843 N Spring Street

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Set on a busy urban corner in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, Spring Street is a new type of office building that leverages the climate and landscape that the city is known for. Technically a renovation, the project takes a windowless, 1980s-era retail warehouse with a parking garage underneath and grafts an new structure on top of it, creating one of the first and largest hybrid CLT buildings in Los Angeles. Spring Street is also a hybrid of LA’s high-rise towers and low-rise bow truss warehouse culture—with a material palette of mass timber, steel, and concrete and a floor plan that integrates both outdoor workspace and biophilic design by providing access to the landscape at every level.

The building is organized around a central public garden that connects across the site and vertically.

Working with James Corner Field Operations, the landscape design embraces the city’s mild climate by maximizing the outdoor space in and around the building—a public landscape experience that gives back to the city as a new urban amenity. The entry features a prominent main staircase that connects Spring Street up to New High Street. The passageway draws foot traffic to smaller retail spaces that match the scale of the neighborhood. Divided into two sections, a tiered vertical garden courtyard between the office wings serves to break down the scale of the building. Open-air circulation spaces, courtyards, private balconies, and a shared rooftop amenity deck provide layers of outdoor connections to users throughout the building.

The open air garden atrium provides public circulation, connecting all levels and culminating in a roof garden with skyline views.

Outdoor work and social spaces are abundant throughout the building.

The hybrid steel and CLT cantilever into the slim, shared outdoor balconies that wrap the building, contributing to Spring Street’s distinctive look. The use of the exposed timber panels, themselves a hybrid of Douglas fir and spruce pine fir, adds sustainable benefits and a natural, warm aesthetic. Sustainability is also incorporated through project-specific targets that include: natural ventilation, a rooftop solar PV array, EV charging stations, replacing 30% of the required parking spots with bike stalls, and recycling 100% of rainwater for re-use on site as landscape irrigation. Additionally, we designed the project’s facade to reduce solar heat gain, and thus energy, with vertical fins at window frames to provide shading in addition to the cantilever balconies.

Spring Street’s hybrid structural system combines 3- and 5-ply CLT panels and concrete topping slab, with exposed steel columns and beams that account for the building’s gravity and seismic loads. The design takes a typical 30 x 30 grid plan from the existing parking garage and extends it up through the building, establishing an efficient grid that both the office wings and central common area nest within. Structurally, the hybrid construction allows the building to meet the technical spans needed for parking and flexible open office layouts without introducing transfer beams between the two levels of concrete construction and the four levels of steel and CLT. The use of CLT also allowed us to build atop the building’s existing foundations instead of demolishing and completely rebuilding the structure—a significant saving in embodied carbon.