West Adams has a stark history of federal eminent domain cutting through the neighborhood to place the interstate 10 freeway. Reworking of the urban fabric gave the landscape altered alignments. The freeway, like West Adams boulevard, is directed laterally East to West while the original neighborhood streets moved diagonally. It became the objective to stitch these alignments together by connecting the urban fabric with a façade.

Two items created design constraints. The first was designing on five parcels of land between tall buildings, which forced views North and South. The second item was to design around a pizzeria placed in the middle of the property called Delicious Pizza.

With the façade being the focal point, the housing and record archive are defined as the people and culture of the area. I acknowledged this by maintaining the diagonal alignment of other housing complexes. Housing has the dominate views, while the archive resides on the first floor. The asymmetrical structure creates interstitial spaces around the pizzeria from the sidewalk to bring circulation throughout the complex. The pizzeria acts as the median, dividing the program of the site. Moment frames made from H columns brace the structure, so both orientations can then be unified by the facade. Each frame is connected together with bolted joists and is then infilled with roof joists, creating the second floor. The envelope is a combination of vertical elements to control the amount of transparency for each individual space. Spaces are shown as different levels of opacity with corrugated metal cladding or transparent plastic and glass that reach the full height of the frame.