Could Los Angeles become the next big city to embrace mass timber construction?

Portland-based LEVER Architecture’s new 843 North Spring Street is the one of the first large uses of cross-laminated timber in a contemporary office building in the city. Located on the eastern edge of Los Angeles’ Chinatown, the five-story-tall, 145,000-square-feet structure is both old and new, incorporating an existing two-story concrete parking garage as its base.

The mixed-use project includes office, retail, a garden courtyard, an amenity deck, and below-grade parking. Located adjacent to the elevated Chinatown station of the Los Angeles Metro Rail, the architects drew on the urban forms of the tight-knit neighborhood and Chinese culture. “There are these amazing alleys that connect streets,” LEVER Architecture Principal and Founder Thomas Robinson says. The building echoes those alleys with a variety of passageways and an open-air atrium based on the model of the Chinese courtyard house. 

The building is configured in two parallel bars: A broad open stair at the north end of the building on College Street welcomes people to the building’s central garden courtyard, which provides landscaped areas on every floor. Exterior decks cantilever from the perimeter of the north and south ends of the structure, expanding the office floors to the outdoors, where workers can take advantage of LA’s temperate climate. LEVER worked with James Corner Field Operations in developing the landscape design that weaves garden spaces throughout each floor of the office block. “That urban generosity and connection to landscape and connection to the urban fabric of Chinatown was something that was really important to the design,” Robinson says.

The project is technically a renovation that places the new glass, steel, and mass timber structure atop a 1980s-era retail warehouse and parking garage. The hybrid solution keeps each material exposed to view. “The hybrid gives you the opportunity to take advantage of the structural characteristics of each material and then combine them in ways that make each of them better,” Robinson says.

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