Selgascano Second Home Offices in Hollywood

The new Second Home in Hollywood, holLA, is a collection of several recipes and
ingredients of a California Cocktail. HolLA lays in East Hollywood on a 90,800 square feet
site with two existing buildings, of which we have to maintain one with two floors, designed
in 1964 by Paul Williams, the first recognized African-American architect working in Los
Angeles. This building has a classical Neocolonialism Los Angeles look and is used as a
core and main entrance for the whole Campus. In this existing building 320 roaming places
are located in the ground floor and additional offices with 200 workspaces are in the firs
floor, with common facilities such as café, bar, restaurant, events and conference hall,
resting areas and open terraces, all around the building.
The other one is demolished and, on top of the existing underground parking, a 60 new
oval-shaped individual offices and meeting rooms are placed surrounded by a garden that
will be the Second Home for almost 700 people. Four different oval shapes create the 60
bungalow offices of 4 different sizes, that are scattered around the garden built with 4 feet
of soil on top of the parking slab, burying the bungalows down to the table height. The
transparent curved walls allow 360º horizontal views of the plants, giving the feeling to be
working among nature.
The interior spaces in this project go pretty much unnoticed and the main focus is outdoors,
which is quintessential to the living style in Los Angeles. In Second Home Hollywood,
instead of bringing the garden inside the office, we have brought the office out to the
garden. 60 one level stand-alone offices in the garden of a Paul Williams building. Offices
(pots) surrounded by planters (plant pots). Over 10,000 plants and trees, many butterflies,
ants, bees, squirrels… and humans inhabit these pots. The wooden and concrete paths
break through the garden with plants in both sides, as a stroll through yearlong flowers.
“If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and then make a
change”. Second Home Hollywood is an experiment for the average office worker: co-exist
daily with living things other than humans. This approximation to nature is not the only step
towards a more sustainable living: plants reduce the temperature and provide shade; the
clear façade eliminates the necessity of artificial lighting and has 3 operable openings for
natural cross-ventilation; all the water at the site is collected in two cisterns totaling 37,000
gallons of storage capacity to be used for irrigation.
Second Home Hollywood has replaced 90,800 square feet of hardscape for 70,000
square feet of landscape. What previously was a parking lot is now a garden. It is one of
the few private developments in history in which the footprint of the built-environment has
been returned to natural-environment.