Housing+

Marcel Sanchez-Prieto’s Shed Fall 2019 studio.
Housing+
In the fall of 2019, Woodbury School of Architecture launched Housing+ as a response to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s challenge to deans and chairs of schools of architecture to act on Southern California’s housing crisis. The results were rich and rewarding, demonstrating a profound desire within our community to address the pressing issues of our time. Our year-long program of lectures, exhibitions and studio inquiries resulted in new firm partnerships, an invitation to the United Nations headquarters in New York City, and a diverse array of student work from 1st year undergraduate through graduate thesis.
Our call had two goals: to empower our students to leverage design in service to the complex challenge of housing access and affordability, and to investigate the future of practice.
Housing+
In the fall of 2019, Woodbury School of Architecture launched Housing+ as a response to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s challenge to deans and chairs of schools of architecture to act on Southern California’s housing crisis. The results were rich and rewarding, demonstrating a profound desire within our community to address the pressing issues of our time. Our year-long program of lectures, exhibitions and studio inquiries resulted in new firm partnerships, an invitation to the United Nations headquarters in New York City, and a diverse array of student work from 1st year undergraduate through graduate thesis.
Our call had two goals: to empower our students to leverage design in service to the complex challenge of housing access and affordability, and to investigate the future of practice.
In the fall of 2019, Woodbury School of Architecture launched Housing+ as a response to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s challenge to deans and chairs of schools of architecture to act on Southern California’s housing crisis. The results were rich and rewarding, demonstrating a profound desire within our community to address the pressing issues of our time. Our year-long program of lectures, exhibitions and studio inquiries resulted in new firm partnerships, an invitation to the United Nations headquarters in New York City, and a diverse array of student work from 1st year undergraduate through graduate thesis.
Our call had two goals: to empower our students to leverage design in service to the complex challenge of housing access and affordability, and to investigate the future of practice.

Jason Rebillot‘s The New American Dream Spring 2020 studio. Work by B.Arch students Leonardo Acevedo, Josue Alvarez, Raphael Capitulo, Jose Montano, Saul Santizo. The New American Dream (TNAD) was a studio collaboration between HDR and Woodbury University, which worked on a new urban development typology for Transit Oriented Communities (TOC's) in Los Angeles.
The Challenge
Southern California’s best-known architecture is unquestionably domestic: Morgan, Wright, Williams, Eames, Schindler, Neutra, Gehry, Lautner. Dingbats, craftsman bungalows, courtyard apartments, McMansions. Ours is a city of houses. For over 100 years, LA’s avant-garde housing projects have expanded aesthetic, cultural, and social norms through innovative approaches to construction, environmental systems, program organization, and suburban development in the face of headwinds such as redlining and shortsighted policies. In other words, designers leveraged the pressing issues of their time to rethink the physical expression and public domain of architecture. Paradoxically, in a region where over 80% of our cities are zoned R1, the scale of California’s housing crisis is striking. The shortage is estimated at 3-4 million housing units, with over 150,000 homeless, constituting a staggering quarter of the national total. It’s time for architects to do what we do best: work collaboratively to rethink California’s housing solutions.

Anthony Fontenot‘s Roofscape Urbanism Spring 2020 studio. Work by B.Arch Students Patrick Castro & Chris Madrid-Gramajo. In response to the lack of affordable housing and fresh organic food in the city of Los Angeles, students developed planning strategies and architectural proposals for a small urban village situated on a building rooftop in the Skid Row neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Our Community
It is particularly appropriate for Woodbury School of Architecture to address Housing. Many in our community - faculty and alumni - are on the cutting-edge of designing and inventing new housing typologies: Linda Taalman, Mark Lahmon, Barbara Bestor, Ted Smith, Hector Perez, Germane Barnes, Catherine Herbst, Marcel Sanchez-Prieto, Mark Hershman, to name just a few.
We cannot imagine a better focus for our students, most of whom, will go on to design housing in their careers. For too many of our students, housing insecurity hits close to home. This initiative empowers our students by giving them the tools to become citizen-architect leaders.

