As Redondo Beach became gentrified, its small and eclectic beachside bungalows were steadily demolished in order to make room for a relatively homogenous collection of large mission style apartments and condominiums. As a result of this transformation, the casual, idiosyncratic, and largely exterior lifestyle of this beach community was replaced by one that was more self-conscious, banal, and highly interiorized. The local Planning Department, meanwhile, stepped in to regulate this development through a slate of draconian zoning and aesthetic ordinances designed to ensure minimum standards of quality, but which had the additional deleterious effect of legitimizing and enforcing the narrow spatial and aesthetic precedents it established.

This project, therefore, sought not only to take a stand against the city’s administrative pressure to mindlessly conform to the surrounding development, but also to demonstrate a more thoughtful example of multi-family dwelling—one that preserved the social and spatial freedom characteristic of its previous building fabric. This was achieved through the project’s use of a semi-lofted sectional strategy of spanning platform spaces separated by two-story open volumes.

Program-specific “rooms” can be established in these platform spaces, which are bounded by interior sliding glass doors along the edges adjacent to the interstitial open volumes. Adjusting these sliding glass doors allows the occupants to tune the degree of separation or interconnectedness of these spaces, providing a range of spatial experiences that include both the individuated nature of private rooms characteristic of the older bungalows as well as the fluid openness of a typical urban loft.

Meanwhile, the overall building massing opens up this active spatial reconfiguration to the exterior through large operable glass facades on the building’s front and rear elevations. In turn, it deploys its massive side walls as buttresses along the shared property lines—as if to figuratively resist the creeping pressure of the neighboring developer-built context. These walls feature an integral trellis-like cladding designed to support a mantle of growing vines—the result of a lengthy and hard fought negotiation with the city’s Planning Department that allowed this project to avoid the sloping Spanish tile roof and wrought iron balcony railings that would have otherwise been required.