Gramercy Place Apartments

Project Design

One of the many challenges facing architects of affordable housing in Los Angeles is designing multi-level, dense structures that blend into adjacent low rise and single family neighborhoods, resulting from LA’s historic, exclusionary zoning. Homeowners often resist the taller buildings housing low-income tenants, and the onus is on the design and development teams to soften the scale. Kevin Daly has masterly made this transition in several affordable housing complexes while weaving private space and open circulation and other shared social spaces into mini-communities.

Gramercy Place Apartments (2021), in the City of Los Angeles, contains 64 apartments for very low-income and some formerly homeless seniors, arranged above businesses, community spaces, and a public plaza on the ground level. The building was designed as six discrete buildings, reflecting the scale of the surrounding single-family residences, connected by an exterior walkway finished with an organic, loose trellis, while courtyard spaces outside of the apartments serve as shared living rooms for residents to gather. A rooftop edible garden offers additional shared common space.

More about Gramercy Place Apartments.

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More about Tahiti Housing, also designed by kdA.

More about Hollywood Community Housing Corporation.

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Top: Gramercy Place Apartments, elevation. Photo by Paul Vu/Here and Now Agency; Bottom, bridge at Gramercy Place Apartments viewed through trellis. Photo by Joshua White /JWPictures.