This layered, translucent space was designed for a progressive film production company in Santa Monica. The industrial building entailed a 2,400 S.F. renovation to accommodate four work areas, offices, conference room, cafeteria, and an audio/visual room.

The fogged translucent panels float and change with the shifts in light throughout the day, seeming to evaporate at times and acting as diffused light sources at night. The acrylic and steel panels maximize available light in order to emphasize the open work environment. Each panel diffuses source light as it travels through the narrow (21') space allowing for evenly lit work stations and offices regardless of location. The seemingly weightless panels consist of two sheets of acrylic and stand in contrast to the solid planes of maple which serve as the work surfaces. The cafeteria area, consisting of concrete floors, maple paneling, and crimson red tables, becomes an alternate visual piece from the work area through its color and materials. The conference room pulls light from the alley through the vertical sliding glass panel door and distributes it to the work area via a pivoting clear glass door and a 4'x10' translucent acrylic window. Workstations were redesigned conceptually from scratch for the new rotating offices of the entertainment world where most employees work on a temporary basis as consultants, and in teams of four or more.

The Kelly residence is a beachfront penthouse on top of an apartment complex in Marina Del Rey. A detached pavilion was added on the roof top terrace. An emphasis was placed on maintaining the exterior shell of the building and working on the exterior with only a few small design moves related to program. A distinctive palette of materials and details were chosen to provide architectural coherence to these interventions and overall clarity to the project. The long narrow proportions of the loft and ocean front views are reinforced by the cat walk that extends from the bedroom loft over the living area to the curtain wall on the ocean side, terminating in a perch from which to survey the beach and the sunset. A trellis leading from the loft to the office pavilion on the roof terrace continues this axis. The kitchen, powder room, bathrooms, closets were placed along the south wall of the primary spaces to allow for the living/ dining area and the bedroom/loft to open to the ocean and city views. A light well cut out over the stair showers it with light, while a wall of translucent reglit glass announces it on the lower level; an opaque glass corner in the shower maintains privacy and at the same time fills the room with light. The office pavilion on the terrace is a steel moment frame with a glass skin. The floor is poured in place concrete in the living room/kitchen level. The master bedroom/ office pavilion level is a wood frame floor, while Dexotex was used on the terrace and ocean deck.

Isolating the hillside house as a building type is very important for architectural discourse. Sloping sites offered California modernists, Wright, Schindler, Neutra, Lautner and others, the opportunity to invent new forms, transforming the house. Continuing in this tradition the Lexton/MacCarthy site offered wonderful west facing views of Los Angeles and suggested a formal strategy of an abstract geometrical form conceived as a play of positive and negative volumes.

The house sits on a steeply sloping lot in Silverlake. The deep vertical section of the site did not lend itself to an easy solution. Working with the structural engineer, Paul Franceschi, the siting of the house, carport and stair was conceived as a Ôstraight dislocation'. The carport Ôbreaks away' from the house with its path traced by a connecting stairway. Retaining walls, excavation, and site grading are typically a major portion of the construction cost for hillside houses. The building pad elevation and siting were considered to minimize the heights of retaining walls and amount of grading.

The program was for a 2,000 sq.ft. house with a carport. Given the limited square footage of the house, the primary floor is conceived as a free plan, which allows for programmatic flexibility. The second story houses the master bedroom suite. The section of the second floor traces an area on the first floor that houses the kitchen, stair, bathroom and closet. The building fenestration on the west wall at the living room are receding and the fenestration at the core of the house reinforces the vertical line through the glu laminated columns. The house is wrapped in 1x6 pine horizontal siding which floats away from the structure with 2"x2" vertical spacers. The second floor siding is stained blue.

The internal plan and distribution of program is suggested in the treatment of the exterior skin. The idea of the house is to establish a horizontal layer on the primary floor and vertical volume on the second floor.

A new vocabulary for wood structures was proposed. The formal simplicity allows for a greater focus on materials, proportions, and details. The abstract geometrical forms stripped of superfluous detailing reinforces the modernist reticence, but is mediated through the use of wood surface which play with the California light. A research component of the project brought us to identify Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian houses as a point of departure. As opposed to the idea that a building should reveal its construction at first glance this solution blurs that criteria and allows the skin to wrap structure, glass, concrete or plywood.

