Description

A desire to redefine the ways architecture can contribute to truly progressive causes has always been a hallmark of the work of Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects. Each project seeks to enhance the urban fabric, to inspire all those who enter or visit to carefully consider the ways the built environment can truly enhance civic engagement or reflect the authentic culture or history of a site. From transforming unloved parcels of land that may seem more fit for traffic than residents in Los Angeles and Detroit to intensely creative and imminently livable housing complexes for students, tech workers, and underserved populations such as veterans and those transitioning out of houselessness, to conjuring glamorous ways to harness light in the darkest of Nordic days for the Guggenheim Helsinki and the Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark, this firm has time and again proved its ability to design intelligently and with a deeply embedded social conscience and unfailing commitment to context. While constantly advancing the technical practice of modern architecture, Lorcan O'Herlihy ensures that even its most contemporary-looking creations reflect in some way the personality of the site or the inhabitants who have long called the area home whether by searching out and incorporating familiar materials in a dense new housing development, such as the stone used in a surrounding neighborhood's most beloved historic downtown buildings, playfully taking as muse a cement plant long known as a landmark in an industrial neighborhood and reinterpreting its very concrete into a fresh and light office building that seems to hover weightlessly above the grit, or reinterpreting 1970s A-frame houses by updating their angles for the 21st century and massing them together into a new and unique infill residence that brings ample light and air deep into a constrained city block meant for first-time homebuyers in one of the nation's most expensive housing markets. LOHA always seeks to elevate the human condition via its work. Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles, in July 2013. For more than a decade, he was the architecture critic at Los Angeles magazine. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Architectural Record, the Architect s Newspaper, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and dozens of other magazines.