Broadway Housing

The ob­jec­tive of Broad­way Hous­ing is to pro­vide low in­come fam­i­lies that work on the West­side of Los An­ge­les with af­ford­able hous­ing that is both en­vi­ron­men­tally and eco­nom­i­cally sus­tain­able. The de­sign clus­ters eco­nom­i­cal, re­peat­able hous­ing blocks around the canopy of an ex­ist­ing shade tree.
An in­creased in­ten­sity and den­sity was en­cour­aged in the site de­vel­op­ment where a va­cant nurs­ing home is re­placed by a three story, four build­ing, 33 unit, hous­ing com­plex with a green roof. Rest­ing on a cor­ner site, across from a large com­mu­nity park, the com­plex has ac­cess to a di­verse range of trans­porta­tion op­tions in­clud­ing the fu­ture Berg­a­mont Sta­tion Expo line and newly es­tab­lished bike lanes.
The com­plex max­i­mizes every cor­ner of the 1.5 acre site. The four, three story res­i­den­tial build­ings are clus­tered around a starfish shaped in­ter­nal court­yard with a play area and two fully wired com­mu­nity rooms at the rear. This com­mu­nity zone al­lows a safe en­vi­ron­ment for chil­dren to play and do home­work, for adult res­i­dents to gar­den, and for classes to be held.
Larger three bed­room units are placed at the ground level. Two bed­room units are placed on the up­per lev­els and are con­nected by lat­ticed bridges that en­ve­lope a cen­tral, shared court­yard. All of the units face this cen­tral court­yard and every room in each unit has ac­cess to nat­ural light and ven­ti­la­tion.
A num­ber of sus­tain­able tech­niques are in­cor­po­rated into the de­sign from a green roof that in­su­lates and slows runoff, cus­tom win­dow frames that pro­tect units from so­lar heat gain, canted wall pan­els that breathe and re­lease heat, a veg­e­ta­tive screen wall that in­su­lates and re­flects noise, and a 15,000 gal­lon un­der­ground cis­tern that col­lects rain wa­ter for ir­ri­ga­tion. As a re­sult of smart plan­ning and in­te­grated sus­tain­able de­sign the thirty-three units do not have air con­di­tion­ing, yet re­main a com­fort­able tem­per­a­ture through­out the year. On the in­te­rior there are flow re­stric­tors in the kitchens and bath­rooms, 100% re­cy­cled CRI Green-la­bel car­pet, formalde­hyde-free in­su­la­tion, and low VOC paint.