Irish-born, Los Angeles-based architect Lorcan O’Herlihy, founder of Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, known as LOHA, died Sunday at the age of 66. His loss puts the spotlight on a brave, soulful and restless artist who changed L.A. for the better — rethinking, among other things, dense urban housing and its relationship to the city.
O’Herlihy’s and his firm’s work was widely published and won more than 100 awards. LOHA was named AIA Los Angeles Firm of the Year in 2018 and won AIA California’s Distinguished Practice Award that same year. O’Herlihy received the AIA Los Angeles Gold Medal in 2021, and in 2023 he was awarded AIA California’s Maybeck Award, one of the state’s highest honors.
It’s hard for me to think about O’Herlihy’s buildings without thinking first about the man himself: his buoyant voice, quick smile and sing-song enthusiasm. (“Hello, laddie,” he would say in greeting, making me chuckle every time.) How he radiated empathy and appreciation. All of this shone vividly through his work, which shared his joy, artfulness and deep feeling, and most of all privileged human experience and social interaction.
He built his more than four-decade career around the conviction that architecture was an optimistic, social art. A way to improve everyday life and repair a tattered urban fabric. He also saw it as a means of disrupting the city’s frustratingly outdated status quo — seeking better possibilities for all manner of living.
A view of the San Joaquin student house complex at UC Santa Barbara, which opened in 2017. Designed by L.A. architect Lorcan O’Herlihy (LOHA), the units feature cross ventilation and direct access to the outdoors.
(LOHA)
O’Herlihy was a leader of a generation of architects committed to expanding L.A.’s architectural thinking into a more collective place. In a city obsessed with the single-family home, Lorcan (who designed many stellar homes, beginning early in his career) became one of L.A.’s most prolific and inventive designers of multifamily housing. Often traversing the difficult middle ground between luxury and affordability, his buildings leaned into the city, using screens, shared balconies, expanded exterior stairs, courtyards, pocket parks, and layered facades to turn tight sites into jubilant places of connection. He always saw density not as a compromise but as an architectural opportunity.
His architecture exhibited a self-assured fluency first honed at the Architectural Assn. in London, then from stints with giants in the profession such as Kevin Roche, I.M. Pei and Steven Holl. O’Herlihy employed color, material and texture with unusual force, creating an unapologetic civic presence. He well understood the city’s brightness, harshness, improvisation and fractured essence.
As the son and brother of actors, O’Herlihy had more than a little intuition for drama. (He liked to say that his dedication to making social spaces came from traveling around Europe with his father on acting gigs.) But his flourishes were both expressive and eminently practical. They shaded you from the sun, protected your privacy, drew you toward other people while still making even the most constrained sites feel alive.
Formosa 1140 by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects was one of O’Herlihy’s breakthrough projects.
(Lawrence Anderson)
One of his breakthrough projects, Formosa 1140 in West Hollywood, exemplified that approach, shifting the typical courtyard apartment’s U-shaped open space to the edge of the site to create a soft, elegant pocket park that served as an inviting space for residents and the public. With its layered red metal skin, graceful pathways, and choreographed framing of space, the building gave generously to the city and received vibrancy and meaning in return.
O’Herlihy branched into more challenging terrain — like affordable, transitional and student housing — where he continued to link architectural invention with a keen sensitivity to place, and insight into how people actually wanted to live. He was especially interested in thresholds: the moment you move from sidewalk to entry, street to courtyard, apartment to terrace; from solitude to community. Those in-between spaces, so often treated as afterthoughts, became one of the emotional centers of his work.
The Isla Intersections supportive housing development by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects has a pedestrian walkway that serves as a buffer to neighboring buildings on a cramped site near the 110 and 105 freeways.
(Eric Staudenmaier)
At Isla Intersections, a supportive housing project in South Los Angeles, he transformed a barren triangle of land, once marooned by chaotic roads and distant freeways, into a vibrant, multi-scaled village of steel shipping containers packed with congregation spaces on every level. There were outdoor hallways, planted patios, a sculpted and porous internal courtyard, and even a new “paseo” next door — a closed street turned into a lovely space for farmers markets and other gatherings.
“All of a sudden, it’s much more welcoming, right?” O’Herlihy told me, with his typical unfiltered enthusiasm, when we visited the site in 2024. He added: “I really like this place. What can I say? I always feel good about being here. I feel this is what I want to do as an architect, yeah?”
O’Herlihy was intellectually hungry — always probing new territory, questioning why things had to be a certain way. In 2015 he opened an office in Detroit, where his firm would author emphatically modern buildings that felt textured by the Motor City’s industrial legacy, celebrating both its past and its new promise.
