American studio Michael Maltzan Architecture has completed a bright white residential complex in the Los Angeles area, which contains over 60 studio apartments and various support services for its formerly homeless tenants.
Crest Apartments was built on a slender, rectangular parcel in Van Nuys ? a suburban district northwest of Downtown LA. Totalling 45,000 square feet (4,180 square metres), the complex serves as permanent supportive housing for those who formerly had no home.

The project was backed by Skid Row Housing Trust ? a local developer and property manager that provides housing for people suffering from homelessness, extreme poverty, illness, disabilities and addiction. This is the fourth residential project that LA-based Michael Maltzan Architecture has designed for the organisation. The five-storey Crest building appears to rise high above its low-scale neighbours. Rather than a simple block, the design team conceived an assemblage of rectilinear volumes that vary in height as they march across the elongated site. The complex has an "arching form", with portions of the building lifted up and supported by pilotis.

"The low points of the building touch down at both the front and back of the site, creating a physical relationship to the smaller-scale single-family residences to the south, and the commercial facades to the north," said Michael Maltzan Architecturein a project description.
Facades are sheathed in white stucco and punctuated with...