Michael Maltzan
Robert Gwathmey Chair in Housing
Michael Maltzan founded Michael Maltzan Architecture, Inc. in 1995. His projects cross a wide range of typologies, from cultural institutions to city infrastructure. Michael’s notable projects include the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, MoMA QNS, Star Apartments, the Pittman Dowell Residence, the new Sixth Street Viaduct, MIT Vassar Street Residential Hall, the UCLA Hammer Museum, and the Winnipeg Art Gallery Inuit Art Centre.
Michael received an M.Arch from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, and BFA and B.Arch degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and received the 2016 AIA Los Angeles Gold Medal. He is a recipient of a 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award and was inducted as a member of the Academy in 2023. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 2020, and currently serves on the Deans leadership council at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Visiting Committee to the GSD. He was featured in the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s 2019 film, What It Takes to Make a Home, delivered the 20th Annual John T. Dunlop Lecture for the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, and his work was named One of the 25 Best Inventions of 2015 by Time Magazine.
Michael’s work has gained international acclaim for innovation in both design and construction. It has been recognized with five Progressive Architecture awards, 52 citations from local, state and national chapters of the American Institute of Architects, the Rudy Bruner Foundation’s Gold Medal for Urban Excellence, the Zumtobel Group Award for Innovations for Sustainability & Humanity in the Built Environment, a 2020 Best of the Millennium AIA LA Honor Award, the 2025 AIA California Maybeck Award, and the 2025 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture.
The firm and its projects have been widely featured in national and international publications and have been exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art New York, the Heinz Architectural Center, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. The firm’s work was selected for the 2006, 2018, and 2020 La Biennale di Venezia and is included in the permanent collections of Carnegie Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Michael's CV is available here.
Portrait photo by Ron Eshel.
Projects
Qaumajuq
Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Qaumajuq, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2021
Qaumajuq, the 36,000-square-foot Inuit art centre at the Winnipeg Art Gallery houses the gallery's collection of over 12,000 works of Inuit art—the largest exhibition space devoted to Indigenous art in Canada. The addition to Gustavo da Roza's iconic building faces the Manitoba Legislature and includes galleries, a lecture theater, research areas, and visible art storage. During the design process, the project team visited Nunavut communities and artists' studios, experiencing the people, culture, and northern landscape that informed the design's ephemeral qualities celebrating historic and contemporary Inuit art and culture. A three-story Visible Glass Vault with curved floor-to-ceiling walls anchors the entrance corner, accessible to curators and scholars while viewable from Ilavut (Entrance Hall), which connects to the theater, café, and classroom spaces. The expansive third-level Qilak gallery provides 8,000 square feet of light-filled exhibition space with sculptural walls evoking northern geographic features and figural skylights creating ethereal illumination reflecting the natural environments where much Inuit art originates. The upper-level Pimâtisiwin gallery opens to Qilak below for exhibitions and performances, while penthouse education studios and classrooms access the rooftop sculpture garden for activities including stone carving and ice sculpting.
Project Partners: Qaumajuq was led by Michael Maltzan Architecture in collaboration with local Associate Architect Cibinel Architecture Ltd.
Moody Center for the Arts
Rice University Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, Texas, 2017
The Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University is a state-of-the-art facility designed to advance transdisciplinary collaboration between the arts, sciences, and humanities through instructional, production, performance, and exhibition spaces. At the building's heart, a double-height flexible studio functions as an interior quad—echoing Rice's numerous quadrangles—around which galleries, a black box theater, shops, project studios, and classrooms are arrayed. The design emphasizes transparency and openness, with transecting sightlines creating layered views of diverse activities across production, instructional, and exhibition spaces while interior glazing highlights artistic process alongside finished works. An interior amphitheater formed by wide stairs rising along the north facade provides informal social gathering space. The building's exterior extends this transparency through floor-to-ceiling glass along the principal first-floor elevations, while the cantilevered second floor creates shaded arcades that make the articulated brick-clad upper story appear to levitate. Large picture windows punctuate the brick facade in playful rhythm, bringing natural light deep into interior spaces. Pedestrian paths cut across the open lawn and through the building, organizing key program areas and linking the MCA to the broader campus, creating an iconic yet contextually appropriate home for the center's forward-looking vision.
