Urban Operations

The Floating Addition lifts a 500-square-foot second story master bedroom suite above an existing single-story residence in Sherman Oaks, supported on a steel moment frame that holds the new volume clear of the existing structure. Once raised, the addition is rotated off the existing house's axis to orient its primary rooms toward the San Gabriel Mountains. The geometry is then chopped at the base to negotiate the junction between new and old. Clad in dark fiber-cement panels against the original stucco, the addition reads as a distinct object hovering above, rather than growing from the house below.

Designed and constructed by Urban Operations, Clip and Shift is one of a pair of contemporary hillside homes built side by side in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Its form comes from two operations working against each other: clip, the volumetric carving that shapes the stacked boxes, and shift, the code-enforced building envelope that pushes each volume back into the slope as it rises. Where the two meet, the setbacks stop being a constraint and produce a terrace on each level, carved from the space the envelope gives back.

The Hulk Addition begins by cutting into the existing 1920s single-story home. A third of the existing residence was removed and reworked into a single flowing living and dining room — then a compact second-story master suite was extruded above it, cantilevering off the new volume to provide views from the master bedroom and a more generous public patio below. Shiplapped Hardie board ties the addition back to the original house, carrying the existing siding up into the new charcoal mass so the two read as one.

The Fast-Twitch ADU is a 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom unit tucked behind an existing duplex in Silver Lake. Its street elevation reads as a white stucco mass caught mid-motion — projecting frames, ledges, and balconies that slip out of alignment floor to floor, as though the building were breaking apart into its own components. Completed in 2022 on a tight infill lot, the composition draws on the slipped-plane language of R.M. Schindler — giving a small building the formal charge of something much larger.

The Sparrow Addition reworks an existing single-story house from the inside out, inserting two new volumes that each create a dialogue with the old roof rather than erasing it. At the center, the kitchen massing is extruded upward and outward — gaining height for a series of faceted lightwells that pull daylight deep into the plan, and conjoining living, dining, cooking, and entertaining into one continuous space. The new master suite takes the opposite strategy: an angled ceiling folds up to allow for paired clerestories, its pitched roof reaching out over the existing hip to trace the original ridgeline without ever touching it.

Designed and constructed by Urban Operations, Slice and Fold uses the constraints of the Hillside Zoning Code to produce a dynamic form. The setback and height limits slice the massing along their regulating lines, and those cut planes are then folded into a faceted facade that turns a zoning constraint into the building's most expressive feature — producing an open plan with outdoor terraces on each level. The same cuts work as lightwells, drawing daylight deep into rooms that a hillside section would normally leave dark.

A 2022 feasibility study for goodr's headquarters, set inside an existing Inglewood warehouse. The brief: expand office space for a growing staff while preserving the company's all-hands gathering space, shipping floor, and existing offices. Rather than commit to a single answer, the study developed three schemes along a spectrum of cost and commitment. Sawtooth builds the most — a new upper-floor office bar and flex suites daylit by lightwells carved into the warehouse roof. Mini-Mega rebalances the existing plan, converting the old all-hands area into offices and recasting a larger gathering space with stepped "bleacher" seating. Mega-Flex intervenes the least and costs the least, dispersing work and meeting functions into a network of light-weight pavilions and courtyards that could be removed entirely if goodr ever leaves the building. Designed in collaboration with firm design Inc.

The Cove Avenue ADU’s are an infill project on an existing multi-family property in Echo Park. Urban Operations was able to produce three 800 SF ADU’s for the parcel and retain ample space around each unit for future landscape opportunities.

A true hilside hustle, Bridge House digs into the terrain at grade and bridges over the slope on the second floor — reducing building mass, excavation, and foundation costs in one move. This 2,400 SF home turns the usual hillside problem into the organizing idea. A massing strategy of sliced forms keeps the plan open while turning closed faces toward the neighboring lots for privacy. Diagonal cuts pull daylight deep into the interior without opening sightlines to the properties next door. The result delivers garden terraces at each level and tucks a sheltered patio beneath the bridge itself, where the hillside passes under the house — landscape running straight through the architecture rather than stopping at its walls.

Carve House begins with the full zoning envelope and works subtractively, removing volume to create cantilevered balconies that produce outdoor space for every room in the house. What reads from the street as a stack of projecting planes and volumes is in fact the opposite gesture — mass eroded away rather than added on. Inside, the same logic turns additive: an open plan where individual rooms are articulated by drop soffits, and a stepped, continuous volume that visually links the ground floor to the pool in the rear yard beyond.

Strata House occupies a steep 1.5:1 slope in Highland Park, where the buildable envelope — capped by L.A.'s Hillside Code — would not contain the full program. The house begins as a box that exceeds those limits, then shears away everything that breaks the code profile and shifts the remaining floors vertically to nest beneath it, staggering the section to follow the grade by digging into the slope. What results reads as geological strata: three white slab edges, each warped to its own profile, peeling from the dark stucco mass like layers folded under pressure. Punched balconies give every level its own outdoor space, while a selective pattern of windows frames the Elysian Valley below and holds privacy against the neighbors close on either side.

Duck and Cover slips three new housing units into the rear yard of a 1920s two-story home without ever showing its face to the street. In an HPOZ, where a contributing house holds the Avenue 52 frontage, the project does exactly what its name says: it ducks below the street's sightlines and takes cover behind the historic structure, reached by a footpath from the front and by cars from the rear alley.

