Dear DNA friends,

I hope you are doing well.

Barely a week goes past without news in housing. And this week the news was good for supporters of affordable housing, and architecture with attitude.

After years tied up in neighborhood struggles and stalling at the City, the Venice Dell Community, an affordable and supportive housing complex for 140 low-income artists, families, and formerly unhoused people, designed by the unorthodox architect Eric Owen Moss, just got a major boost. 

Last week a Los Angeles Superior Court Judge rejected a claim by the “Coalition For Safe Coastal Development” that the project, to be located on a city-owned parking lot on the median close to Venice Beach, had been illegally exempted from CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act), handing a victory to the nonprofit developers Venice Community Housing, and Hollywood Community Housing Corporation.

The project, initiated in 2016 when the City Administrative Office selected the site at 200 N. Venice Blvd as an early Affordable Housing Opportunity Site and subsequently supported by LA City Council and the Planning Commission, became a lightning rod in Venice, a neighborhood that has seen a loss of affordable rental housing, very little new construction, and extreme gentrification. According to a press release issued by VCH and HCHC, “Oakwood, the historic Black neighborhood within Venice, was 75% Black and Latinx in 1990, but by 2017 was 75% white.” Rents in Venice rose higher than in Beverly Hills.

Rendering of the long-awaited Venice Dell Community. Courtesy Eric Owen Moss Architects.

VCH has spent more than 35 years providing shelter, services, and arts opportunities for people with often deep economic and health challenges (as I learned when I co-produced this short video). So the project had plenty of support but also many naysayers, from the local Neighborhood Council to Councilwoman Traci Park. They argued the development would increase crime, reduce the availability of public parking, detract from neighborhood character, and damage the environment. There was the price tag (all in, including the market value of the land, “a whopping $1.24M per 460 square foot unit,” stated Parks, who ran on her opposition to Dell). And then there was the design.

Moss, known for formally experimental buildings that are hard to box stylistically, created the delightfully menacing (W)rapper by the Expo Line, as well as the famed Hayden Tract, Culver City, a collection of warehouses creatively recast as an art park of highly sculptural office buildings. He saw no reason to water down his design voice for this affordable housing combined with ground-level shops, cafes, pocket parks, and a parking structure. The whole would be encased in a sandy-colored structure with listing walls and cantilevered, reverse-sloping, upper stories punctuated by irregular windows. It looks in the renderings to have been sculpted out of the nearby beach sand. Now that will have character. Opponents dubbed it the “Monster on the Median.”

Well now, it looks like the monster may rise and, as with all Moss’s buildings, which seem to embody the French aesthetic of jolie-laide (pretty-ugly), it may prove to also be a swan. There are still a few more hurdles, but VCH co-executive director Becky Dennison is optimistic, saying. “With this victory, we are excited and hopeful that Mayor Bass will direct her teams to take the actions needed to get these desperately needed affordable homes across the finish line and help fulfill our community’s vision of a Westside for all.”

Rendering of the street facade of the Venice Dell Community. Courtesy Eric Owen Moss Architects.

Design Things To Do

Lovely Long Beach                                                                                                       Long Beach Architecture Week
May 29th–June 9th
Various Locations and Venues 

Long Beach is home to a lively urban downtown, Art Deco delights, and gems of midcentury Modernism. And that's just for starters. Get better acquainted with the cityscape at Long Beach Architecture Week, co-presented by KCRW.

Click here for details.

A Housing Three-fer:
Building on History, in the City of Los Angeles, May 29th
Move LA Expo, on Transport and Housing in LA, May 31st
Housing Solutions and the Future, in Santa Monica, June 6th

As mentioned above, not a week goes by when LA's housing challenges are not under consideration. If you want to join the conversation, pick from these three panels:

On Wednesday, May 29th, the California Preservation Foundation hosts Building on History: A Summit for Housing Solutions, a conference at the Herald Examiner building as well as online. There's a great line-up of speakers, including a keynote by the lawyer-developer to watch Alfred Fraijo Jr., Principal, Somos Group. I’ll moderate a panel about saving NOAH (Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing.) 

On Friday, May 31st, Move LA Expo, at the Biltmore Hotel, largely focuses on creating a workable transportation system but includes a panel on Real Strategies that Address the Affordable Housing and Crisis of Homelessness in LA.

Next week, June 6th, at Santa Monica Museum, currently showing the exhibition UnHoused: A History of Housing in Santa Monica, I'll moderate a discussion about Housing Solutions and the Future. This promises to be lively, with guests representing the city (Jing Yeo, City of Santa Monica Planning Commission), affordable housing (Jesús Hernández, Community Corporation of Santa Monica), renters rights (Denny Zane, Santa Monicans for Renters Rights) and home-building. The latter is represented by Bruce Fairty, Cypress Equity, developer of the "Lincoln Center," below, a plan to replace a  Gelsons with a dense housing and retail development that has been as controversial locally as the Venice Dell Community, above.

The Lincoln Center project, planned to replace a Gelsons and a parking lot at Lincoln Boulevard, designed by Koning Eizenberg Architects

Wrapture, works by Jim Isermann, presented by Miles McEnery Gallery
Pacific Design Center Design Gallery, 8687 Melrose Ave, West Hollywood, CA
On view through June 29th, Tuesdays–Saturdays, 10:00 AM–6:00 PM;
Reception for the artist, Thursday, May 30th, 3:00 PM–7:00 PM

Since childhood, the artist Jim Isermann has been “super interested in how pattern works,” he told Palm Springs Art Museum on the occasion of a show of his work in 2020. He added that he is “very interested in working with materials that make me construct patterns in a different way.” 

His super-sunny geometric designs, evoking Op and Pop Art, and Supergraphics, fit naturally into crisp interiors with both modern furniture like his own Donald Wexler-designed steel and glass house in Palms Springs, and the walls of the Pacific Design Center Design Gallery, where you can see a survey of Isermann’s vinyl decal and painting work from 1986 to the present.

A reception will be held this Thursday, May 30th, coinciding with Pride Week. Expect tacos and Tecate from El Comal Rosa, and a burst of glorious color.

Click here for details.

What I'm Digging

Report from Musk's World

Several years back, just before the Tesla Model S was launched on the market, I got the chance to sit in the car and talk to Elon Musk about the design. Back then he was reachable directly by email, and great fun to be around, a suave, funny, nerd; just imagine Q and James Bond rolled into one. That was then. Now Musk appears to be decoupling from regular humanity, as explored in this thought-provoking meditation centered on SpaceX in Brownsville, Texas, by Christopher Hooks.

He writes that people don't just work for SpaceX, some fully support the Musk goal to “preserve humanity and extend consciousness” with human settlement of the solar system. Others simply wish to preserve the local ecology from the rockets' insistent presence. Hooks channels those of us skeptical of occupying the Red Planet. "Mars may have water and other potential resources, but on top of its profound hostility to human life, the planet looks like the most charmless corner of the American Southwest, without the saving grace of being able to grab a Cherry Coke slushie from a nearby filling station."

SpaceX at Brownsville Texas. Photo courtesy SpaceX.