LA’s transition from one-industry town to arts-to-tech creative hub is attracting an influx of hubs-within-hubs. And London-based operations are leading the charge. Not surprisingly Soho House already has two LA outposts with another in the works for downtown. Spring Place opened in Beverly Hills last year and is also planning an opening downtown. Co-working operation Second Home, which now runs four sites in London after recent openings in Clerkenwell and London Fields, arrives in LA this September.
Second Home has chosen still sketchy East Hollywood as its entry point with architects SelgasCano on design duties – the team behind three London locations and the Lisbon location. The architects are transforming the historic Anne Banning Community House. And as a teaser Second Home has shipped out and installed the Madrid-based practice’s 2015 Serpentine Pavillion at La Brea Tar Pits.
Over the next six months the pavilion – 866 sq ft of interlocking organic chambers and tunnels in translucent coloured fabric – will host a programme of art, music and talks including events with filmmaker David Lynch, Netflix and the World Wildlife Fund, and charities such as the American Youth Symphony and Inner City Arts. The installation is a collaboration with the National History Museums of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC) – La Brea Tar Pits is the only active urban Ice Age excavation site in the world and saber-toothed cats, giant sloths, dire wolves, mammoths, and mastodons have all been found on the site and displayed at George C. Page Museum.
Sam Aldenton, who co-founded Second Home with Rohan Silva in 2014 (see our interview in W*229), says the pair have fallen in love with the ‘contradictions, sub-cultures and people’ of the city and call the installation their ‘Love letter to LA’.
When it opens, Second Home LA will include 90,000 sq ft of co-working space, as well as a 200-seat event space, recording studio, restaurant and a branch of the Libreria bookshop. Second Home’s sites are more porous than most co-working operations and members clubs and the events space and restaurant will be open to the public and local charities and neighbourhood groups will be able to use meeting rooms for free.
The campus-style development is made up of 60 single-storey oval-shaped studios wrapped in translucent acrylic with ‘lily-pad’ like roofs, all set in a lush new garden and designed to house 250 organisations.
NHMLAC meanwhile recently announced plans to ‘re-imagine and renovate’ its 12-acre campus in Hancock Park, which includes La Brea Tar Pits and the George C. Page Museum. A competition to develop a masterplan for the site is down to three practices, including Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. §
