Architects Building on Their Social Conscience

Early in his professional career, architect Arnold Stalk was troubled by the plight of the homeless. The fate of families forced to survive on the street or crowded into overpriced Skid Row hotel rooms oppressed his soul and challenged his sense of responsibility as a neophyte designer.

Unlike many architects, who feel they ought to do more than build homes for the rich but never come to grips with their troubled consciences, Stalk took action.

In 1983 he co-founded the Los Angeles Family Housing Corp. as a nonprofit agency dedicated to the creation of low-cost housing for economically deprived families. Increasingly, LAFHC’s projects that range from temporary shelters to permanent apartments for the homeless have begun to attract national attention as economical yet thoughtfully designed architectural models.

“We could use a multitude of Stalk clones,” said John Ochoa, executive director of the Greater Los Angeles Partnership for the Homeless. “Failing that, we must find ways of getting more designers involved in finding clever and attractive ways of housing displaced victims of social, economic and political changes over which they have no control.”

Two recently completed LAFHC projects illustrate how Stalk and his architect wife, Michelle, design their way out of lean budgets and rigid building codes that regulate everything from the quality of finishes to the sizes of rooms.

Triangle House, on a shabby side street off Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights, contains eight apartments arranged in an imaginative complex that could grace any upscale Westside neighborhood. The upper level units have mezzanine sleeping lofts instead of separate bedrooms to increase the sense of spaciousness. And an air of avant-garde elegance, rare in subsidized housing, is induced by touches such as the galvanized pipe railings and the eccentric skyline silhouette.

Style on Minimal Budget

In the Pico Union district, Villa Nueva’s 20 apartments are designed on two levels around a central courtyard. Its neat, pitched roofs, cross-pane windows and fine sand-finished stucco lifts the visual depression of its dilapidated downtown district. Intended for families with very low incomes, the publicly funded project rents its units for about $250 per month, demonstrating how minimal budgets need not dictate mean architecture.

“Architects can do a lot to raise the quality of life for people desperate for shelter,” Arnold Stalk said. “We can use our expertise as designers to dissipate the almost Victorian stigma of charity and ugliness that still clings to public housing of any kind. We can create environments that are as pleasant as they are cheap.”

The Stalks search out potential locations for LAHFC projects by driving the streets all over the city. They find funding from a mixture of government agencies such as the Community Redevelopment Agency and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and from private charities.

Privately Funded

As a privately funded project, Triangle House was subject to fewer design restrictions and delays than housing built with public money. Its construction cost, at $39 per square foot, is roughly half the average cost of $60-$70 for most subsidized residential developments, and its completion within a year contrasts with an average of three years for publicly financed projects.

Triangle House contractor John Bohling attributes the project’s remarkably low construction cost to a mixture of professional dedication by the Stalks and a plethora of donated materials and services.

‘More Collaboration’

“The project ends up a lot nicer than many a Marina del Rey apartment complex I have built with twice the budget,” he said. “There’s less tension and more collaboration here, and therefore things go much faster and much happier.”

But the Stalks can even create imaginative public housing on a budget.

Funded by the CRA, Casa Familia, an eight-unit complex on East Adams Boulevard completed in 1984, followed a familiar Angeleno architectural tradition of two-story townhouses grouped around a courtyard. But in a neighborhood of tough streets, the courtyard also served as a relatively safe place for kids to play while parents watch from kitchen windows.

Constructed at a modest cost of $50 per square foot, the units rent at about $300 per month, way below the market rate for rentals in the crowded area.

Administers Project

“Although we are in the midst of an urban battle zone, surrounded by dangerous street gangs and drug dealers, we have managed to maintain a strong community sense in Casa Familia,” said Noelle Sweitzer, president of Housing Development Services, the contract agency that administers the project.

The Stalks’ inventiveness in finding ways to create housing ranges from converting historic buildings such as the 100-year-old Strong Mansion, moved from its site near the expanding Convention Center earlier this year, to conjuring up “quick build” demonstration projects such as the Gentry Village apartment complex in North Hollywood, to be erected between this Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

The architects are also excited by the idea of constructing homes over the city’s 140 municipal parking lots, which they see as an under-used resource of vacant land in a crowded urban scene.

Many architects might wonder how the Stalks can afford to spend so much time on homeless housing projects, which pay a professional fee of less than half what a designer might command in the commercial housing market. Considering the extra red tape involved in any operation controlled by public agencies, plus the complexity of the official housing codes, few designers can make a profit in this specialty.

The Stalks balance their public work with a practice in custom-designed homes. Designers Plus, their private design firm, operates out of the ground floor of their Woodland Hills home. The link between the architecture of their designer homes and the LAFHC projects is a Cubist simplicity of style and a predilection for muscular materials like galvanized steel pipe railings and stark white stucco surfaces.

Paid Their Dues

“Arnie and I have paid our dues, putting in much sweat and long hours bringing low-cost housing projects to completion,” Michelle Stalk said.

“We’ve learned to punch our way through brick walls of bureaucratic obstruction, or find ways around obstacles, while struggling to survive as professionals. We feel the profession as a whole should be more involved in helping to house the homeless, rather than leaving it up to a few dedicated people.”

A big beetle-browed man with gentle brown eyes, Arnold Stalk believes most architects feel uneasy about this issue, even if they do little or nothing to appease their consciences.

“I lecture at SCI-ARC, and find a deep concern among my students about the homeless,” he said. “I keep telling them, and any other architect who’ll listen, that we can solve the homeless housing problem, if only we’re willing to bring our energy and imagination fully to bear.

“Sure, it’s exhausting and unglamorous, and bad for your bank balance. But designers simply must get involved. In the long run, much of our professional repute depends upon how we respond to this painful human emergency.”