Project Description
Category: Live
Honorable Mention
The 2802 Pico Housing project brings affordable housing to a mixed commercial and residential zone near the Santa Monica College campus, just 2.5 miles from the beach. In the face of zoning constraints and neighborhood concerns, the locally based architects designed a 42,263-square-foot cluster of dwellings, retail, and community space surrounding a courtyard that benefits from westerly ocean breezes in a manner that showed “a will to transform a sometimes very tough and heartless typology,” juror Sheila Kennedy said. Interlocking bridges cross the central open area to provide access to 33 residential units along single-loaded corridors that relate to the area’s pedestrian scale, despite the fact that “this project was about a different kind of urban fabric, and community life,” juror Cathy Lang Ho said. —Deane Madsen, Assoc. AIA