Everyone deserves access to public collective space as well as personal space to call home. Skid Row is a hostile and striated urban condition, defined by walls, blank facades, and fences. The little public space available, the streets and the sidewalks are utilized by the individuals who compose Skid Row’s close-knit community. The project is a mixed-use public library and affordable housing complex, integrated onto a site with an existing single-room-occupancy housing building. The project serves as a public living room for the community, extending the street and sidewalk into the building and connecting to the adjacent park.

Conceptually, the project is a shelf on the scale of the city. Its architectural form the max envelope of the site with a carved-out central atrium and a series of loggias that pierce the exterior envelope with vegetated spaces. Loggias occur on various floors, bringing the park into the interior and blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior, natural and built. A diverse set of programs and constituencies are accommodated and intermixed on each ‘shelf,’ namely a public library, an existing single-room-occupancy hotel, and public housing. Assembled in one building, the architecture dissolves distinct separations between public and private and proposes the role of architecture as infrastructure. Each housing unit is a microcosm of the larger architectural whole, porous and flexible, and is designed to maximize the freedom of use for residents. The shelf and the voids generate spatial porosity and flexibility, where inside is outside, private is public, and collective spaces arise. Heterogeneous activities and constituencies are intermixed in loose, open, and flexible spaces where individuals come together in a specific locale to define a public. A Public Living Room is an architectural project that defines a new type of public building, infrastructure that serves the diverse demands of the community as both individuals and a collective while serving as a model for the future development of Los Angeles.