Studio Gang unveils plans for its first curvy LA tower

Image source: www.studiogang.com

The 26-storey tower will be built at 643 North Spring Street in Chinatown and it will the be the first project of the firm built in Los Angeles. The slim and curvy tower will consist of 300 apartment units, 149 hotel rooms and open public space on the terraced roof and the first floor roof stretching towards the edge.

Due to the narrow form of the site, the studio proposes a wavy and narrow form, not to look like "a building wall" within the city context. The planned tower will rise 82,29 metres, or 26 stories, and measure just 16,76 metres wide.

Floor-to-ceiling glazing will wrap the whole building to get fresh air and sunlight in every unit. Transparent balconies will surround the building and mark its wavy form far away.

Hotel guests and building residents will share amenities on landscaped, second, and third-floor terraces. At street level is 2,043m² of public plazas - to be designed by Elysian Landscapes.

Community sensitivity to taller buildings

"The site is at the nexus at a lot of different nodes of development," Studio Gang design principal Weston Walker told Curbed LA. "You never get that feeling of [the building] being a wall," said Jeanne Gang, founder and principal of Studio Gang.

Developed by French real estate company Compagnie de Phalsbourg, the new tower will be built in Chinatown where its residents are against taller buildings in the neighbourhood. "Obviously we know there’s some sensitivity" to a taller building, Gang added. But the project "seems to fit in", she explained.

The project site is currently occupied by pair of low-rise buildings — one of which is the shuttered King Hing Theatre. The plans were already filed for the project and community meetings will be arranged in the coming months.

Article originally published on World Architecture Community.