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2015 Residential Architect Design Award presented to Studio Twenty Seven | Leo A Daly JV

“It has both an approach to its urbanism and its massing that responds to and engages with the city.” Juror’s Comment

La Casa Permanent Supportive Housing project in Washington, DC received a Residential Architect Design Award for representing the best in North American residential architecture, in all its diversity.  RADA selected this project as the best example of Affordable Housing in 2015.  

The notion that La Casa is experienced by its residents as a home, rather than an institution, is crucial to its success as a supportive housing facility. The living units are bright, simple, and efficient. Aperiodic floor-to-ceiling windows give each resident a unique perspective of the busy urbanscape outside. Full kitchens and accessible bathrooms give residents space to care for themselves. The interior finishes are durable but characteristically domestic – the warm grain of a wood floor, the brightness of colored tile, or the weathered patina of exposed concrete are details that resonate with human perception.

La Casa is an efficient and sustainable building that does not sacrifice open and active design. At the scale of the street, its facades bend in response to busy sidewalks and shaded pocket parks. Its two-story, fully-glazed lobby provides visual access to the interior, inviting passing community members to engage in the facility’s mission. The building’s regular form and shallow facade are activated by the irregular pattern of windows into the living units. Dark voids during the day and projections of light at night, the windows are framed by layers of cladding in low relief. It is a composition of light density that imbues the structure with the energy of the city.

The Studio Twenty Seven | Leo A Daly team designed La Casa to inspire pride and a sense of community membership in its residents. It is a building that leverages the power of spatial autonomy with the context of a secure, supportive environment to encourage the rehabilitation of it residents. Not quite an apartment building, nor a dorm or shelter, La Casa is a new typology for housing the homeless.

2015 Residential Architect Design Awards Coverage