Fractured Enclosure —
low-density urban housing


AUD413: Building Design with Landscape Studio
Instructor: Narineh Mirzaeian
Duration: 5 weeks




Los Angeles’s housing crisis has historically been resolved using the courtyard typology as a foundational framework. While efficient in providing single-family homes for the masses, the traditional courtyard stands autonomous from its urban landscape, setting clear thresholds between residents and the urban collective. This project seeks to accentuate its adjacencies to generate physical and visual connectivity across the private spaces of residents and open urban spaces of the public. The figure-ground relationship exhibited aims to produce more porosity within the site by way of housing clusters that give prominence to the spaces between built form. The spatial organization and aggregation of the courtyards are meant to both interiorize the exterior walkways external to its court and invoke an extroverted quality to the courtyard’s centers.


UCLA Architecture and Urban Design
Fall 2020



The project begins with an establishment of two principal urban axes meant to bridge disjointed neighbourhoods on the two sides of the site. These axes function as scaffolds for the growth of a housing masterplan that reflects on courtyard housing as a typology and the figure-ground as an organizational tool. The figure-ground relationship exhibited in the project is a deviation from normative urban strategies, typically oriented towards large streets and through fares, in that it aims to produce more porosity within the site by way of housing clusters that give prominence to the spaces between built form.














Through inflecting its form, the housing project’s public street life is interiorized and the threshold between public and private spaces are blurred. The organizational fractures in plan are projected vertically to posit further spatial multiplicity and diversity within the site. Views into and across the site are thus framed by these inflected forms. Elevational glitches and forced perspectives are devised at entry points into the site to generate a misreading of cluster thresholds and visual guides to public spaces. The misreading also functions as a mechanism that breaks up the mat urban strategy that the project emulates.





As a dense hybrid of landscape and building, the urbanism posed in this housing project is meant to elucidate the density and complexity of urban multi-family housing, while reflecting on the formal organization and scalar logics of the single-family assemblage.




- Artin Sahakian -