divided into garage door segments, roll or tilt up into 50,000 square feet of art and production space that spills, next, into a nested route of outdoor passages. The site meets at a central plaza that physically mimics the work yards of nearby shops and functionally provides an alcove escape from the peripheral street traffic.