New Carver Apartments

Project Design

Michael Maltzan has been deeply engaged with LA‘s pressing social and economic issues since founding his firm three decades ago. MMA, which won a 2025 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, has designed structures that have transformed the urban fabric such as the replacement Sixth Street Bridge and the quarter mile long One Santa Fe mixed-use development in downtown LA’s Arts District. He has also worked intensively in LA’s Skid Row neighborhood, starting with Inner City Arts, offering arts education to public school students, and then several affordable, permanent supportive housing complexes, including New Carver Apartments (2009).

The firm describes its practice as “rooted in a deep belief in architecture’s capacity to create new physical, cultural, and social connections, and the firm’s groundbreaking work is often located in challenging locations.” New Carver Apartments, 97 units of permanent supportive housing, occupies an extremely challenging location, in downtown Los Angeles beside the 14-lane, 10 freeway.

So the team created a six-story circular form, with facets on the facade that position windows obliquely to the direction of sound, and create a play of light and shadow on the exterior. The residential experience is focused inward, into a light-filled open courtyard with a broad staircase, A series of vertical fins line the inner edge of the central space, and serve as structural support, privacy screens for tenants, and ventilation risers for methane gas.

This courtyard provides public open space and delivers natural light and fresh air to each apartment. Together with a shared roof terrace offering a high level panorama towards the mountains, New Carver models architectural and social ambition.

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Top: New Carver Apartments, elevation, photo by Iwan Baan; Bottom, courtyard at New Carver Apartments. Photo by MMA.