tony61 – Page 2 – Corsini Stark Architects

Atwater Union

The site is located between a manufacturing zone to the east and a commercial zone to the south. The city’s live-work ordinance was applied for the first time to a small lot subdivision to legally allow in-home businesses at this location.

Living spaces for Unit Type A are placed on the third level, convenient to the roof terrace immediately above, and allowing views over the two-story Type B houses towards the Griffith Park hills. Residents are required to exit their garage into the mews and enter their home using the open-air stair that spills out into the mews, forming a stoop. There is no internal connection from the garage. The designated workspace is accessed from the side yard on the east and from the garage, but not directly from the residence above.

For Unit Type B, a single car garage and carport are arranged in tandem. A small patio is provided outside the kitchen and contiguous with the carport to create a semi-private space along the mews. This arrangement, together with the Unit A entry stoop across the way, will cause neighbors to enter the mews space to before accessing their car.
Private front yard gardens are located on the Glendale Blvd. frontage, similar to those on the Venice Beach walk streets, and directly access the public sidewalk leading to stores and restaurants in the commercial district.

It’s similar to the literary idea: in this architectural case, the design responds to the rhythms of daily life (such as with the carport/patio idea and its relation to the stairway/stoops across the mews to embody the daily routine of coming and going, building in a way for people to see their neighbors in public space), and also using the formal device of physical repetition, theme and variation, to create rhythm in the project’s visual, outward massing…giving it a visual heartbeat, so to speak. And the repetition, or beat, of the tall, wider black Type A units, with the low, narrower, white Type B units along the mews is a true syncopation.

CATEGORY	INFORMATION
Project Type	Single-Family Townhouses
Location	Atwater Village, Los Angeles, CA
Status	Completed Fall, 2019
Size	Site Area:19,815 SF/.45 acre Building Area: 16,600 SF

Santa Monica Animal Shelter

Renovation of the City of Santa Monica’s animal shelter featuring an image abstracted into a concrete-block mosaic.

CATEGORY	INFORMATION
Project Type	Public Facilities Renovation
Location	Santa Monica, CA
Status	Completed 2009

Southwestern Law School Graduate Residences

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The building’s design presents the school as a positive influence in the neighborhood — bright, dignified, and sufficiently confident in its stature to be visually open. This visual openness symbolically conveys a positive message to the community, while physical openness allows daylight and natural breezes to fill the building for the benefit of its residents. We want people to see the world a little differently by using this building; the juxtaposition of one framed view or fragment against another allows one to understand the architecture, and the city, in unexpected ways that hopefully reveal some new insight about the nature of this place.

Wide hallways open to cooling breezes and punctuated by daylight, seating, and framed views encourage social interaction. Living rooms for two-bedroom apartments were placed at the building corners along a diagonal line-of-sight from the entry to dramatically frame city views. One-bedroom apartments are oriented lengthwise along the exterior wall, with living and sleeping areas linked by an open galley kitchen. This doorless internal arrangement provides good daylighting and allows cross-ventilation for each apartment in a double-loaded plan.

We organized the project much the way a choreographer conceives a dance: considering bodies moving through space, in sequence, with path trajectories, confluences and conflicts, and eddies of stasis amid fluid movement to encourage the spontaneous chats and chance encounters that build a sense of familiarity and community. Varying sequences of daylight and framed views set the rhythm.

CATEGORY	INFORMATION
Project Type	Academic Multi-Unit Housing
Location	Koreatown, Los Angeles, CA
Status	Completed 2013
Size	106,000 SF — 133 Units — 153 Beds

CTTi, Cal Poly Pomona

As the lead design firm for this project, we created fundamental improvements to the campus master plan, conducted the building programming, developed the design, and lent graphic support for fundraising efforts.

The entire complex contains multiple programs of the College — professional development courses, NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory technology conversion center, and a business incubator for the development of entrepreneurial endeavors in the region.

Located on the southern edge of the Cal Poly Pomona campus, the buildings created a new entry to the university and a focal point for community engagement. The four buildings are organized around a quadrangle with views to the mountains. The outdoor spaces, planned recital hall, and bookstore/café create a rich environment for lifelong learning, innovation, and collaboration.

Phase I construction was 47,500 SF with an additional 17,000 SF planned for phase II. It was built to meet the criteria of five public and private funding sources and is an example of quality design with a modest budget.

CATEGORY	INFORMATION
Project Type	Institutional
Location	Cal Poly Pomona, Pomona, CA
Status	Completed 2001
Size	47,500 sq. feet

University of Southern California Historic Houses Rehabilitation Program

This project involved the preservation and adaptive re-use of three houses listed as Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments on the USC campus: the Dosan Ahn Chang Ho Family House, the Minkin House, and the Freshman Writing House. The Ahn House, an example of the American Foursquare style, is significant for its association with the family of the 20th C. Korean independence movement patriot. It was relocated to the northern edge of campus where it joined the Freshman Writing House and an ensemble of other buildings of similar character along a streetscape restored to its period of significance. The 2.5-million-dollar project included ADA upgrades, new electrical, data, mechanical and plumbing infrastructure, and full exterior and interior rehabilitation. The Minkin House, significant as a rare example of the shingle style in the West Adams District, was relocated to a nearby site north of campus.

CATEGORY	INFORMATION
Project Type	Adaptive Reuse
Location	Los Angeles, CA

Casa Romantica Cultural Arts and Educational Center

La Casa Romantica, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is a pre-eminent example of the Spanish Colonial Revival of Southern California, in City of San Clemente. La Casa Romantica was designed by architect Carl Lindbom and completed in 1928, two years after its more famous sister residence, La Casa Pacifica, which served as President Richard Nixon’s Western White House. The program for the adaptive re-use of the 7,000 SF 2.4 acre historic residence as a community cultural arts center includes a community library, conference rooms, historic exhibitions, art gallery, arts workshop and classrooms, administrative offices, gift shop, community park, and garden and a new amphitheater.