Inner-City Arts
Inner-City Arts, Los Angeles, California, 2008
Located just east of downtown Los Angeles on the edge of Skid Row, the Inner-City Arts campus provides arts education for over 10,000 at-risk youth from Los Angeles public schools each year. The campus houses a range of art facilities and is an oasis in the urban environment. Built in three phases over 15 years and completed in 2008, the one-acre campus was conceived as an open-air village designed with the contemporary and progressive sensibilities of the founding arts organization in mind. An aggregate of forms, the campus design highlights the interplay of physical and programmatic elements. Arrayed across the grounds, program spaces interconnect around a network of plazas and courtyards, blurring the threshold between interior and exterior as each building gestures to mix context and program. Program spaces include a black box theater, faculty offices, ceramics studios, animation studios, and larger multipurpose rooms. At the street, taut white walls protect the arts enclave and rise in contrast to the surrounding neighborhood sprawl. The campus is secured, but not isolated from its Skid Row context. Deflections in the exterior wrapper open, inviting the students to acknowledge and engage the complexities of the city. Texture of form, light, and color are used to inspire learning and embrace the growth of the individual. The ceramics tower beckons as a symbol of the connections forged between students, the community, and the world at large.
Hammer Museum
UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California, 2023
Over two decades, Michael Maltzan Architecture has transformed the Hammer Museum from an anonymous institution with blank, impervious facades into a vibrant contemporary art center connected to both UCLA's campus and Los Angeles's urban fabric. Originally designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes to house a private historical painting collection, the museum evolved into an internationally recognized contemporary art institution that had outgrown its physical capacity. MMA's strategic renovations—including the Billy Wilder Theater (2006), courtyard and Education Lab (2012), John V. Tunney Bridge (2015), galleries (2017), Nimoy Studio (2018), café (2018), bookstore (2022), new entry and lobby galleries (2023), and 40,000 square feet in the adjoining Claud Beelman-designed office tower (2023)—address the museum's spatial needs while establishing new visibility and vitality. The design capitalizes on the museum's urban location by converting the formerly vacant central courtyard into an active hub that connects circulation routes from the lowest parking level through transparent and translucent elements, across the suspended bridge, and up to the museum's upper levels with views to the surrounding streets and sky. These interventions organize movement throughout the complex while highlighting the museum's diverse programming and active cultural life.
Sixth Street Viaduct
Sixth Street Viaduct, Los Angeles, California, 2022
The Los Angeles Sixth Street Viaduct creates a new vibrant civic armature to support culture, history, and community building. The design is equal parts engineering and architecture and began with the idea of ten pairs of arches, relating to the iconic pair of arches on the former bridge, rising and falling along the north and south edges as it extends from east to west. This approach unifies and optimizes the architecture of the viaduct through repetition, creating a unique configuration through the repeated use of arches, roadways, and pier forms. The new span unites the Boyle Heights community to the east with the Arts District and Downtown to the west. It accommodates cars, incorporates significant new bicycle connections, and increases connectivity for pedestrian access, not only at its endpoints, but along the entirety of the span, linking the bridge, the Los Angeles River, and new urban landscapes underneath establishing a more meaningful relationship.
Project Partners: The design team includes Michael Maltzan Architecture (Design Architect), HNTB (Engineer and Executive Architect), Hargreaves Associates (Landscape Architect), and AC Martin (Urban Planning)
One Santa Fe
One Santa Fe, Los Angeles, California, 2015
One Santa Fe, completed in 2015, is a 510,000 square foot mixed-use development in the expanding Arts District of Los Angeles. Located alongside the Los Angeles River and an active railyard, the building is more than a quarter mile long and adds critical new residential, retail, and commercial spaces within the formerly industrial neighborhood, transforming the city and its urban center. The 438 upper-level residential units include multiple models in order to provide for a diverse range of residents and living arrangements. Six-unit types are available, ranging in sizes from a 350 square foot studio apartment to a 1,250 square foot multi-level unit. The project also includes 78,620 square feet of ground level retail space, known as “The Yards”, with adjacent outdoor community plazas and above grade parking.
