The Mark, a new residential building in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, is not the first site architect Lorcan O’Herlihy has confronted that is immediately adjacent to a famous structure designed by a formidable architect. That would be Habitat825 (2008), which O’Herlihy’s firm, LOHA, designed next to Rudolph Schindler’s own house from 1922, the pad that established the archetype for the indoor-outdoor lifestyle that has become almost an L.A. cliché.

Something rubbed off from that delicate dance with Schindler, as the countless residential projects LOHA has designed across West L.A.’s urban sprawl all lean into that typology in inventive ways and, importantly, in approaches that benefit the people who call them home. For the Mark, a 37-unit student housing development, the landmark next door is John Lautner’s Sheats Apartments (1949), the ding-iest of dingbats, all shifting planes and organic shapes placed atop a pilotis-framed carport at street level.

The design team could not adopt this structural position even if it tried—dingbats are not the best in high seismic-hazard zones, it turns out—but LOHA found a way to make common cause with Lautner’s roof terrace, breaking the Mark’s 88,000-square-foot mass with courtyards, light wells, and roof decks, which enliven the sprawling building by displaying the goings-on of its residents. In all, the project encompasses nearly 5,340 square feet of open space, designed in collaboration with landscape architect HPLA Studio.

From the uppermost deck, you can appreciate how the Mark takes advantage of the topography of the hills surrounding the adjacent University of California Los Angeles campus (UCLA). “There is a 60-foot grade separation from the front to the back of the site,” says LOHA director Brian Adolph. “We came up with this gesture of a Z-shaped building that moves up the site, while also shifting with the slope of the street.” This allowed the architects to achieve the density the developer wanted while addressing neighborhood concerns regarding such a large-scale project.

The Mark also features many of LOHA’s signature moves for expressing volumes with surface-material variations. Kenji Hattori-Forth, a member of LOHA’s project team for the Mark, notes that the firm undertook several iterations to arrive at the combination of light gray ribbed-metal panels for outward-facing surfaces and darker fiber-cement board for courtyard faces. LOHA varied the spacing of the ribs on the metal panels to create a “stacking” effect on the building’s individual volumes. That material language is maintained across the street-facing courtyard by perforated metal panels that span across the third and fourth floors, completing the volumetric massing of the building without adding weight.

Although the development includes five very-low-income apartments for families, the majority of the units are aimed toward UCLA students. Amenities include 170 bicycle-parking spots in the basement garage, a large fitness center, a clubhouse, a small pool, and a shared roof-deck with expansive city views. “For the roof-decks, we used cable-mesh and glass guardrails to maximize visibility for tenants,” says Hattori-Forth.

Units contain between two and five bedrooms each; some feature private decks or small backyard patios nestled into the setback around the surrounding retaining walls, to the north and south. Each unit includes a kitchen, living area, laundry, and a combination of en suite and shared bathrooms for dorm-like bedrooms.

The Mark is a significant expansion of LOHA’s built footprint in Westwood. A block to the southwest, the firm designed a similar student-housing project called SL11024 that opened in 2015. At the same time the Mark went up, LOHA was working with a different developer on a much smaller, 18-unit, student-housing project called the Hive Glenrock. The six-floor, 30,665-square-foot building’s units range from three- and four-bedroom layouts, with common bathrooms and open kitchens and living rooms.

The architects’ primary move here was to split the building into east and west volumes, divided by a central outdoor space, with two plein air staircases positioned to the north and south sides. In a departure from the firm’s usual penchant for metal-panel siding, the entire building is wrapped in a custom facade of preserved-wood slats placed on top of UV-stabilized black waterproofing. Operable vinyl windows, with aluminum spandrels along the top edges, punctuate the timber in seemingly random patterns. Adolph says they aimed for a panelized system for the timber cladding, but it was easier in the end to stick-build it on-site.

Some of the units include wedge-shaped outdoor terraces enclosed with metal-and-glass balustrades. The effect imparts a stacked appearance to the building, which is enhanced by the overall restrained material palette. “It was a trick to get the outdoor space where we needed it to be on each unit by flipping living rooms and bedrooms on each floor to create these switchbacks,” says Adolph.

With the Mark and the Hive Glenrock, LOHA cements its status as one of L.A.’s most innovative practices, rethinking not only student housing but infill development across the city. It is virtually impossible to find an area in which the firm has not contributed something remarkably different, joyful, and lively, even when their neighbors include Schindler and Lautner.

The Mark image courtesy Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects; click to enlarge

Hive Glenrock image courtesy Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects; click to enlarge