SOCIAL SERVICE.

This housing in Santa Monica is an enlightened addition to the public realm.

Beyond the insular Californian scenography of villa and pool, there remains an urgent and pressing need for affordable housing in Los Angeles. Bound up with wider political and social issues, the provision of decent, dignified housing for poor and marginalized groups is a subject that attracts scant attention from the city's glossy coterie of superstar architects. Koning Eizenberg are a rare exception. Based in Santa Monica, Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg have established a reputation for making socially responsive architecture that also has great formal and tectonic presence. The Simone Hotel (AR June 1993), for instance, is a humane and inventive approach to the maligned typology of the short stay hostel, providing accommodation for people who would otherwise be living rough on the streets.

For this more recent project, Koning Eizenberg were asked to design a block of affordable family housing on a tight site in downtown Santa Monica. The roughly square site is bounded by a featureless assortment of parking lots, offices and residential buildings. To the south-west, a 12-storey bank lowers over the cityscape. The programme specified a mixture of two, three and four bedroom house types, including some with disabled access.

Koning Eizenberg's strategy divides the accommodation into four terrace-like components, arranged around a south-west facing courtyard. This takes advantage of the sun and sea breezes (the site is only four blocks away from the Pacific Ocean). The three-storey terraces sit on top of a subterranean parking level, so freeing up the entire site for housing. Organized around a front-to-back plan, with living and kitchen spaces at ground floor and three bedrooms above, Koning Eizenberg's basic template is a modern version of the familiar town house. The second floor is given over to 10 single-storey apartments, varying in size from two to four bedrooms. External walls are kinked, skewed and pulled back from the line of the houses below, to create terraces for the apartments. An elevated walkway links the blocks at this upper level and connects with a free-standing stair and lift for disabled access.

Although the scale of the blocks is far from oppressive, Koning Eizenberg contrive to humanize and animate the terraces through various formal devices. Individual blocks are stepped and staggered to break up their mass and chunky bay windows articulate wall planes. White stucco predominates, giving the complex a buoyant Mediterranean air, further enlivened by the use of vivid applied colour. Taxi-cab yellow and terracotta red recall Barragan's use of pigment to articulate and define space.

External areas between the blocks are enclosed and landscaped to create semi-private gardens for the town houses, and there is also a large communal courtyard with a children's play space. Front doors and kitchens overlook the courtyard, fostering a sense of intimacy and informal neighbourhood supervision. By sensitive manipulation of forms, materials, scale and light, Koning Eizenberg make the simple and familiar seem quietly extraordinary. Their 5th Street housing is a testament to the transforming social and civic potential of architecture.

Architect

Koning Eizenberg, Santa Monica, USA www.kearch.com

Photographs

1, 2, Grant Mudford

3, 4, 5, Benny Chan

1. Low-rise blocks arranged around a courtyard recall traditional Mediterranean patios. Bold colours enliven the humanly scaled spaces.

2. Apartments with terraces sit on top of two-storey town houses.

3. Typical street elevation.

4. A narrow semi-private street leads to the central courtyard. Although public and private realms are separated by a gate, the scheme is not obsessively hermetic in its relationship with the wider world.

5. Kitchens overlook the courtyard, fostering a sense of informal communal supervision.