The project is to transform an existing commercial interior space into the signature headquarters for a broadcasting talent agency. Located in Beverly Hills, this 6,100 SqFt office building includes the program of executive suites for the principals of the company, offices for other members of the executive team, assistants, and support staff, two conference rooms, a kitchen and lounge area, reception and miscellaneous service rooms. By layering architectural elements the space itself gets fragmented, but not divided. Through that it becomes a metaphor for the stratum of information within the media television.

Location:
Shijiazhuang, China

Site Characteristics:
20,000 square meter parcel on a flat site in a densely populated area of the city.

Zoning Constrains:
The lot has a 24 meter height restriction,15 meter side yard setback, 36 meter rear yard setback, and 10 meter front yard setback.

Type of Client:
The City of Shijiazhuang, Planning Department

Program:
5,000 square meter office space.

Construction System:
Poured in place concrete frame, with a metal curtain wall system of fiber cement, glass, and copper panels.

Funding:
Funded by the City of Shijiazhuang

Budget:
$2,000,000

Schedule:
To be completed on October 2003

Youbet.com is a renovation of an existing 35,000 SF building realized in collaboration with Pugh + Scarpa. The Youbet Network is America's first interactive online horseracing service. Youbet.com, Inc., is a service organization that provides horseplayers instant access to live racing, information, and wagering worldwide via a private, secure online environment.

When Youbet leased the former Xerox headquarters for their new corporate headquarters, they wanted to create an atypical corporate environment that would serve their complex programmatic needs and express the cutting edge attitude of the company. The space they were moving from as well as the existing Xerox space they were moving to offered conventional, ordinary commercial environments featuring 8'-0" dropped acoustical ceilings and an unimaginative use of space. Thus, the first design move required the complete stripping down of the existing space to its core elements. With this raw industrial shell as a desired backdrop, Youbet's new offices could take shape. From the outset, the new headquarters distinguish Youbet from the former typology.

The program for Youbet accommodates 190 staff-persons with offices, open workstations, service cores, meeting rooms, a board room, and a large public space featuring a cafe and lounge area. Because of the highly proprietary nature of information at Youbet, a design scheme emerged to facilitate security without fragmenting or jeopardizing design coherence or overall ease of circulation. The organizational strategy creates a centrally located technical and service core around which all other programmatic events unfold. This core consists of the racing operation center (roc), the network operation center (noc) and research labs all of which are densely equipped technical spaces featuring cutting edge computing, networking and media equipment. Service spaces, such as bathrooms and mechanical rooms, complete the core.

The perimeter of the building functions as a continuous loop of space-a circuit — along which Youbet's primary corporate divisions (i.e. Executive Management, Software Development and research, accounting, marketing, technical operations, and human resources and call center) unfold. Organized in a series of secured zones with checkpoints requiring pass cards for entry at each divisional threshold, all zones connect back to the core (functionally and visually) via an infra-structural loop in the form of an architectural soffitt. This soffitt provides an elegant, orderly formal resolution for the distribution of services (mechanical, electrical, tele-communicating) throughout the space.

In some ways, Youbet is organized like a medieval city. A circuitous path of varied events revolves around a central core. By implementing this organizational strategy, the perimeter is left free to maximize views to the outside and exposure to natural light. A series of skylights are introduced at the roof plane to provide additional washes of natural light. The circuit at Youbet fulfills the company's boundary and security needs without creating an overtly fragmented, divisive or unfriendly spatial experience. Subtle design moves-such as compression and expansion of space-create a dynamic experience. Regions of the loop densely populated with offices or open landscape workstations create a comfortable, but narrow circulation passage. At several locations, these compressed areas give way to an opening up of space, not unlike a piazza in an italian city, providing a spacious field in which feature design elements command attention and animate the architectural experience.

These freestanding sculptural events are distinct programmatic elements, deliberately set apart from the field. These elements are characterized by their public nature-each constitutes an important gathering space: board room, conference room, group meeting room etc. Each of these events is characterized by an expressive architectural form and experimental use of materials. The organic form of the a meeting room in the network operations support zone, for example, is articulated with smooth painted drywall on the interior and a cage like matrix of steel reinforcing bar on the exterior.