08 / 2020Architecture / Housing

Hope
in Gap

A supportive-housing prototype that places prefabricated homes within overlooked urban gaps and uses layered porosity to protect light, air, views, and shared life.

Type: Individual architecture studio
Site: Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles
Studio: USC · Gary Paige

Supportive housing prototype occupying a narrow gap site at dusk — A five-story narrow slab turns a leftover lot into housing, shared gardens, and neighborhood services.

DESIGN PREMISE

Housing begins with the spaces the city overlooks.

High land costs and long construction timelines constrain the delivery of supportive housing in Los Angeles. Hope in Gap starts with a distributed resource already present in the city: narrow interstitial sites between buildings, behind parking lots, at street corners, and along infrastructure. A prefabricated system allows one architectural prototype to adapt to those different conditions while reducing on-site construction time.

01 / A DISTRIBUTED SITE

Small gaps become a network rather than isolated exceptions.

Lincoln Heights contains many leftover parcels too narrow or irregular for conventional development. Typical slots are approximately fifteen to twenty feet wide and around one hundred feet long. Mapping them together reframes scarcity: no single gap solves the housing problem, but a repeatable building type can turn many fragments into a distributed support system.

Figure-ground map of Lincoln Heights showing narrow urban gaps — Figure ground — potential sites appear within the existing neighborhood fabric.

Oblique urban drawing locating supportive housing prototypes in several gap conditions — Distributed prototype — narrow slabs occupy distinct leftover conditions without requiring a single large parcel.

Aerial collage showing supportive housing prototypes inserted across Lincoln Heights — Neighborhood field — three buildings demonstrate how one system can adapt to separated sites.

02 / PREFABRICATED KIT

A small family of units can produce multiple domestic relationships.

The system begins with a repeatable structural grid and a limited set of prefabricated volumes. Units are divided and recombined rather than treated as identical boxes. Their shifts create split levels, balconies, interior voids, and different depths between private rooms and the shared exterior edge.

Diagram showing a base housing unit dividing into a family of modular types — Unit family — one base volume generates multiple prefabricated configurations.

Five diagrams showing spatial arrangements between solid and void volumes — Spatial arrangements — units shift around carved voids instead of repeating one closed plan.

Comprehensive board showing porosity concepts, gap sites, and modular housing prototypes — Porosity system — bar typology, grid division, carved voids, and different gap conditions form one adaptable framework.

03 / LAYERED POROSITY

Density is softened by different depths of indoor and outdoor space.

Five split-level unit types organize private rooms around voids of varying depth. These openings bring light, ventilation, and longer views into the narrow slab while producing terraces and shared gardens along the single-loaded circulation. Porosity is therefore both an environmental strategy and the building’s visible social structure.

Plans and axonometric drawings of five split-level supportive housing unit types — Five unit types — changing void depth creates distinct relationships between room, terrace, circulation, and garden.

04 / THE NARROW SLAB

Public programs anchor the ground; homes and gardens rise above.

The five-story building follows the scale and grain of the neighborhood. Medical and educational rooms and a communal kitchen occupy the ground floor, extending support to residents and neighbors. Above, the split-level units line a single-loaded route punctuated by communal gardens. Repeated sections test how those open spaces remain connected through a very narrow footprint.

Serial sections, plans, and elevation of the five-story supportive housing prototype — Serial sections — public ground, split-level homes, shared gardens, and layered facade are coordinated across the narrow slab.

DESIGN POSITION

The prototype treats leftover land as a civic resource.

Hope in Gap does not depend on one exceptional site or one monumental building. Its value lies in repetition with variation: prefabrication accelerates delivery, while layered porosity keeps each dense insertion open to climate, neighborhood, and collective life.

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