The San Vicente office building is located on a busy street at the entrance to a luxury shopping and restaurant district in Brentwood, Los Angeles, and it faces a large open park across the street. Metallic silver paint coats the façade of the two-story structure, reflecting the changing light conditions throughout the day and rendering the stucco underneath almost immaterial. The façade’s color ranges from crisp silver against a foggy sky to the glowing orange of the evening sun. The varying depths of the apertures on the three sides of the building register the varying wall thicknesses, accentuated and given volume by a black and silver palette.

Vault House is situated on a densely developed Californian beach site and challenges the standard prime, single-view typology by applying a strategy of a complex layering of transparent interior spaces. With a series of stacked and unidirectional vaults contained within a simple solid mass, the parallel orientation of the rooms within the house becomes a filter that emphasizes the continuation of the oceanfront view from the beachfront façade to the street. Similar to the paradigm of a shotgun-house, the singular direction of the vaults maximizes the connection of all spaces within a deep building, meanwhile incorporating the ideal exterior landscape of the ocean and horizon.

Designed for an irregular hillside lot in Los Angeles, the form of this 3,600 square foot single-family residence results from two economically driven demands: to maximize the allowable volume permitted by the zoning code and to minimize the number of foundations and subsequent footprint of the house. The resulting structure adopts a site-specific form by registering the zoning envelope and optimizing the building volume’s performance on an inclined plane. Window quantities are minimized for privacy while window sizes are maximized for views and ventilation. The overall cladding strategy seeks to minimize the distinction between roof and wall planes while maximizing the differentiation between interior and exterior.

Designed for an ecologically rich site on the Argentine plains near Rosario, this 3,000 square foot house optimizes a compact dwelling space by maximizing the experience of the surrounding views and prioritizing environmental performance. The Taurus shape creates expansive spaces by layering volume and view within and throughout the house. The siting, orientation, and form of the house minimize dependence on mechanical systems, making use of natural light, airflow, and alternative energy systems to create a dynamic living experience directly engaged with the local site conditions.

Porch House is a concrete house built upon a small pad at the top of a sloping hillside. Expansive views of the Pacific Ocean and Will Rogers State Park informed the design to allow the main living space to transform from an indoor to an outdoor experience. While a standard house typology provides living space on the ground floor and private rooms above, the Porch House is reversed in order to maintain an unbroken progression from the street, thereby allowing the living room to expand vertically.

Sited on a plateau at the eastern edge of Marfa, Texas, this single-family house makes use of a traditional building material – adobe brick – together with steel spanning frames to create a courtyard house. The adobe bricks, fabricated and lay by local craftsmen, optimize the thermal properties of the earthen material in the walls orientated towards the east, south, and west, which are defined by smaller openings and maximum sun exposure. To the north, the courtyard plan integrates the spatial qualities of the steel framing with large glazed openings and outdoor patios adjacent to a gallery and living areas. The kitchen, anchoring the two wings in the center of the house, is oriented north with a view through the V-shaped courtyard. The unified, singular pitch of the metal roof visually connects the building mass to the sloping terrain of the site. The new earthen mound surrounding the kitchen to the south, which nearly touches the roof at its lowest point, orients circulation on the site towards the public and private zones of the house from the parking court.