Architecture · LOS ANGELES
Reading time: 8 minThere are projects that follow a city’s momentum and projects that redirect it. Los Angeles has seen plenty of the first kind in recent decades, particularly in neighbourhoods like the Arts District, where the creative energy that built the place has too often become the justification for replacing it with something that exploits the brand while erasing the substance. 670 Mesquit, the mixed-use development designed by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) for a site along the Los Angeles River, is an attempt at something more difficult and more worthwhile: a project that takes the qualities that make the Arts District genuinely extraordinary and asks how architecture might amplify them rather than overwrite them. It is one of the more searching questions a major architectural practice has posed in Los Angeles in some time. The Los Angeles City Council gave the project its approval in late July 2025, nearly a decade after design work began, and what comes next will be worth watching carefully.
The Arts District and What Made It
The Arts District occupies the eastern edge of Downtown Los Angeles, framed by Alameda Street to the west, First Street to the north, the Los Angeles River to the east, and Violet Street to the south. What most distinguishes it physically from the rest of the city is the industrial building stock that has survived the passage of time: a collection of warehouses and processing facilities mostly built in the early decades of the twentieth century, constructed from prefabricated concrete and steel in the most cost-efficient ways available at the time. These were buildings designed for functionality and flexibility above all else, large open floors, generous structural spans, exposed material, and an absence of ornament that has made them, paradoxically, extraordinarily well suited to adaptive reuse.
The neighbourhood that emerged from decades of gradual occupation by artists, designers, and creatives is one of the most convincingly authentic urban environments in Los Angeles, a city not always celebrated for the depth of its urbanism. The raw concrete and steel do not feel like a costume. The galleries, studios, lofts, coffee roasters, restaurants, and independent businesses that line its streets feel genuinely embedded in the place, not parachuted into it. The Arts District works because its architecture, or at least its inherited architecture, has enough character to survive transformation without being consumed by it. The challenge facing any new development here is whether it can add to that character rather than dilute it.
BIG’s Central Question
When BIG began working on 670 Mesquit in 2016, the practice framed its design challenge in terms that are deceptively simple: how can the Arts District be renewed by embracing, rather than replacing, the qualities that have defined this one-of-a-kind urban environment? It sounds obvious when stated that way, but the history of urban regeneration is largely a history of projects that asked the same question and answered it badly, replacing the textures that made a place interesting with a version of those textures rendered in smooth, developer-safe materials and scaled to maximise rentable area. The fact that BIG kept asking the question for nearly a decade, revising and refining the proposal through community consultation and the slow machinery of Los Angeles planning approvals, suggests a level of seriousness that goes beyond positioning.
The answer that has emerged is organised around a concept of dual scale. 670 Mesquit, also known as the Los Angeles Arts District (LAAD) development, is composed of four interconnected buildings rising as high as 34 stories along the Los Angeles River. But the design operates simultaneously at two registers: the large structural framework of the buildings themselves, which establishes the scale of the complex in relation to its surroundings, and the intimate, human-scale spaces within and between those buildings, which are designed to be customised and occupied according to the needs of the people who inhabit them. The gap between these two scales is not a failure of resolution but the whole point.
The Case Study Houses and What They Mean Here
To develop the vocabulary for this approach, BIG reached back to one of the defining moments in California’s architectural history: the Case Study House program, initiated in 1945 by John Entenza through his magazine Arts and Architecture. Running intermittently until 1966, the program brought together leading architects, including Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, Craig Ellwood, and Pierre Koenig, around a shared brief: to design low-cost, prototypical homes for the post-war California market. The houses that resulted came to define California Modernism, emphasising open-plan living, the structural expression of prefabricated or modular systems, and a dissolving of the boundary between interior and exterior that suited both the Southern California climate and the optimistic mood of the era.
What BIG has taken from the Case Study Houses is not their aesthetic but their underlying logic: the idea that a structural system can define a generous, flexible space that is then inhabited and personalised according to the needs and preferences of its occupants. At 670 Mesquit, large modular units can be subdivided and configured in different ways, allowing the development to accommodate a range of uses, lifestyles, and tenant types within a coherent structural envelope. BIG describes the project as the freedom of the warehouse loft meeting the individual customisation of the stick-built Case Study House, the industrial and the human, the generic and the specific, held in productive tension within a single development.
“The freedom of the warehouse loft meets the individual customisation of the stick-built Case Study House. The coexistence of the two scales, the industrial and the human, the warehouse and the case-study house, turns the ancient dilemma between the generic and the specific inside out.”