Sandi Simon Center for Dance by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects is a unified space alive with glowing light that evokes the graceful, flowing movement of the dancers inside.
(Eric Staudenmaier)
Back on the West Coast, Canyon 5, a multi-unit development just south of L.A.’s Beachwood Canyon, reconsidered the typical housing model, splitting a single mass into angled, sculptural volumes that feel like individual homes, filled with space, light and life. At Chapman University in Orange, he uncovered massive hidden trusses and blasted through the concrete floors of a former orange packing warehouse, creating the Sandi Simon Center for Dance, a unified space alive with glowing light that evokes the graceful, flowing movement of the dancers inside.
That kind of unique engagement with history and setting was a driving passion. Be it the creative restoration of Raphael Soriano’s home and studio for photographer Julius Shulman, or the formation of confident, multi-layered housing projects next to landmarks by Rudolph Schindler (Schindler House) and Richard Neutra (Strathmore Apartments), O’Herlihy’s curiosity pushed buildings forward while his empathy preserved their spirit.
The exterior of Jeffrey Hamilton’s condo in West Hollywood, which was designed by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects.
(Kit Karzen / For The Times)
Some critics were skeptical before the completion of each project, fearing they would overwhelm the landmarked buildings or erase essential history. But those controversies largely evaporated after the work was done, proving O’Herlihy’s familiar optimism to be well founded.
“It gave him the sense that what he was dedicating himself to had meaning in its own right. And that it had a place in Los Angeles,” said my friend and colleague Greg Goldin, who worked with O’Herlihy on multiple books.
Nonetheless, O’Herlihy never achieved the kind of mass recognition and celebrity enjoyed by predecessors like Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne. Perhaps because he was better at delving into the social and urban fabric than at creating popular spectacle.
But his warmth, purpose, and daring creativity are all now embedded into the city’s DNA.
O’Herlihy’s many L.A. buildings are full of motion and discovery, reflecting his restless intellect and optimism, a sense that even the most compromised urban site was capable of producing something valuable. In a city still struggling with affordability, homelessness, sprawl, and social fragmentation, his work and his spirit are reminders to be more generous.
Architecture, O’Herlihy insisted through his work, is an act of faith in the people who will use it, and in the city around them.
Irish-born, Los Angeles-based architect Lorcan O’Herlihy, founder of Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, known as LOHA, died Sunday at the age of 66. His loss puts the spotlight on a brave, soulful and restless artist who changed L.A. for the better — rethinking, among other things, dense urban housing and its relationship to the city.
O’Herlihy’s and his firm’s work was widely published and won more than 100 awards. LOHA was named AIA Los Angeles Firm of the Year in 2018 and won AIA California’s Distinguished Practice Award that same year. O’Herlihy received the AIA Los Angeles Gold Medal in 2021, and in 2023 he was awarded AIA California’s Maybeck Award, one of the state’s highest honors.
It’s hard for me to think about O’Herlihy’s buildings without thinking first about the man himself: his buoyant voice, quick smile and sing-song enthusiasm. (“Hello, laddie,” he would say in greeting, making me chuckle every time.) How he radiated empathy and appreciation. All of this shone vividly through his work, which shared his joy, artfulness and deep feeling, and most of all privileged human experience and social interaction.
He built his more than four-decade career around the conviction that architecture was an optimistic, social art. A way to improve everyday life and repair a tattered urban fabric. He also saw it as a means of disrupting the city’s frustratingly outdated status quo — seeking better possibilities for all manner of living.
A view of the San Joaquin student house complex at UC Santa Barbara, which opened in 2017. Designed by L.A. architect Lorcan O’Herlihy (LOHA), the units feature cross ventilation and direct access to the outdoors.
(LOHA)
O’Herlihy was a leader of a generation of architects committed to expanding L.A.’s architectural thinking into a more collective place. In a city obsessed with the single-family home, Lorcan (who designed many stellar homes, beginning early in his career) became one of L.A.’s most prolific and inventive designers of multifamily housing. Often traversing the difficult middle ground between luxury and affordability, his buildings leaned into the city, using screens, shared balconies, expanded exterior stairs, courtyards, pocket parks, and layered facades to turn tight sites into jubilant places of connection. He always saw density not as a compromise but as an architectural opportunity.
His architecture exhibited a self-assured fluency first honed at the Architectural Assn. in London, then from stints with giants in the profession such as Kevin Roche, I.M. Pei and Steven Holl. O’Herlihy employed color, material and texture with unusual force, creating an unapologetic civic presence. He well understood the city’s brightness, harshness, improvisation and fractured essence.
