Architecture can make a meaningful contribution to a crisis of urban living by building community, says award-winning LA architect Michael Maltzan.
Maltzan tells Nine to Noon architects in LA have been doing their bit in tackling homelessness, city sprawl, housing affordability and building faster and better housing by designing ways to connect buildings with host communities.
He is in New Zealand later this month for the Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects conference.
Photo: Michael Maltzan
Like Auckland, Los Angeles is experiencing intensification and urban sprawl, with the many social problems it brings.
“Intensification is one of the genuine existential issues for Los Angeles moving forward,” he says. “LA is a city that is similar to other post-war contemporary cities in that the building in the city over the years really centred around the single family residence suburban model that sprawled and sprawled and sprawled.
“That has gotten to the point where it’s really unsustainable from many different vantage points, around accessibility, affordability, mobility and resource-management. Those pressures are clearly creating a rethinking of the way development happens in the city and intensification is one of the results of that.
“It has many positive aspects, but it comes with very complex social issues as well.”
Urban sprawl and unaffordability are contributing to homelessness, but this is one factor among many, he says. Intensification usually involves the displacing of urban poor communities.
“Gentrification is part of that. It’s something that really moves hand in hand with intensification,” he says.
“Those pressures to build more housing in the city mean that many neighbourhoods, especially middle-to-lower income neighbourhoods, get higher economic pressures put on them and it inevitably puts great pressure put on the people who are living there, forcing them out.
“There are only so many times that you can be pushed out of an apartment and try to find another apartment without you eventually falling into homelessness. It’s one of the clear drivers of this problem in the city.”
He’s been working for about 15 years on projects to help people avoid homelessness by building community capacity. Many homeless people had lost their ability to be part of a community, something architectural projects can help address, he says.
“The projects that we have done have endeavoured to find ways to build community back and I think that’s one of the keys, not only in the buildings we’ve been doing for homeless individuals, but for housing in general. It has to not only build community within the building up it has to participate in community, in the places where those projects are being built.”
There can be anxiety and resentment within the neighbourhoods where those projects are built, he says.
For Maltzan the buildings have to have some type of authentic relationship to the neighbourhoods. One way is to make the building transparent to a visual degree, so that any sense of isolation between the building and those in it and the community is removed.
Creating buildings that are more mixed use, as opposed to just housing, is another way to connect to host communities. These can include having store fronts on the ground floor, he says.
“Again, in a lot of cities this wouldn’t seem so unusual, but in a city like Los Angeles and in some of the communities where these projects are built, that’s a huge step, a way of creating genuine community and connection on the street.”
Maltzan says there has been political pushback against designing projects to build a strong aesthetic presence in communities.
Photo: Ron Eshel
“They are not anonymous shelters, they are meant to be strong monuments of architecture in the community, to say ‘no matter who is living in our buildings in these communities, that the buildings are meant to be at the very highest level of design,” he says. “That they are significant contributors to the overall aesthetic landscape of the city.”
With Inflationary pressures on building costs, and cost of living, there exists an even greater tension between the need for quality and the need for quick solutions. Maltzan says a balance can be achieved.
“You have to be intelligent about the way you go about these projects,” he says.
“I think this is where architects belong in this equation. Architects have the ability to take on very complex problems, like trying to build in strong ways aesthetically, to make a contribution. But also, to do that with budgets and schedule in mind and those parts of the project are their functional programmatic elements, they’re design issues. They’re design problems.
“A lot of it has to do with being very clear on what the design ambitions are going forward and the challenges are and attacking them from the beginning.”
Prefabrication can also help bring good quality design into a process while moving towards speedy urban solutions. LA’s 110-unit Star Apartments is one such example. The city’s building codes were changed to accommodate the project.
Maltzan says the method of building is useful when big projects are involved.
“It’s not a magic bullet. It’s an extremely useful techniques for a certain type and scale of project,” he says.
“It’s best and most useful applications are when you’re looking at very large projects, more than 100 units, as that’s when you start getting a true economy of scale in that manufacturing process.
“But it does have some other significant benefits, for example, from a sustainability standpoint.”
He says prefabs potentially involve much less construction waste. Because it is put together in a factory the quality of how it’s put together tends to be of a higher level and very controlled, which has long-term benefits for any project,” he adds.
Preserving a city’s heritage buildings and look can be achieved through the process of building community, he says. This brings trust between design teams and protagonists in the community.
“All cities have their own unique identities and long histories within particular cultures. One solution in one type of city doesn’t necessarily work exactly in another city.
“But one of the things we have found is it’s absolutely imperative to get a community… preservationists need to be part of that community. The broader you can create a circle of conversations at the beginning of a project the better chance you have of understanding what the challenges are and not only the overt concerns but also it’s important to be able to listen to the concerns that are not so clearly, or implicit, hiding behind the framing of questions.”
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