Garfield Lofts, Courtesy of Sin Hei (Bart) Kwok (Woodbury MRED Program)
Partners
In order to provide our students with tangible examples of architect-led housing solutions, we hosted two symposia. Our fall ‘Frontier Housing’ symposium at Gensler LA, was moderated by Rob Jernigan and Roger Sherman, and featured six designers working on the ‘frontiers’ of technological and geographical territories. ‘S, M, L, XL Housing’, our spring symposium, brought together Dana Cuff, Christopher Hawthorne, Barbara Bestor, Michael Maltzan, and Madeleine Brand, to interrogate Southern California housing at multiple scales.
Housing+ also brought us new partners. Our Agency for Civic Engagement, led by Jeanine Centuori, partnered with the National Health Foundation and NBBJon a 60-bed Recuperative Care Facility for Homeless in Pico Union. The architecture/engineering firm HDR, together with LA Metro, is sponsoring a studio led by Dr. Jason Rebillot, to develop proposals for transit-oriented development along the West Santa Ana Branch line. Gensler LA and Miguel Santana of Fairplex, are sponsoring a seminar and studio to transform LA County Fairgrounds into a ‘Housing Expo’. Taught by Chair Heather Flood and faculty Scrap Marshall, students designing a modular unit to be exhibited at the LA County Fair. Abode Communities, the non-profit social enterprise committed to affordable housing, sponsored our final exhibition.
Demonstrating the relevance of our initiative, Dean Wahlroos-Ritter was invited to present our Housing+ initiative at the United Nations Headquarters in NY, as part of the 58th session of the Commission for Social Development to describe how the academy can participate in solutions for affordable housing and homelessness.

47,547 Homes. Ixtapaluca, Mexico, Courtesy Livia Corona Benjamin
Future of Practice
Implicit in our Housing+ initiative is a critique of our discipline. Many in our design professions have remained notoriously absent from the discussion, claiming that architecture cannot solve the housing crisis. ‘Housing’ is considered by many a socioeconomic product divorced from design. We disagree. We believe that housing is a critical architectural question and a basic human right.
That we have turned our backs on housing is simply evidence that we have turned our backs on broader pressures facing the profession. Housing+ challenges our faculty and students to identify new opportunities, new modes of design activity, new value systems, new procurement models, new clients operating in ways that we might not yet recognize, new models of project financing, and the implementation of technology that offers not only a new means to an aesthetic end but entirely new aesthetic value systems.
The outcomes of Housing+ - varied, inventive, joyful - demonstrate the power that architects and designers have to address the vital issues of our time.
Housing+ is a year-long program of lectures, exhibitions and studio inquiries focused on a topic that is of particular relevance to Woodbury School of Architecture. The school brings together students, faculty, administrators and community partners to address the topic of housing in the 2019-20 academic year. Implicit in this call for new models of housing is a call for new models of practice.
Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter, FAIA
Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter is an architect, educator, and design consultant specializing in the building envelope and the experimental architectural use of glass. Currently Dean of the School of Architecture at Woodbury University, she has taught at Yale, Cornell, the Bartlett, and SCI-Arc. She is also Director of WUHO, the Woodbury University Hollywood gallery, a venue for experimental installations, public lectures and workshops. She currently serves on the LA Forum Board of Advisors.
The work of her collaborative office, WROAD, navigates transdisciplinary territory in the diverse type and scale of projects. She has collaborated on multiple award-winning projects including as façade consultant on Bloom with DoSu Architects, the Portland Aerial Tramway with AGPS, the Centre Pompidou exhibition, Continuities of the Incomplete, with Morphosis, and as project architect for the Corning Museum of Glass with Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects.
Named AIA Fellow in 2018, Ingalill is recipient of AIA California Council 2016 Educator Award, was honored with the AIA|LA 2018 Presidential Educator of the Year Award, and recognized by DesignIntelligence as one of the nation’s Most Admired Educators in architecture and design.
Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter is an architect, educator, and design consultant specializing in the building envelope and the experimental architectural use of glass. Currently Dean of the School of Architecture at Woodbury University, she has taught at Yale, Cornell, the Bartlett, and SCI-Arc. She is also Director of WUHO, the Woodbury University Hollywood gallery, a venue for experimental installations, public lectures and workshops. She currently serves on the LA Forum Board of Advisors.
The work of her collaborative office, WROAD, navigates transdisciplinary territory in the diverse type and scale of projects. She has collaborated on multiple award-winning projects including as façade consultant on Bloom with DoSu Architects, the Portland Aerial Tramway with AGPS, the Centre Pompidou exhibition, Continuities of the Incomplete, with Morphosis, and as project architect for the Corning Museum of Glass with Smith-Miller + Hawkinson Architects.
Named AIA Fellow in 2018, Ingalill is recipient of AIA California Council 2016 Educator Award, was honored with the AIA|LA 2018 Presidential Educator of the Year Award, and recognized by DesignIntelligence as one of the nation’s Most Admired Educators in architecture and design.
Named AIA Fellow in 2018, Ingalill is recipient of AIA California Council 2016 Educator Award, was honored with the AIA|LA 2018 Presidential Educator of the Year Award, and recognized by DesignIntelligence as one of the nation’s Most Admired Educators in architecture and design.