The Arroyo Affordable Housing | Koning Eizenberg Architecture, Inc

The Arroyo offers 64 units of affordable, LEED Platinum housing for families that earn 30-60% of county mean income. Located on a rapidly developing urban street, and  within a 5-minute walk to a train station and bus lines, the Arroyo comprises two five-story buildings arranged around an open-ended courtyard. The courtyard follows a long abandoned arroyo (dry creek) that was replaced by a storm drain in the 1960s. The courtyard provides a social hub for residents, captures prevailing ocean breezes, provides daylight to apartments, and makes the street more pedestrian friendly. As the boulevard fills in, the courtyard provides welcome borrowed landscape back to the neighborhood. Given the budget, the crafting of place embraces the limitations of conventional wood-frame construction using minimal secondary moves to animate; a gestural angle, shading that provides amenity and ornament, and a rippling, rather than static grid, approach to window placement.