Santa Monica, CA
Millennium East Village is a radical transformation of an abandoned mobile home park into a 362 unit, 5-story mixed-use project that:
• Creates a sustainable community, providing units with flow-through ventilation and natural light from both sides.
• Creates a vibrant and welcoming pedestrian environment with neighborhood-serving commercial spaces.
• Creates a greater level of tenant and community interaction at-grade and above-grade.
Our design goals were to provide an extensive pedestrian-friendly urban experience, connect apartment dwellers and the surrounding community to a welcoming ground floor with neighborhood-serving commercial spaces. The design provides a fully customized building skin that allows each resident to control individual light, privacy, and sun-screening functions.
The design integrates passive solar design principles and incorporates sustainable strategies with a building fenestration that responds to its solar orientation.
The design strategy focuses on a permeable street façade, breaking down the scale by modulating the building massing and fostering a welcoming presence to tenants, neighbors and guests.
The shifting floor plates break down the monolithic appearance of a typical apartment building and shape the street façade massing into four separate building forms that vary in height and reflect the openness of the building to the community. Single loaded corridors, resulting in those units receiving natural light and ventilation from both sides, connect more than fifty percent of the building’s pedestrian circulation.
The project, which is slated for LEED Platinum certification, includes photovoltaic cells on the roof which will provide all necessary energy for public spaces.
Twenty percent of the 362 units have been set aside for low and very low-income tenants.
Status: Built
Location: Santa Monica, CA, US
Firm Role: Design Architect