“Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles” exhibition, currently at the A+D Museum until November 6, presents constructed and in-progress housing proposals of L.A.’s evolving cityscape. For more than a century Los Angeles has been the epicenter of innovative residential architecture in the United States, if not the world. Countless pioneers, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry.
This architects have taken advantage of the city’s diverse landscapes, openness to new ideas, culture of making, ideal climate, and steady influx of new residents to create homes that have defied imagination and convention, fostering both a new lifestyle and a different image of what architecture could be.
But Los Angeles has become — both by necessity and demand—a very different place in recent years, shifting its emphasis from single-family homes and the private realm to a culture of density and inclusivity.
At the same time it faces new challenges, like population saturation, stratospheric costs, crushing congestion, and unprecedented environmental crises, which can no longer be met by existing residential typologies.
Shelter encourages six Los Angeles design practices to meet these challenges, proposing creative new housing models for a changing Los Angeles. The teams include Bureau Spectacular, LA Más, Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, MAD Architects, PAR, and wHY.
Their single and multi-family proposals are located along two of the city’s most fertile new development zones: the Wilshire Corridor, where a new subway extension will reach miles to the west; and the Los Angeles River, where a more than billion-dollar restoration is catalyzing a surge of new building. Source by A+D Museum.