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KCET – Artbound
History
Post World War II, decades of economic depression and global conflict had left the nation’s built environment insufficient to shelter the influx of both military veterans returning from overseas and a burgeoning immigrant population. The dominant discourse surrounding the crisis was flavored by “magical thinking,” either naïve or unrealistic, and by anxiety.
Newspaper classifieds were filled with desperate advertisements: “No sympathy or charity. Wanted: Just a home. Whatever you have to offer. We aren’t perfect, just normal people. Veteran, wife and child. Won’t you please call us?”
In early 1945, however, the announcement of The Case Study House Program cut the confusion and initiated Los Angeles as a housing laboratory. Delivered in a no-nonsense tone, it challenged the city to roll-up its sleeves and build the future: “Perhaps we will cling longest to the symbol of ‘house’ as we have known it, or perhaps we will realize that in accommodating ourselves to a new world the most important step in avoiding retrogression into the old, is a willingness to understand and to accept contemporary ideas in the creation of environment that is responsible for shaping the largest part of our living and thinking.”
By declaring the sponsorship of the design and construction of prototype housing, Arts & Architecture magazine deployed the Case Study House Program to solicit concrete solutions to the unprecedented shortage of housing stock. It set the terms, requiring its homes to meet a budget, respond to occupant needs, use the best of the modern building techniques and technologies, and comply with policy restrictions. It enlisted the most esteemed local architects, including Richard Neutra and Charles and Ray Eames, employed product manufacturers, and insisted that the models were open to public review and improvement prior to replication.
By the time it wrapped up in 1966, the program had sponsored thirty-six iconic homes. Small in numbers, dramatic in effect, the houses were a radical success. The prolific media attention surrounding them played a significant role in a building boom that, through the injection of ideals, flavor even today’s American home ownership dreams.
History All Over Again
Seventy years later, Los Angeles is in the midst of another housing crisis. Not only are there not enough houses, the vast majority of the city’s residents are priced out of those that are available. The rhetoric surrounding the conundrum is dire. In the rapidly changing enclave of Echo Park, however, Blackbirds, a new residential experiment, risks a projective stance.
Built on the site of five former single-family residence parcels, the nine structures that contain eighteen independent houses is the work of an aspirational team – Barbara Bestor Architecture, Mia Lehrer + Associates, and LocalConstruct. Blackbirds interprets the city’s controversial small lots ordinance, a 2005 amendment to the Los Angeles Municipal Code promoting densification, as a platform for challenging expectations. It takes advantage of the policy’s minimized lot sizes and setback requirements, not to capitalize on a unit count, but to create communal spaces. It attempts to expand attentions on infill housing to include a design conscience.
Citing the balancing act of trying to address the housing shortage while upholding the city’s unique character and fabric, Barbara Bestor, the project’s architect, states: “I was struck by the quest in Silicon Valley [the HBO comedy] to find a compression algorithm that maintains very high quality… High quality architectural compression is sort of our goal when it comes to these strategies for densifying Los Angeles.”
Barbara Bestor is a celebrated architect who is well known for a popular array of residential and commercial projects around Los Angeles. She already has made significant contributions to contemporary lifestyle expectations. Her designs, which include Beachwood Café, Intelligentsia, and most recently Beats by Dre, carry forward the California legacy of seamlessness among art, craft, and living. With Blackbirds, she is moving her ideas to the scale of community.
The compression algorithm is the means of a computer science quest to minimize data size without compromising information. Bestor’s architectural compression algorithm adheres to a similar intention for lossless residential downsizing. Blackbirds represents an ambition to deliver within the compact all of the amenities and perks standardized by the home-ownership value system.
She achieves her goal by setting up most every component of the development as dual purpose and multi-user. Site terraces, in an endeavor to respect the outlines of the original hillside, step the new houses into the existing topography and invite residents to transform the resulting platforms into shared gardens. The requisite parking count is met in a central hard-surface court that anticipates a second life as a plaza for events, gatherings, and games. Slips between the buildings connect the properties to each other and to the neighborhood. “The communal areas encourage spontaneous group activities; there’s potential for anything from a party, to a farmer’s market, to a political rally,” Bestor explains.
