In response to Los Angeles’ ballooning housing crisis, exacerbated to historic levels by the COVID-19 pandemic, Los Angeles Magazine sent out a call: Who could design L.A. out of its crisis with smart, daring affordable housing? 13 local architecture firms answered, each offering a hypothetical solution intended to drown out any NIMBY protestations with clean lines, sustainably sourced materials, biophilic moments, and a community-focused approach.
Assembledge+, founded and run by architect David Thompson, submitted a scheme that would incentivize homeowners to build ADUs in their backyards. The homes would abut alleyways, transforming the strips of asphalt into activated pedestrian thoroughfares and greenspace. Assembledge+ anticipated a variety of people with differing needs could make good use of these dwellings, so the firm presented the ADUs as customizable, prefabricated units ranging from 500 to 650 square feet.
The idea didn’t last long as a hypothetical. Two years later, Assembledge+ tested their concept on a real-life lot shared with a well-maintained 1916 Craftsman bungalow in Los Angeles’s Hancock Park neighborhood. With a reputation as a historically preserved architectural menagerie, the neighborhood was the ideal environment to test if Assembledge+’s ADUs could deliver on their promise to provide functional supplemental housing that activates the surrounding site and unobtrusively melds with its context. Luckily, the clients were very willing to participate in the experiment, being old friends and previous patrons of Thompson’s.
Read more on aninteriormag.com.
