Learning from LOHA

Lorcan O’Herlihy and his design firm LOHA are leading the charge for architecture that matters with their work. His latest book is called “Architecture is a Social Act,” and it chronicles his team’s efforts to think of architecture as a force of creating spaces that are livable, that encourage community, and are socially equitable. I recently attended a lecture for Kennesaw State University’s architecture department and he presented several of his projects where he discussed design actions that doubled as guerilla tactics for creating social spaces and actual change for the communities.

Formosa 1140

This project for affordable housing in Los Angeles inverts an introverted building type (a courtyard) into a more extroverted one: an exterior walkway connects through-block units, giving them cross ventilation and a greater perception of interior space. Contracting the building’s form and pushing it to one side, and sinking a parking podium under the site, provided room and a creative strategy for a new community park space. The building itself is a study in layering and color and light and shadow: a painter designed these elevations, and even in a small 11 unit building they are rapturous and complex.

Screenshot from the LOHA lecture showing the Formosa elevation.

The park exists only because the architect made space for it and deemed it necessary and vital.

Inventive site section becomes the social act, creating social space where it would not otherwise exist.

MLK 1101

Designers cannot forget to carve the room to allow us to come together. What happens when a city cannot grow any further, and it discovers that sidewalks and boulevards are not enough? There are over 60,000 homeless in Los Angeles. LOHA designed this project for supportive housing for veterans and families with the simple tenet that open space and natural light are needed for a healthy mind. Architecture houses that healing mind, and creates outdoor living rooms, inviting community amenity spaces, and an uplifting spirit of design where residents cannot help but feel valued and anchor their dignity.

The building plan fragments, bends and encourages residents to gather on the roof of the parking podium.

The street elevation, with its peek at a green roof, stairs up to the piazza, and a healthy attention to a bright facade.

These LOHA projects are successes beyond being some of the best architectural design in affordable housing today; the designs began with purposeful action, the ‘social act’ of their mantra. Community matters, dignity matters, and these become design rudders for decisions that follow. The result is a place that connects, is alive, and has real significance to its neighborhood.

My Last Day at Work

The watch wristbuzz wakes me gently, with the earbud I left in last night blossoming with optimistic sound waves like ambient dawning. After breakfast maybe I’ll peek at the data and look at the dream-wave signatures, wonder if my sleep was productive, if I’m still grinding my teeth, count signs of nocturnal vigor, haha. So much data. A daily fog of data.

In the shower the ping of a calendar reminder: this morning’s office meeting will be a pioneering one, a potential landfall after a season of drift: the last of the program linkages between design departments in the studio were cloud-loaded and enabled last night. Today we find out if the new design software can be more than the sum of its parts. I opened up all current work to the DesignMind program (or DM as us old-school folks call it) and after some debate, we dismantled the firewalls and teased the nerve links to connect to Alphanet. Alphanet owns the out-of-the-box DM, pre-adoption as it were, and with this new baby neural net our DM architectural modeling program will, theoretically, wake up and learn and absorb basically everything any architect has ever drawn digitally.

The total digital sphere of architectural influence will be folded into the Buildspace. Our Buildspace. That, combined with the scans of every major historic work of architecture libraried online, will make for pretty deep knowledge of how and why and what us humans have built anywhere on this earth. My team says it will be like giving LSD to a child with a CrayonApp on an old iPhone (I never know if their metaphors are supposed to be a good thing or bad...) They are usually so rhapsodic about big data and the potentialities of a machine learning assist, but I don’t know now... Anything that helps produce an array of possibilities so we can whittle down the design options from infinite to one could be a great thing. I will always be there to sift and sort from the best iterations myself: DM cannot know the best result because it doesn’t intuit. That’s all I do anymore in this thought processing world: Feel my way through. That’s my value.

Dress and signal the Coffeepour. Do I need the Faraday tactical suit today at client’s office? They wouldn’t dare to try stealing the BIM file library from our phones again. Driveway message from the car: expect good battery storage today, with forecast for clear skies. Full charge. Drone deliveries stack against the garage, blocking the gate again—can they not stay in the pad zone? Refrigerator and pantry must have colluded for a simultaneous food order. Last time this happened they accessed my HealthChart and revised my milk order to skim and added vegetables pulled from the wife’s recipe search history. All because my cholesterol is still high? I need to figure out the overrides.

Car says fourteen minute drive to office with negligible traffic risk probability—I’ll let it get me there and interface with the team en route. Did I leave the house without saying goodbye again? Everyone is in their own world all the time. I rail against them but I am the one lost in a virtual space most often. What’s the matter with me? This is what we’ve become? Getting that uncomfortable feeling again that we’re in the future and it’s not what we thought it would be. “Phone: add family time to weekly calendar, merge available times, set recurring. Then call studio. And put me in everyone’s ears.”

“Folks, why would the generative chorus run more than once last night? It should have enough resolution on best solutions after one pass, right?” (I might not have my head under the hood, but I know what the engine should sound like.)