Star Apartments
Star Apartments, Los Angeles, California, 2014
Star Apartments is Los Angeles’s first modular multi-family project for unhoused individuals. It transformed an existing one-story commercial structure in downtown Los Angeles into a LEED Platinum facility with 102 apartments and support services for individuals experiencing chronic homelessness. The design of the six-story, 95,000 square foot building’s prominent location in LA’s Skid Row neighborhood was completed in 2014 and makes a powerful statement about the important role innovative, affordable, and safe supportive housing can play in our cities. The building is organized around three spatial zones stacked one upon the other: a commercial zone at street level, a second level for community programs which focus on health and wellness, and four terraced floors of residences above. The first floor includes the headquarters of the LA County Department of Health Services’ (DHS) Housing for Health Division and an onsite medical clinic. Star Apartments is the first affordable, modular multi-family housing project in Los Angeles to utilize prefabricated modular construction.
26 Point 2 Apartments
26 Point 2 Apartments, Long Beach, California, 2023
26 Point 2 Apartments is a 5-story, 77-unit permanent supportive housing building in Long Beach, California, for Excelerate Housing Group. The 48,000-square-foot project mediates between Pacific Coast Highway's busy commercial corridor to the north and a modest residential neighborhood to the south through carefully scaled massing that responds to both contexts. Along the residential street, pitched facade motifs echo nearby gabled roofs, while the residential volume hovers on columns above a single-story, pitched-roof amenity building that relates to PCH's commercial scale. A fully glazed ground level preserves visual connections to the surrounding city while creating protected interior space for residents, with color employed strategically to articulate distinct yet interconnected zones. The project achieved LEED Gold certification through comprehensive sustainability strategies including high-efficiency conditioning systems, solar hot water, high-albedo roofing, operable windows, permeable paving, and drought-tolerant native landscaping that reduce energy consumption and conserve water resources. Beyond environmental performance, 26 Point 2 provides socially sustainable high-density housing for formerly unhoused residents, offering wraparound supportive services including on-site counseling, staff offices, and social amenity spaces designed to foster genuine community and stability.
New Carver Apartments
New Carver Apartments, Los Angeles, California, 2009
New Carver Apartments explores how architecture can create both new possibilities for its highly vulnerable, dramatically under-served residents as well as for the city at large. The project aims to construct a new optimism for public housing in Los Angeles and to form an armature for change through architecture. Completed in 2009, the New Carver Apartments is a 97-unit permanent supportive housing apartment building in Los Angeles’ revitalized downtown, immediately adjacent to the freeway. Built for the Skid Row Housing Trust, the six-story 53,000 square foot building incorporates a subtle pattern of color, light, and shadow, making it a refreshing departure from more traditional apartments and the nearby highway infrastructure. At the building’s core is a broad stair and open courtyard that provides public open space for residents and allows natural light and fresh air to reach each apartment. Other public spaces in the building include on-site social service offices, a ground level community kitchen and garden, a third-floor lounge and laundry room, and a sixth-floor terrace with panoramic city views.
Pittman Dowell Residence
Pittman Dowell Residence Exterior, La Crescenta, California, 2009
Inspired by geometric arrangements of interlocking polygons, the Pittman Dowell Residence takes the form of a heptagonal figure whose purity is confounded by a series of intersecting diagonal slices. Located 15 miles north of Los Angeles at the edge of Angeles National Forest, the Pittman Dowell Residence is sited on 6 acres of land originally planned as a hillside subdivision designed by Richard Neutra. Although three level pads were cleared, only one house, the 1952 Serulnic Residence, was built on the site. The Pittman Dowell Residence, completed in 2009, sits on the last clearing, circumscribed by the sole winding road which leads past the house to the Serulnic Residence on the bluff above. Inspired by geometric arrangements of interlocking polygons, the house takes the form of a heptagonal figure. Connected by an interior courtyard, the living spaces unfold in an array of shifting frames. The home’s non-parallel walls never fully enclose the space of a room. Instead of using doors, privacy is maintained by layering space and limiting view access.