What 670 Mesquit Contains
The programme assembled for 670 Mesquit is ambitious in its breadth. The development will deliver 895 residential units, ranging from loft-format spaces that maintain the industrial openness of the surrounding neighbourhood to more conventional apartment configurations. Office space is concentrated in the tallest tower, which anchors the corner of the site, while a hotel occupies the smallest of the four buildings, offering a more intimate scale alongside the residential and commercial volumes. A charter elementary school is included within the development, a commitment to the growing permanent population of the Arts District that goes beyond the usual provision of ground-floor retail. Studio MLA, the landscape practice founded by Mia Lehrer, has designed the green spaces and public parkland that complete the programme, bringing a rigorous approach to the outdoor realm that the project’s river-adjacent location demands.
Retail and recreational spaces thread through the complex at ground level, designed to activate the streets and create the kind of continuous public life that the best urban developments sustain. The stepping configuration of the four buildings, which diminish in height along one edge of the site, creates a series of terraces and balconies that maximise natural light and river views for residents and workers throughout the complex. The tallest structure, dedicated to office use, anchors the corner of the site; the hotel occupies the smallest building; and the two central towers house the majority of the residential units, offering a balance of scale and function across the development.
The Public Realm and the River
The most striking single gesture in BIG’s design for 670 Mesquit may be the expansive deck that cantilevers over the neighbouring railway line, creating a public park that bridges the gap between the development and the Los Angeles River. This move transforms what would otherwise be a barrier into an opportunity. The cantilevered park makes the river accessible not just to residents of 670 Mesquit but to the wider neighbourhood, extending the public realm in a way that the riverfront’s industrial history never permitted.
The Los Angeles River has been the subject of significant attention and investment in recent years, with ongoing efforts to restore ecological function and public access to a waterway that was largely encased in concrete through the mid-twentieth century. Studio MLA’s landscape strategy for 670 Mesquit engages directly with this broader ambition, treating the riverfront connection as a genuine design opportunity rather than a technical constraint. The result is a public realm that feels continuous with the city rather than enclosed within the development, a significant contribution to a neighbourhood that has grown substantially in recent years but remains underserved in terms of accessible green space.
A Decade in the Making
670 Mesquit has been in development since 2016, a period that has encompassed multiple rounds of design revision, community consultation, and engagement with the complex approvals process that characterises large-scale development in Los Angeles. The City Council gave the project its approval in late July 2025, marking a significant milestone after nearly a decade of sustained effort. That timeline is, in one reading, a testament to the difficulty of building anything at this scale in a city with Los Angeles’s planning constraints. In another, it reflects the thoroughness with which BIG and its partners engaged with the community and the regulatory process, taking the time to develop something that could withstand scrutiny rather than rushing to groundbreaking.
The impact on the Arts District is likely to be considerable. 895 new residential units represents a meaningful addition to the housing supply in a neighbourhood where demand has significantly outpaced supply for years. The inclusion of a charter elementary school signals a commitment to the long-term residential community that distinguishes 670 Mesquit from purely market-rate developments. The public park and riverfront connection offer something back to the neighbourhood that the development is entering, a contribution to the public realm that goes beyond the minimum required by code. Whether the development sustains the Arts District’s identity or changes it is a question that will only be answered over time. But the quality of the thinking behind the design gives genuine grounds for optimism.
BIG in Los Angeles
670 Mesquit is not the only evidence of BIG’s growing commitment to Los Angeles. The practice has recently established a permanent office in Santa Monica, occupying a 1928 Spanish Revival building, a choice that reflects the same interest in existing architectural character that animates the 670 Mesquit design. The office gives BIG a permanent base from which to engage with the Southern California region, a market that the firm clearly regards as a significant part of its future practice.
The approach BIG is developing at 670 Mesquit also has parallels elsewhere in the firm’s current work. A similar pixellated mixed-use development is currently under construction in Toronto, reflecting BIG’s broader interest in the possibilities of flexible, modular architecture at an urban scale. What is distinctive about the Los Angeles project is the specificity of the site and its context: the Arts District’s industrial heritage, the Los Angeles River, and the particular creative culture of a neighbourhood that has spent decades developing an identity worth taking seriously. The question BIG asked at the beginning of this process remains the right one. How can architecture renew a place by embracing rather than replacing what makes it extraordinary? The answer will be visible only when the buildings are standing, and the streets around them are alive with the people who inhabit them. On the evidence of what has been designed, I expect it to be worth the wait.
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