Mayor Eric Garcetti on Monday announced the winners of a design challenge that seeks to create new housing ideas for Los Angeles areas that are zoned for single-family homes and low-rise apartments.
The 12 winners of the Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles challenge were chosen by a panel of leading architects and experts in urban planning and affordable housing from a total of 380 submissions, Garcetti's office said. Twenty-three entries received honorable mentions.
"Angelenos want a more livable city with more affordable housing, more opportunity, and more accessible transportation options no matter where they live," Garcetti said in a statement Monday. "This challenge was designed to inspire creative ideas that might reimagine the future of housing in Los Angeles — and the results brought forward an extraordinary range of solutions to build affordable homes that are closer to jobs and transit."
The four first-place winners will receive $10,000, second-place winners will receive $3,500 and third-place winners will receive $1,500. The city views the winning designs as a way to offer an achievable vision for Los Angeles to add additional housing in single-family and low-rise neighborhoods, which account for more than 80% of Los Angeles' residential land.
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The winning ideas include:
- building new duplexes lining a network of "green alleys" in Northeast L.A.;
- reintroducing corner stores to residential neighborhoods to support local merchants, reduce driving and build community cohesion; and
- redesigning apartments so they can be expanded or shrunk over time as families change, which would support multi-generational households and ease overcrowding.
Six of the winning teams were submitted by Los Angeles-based teams, a seventh was from Orange County, and the remaining teams were from New York, the United Kingdom and Texas.
Categories for the contest included:
- fourplexes on lots covering 7,500 square feet;
- freestanding duplexes on a 50-foot-by-50-foot parcel;
- six to ten units spread across two newly combined residential parcels; and
- a reimagining of famous single-family houses — including by architects Frank Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright and R.M. Schindler — as fourplexes.
The winning designs will be published as a collection featuring essays
and interviews. The winners can also be viewed here.
