One of Time Magazine’s “Top 25 Inventions of 2015,” the 95,000 SF, 102-Unit Star Apartments, for which Wil Carson was the Project Designer and Hiroshi Tokumaru the Senior Technical Coordinator at Michael Maltzan Architecture, represents a radical new paradigm for how prefabrication can transform multifamily development and our cities. The project is the first prefab multifamily development in Los Angeles in the past 30 years, the beginning of an exploration that has continued with 64North’s current prefabricated multifamily work. The mixed-use development transforms an existing one-story commercial building at the periphery of the downtown core into permanent supportive housing, with retail, offices, and community health spaces at street level. The LEED Platinum project utilizes an innovative prefabrication technique to construct individual units offsite and crane them into place, shortening construction duration, lowering costs, providing higher quality, and helping to accomplish the project’s sustainability goals.

“Built by stacking pre-outfitted apartments in Lego-like fashion, limiting construction costs and fast-forwarding the project timeline. It is the first such building in the nation to be constructed this way… When people look at this building, what they see is a vision of the future.”

W E S L E Y  L O W E R Y ,  L A  T I M E S

R O L E S

Wil Carson, Project Designer
Hiroshi Tokumaru, Senior Technical Coordinator
Michael Maltzan Architecture

P H O T O G R A P H Y

Wil Carson & Christopher Norman