Цель конкурса – привлечь архитекторов к поиску идей по созданию малоэтажного жилья нового формата для Лос-Анджелеса. Конкурсное задание основано на итогах опроса горожан и экспертов. Жители города рассказали, в каких домах хотят жить, и какими видят свои дворы. Задача участников – придать этим желаниям архитектурную форму.
пресс-релиз:
Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles is a design challenge meant as a significant first step toward that conversation. Organized by the Chief Design Officer in collaboration with the Mayor’s Office of Budget and Innovation and other partners, it is not a competition, at least not in the traditional sense, and in fact is marked by two features that we believe separate it from earlier efforts to engage architects in sketching out design proposals for new models of low-rise housing. To begin with, this design challenge is part of a larger research initiative, supported by the James Irvine Foundation and in collaboration with Urban Institute and other key partners, to explore new paths to homeownership and new models of affordability in low-rise neighborhoods across Los Angeles. This design challenge has been informed by that research project, and vice versa, in a symbiotic relationship we expect to continue well into 2021.
In addition, Low-Rise is organized differently from a typical design competition, in which architects tell communities what new housing should look like. We are turning the typical formula inside out. We began our work on this design challenge by engaging community experts in housing and asking them, in a series of listening sessions organized by theme, how they and their fellow residents would like to see their neighborhoods evolve. Their answers to that question and others have directly shaped this brief. (See the “Helpful Resources” section for more details on these listening sessions and how to watch them.) The result is that communities are explaining to the participating architects what they’d like to see in their neighborhoods and asking for their help in turning those ideas into a series of design proposals. We are not collecting architectural ideas and then workshopping them with the public. Instead, we began by workshopping with community and housing-advocacy leaders a set of questions and hypotheses about how they and their neighbors would like to see their communities grow. Now, with those workshops complete, we are presenting the results to the design challenge participants.
For all the ambition of our effort in terms of its commitment to allowing community voices to guide its main themes, we proceed with a clear degree of humility and awareness of limitations. The winning proposals chosen by our jury in each of the four categories in the design-challenge brief will not mark some conclusion or endpoint for discussions of what new housing typologies are most appropriate for 21st-century Los Angeles. In this sense, they will be markedly distinct from the Case Study proposals in terms of their awareness of a wider political debate about housing. John Entenza, the pioneering editor of Arts & Architecture magazine and the driving force behind the Case Study program, did not spend a lot of time thinking about — to say nothing of writing about — redlining, exclusionary lending, or the ways in which federal subsidy for highway building or (white) homeownership formed the foundation of single-family homebuilding in the postwar period.
Rather, the designs that emerge from our effort will represent a step — an important one, we hope, but a single step nonetheless — in the direction of a more inclusive and wide-ranging discussion in Los Angeles about these issues. They will set the stage for, that is to say, a process of reengagement with L.A.’s low-rise neighborhoods, one that will be well timed to inform the ongoing updates led by the Department of City Planning of specific Community Plans and the city’s overarching Housing Element. They will be part of a larger process to reimagine what it means to live the good life in Southern California — and to understand the ways in which the good life, to be good for everyone, must also be sustainable and equitable.
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