Stacking The Deck: An architect and a nonprofit client work together for the third time to create housing for the formerly homeless, this time using prefabricated modules.
Star Apartments, in downtown Los Angeles, is striking not just for its angular, almost levitating sculptural form, but also for the ways it differs from Michael Maltzan Architecture (MMA)'s prior work for the nonprofit Skid Row Housing Trust (SRHT). “Rather than create a prototype and make it over and over, our collaboration with the Trust as our client is very much in the laboratory phase, still exploring what's possible,” says principal Michael Maltzan. Each successive commission—Star is the third—“has expanded the ambitions,” he says, “allowing us to reconsider how a building can be lived in, can support its residents, fit into the evolving city, and even be made.”
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