The office replies: “Brian, you know DM assembles all project files on the server when initialized; it swallows google earth, sat imagery and utility data, it knows the program square footages the building needs, every parameter and constraint. Construction budget. Equity investor tendencies and market valuations. Previous work built by this client. It’s digested everything. The generator ran and kept running.”

“So when I get in we can look at the iterations and steer it where we want it to grow.”

“It isn’t following list commands anymore. It’s just. You’ll see.”

“What will I see?”

“Maybe your access code can reboot, but it’s done. The building is designed. It says it’s complete, it’s run accessibility and code review, clash detection, all the obvious stuff. It’s not waiting for...your approvals... that sounds strange to say out loud.”

“Sending you my temp log-ins now; let’s back the timeline up to concept mode and not let it play out to full constr—“

“Brian, it’s done. We’re just sitting here paging through a 324 sheet set, engineering and all, put together by DM. Window details. Landscape. Exterior envelope with perfect execution. Solar shading studies. Predictive reads on energy use... it ran scripts for renderings even, they seem to emulate the moody atmospheres from our previous work. Novel color schemes, in a way. Wait, it’s...”

“What? There are literally thousands of decisions to make before the design can be complete—wait, what does it look like?”

“T says the program is preparing a download site... It’s downloading the model offsite! It’s downloading itself to itself? That doesn’t make sense... What does it look like? It looks like something we thought you could do on your best day. It’s nice, you know, tasteful. Good plan. Perfect plan, really. None of those serendipitous moments that you seem to get excited about though, those little spiritual efforts that you’re always pushing us to be open to and looking for. Sense of wonder or whatever. That’s all subjective though, right? But it’s a totally complete thought, like it knows you, you know? K thinks you’re playing with us. Are you playing with us?”

“Pulling in now, I’ll be right up. Double the office air recycle if you don’t mind. We’ll call the client and...”

“... Looks like it sent itself to the client’s server early this morning. Why wouldn’t it have told us that? It’s embedded your stamp and forwarded itself to the city’s Bureau of Buildings. Now it’s scanning across all Amazon for fabricators? Could it be following through on the what-ifs in our meeting minutes? Your log in permissions look like ours now... they can’t override or reset or even delete. None of us can interfere with it now. What should we work on in the meantime? The program seems to be cycling through all of our active projects... Hello? Are you still there?”

Books: For an Architecture of Reality

My copy from 1989

I first read Michael Benedikt’s book late in my undergraduate years at Penn. My major was a pre-architecture amalgam called Design of the Environment that taught a wide spectrum of design (fine arts, sculpture, landscape architecture, urban studies, art and architectural history, design studios, and philosophy) from which, if you felt the calling, you could re-align intentions and set forth to become an Architect. This book became a bit of a compass for me, showing me a possible true north going forward in my career: it presented four simple notions that, when combined with one’s own heart and intention, I was convinced would surely produce better architecture, better cities, a better man.

The book’s origin story began as a counterpunch to Post Modernism in architecture in the 1980s, which, perhaps owing to Venturi’s books (Complexity and Contradiction and Learning from Las Vegas) became a grab bag of historical references, no longer really concerned with the purity of modernism’s clean functionalism. Post Modernism was referential; it wasn’t about itself. You had to be in on the joke.

Benedikt didn’t want Modernism or any other -ism other than realism. He wanted architecture to remember how to be substantial and present, not thin and immaterial; how to be authentic and real, not throw-away or dishonestly fake. It was perfect timing for me: every undergrad needs a manifesto, and this one spoke of creating presence in architecture, finding/discovering its significance, and filling the zen emptiness of space. It made more sense than Bachelard, even for this poetry-lover; its guiding thoughts were more subjective than Le Corbusier’s Five Points. Benedikt had four: Presence. Significance. Materiality. Emptiness. Four guiding lights for an architecture of reality. It was seventy slim, evocative pages. By graduate school I had parts of it memorized. Like this bit about the finding meaning in life:

“We seem to fear that unless we keep talking and calling upon the world to talk, we will be overcome by the dread muteness of objects and by the heedlessness of nature, that we might awaken to our “true” condition as “strangers in a strange land. But... just being a man or woman and alive is enough to guarantee the world’s meaningfulness, and we need not fear.”

The book’s treatise metamorphosed within me in graduate school, aiding in my design confidence (I have a path forward! I will not be seduced by style! I will not be deflated in my efforts to make beautiful, meaningful spaces!). But that confidence was tempered by failure after failure, for all the reasons students fail. It’s like I saw myself as my own Unified Theory of architecture; of course I failed. My design thesis for a school of music floated away on intangibles. Its elevator pitch:

“Realizing architecture as a confluence of metaphors, as a question of human awareness in landscape: there is a connection between the structure and reason in poetry and architecture.”

What?

A small consolation and an immense truth exhumed from my journals back then: a classmate I was lamenting with told me that trying was not failing. Trying was a win-win. Won’t we forever be trying?

I carried the book with me into my professional life, and a different quote became very important:

“One can see how buildings constructed rapidly by indifferent men with indifferent plans, using remotely made and general parts, are bound to create indifference—at best—in the population at large... These buildings lack significance to anyone, and are the less real for it.”

Indifference as the opposite of love. Do not become indifferent.