I remember being at the huge, rowdy grand opening party for the Pacific Electric Lofts in downtown LA, circa 2006. In the middle of the speeches, a city official recognized all the newly moved-in residents in the crowd, and someone yelled out, “Welcome to our home!” That was a revelation for me about architecture.
I love being a part of creating homes for people—the places where they will experience their lives and pursue happiness. I like to think that the places we create play a role in that pursuit – making people’s lives more pleasant, joyful, comfortable or just plain easier as they move through their days. I love collaborating with clients to figure out the puzzle of housing, from the initial concept through funding, design development, and into the details of living units.
An open secret about me is that my first passion was landscape architecture, which was my undergraduate major. I “switched” to architecture for grad school, but the root of my passion was still my driver: how do we experience the spaces of the world, and how do objects – whether a tree, or a wall, or a telephone pole – define the quality of the space and our movement through it. I’m as interested in designing the spaces between buildings and fitting them in their location as I am with the buildings themselves, something that continually vexed my professors in architecture school.
On weekends I tool around the city on my bike quite a bit – exploring the beautiful mess of LA, and looking at how the city functions and flows, parsing its history through landscape features. If I’m near one of KFA’s completed projects, I’ll stop in and poke around to see how it’s being used, and to see what we got right and what we didn’t. About a year after it was finished, I dropped into NoHo Senior Villas, one of my favorite projects, developed with PATH and Clifford Beers Housing for seniors at risk for homelessness. I cajoled my way into the locked building and was able to roam. I was riding up the elevator with a resident and I asked her how she liked living there. She said she loved it, and was able to tell me a few specific things she loved about it – the outdoor spaces being one of them. When I told her I was the architect, she teared up, thanked me, and told me how living there changed her life. That was a moment of true satisfaction with my work.
John joined the KFA team in 1999 and has enjoyed the opportunity to be involved in both LA and KFA’s continuing growth and evolution. John has focused on the full range of multi-family housing types including adaptive reuse projects, hotels, affordable family and senior housing, and market-rate condominiums and apartments. He enjoys working with developers and communities throughout the design process to find the project that best fits each site and meets client goals. John is also an active volunteer in his South LA neighborhood, helping out with planning and historic preservation issues. As time permits, he spends vacations with Habitat for Humanity building homes in India and Sri Lanka.
