Pasadena Studios

Inspired by an interview with Frances Anderton on the Building LA podcast, I decided to seek out and photograph some design-forward affordable housing developments in LA County. First up was one not too far from where I live: Pasadena Studios, just south of the 210 in Pasadena, designed by Stanley Saitowitz — an architect I first came across in the 1993 Michael Blackwood documentary The New Modernists: 9 American Architects. It’s a fabulous film, as are most of the film-era Blackwood documentaries (not sure why, but as soon as his stuff went digital it really altered the vibe), and Saitowitz is one of the more intriguing characters in it; I particularly enjoyed his languid South African accent discussing the failures of deconstructivist architecture (“a rotten chicken with nails sticking through it”), and the scenes of his incredible Natoma St. office under construction.

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This building — an updated take on SRO housing — is discussed in detail here on FORT LA, and I really enjoyed spending a few minutes looking at it from the street. In pictures I hadn’t noticed the funny little boxes attached (?) to the outside, meant to extend the building’s horizontal elements and evoke the projecting beams of Pasadena’s many nearby craftsman houses. The alternating vertical and horizontal railings on the deep porches are also a nice nod to the local dialect.

I doubt it was a stylistic reference, but in style and color the building did immediately remind me of Buff & Hensman’s work from the 1980s, much of it also built in Pasadena. I wonder if they too were hoping to recall the craftsman look in their late modern designs.