One thing that often surprises first-time visitors to downtown Los Angeles is the proximity of its gleaming clutch of skyscrapers and cultural facilities to the homeless encampments in the area known as Skid Row. From the front doors of Frank Gehry’s exuberant Walt Disney Concert Hall, it takes about 15 minutes to walk—or 2 or 3 minutes to drive—the mile or so downhill to a landscape full of quiet but marked desperation, a place where social-services agencies, single-room occupancy hotels, and liquor stores serve a stubbornly large homeless population. (From the steps of City Hall or the wide plaza in front of Thom Mayne’s Caltrans headquarters, the trip is even shorter.) It is on the edge of this neighborhood that the Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan has spent a decade and a half—or nearly his entire career as the principal of his own firm, Michael Maltzan Architecture, which he founded after leaving Gehry’s office in 1993—working on a campus of buildings for the nonprofit arts-education organization Inner-City Arts (ICA).

Maltzan is no stranger to well-heeled clients. Many miles to the west of Skid Row he is finishing work on a sizable new house for the former Hollywood power broker and art collector Michael Ovitz that is as much museum as private residence. But the ICA project, on which he has worked pro bono, is one that seems to have fully engaged him from the start. Perhaps the central reason is that the ICA’s 1-acre site, built up in three phases since 1994, has allowed Maltzan to execute a strategy that slides almost imperceptibly from architecture to urbanism and back again. The result is a family of new buildings that interacts with its context in a complex range of ways, emerging finally as a kind of protected beacon.