As Los Angeles confronts a growing housing crisis, a city known for
its single-family housing will inevitably shift toward a greater
emphasis on apartments and other types of multi-family housing.
Anderton's book shows how connected dwellings work as good architecture
and good social systems; multi-family housing itself will become an
aspirational form of dwelling, not second in status or style to single
family homes.
For decades, the Los Angeles lifestyle has been equated with the
suburban single-family home with a big backyard, yet L.A. has also been
a laboratory for exceptional experiments in multifamily housing, from
the courtyard to the rooftop garden, all centered on shared open space.
In Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles, author Frances
Anderton explores that fascinating history, from the bungalow courts and
apartment-hotels of the 1910s, to the development of garden apartments,
to contemporary mid-rise "urban villages," and experiments in co-living.
Common Ground features the work of the Zwebells, Rudolph Schindler,
Richard Neutra, John Lautner, Ralph Vaughn, Koning Eizenberg, Sean
Knibb, Michael Maltzan, Brooks + Scarpa, Lorcan O'Herlihy, Shin Shin,
and many more. In a time of housing crisis, Anderton makes the case that
well-designed, equitable connected living is tomorrow's aspirational
American dream.
