Social Transparency: Projects on Housing

For the past decade, the Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan has designed multiunit housing in a city known for its proliferation of single-family residences. Working with the Skid Row Housing Trust, these projects advance new forms of supportive housing that address the services and infrastructures needed for their particular populations of inhabitants. For Maltzan, housing manifests an incredibly complex set of spatial problems―social, economic, political, typological, aesthetic, and urban―that recast architecture's role in framing the social relationships and individual challenges of everyday urban life. Social Transparency includes a recent lecture by Maltzan at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, as well as reflections from fellow practitioners on this sustained engagement with housing and the city.

Michael Maltzan founded his Los Angeles-based architecture and urban design practice in 1995. Committed to the creation of progressive, transformative experiences that chart new trajectories for architecture, urbanism, and the public realm, Michael Maltzan Architecture is dedicated to the design and construction of projects that engage their context and community. The practice's intensely collaborative studio culture develops partnerships across disciplines to integrate sustainability and architectural form, and their work has been recognized with numerous national design awards.