For the past decade, the Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan has designed multiunit housing in a city known for its proliferation of single-family residences. Working with the Skid Row Housing Trust, these projects advance new forms of supportive housing that address the services and infrastructures needed for their particular populations of inhabitants. For Maltzan, housing manifests an incredibly complex set of spatial problems—social, economic, political, typological, aesthetic, and urban—that recast architecture's role in framing the social relationships and individual challenges of everyday urban life. Social Transparency includes a recent lecture by Maltzan at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, as well as reflections from fellow practitioners—Amale Andraos, Hilary Sample, Florian Idenburg, and Níall McLaughlin—on this sustained engagement with housing and the city.

Michael Maltzan

Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016

19.5 X 13 cm, 144 pages