This Weekend: Tour the Carver Apartments by Michael Maltzan Architecture

Carver Apartments image via Zev's BlogThis weekend, deLaB (Design East of La Brea) will host a tour of the Carver Apartments by Michael Maltzan Architecture. Since they were completed in 2010, the Carver Apartments--the second Maltzan project for the Skid Row Housing Trust--have been celebrated for innovative design benefitting the large homeless population of Downtown Los Angeles. Tickets for the tour (available here) will cost $20 to tour the 97-unit supportive housing complex, with proceeds benefitting the Skid Row Housing Trust and deLaB.

In a bit of PR-serendipity, deLaB isn’t the only Los Angeles group that has focused  on the community-driven work of Michael Maltzan lately. The blog of LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky last week published a long, detailed account of Maltzan’s growing portfolio of work for the Skid Row Housing Trust, the most recent example of which is Star Apartments at 6th Street and Maple Avenue in Downtown LA. Zev’s Blog sums up this latest ambitious effort, which will begin installing units this month, as “a project that will graft pre-fabricated housing units onto an existing, multi-use single-story building at 6th Street and Maple Avenue. A new ‘structural tray’ atop the original building will support the network of 100-plus studio apartments being trucked in from a factory in Idaho, while also forming a kind of outdoor mezzanine with community gardens, jogging track, basketball court, yoga platform and shared kitchen, laundry and computer room spaces.”  So, fans of prefab, keep your calendars open for tours of Maltzan’s latest contribution to the welfare of Los Angeles when that project is complete spring or early summer 2013.

The Star Apartments. Rendering via Zev's Blog.