Living on a New Frontier. One Santa Fe Mixed-Use Complex

By Michael Webb - 30 September 2015

Over his 20 years of practice, Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan has housed the homeless and the super-rich; now he has created an exemplary complex of market-rate apartments. One Santa Fe (named for its street address) comprises two staggered blocks that together extend 400 meters along a narrow strip of land sandwiched between railway tracks and SCI-Arc, the architectural school that occupies a former loading dock. In this gritty industrial section of downtown LA, Michael Maltzan Architecture have created an icon as significant, architecturally and socially, as their Inner City Arts campus and their Star Apartments (The Plan 082) for the Skid Row Housing Trust.

The two six-story blocks would be the fifth tallest building in the world if they were stood end on end. From the air, they evoke the trains that pause or pass on the tracks to the east, and their horizontality plays off the cluster of high rises to the west. They symbolize the growing densification of a city that is still widely perceived as a suburban sprawl. Already the lofts and older office buildings of downtown LA have been converted to residential use; One Santa Fe represents a new frontier. And it is one that is sure to expand as light rail links this area to the rest of the city, and the LA River is transformed from a concrete culvert into a green oasis. After a century of outward growth, the center of this megalopolis is regaining some of its former importance.

Los Angeles has an abundance of architectural talent and a severe deficit of enlightened clients. One of the few visionaries is Nick Patsouras, an electrical engineer by training, who made an unsuccessful run for mayor and became involved with the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). Maltzan admires his understanding of how environments, buildings, and infrastructure change cities. Patsouras realized that SCI-Arc’s move from West LA and the downtown renaissance would shift the city’s...