New arrangements for communal living, however, come up against current legal limitations. A proposal for pedestrian thru-stairs that would run through the site and stitch the development edges to the center remains unrealized due to liability concerns.
Policy structure, in general, precludes many of the enablers for improving the conditions of the built environment. The small lots ordinance, responsible for a mounting explosion of higher density conditions and through which Blackbirds was conceived, is itself a key example. Both citizens and developers are hemmed in by the regulation’s lack of adequate design-quality incentives, a citywide distribution strategy, economic enforcements, or transportation-infrastructure provisions. Communities are experiencing loss of neighborhood character, congestion, gentrification, and displacement. And, the trials involved in navigating unresolved procedural hurdles discourage developers from expending additional efforts at design and community building.
It, in fact, took four years to make Blackbirds possible. Not only did LocalConstruct, the project developer, go out of its way to engage an architect and embed design into its process, it did so while navigating disjuncture in city agencies, political resistance, and community apprehension. As the company co-founder, Casey Lynch, states, “There are easier ways to make money.” But, he wants the extra effort to serve as a precedent for other developments, to demonstrate that providing high quality housing in Los Angeles is still possible. “The standard approach to today’s development is too formulaic… We live in one of the world’s biggest, most innovative cities. We should be providing good design.”
Still, Blackbirds has received some negative feedback. “The criticism is largely about density, in general… In the end, we got the support of most groups,” Bestor explains.
Indeed, the design of the development is painstakingly conscientious of the existing conditions. Orchestrated to preserve and take advantage of sweeping views, the houses clear visual corridors not only for each other but also for the neighbors. The dispersed composition masks the housing quantity and creates intimacies across the site. The folding roof planes disguise where one residence ends and another begins. The contrast of the black and white colors pushes and pulls the focus of the eye, creating a difference that breaks up scales.
Speculating on what could otherwise have been – on land zoned for far denser with the capacity for many more units, Bestor says, “We’re proud of Blackbirds.”
The landscape, designed by Mia Lehrer + Associates, then weaves all of these elements together with the larger scene. Chosen for their seasonal behaviors and attractiveness to pollinators, a mixture of water-wise shrubs and trees frames the architecture and offers a porous face to the development boundaries. Beneath the vegetal shade, a series of strategically placed, body-friendly boulders act as outdoor furnishings for passers-by.
For Lehrer, who also is a member of the re:code LA Zoning Advisory Committee, an expert group preparing for a comprehensive overhaul of the city’s sixty-nine year old planning code, Blackbirds is a small move in a grander vision for a version of home ownership that is civically minded. She thinks that such out-of-the-box thinking for the common good is the way forward. Her version of this bold new world is a green network, as dense in planting as it is in building, of shared resources and amenities, interconnected by a vast pedestrian, biking, and public transportation system. She imagines a future in which “the urban forest takes precedence over the individual oasis.”
A Contemporary Case Study – Tomorrow’s LA
The quandaries of the current era, not dissimilar to those that compelled the launch of the Case Study House program, are overwhelming. Beyond the housing crisis, resource and mobility infrastructure is stressed. The ongoing drought exposes the region’s environmental precariousness. All too frequently, the fallout from these pressures is most immediately suffered by the most vulnerable.
Los Angeles’s advocacy groups address the issues as distinct causes: density by planning officials and urban strategists; affordability and livability by community and social welfare organizations; transportation by anti-car activists; sustainability by green energy, waste, or water agencies. Like the Case Study House Program, on the other hand, today’s truly forward-thinkers are trying to shift the cultural consciousness by resolving multiple complexities in one tangible package.
Blackbirds, while not a comprehensive solution to the city’s dilemmas, provides a visual around which pieces of the puzzle might come together. Granted, it does not take on the economics, remaining locked in the inflated pricing cycle beyond the reach of most. But, by taking the image of the separate, self-contained single-family home and pushing it to think collectively, it strives to give form to a future, more generous, vision.
The optimism around Blackbirds is contagious. The consistent expressions of idealism coming from a team of people familiar with California’s contributions to the built environment and wanting to play a role in advancing that history are reminiscent of the sentiments that precipitated a long-ago breakthrough. It suggests that, with a little bit of Case Study House Program “can-do,” there might just be a way out of the conundrum.