Rather than mimic the old house or contradict it, the design abstracts the neighborhood's pitched-gable vernacular into two dark slate-clad volumes flanking a shared courtyard — familiar in form, clearly contemporary in detail. The result reads as quiet from Avenue 52 and sharp up close, and earned approval from the area's historic review board on exactly those terms.

The Split and Slide House begins as a single volume that is divided along its length and pulled apart, the two halves sliding in opposite directions in order to create front and rear courtyards between them. That fracture becomes the spine of the house — the entry threads into it from the street, and public programs and circulation unfold along its length, with secondary volumes of bedrooms stacked above each half. The move is also contextual: set in a former avocado-farm tract of mixed R1–R3 fabric, the house breaks what could have been one large mass into a cluster of smaller forms, a scaled, mixed-material massing more reminiscent of the older Craftsman farmhouses that once dotted the area. The rear volumes open through broad glazing to the pool and garden, with framed views toward the Hollywood Hills; the street face stays deliberately reserved.

Pitched sits on an irregular hillside lot on Sunset Drive, where a strict 28'-0" height limit governs what can be built above grade. The house consolidates its program into a single stepped mass that follows the slope downward from a street-level carport, then folds its roof planes to fit beneath the height line — producing a series of colliding pitched forms that are a product of the zoning constraints. Inside, these angled planes inform the interior architecture: a faceted ceiling of intersecting ridges and valleys, with skylights punched through where the folds pull apart, flooding the open living level with light from above. Each floor steps down to its own balcony and terrace, turning the section into a vertical sequence of indoor and outdoor rooms with city views beyond.

Wedge occupies one of the narrowest buildable slivers in its Silver Lake hillside — hemmed in by zoning regulations, pinched between two existing neighbors, and falling steeply toward a downtown skyline view. The house answers these constraints at once: rather than standing plumb within the tight envelope, its walls cant and taper, leaning the living spaces and their glass toward the view while shaping the plan to the slope and setbacks that define the site. Fhe street facade reads as a single quiet story — and the section then steps down the slope, each level opening to the vista as skylights and pillbox strip windows pull daylight through the narrow plan.

Pleat House is a 2,000 SF residence on a 1.5:1 slope in Highland Park, raised on tall piers so it hovers above the hillside and nests lightly among the site's established trees. Its form answers Los Angeles's Baseline Hillside Ordinance — and gently questions it. Where the code's height and envelope limits would flatten a hillside house into a generic box, here they pleat the roof into a set of folded, tilting planes that abstract the gabled rooflines of the surrounding neighborhood. Below, the house steps down the slope in fractured tiers, opening each level to outdoor space and to the canyon views beyond.

A small apartment renovation on the Upper East Side, designed as a pied-à-terre for a retired couple splitting their time between Florida, New York, and Paris. The remodel strikes a balance between aesthetic refinement and domestic comfort and the spatial efficiency Manhattan interiors demand: a compact open kitchen of high-gloss white cabinetry and dark floors, folded white ceiling planes that catch the light, and a single charged note of chartreuse at the backsplash.

Stack and Trim is a 2,600 SF home on a tight, wedge-shaped Silver Lake lot falling at a 2:1 grade. It begins as a simple bar — three stories at the rear, two at the street — then gives ground where it meets the neighborhood: the street-facing volume is trimmed back so the house tucks into its context, while the full mass is held at the rear, rising three stories above an alleyway, where a small roof-top terrace captures views of Downtown L.A. Extruded floor plates and balconies open to the landscape, while at the street the house keeps to itself, an urban nest within the dense Silver Lake neighborhood.

Designed and built by Urban Operations, Butterfly House is a 2,200-square-foot residence conceived as a small skyscraper: by minimizing its footprint on a steep hillside lot, it cuts foundation cost and stacks its domestic program vertically. The public rooms meet the street at the high point of the site, with a master suite and rooftop terrace extruded above and a second bedroom suite and living room tucked into the slope below — a public core sandwiched between private floors. The stepped massing recaptures square footage a sloping site would otherwise forfeit and turns each shift in the volume toward the Elysian Valley views beyond. Inside, a restrained palette of bamboo flooring and plywood millwork is punctuated by a vertical red circulation core that pulls daylight down through the stair.

The first project designed and built by Urban Operations, Work House contains all the spatial desires of the mass-market home while rejecting its conventions of domestic life. Wrapped in corrugated metal with a cedar-clad volume on top, it was built as a series of open, interconnected spaces loose enough to be occupied by multiple programs — for ten years it served as the studio's own office. The building has been featured on HGTV, used in numerous film shoots, and included in the 2007 Silver Lake Modernism Tour and the 2009 Dwell Home Tour.

A grass-roots landscape project to reclaim a piece of the Silver Lake streetscape. The site is a triangular sliver of asphalt that was once a turn lane; the concept was simple — an "urban lounge," a place where one lingers but does not stay. It is without style or aesthetic. It just is. Planted with native, drought-resistant trees, succulents, and grasses, and furnished with flat boulders for seating, the park was built by a handful of designers and a hundred neighborhood volunteers. It won a 2009–2010 Community Beautification Award, received additional support from the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council in 2012, and was included in "Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good," the US Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.

A façade remodel and identity redesign for an existing LAPD-sponsored youth center on busy East 1st Street. The brief was pragmatic: off-the-shelf materials, resistant to vandalism and the daily wear of a public building. The response gives the center a face out of tough, ordinary parts — a rhythm of angled metal screens shading the upper windows, corrugated and perforated panels banding the street level, and a bright chartreuse entry that signals the way in. The design received approval from the City of Los Angeles.

Urban Operations Skyscraper Zines