CATEGORY	INFORMATION
Project Type	Adaptive Reuse
Location	San Clemente, CA

Avenel Homes

In 1948, ten families united by their progressive politics pooled their resources, bought a sloping site in the hills of Silver Lake, and hired architect Gregory Ain to design a ten-unit housing cooperative with private gardens and flexible interior space. Like countless post-war housing developments in the U.S., Avenel Homes was financed through the Federal Housing Administration.

The cooperative had changed its tenure to condominium status and fallen into disrepair when CSA partner Rick Corsini purchased a unit in 1993. Over the next ten years he helped guide the incremental restoration of the complex, with fellow architect and resident Gordon Olschlager, toward its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Avenel Homes is one of only three post-war modernist buildings in Los Angeles listed on the National Register.

CATEGORY	INFORMATION
Project Type	Renovation of Historic Cooperative by Gregory Ain (1948)
Location	Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA
Status	Completed 2003

Works on Paper Gallery

Works on Paper, Inc. is a fine art gallery specializing in contemporary drawings and mixed media work. The client’s program called for breaking the rigid white space art gallery design convention to accommodate art in a wide range of media and format, including small drawings, large scale paintings and photographs, sculpture, and installations. The scale of the space needed an intimate dimension suitable for smaller works and closer in scale to a residential environment.

The solution emerged through a concept of flexibility through specificity. A 12-foot high white wall extends the length of the space to accommodate large format work. An angled white soffit was introduced on the west side of the space that alters one’s perspective to create the illusion of expanded space. The wall below this soffit varies in height from 7’-10” to 10’-0” and is painted a yellow beige color. This came to be known as “the intimate wall.” The far wall and the ceiling were painted a medium greenish gray so that these elements would visually recede relative to the white elements and thus perceptually expand the space. A small wall behind the reception desk was painted light blue. And a narrow wall concealed mostly from view leading to the restroom received a dark red as an unexpected “sneaky” accent.

The color palette was a major component of the design. Hue and value were strategically introduced to create the illusion of expanded space and to lend a sense of intimacy while maintaining the abstract nature of the design. This was achieved by assigning a medium warm gray to the ceiling and to the wall plane at the end of the axis of entry, causing the wall to visually recede. The white wall plane and soffit were then left as the primary space-defining forms, with the yellow-beige plane as the secondary one. Light blue and red planes were discreetly introduced on non-display walls as accents. A dark plum-brown ground plane was intended to psychologically “anchor” the space and visually unify the individually-articulated wall planes. Natural light was brought in through a circular skylight placed on-axis with a translucent glass entry door to create a subtle sense of hierarchy and to provide a logical place to locate the occasional sculpture exhibition.

CATEGORY	INFORMATION
Project Type	Creative Workplace
Location	Miracle Mile District, Los Angeles, CA
Status	Completed 1999

Ayzenberg Group Expansion

A common problem for multi-faceted creative advertising agencies is that staff and workgroups can easily become isolated into workplace islands of specialization. This problem increases when the organization occupies multiple floors in a single building. In this case, the agency grew by acquiring adjacent buildings that became available over the last eight years. Spatial integration between existing and new buildings and through multiple floors to make the workplace feel as one and encourage collaboration is truly a three-dimensional problem.

This project involves the renovation of a two-story, 12,400 SF building and addition of a three-story, 9,200 SF building that then interconnects with three-story and one-story buildings. To address the visual interconnection between floors, a shaft of space runs diagonally from the first level gathering space to a large light monitor at the third level, framing a view of the sky and visually uniting the three-level workspace as one. Between the new and existing buildings and within the new building itself, circulation loops functionally tie common spaces together.

Axial, oblique, and diagonal sightlines, some that coincide with circulation pathways, help weave space, light, and movement together, creating constant awareness of spaces beyond the space one occupies. This simultaneity lends the project a palpable rhythm of space and activity, where larger, scheduled meetings and impromptu discussions occur at once within the workplace visual field without compromising privacy and workgroup activity.

CATEGORY	INFORMATION
Project Type	Adaptive Reuse, Creative Workplace, Urban Infill
Location	Historic District, Pasadena, CA
Status	January, 2017 Completion
Size	9,200 sq. feet new; 12,400 renovated
Awards	2017 AIA \| LA DESIGN AWARD

Ayzenberg Group

Ayzenberg Group, a creative advertising agency that serves the video game industry, sought to expand its video editing capabilities through the addition of video edit bays, private offices, a common work area with critique spaces, and a flexible conference room. The new office orchestrates these spaces to allow and encourage interaction and interfacing between collaborators — essential to the company’s ethos.

Traditional video editing bays rely on orthogonal geometry that tends to impede face-to-face contact. We, in turn, developed a pentagonal plan to allow simultaneous sight lines between video editor, creative team, and video screen. This became the building block for the faceted geometry and angular expression throughout the project — shifted views and bent axes, manipulated perspectival space, and angular ceiling surfaces that baffle daylight to create bright or dim spaces and provide aesthetic variety.

The new critique space with its red rubber flooring ties the existing office together with the expansion to create a geographic and metaphoric heart for the workplace; acoustical tackboards allow informal pin-up critiques throughout. The black, white, and metal finishes and angular geometry of the new forms contrasts in productive and pleasing tension with the brick-and-wood texture of the existing building.

CATEGORY	INFORMATION
Project Type	Adaptive Reuse, Creative Workplace, Urban Infill
Location	Historic District, Pasadena, CA
Status	Completed 2011
Size	4,500 sq. feet

Author: tony61