Second Home brings SelgasCano Serpentine Pavilion to Los Angeles
Ahead of Second Home’s September opening in LA to a SelgasCano-designed building, the co-working operation brings the Madrid-based architect’s 2015 Serpentine Pavilion to the La Brea Tar Pits

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.
RELATED STORY
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.
INFORMATION
ADDRESS
Receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the world direct to your inbox.
La Brea Tar Pits
5801 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles
CA 90036
US
-
The Stuff That Surrounds, episode three: Inside the home of architect Glenn Sestig
In The Stuff That Surrounds, Wallpaper* explores a life through objects. This episode, we’re invited inside an architectural gem – just what you'd expect from one of the most distinctive voices in the field today
-
Germane Barnes just transformed a humble Indiana parking garage into an enormous sub-woofer system
With Joy Riding, the Miami-based designer’s installation at Exhibit Columbus, Barnes celebrates togetherness by evoking Black car culture
-
The best Ruth Asawa exhibition is actually on the streets of San Francisco
The artist, now the subject of a major retrospective at SFMOMA, designed many public sculptures scattered across the Bay Area – you just have to know where to look
-
Inside a Donald Wexler house so magical, its owner bought it twice
So transfixed was Daniel Patrick Giles, founder of fragrance brand Perfumehead, he's even created a special scent devoted to it
-
The Pagani Residences is the latest ultra-luxe automotive apartment tower to reach Miami
Rising up above Miami, branded apartment buildings are having a renaissance, as everyone from hypercar builders to crystal makers seeks to have a towering structure bearing their name
-
A modern cabin in Minnesota serves as a contemporary creative retreat from the city
Snow Kreilich Architects' modern cabin and studio for an artist on a lakeside plot in Minnesota was designed to spark creativity and provide a refuge from the rat race
-
Touring artist Glenn Ligon's studio in Brooklyn with its architect, Ravi Raj
Glenn Ligon's studio, designed by architect Ravi Raj, is an industrial Brooklyn space reimagined for contemporary art
-
The Monthly Architecture Edit: Wallpaper’s favourite July houses
From geometric Japanese cottages to restored modernist masterpieces, these are the best residential projects to have crossed the architecture desk this month
-
A dynamic Mar Vista house plays with the rhythm of indoor and outdoor living
A new Mar Vista house, designed by Mexican architecture studio PPAA, combines a façade with a whisper of brutalism, and a breezy, open interior, seamlessly connected to its Los Angeles setting
-
This Michigan lakeside house is an exercise is sculptural minimalism
Explore a Michigan lakeside house, designed by Disbrow Iannuzzi and featuring sculptural timber interiors and a contemporary minimalist feel
-
Welcome to How House, a revived Rudolph Schindler gem in Los Angeles
The latest owner of How House, an early Rudolph Schindler gem, is taking a contemporary approach to conserving its heritage