Owner : FPCH Hollywood

Design team : THR.D studio, Inc.

Project Description

The FPCH Sound Studio project includes the renovation of two existing CMU buildings and a new exterior design for the site on Hollywood Blvd. The key components of the design include infrastructural and safety upgrades, an interior music recording studio, open office future tenant leasing spaces, exterior seating areas and new facade design.

Architect - OpenForm Arch Co

Contractors - Kear General Construction, OpenForm

Project SF - 1,156 interior, 5,680 exterior

This renovation project was for a 1926 house in the up and coming neighborhood of Montecito Heights near northeast Los Angeles. The nearly forgotten structure had several cover-up renovations over the years that left the exterior to style-less disarray; and pushed to the background of an otherwise nice, quiet hillside neighborhood. The driving ambition of the design was to produce a new identity through material and textural overlays that would emphasize the existing silhouette and organizational layout. A neutral palette of black and white contrasts internally, and also externally among colorful red and green wood siding houses. A small icon among larger houses, the project mimics contextually through familiar gabled roof pitches and landscaping of colorful variation. An exterior garden and fire pit at the front portion of the site provides an outdoor retreat for intimate gatherings among lush vegetation; while hillside terracing with multiple living spaces and an upper steel deck provides views to the distant NorthEast LA hillsides. The building’s scope of work includes a completely redesigned exterior, new kitchen, walls, floors, windows, doors, trim, fixtures, appliances, storage, landscaping, siding, roofing, lighting, MEP, fireplace and bathroom. Essentially a new house visually, the reverse hillside slip rock below, concrete foundations, and old growth wood framing were more than adequate structurally to remain intact. Project completion Summer 2023.

Lake Tyler, Texas

The Zedar Haus project was completed in 2015 as a collaborative effort between THR.D studio, executing a design/ build delivery for the concept and structural work, the home owner and an independent General Contractor. The site, on an East Texas lake, is surrounded with tall pine trees and a 180d view of open water. The organization and overall design concept is based on seamless integration of water sport activities, entertaining and a strong formal silhouette. Deep overhangs take advantage of the natural vegetation shading. The design for a weekend interior space incorporates a feasible floor plan, and the creation of a translucent shell for views of the horizon. This 850 sq ft project is attached to the land side of an existing boathouse. A roof of triangulated planes protects the expansive glass from exposure on the west and south facades. Program is pushed to the north wall in order for transparency to be maintained on the more private south half of the building. The cantilevered roof engages and protects the visitor approaching from the walkway while its low pitch takes advantage of the southern angle for the integration of a net zero PV system. 

Garet Ammerman, Matthew Lopez

This project explores the possibilities of contemporary museum design at the intersection of digital techniques and familiar architectural profiles. The collapse of ceiling and roof determines form and circulation in place of how walls, floors and facades of the building are typically used. The “forgotten elements” focuses banal architectural forms, by engaging formal manipulations of the aggregation; creating a subtle reminiscence of the original profiles.  A new reading of the overall massing questions the legibility of roof pitch profiles and an incoherent mixture of triangulated shapes.

Garet Ammerman, Matthew Lopez

This concept design project is for a mixed-use building complex in Santa Monica, CA. The program analyzes key aspects of mid-rise hotel, residential and office space requirements in the coastal commission jurisdiction. Orientation for views and optimal day lighting of various spaces offer a design approach towards the role of apertures deeper than an exterior clad envelope layer. Despite the basic understanding of windows that occur strictly at the outermost skin of a building; this project utilizes three shapes of apertures that are similar in shape but vary in scale. These conceptual drivers project through all 3 buildings of the complex and offer continuity between form through simple geometrical alignments. In section, the buildings are homogenized further by the utilization of the projection angles and pedestrian bridges that become voids at the upper levels. The aperture types are configured in a way that allow them to do three facade manipulation processes. They will either be outwardly extruded from the facade, inwardly extruded into the facade, or they can cut much deeper to become streaked openings and arrange interior spaces.

The final design produces a large mixed-use complex of seemingly monolithic structures and different programs that remain loosely in conversation through envelope and aperture formal strategies.

Garet Ammerman

This project proposal is for an addition to the Daniel Libeskind 1999 Jewish Holocaust Museum in Berlin, a very politically and culturally iconic building. The expansion of the original museum is necessary due to the institutes’ absorption of archival material and personnel from 2 other smaller Holocaust museums in Berlin. The new design is linked to the original via underground passageways through the lower floors similar to the main entrance of the museum. This allows the new building to move away from the visible above ground portions of the current building. This is a key design move given the strong overhead form and significance of the existing building. The new extension ties into the Berlin fabric by reflection of geometries, updated materials and formal strategies within the stand alone buildings. The maze-like circulation and views back into the museum’s own courtyards further contribute to the self-realization and emotional experiences deemed successful by the museum’s critiques in the past 20 years.

Garet Ammerman