Design Principals: Claus Benjamin Freyinger, Andrew Holder
Project Team: Noah Rubin, Russ Holthouse, Emmet Ashford-Trotter, Courtenay Bauer
Type: Multi-Family Residence
Location: Los Angeles, California
Year: 2008
Status: Under Construction

Lucile Avenue is a four-unit multifamily project on a hillside lot in Silver Lake overlooking Hollywood. Los Angeles condominium development is squeezed by a restrictive planning and zoning code that makes extraordinary demands on the use of space, forcing most building projects to “inflate” to occupy the entire permissible zoning envelope in order to accommodate the litany of requirements. This inflation inevitably forces the building masses to become uniform boxes, making condominium development in the City a disadvantageous environment for architects. In this instance we assert ourselves as a specialized organism, thriving in the adverse condition; the ambition is to define a design strategy that operates on the building code to generate interesting architecture, rather than produce an interesting design which is then diluted by its contact with the City’s regulatory framework.

The project uses the extreme density of parking spaces required by the City – a total of nine required on a parcel less than 50 feet wide – to aerate an otherwise solid four-story block of living space.  The parking aeration functions as a kind of missing level in the otherwise continuous four-story stack of floor plates that connects the otherwise discrete units and organizes the stack of living space into a series of environments with distinct spatial and material characteristics. After arriving at the entirely open-air parking level, residents circulate both up and down to access different portions of their units, navigating a series of horizontal and vertical landscapes from a plinth lodged into the steep hillside at the lower level to a rooftop garden with a panoramic vista of Los Angeles.