Winners announced in Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles design challenge

The results are in: Launched last November, the Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles design challenge, a free-to-enter ideas competition organized by the Office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Chief Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles, Christopher Hawthorne, now has a roster of winning concepts. As previously detailed, the challenge invited architects and landscape architects to envision progressive models of low-rise, multifamily housing in America’s second-most populous city with an emphasis on affordability, sustainability, and “confronting historical patterns of racial and environmental injustice in housing policy in Southern California.”

The first-, second-, and third-place winners stretch across four unique and mostly self-explanatory categories as outlined in the competition brief: Corners, Fourplex, Subdivision, and (Re)Distribution, a category in which participants were invited to choose an iconic L.A. home from a provided list and divide it into four housing units. The winning entries were selected from a pool of 380 submissions from around the world. Per a press announcement revealing the winners, 7 of the 12 top submissions were from teams hailing from Southern California while the remainder of the 5 top slots went to teams from New York City (two), the United Kingdom (two), and Austin, Texas (one).

An additional 23 submissions received Honorable Mention citations from the jury; 11 of these teams were composed of members from Southern California. In total, 18 of the 35 recognized submissions—the 12 winners and 23 honorable mentions—came from Southern California-based teams.

The quartet of first-place winners in each category will receive a cash award of $10,000 while the second and third place winners in each category will receive awards of $3,500 and $1,500, respectively. Support for Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles, a project initiated as part of a larger research undertaking spearheaded by the Mayor’s Office of Budget and Innovation, was provided by the James Irvine Foundation, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Citi, and the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles.

The full list of awardees including the members of each respective team can be found below with links to each winning submission. The Low-Rise website also lists the honorable mention-granted submissions within each category. A full list of the 28 jurors—7 for each category—can be found here. (Jeanne Gang, Deborah Berke, Tatiana Bilbao, and Jason Foster, president and COO of Destination Crenshaw, were among the jurors, to name just a few.)

Over the next several months, the Low-Rise organizers will coordinate and announce a series of “re-engagement sessions” aimed at gleaning feedback on the winning submissions from community partners as well as architects, planners, and affordable housing developers. As detailed in the announcement, competition organizers will “then work with our colleagues at City Hall to incorporate the most compelling and feasible ideas from the design challenge into updates to our affordable-housing, zoning, and land-use policies,” with the “hope that these winning designs, with their focus on community amenity and self-determination, will set the stage for a more productive and less polarized conversation about the future of our low-rise neighborhoods.”

Without further ado, the Low-Rise winners: