Star | Los Angeles, California

This innovative, 102-unit permanent supportive housing development provides healthy and sustainable homes with social services to disabled men and women experiencing homelessness.

The project was constructed atop an existing 1-story retail building, which was gutted and renovated to meet the Owner’s programmatic needs and support the structure above.

The original building was the typical skid row hodgepodge of mom-and-pop street-level retail beneath roof-deck parking.

Razing this five-year-old structure would have violated the developer’s commitment to sustainability and also forfeited its chance to include retail, since its funding stipulations permit only preexisting mixed-use.

The decision to piggyback on an existing structure led the architect to an approach not explored in Los Angeles in decades: multifamily modular prefab.

Traditional configurations, including double-loaded corridors and central courtyards, failed to fit enough units, plus generous outdoor areas, within a six-story limit so the architect’s solution was to re-purpose the parking deck as a podium, a 15,220 sqft terrace with gardens and a jogging track, alongside a communal kitchen, lounge, and rooms for art and exercise. Above that level, a new concrete tray could accommodate 102 units, stacked non-hierarchically and interwoven with patios and outdoor catwalks—a configuration reminiscent of a hill town’s scale, density, and meandering routes.

Each module included a 350-square-foot studio with full kitchen, bath, and interior finishes factory-installed—while the existing building in downtown Los Angeles was retrofitted with extra concrete columns to help support the new sections.

Two concrete interior stairways were also added, laterally bracing the second-floor deck. From the exterior, these muscular diagonals express the structural brawn of holding the modules high above the podium.

The project has attained LEED for Homes Platinum.