L.A-Frame House by Tim Durfee & Iris Anna Regn

We're delighted to feature the L.A-Frame House by Tim Durfee and Iris Anna Regn. The collaborative team won a NextLA Merit Award for the project in the recent conclusion of the 2013 AIA|LA Design Awards, which honors the best works by Los Angeles-based architects.

Here are some project details we received from the team.

Project description:

"The L.A-Frame House employs an often maligned typology to respond to the conditions of its site – and proposes an alternative to prevailing strategies of residential development in Los Angeles.

Mount Washington, like many residential areas of Los Angeles, is suburban in character but urban in context. Increasingly, however, the impulse to build available lots to the maximum allowable volume is altering the nature of this once unique form of LA neighborhood. Specifically, the new development tends to eliminate the visibility of private backyards from the streets which, in a city impoverished of public green space, is often the only form of visual and spatial relief."

"The L.A.-Frame House instead stacks program vertically into a pavilion, and provides a deck to augment the living and playing area of the backyard. Occupants thus travel 'under the yard' - past a workspace and library - to get from one structure to the other. This unusual path of interior circulation also enables the clear visibility of the mountain-view from the entire site."

"While the origins of the form were non-referential, once the A-frame profile emerged in the development of the design it was embraced as an appropriate foil; the existing 1954 cabin was a product of the same piney post-war culture of leisure that built the original California A-frame houses, and the juxtaposition of the old and new structures can serve to represent, in their modest way, a debate between the expansive ethic of LA’s horizontal past, and the possible benefits of a more vertical future."

Credits:

Project Team: Jennifer Yukie Takeshi, Haila Adamo, Rob Decosmo, Roy Craig Katz, Matthew Kelley, Adam Martinez, Heather McGinn, Chris McMillan, Keith Melchior, Midori Mizuhara, Jeremy Schmit

Structural Engineer: Nous Engineering
Softscape Design: Laura Cooper
Geotechnical Engineer: The J. Byer Group, Inc.
Surveyor: Becker and Miyamoto, Inc.

Images courtesy of Tim Durfee.

Click the thumbnails below to view diagrams.