The intriguing – and often maddening – trends buffeting effective urban development lie in complexities beyond those of the physical environment. Demographics, economics, financing and market pressures create or hinder opportunities, even as planning and regulatory initiatives try to guide both public and private investment toward consensus goals. Time is a further variable: whereas interest rates may change quarterly, housing crises take a long time to start and even longer to solve. Downtown Los Angeles is a microcosm of these short- and long-term issues. It’s also a good place to observe how design thinking moves a city forward.

Good design principles are always worth employing, whatever the development climate… these three especially: alliance, resilience and quality.

Design alliance

Long-range planning in Los Angeles created the sprawling Metro rail network, with DTLA as its primary hub. This is large-scale planning, but design alliance happens at a smaller scale too. It entails seeing a project as inherently connected to its context and finding ways to benefit its surrounding neighborhood.

Here’s an example: As large development sites become rare in geographically constrained cities, smaller sites become the predominant development opportunity. Throughout L.A., small infill lots in such neighborhoods as DTLA, Koreatown, Echo Park, and Los Feliz are stymied by the need for parking. Despite L.A. having an overall abundance of parking, it’s not always where people need it and the city has not urbanized to the point where most people can access transit conveniently.  And small parking podiums are expensive. Commercial district parking garages already serve and energize historic retail and commercial corridors, so why couldn’t a private or public collective create a residential district garage, making feasible small developments in and around it? Other alliance opportunities might include collective battery storage for a microgrid, or shared open space on a rooftop, both of which could offset the costs of individual projects.

Design alliance can be quite prosaic: for instance, adjacent developments agreeing to share a joint emergency vehicle access, thereby increasing both sites’ building area. An alliance might also be the thoughtful design of a ground-floor space in a new tower, anticipating a home for an iconic neighborhood restaurant at risk of losing its current space.

Design resilience

Consideration of climate resilience has become common in addressing high capital costs and abrupt market changes. One example of design resilience is designing for flexibility. Modular manufacturing can effectively negotiate tight schedules and mitigate local labor shortages. If design is flexible from the outset, buildings can be maintained longer and adapt to changing environments.

A recent series of four supportive/affordable housing sites from Hope Development in central L.A. (starting with the Hope on Alvarado near MacArthur Park) followed this design-resilience strategy. Built with volumetric modular construction with various steel and wood manufacturers, each one successfully negotiated changes in global trade, supply chain disruptions, tariffs, transportation, and manufacturer ownership.

And fresh approaches to zoning and land use can encourage design resilience. Downtown Los Angeles’ new Community Plan Update, once implemented, will greatly increase development flexibility. In preserving the character and scale of some historic areas and long-term manufacturing uses, the plan balances the past and present, and it anticipates future adaptation and change.

Design quality

The Trust Building in Los Angeles’ historic core is a case study in the long-term value of design quality. Originally built for the offices of a title insurance and banking firm, the building opened in 1928 and has been adapted to multiple uses over its history, including light manufacturing and even as a temporary home for the city’s central library. The building’s appeal comes from its crisp terra cotta facade, its inventively grand entry lobby, and its engaging tile murals within a bronze-gated portico. Renovated in 2020 by Rising Realty for creative office use, the building was recently acquired by University of California, Los Angeles as an urban satellite building. Although the Trust Building has been preserved substantively intact for nearly 100 years, the predominant character of its context – physical, cultural and economic – has been constant change. Design quality has helped preserve the Trust Building’s value over time.

The quality of the design idea is the key to creating both short-term and long-term value. Consider the mixed-use collaboration between Related and Gehry Partners across from Walt Disney Concert Hall, on the Grand Avenue Cultural Corridor. The long-anticipated project opened in 2022 with a hotel, rental apartments and restaurant and retail spaces.

Transforming a sloping parking lot into an engaging urban environment is a tall order. Through its various iterations over time, the project’s program, urban presence, and architectural expression shifted significantly. But what remained constant was a strong design idea: creating an economically vibrant, pedestrian-focused urban environment in an area that has long been disconnected from its surroundings. The design concept of two relatively short towers bracketing an engaging series of multilevel indoor and outdoor spaces that step down the sloped site and up from the street create, define and protect a small-scale urban environment that anticipates connections and continuity with future developments, essentially, a mini-city providing a deft synthesis of uses, views and architectural perspectives.

Mark Oberholzer, AIA and LEED AP, is a principal at KTGY.