As the son and brother of actors, O’Herlihy had more than a little intuition for drama. (He liked to say that his dedication to making social spaces came from traveling around Europe with his father on acting gigs.) But his flourishes were both expressive and eminently practical. They shaded you from the sun, protected your privacy, drew you toward other people while still making even the most constrained sites feel alive.
Formosa 1140 by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects was one of O’Herlihy’s breakthrough projects.
(Lawrence Anderson)
One of his breakthrough projects, Formosa 1140 in West Hollywood, exemplified that approach, shifting the typical courtyard apartment’s U-shaped open space to the edge of the site to create a soft, elegant pocket park that served as an inviting space for residents and the public. With its layered red metal skin, graceful pathways, and choreographed framing of space, the building gave generously to the city and received vibrancy and meaning in return.
O’Herlihy branched into more challenging terrain — like affordable, transitional and student housing — where he continued to link architectural invention with a keen sensitivity to place, and insight into how people actually wanted to live. He was especially interested in thresholds: the moment you move from sidewalk to entry, street to courtyard, apartment to terrace; from solitude to community. Those in-between spaces, so often treated as afterthoughts, became one of the emotional centers of his work.
The Isla Intersections supportive housing development by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects has a pedestrian walkway that serves as a buffer to neighboring buildings on a cramped site near the 110 and 105 freeways.
(Eric Staudenmaier)
At Isla Intersections, a supportive housing project in South Los Angeles, he transformed a barren triangle of land, once marooned by chaotic roads and distant freeways, into a vibrant, multi-scaled village of steel shipping containers packed with congregation spaces on every level. There were outdoor hallways, planted patios, a sculpted and porous internal courtyard, and even a new “paseo” next door — a closed street turned into a lovely space for farmers markets and other gatherings.
“All of a sudden, it’s much more welcoming, right?” O’Herlihy told me, with his typical unfiltered enthusiasm, when we visited the site in 2024. He added: “I really like this place. What can I say? I always feel good about being here. I feel this is what I want to do as an architect, yeah?”
O’Herlihy was intellectually hungry — always probing new territory, questioning why things had to be a certain way. In 2015 he opened an office in Detroit, where his firm would author emphatically modern buildings that felt textured by the Motor City’s industrial legacy, celebrating both its past and its new promise.
Sandi Simon Center for Dance by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects is a unified space alive with glowing light that evokes the graceful, flowing movement of the dancers inside.
(Eric Staudenmaier)
Back on the West Coast, Canyon 5, a multi-unit development just south of L.A.’s Beachwood Canyon, reconsidered the typical housing model, splitting a single mass into angled, sculptural volumes that feel like individual homes, filled with space, light and life. At Chapman University in Orange, he uncovered massive hidden trusses and blasted through the concrete floors of a former orange packing warehouse, creating the Sandi Simon Center for Dance, a unified space alive with glowing light that evokes the graceful, flowing movement of the dancers inside.
That kind of unique engagement with history and setting was a driving passion. Be it the creative restoration of Raphael Soriano’s home and studio for photographer Julius Shulman, or the formation of confident, multi-layered housing projects next to landmarks by Rudolph Schindler (Schindler House) and Richard Neutra (Strathmore Apartments), O’Herlihy’s curiosity pushed buildings forward while his empathy preserved their spirit.
The exterior of Jeffrey Hamilton’s condo in West Hollywood, which was designed by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects.
(Kit Karzen / For The Times)
Some critics were skeptical before the completion of each project, fearing they would overwhelm the landmarked buildings or erase essential history. But those controversies largely evaporated after the work was done, proving O’Herlihy’s familiar optimism to be well founded.
“It gave him the sense that what he was dedicating himself to had meaning in its own right. And that it had a place in Los Angeles,” said my friend and colleague Greg Goldin, who worked with O’Herlihy on multiple books.
Nonetheless, O’Herlihy never achieved the kind of mass recognition and celebrity enjoyed by predecessors like Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne. Perhaps because he was better at delving into the social and urban fabric than at creating popular spectacle.
But his warmth, purpose, and daring creativity are all now embedded into the city’s DNA.
O’Herlihy’s many L.A. buildings are full of motion and discovery, reflecting his restless intellect and optimism, a sense that even the most compromised urban site was capable of producing something valuable. In a city still struggling with affordability, homelessness, sprawl, and social fragmentation, his work and his spirit are reminders to be more generous.
Architecture, O’Herlihy insisted through his work, is an act of faith in the people who will use it, and in the city around them.
Irish-born, Los Angeles-based architect Lorcan O’Herlihy, founder of Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, known as LOHA, died Sunday at the age of 66. His loss puts the spotlight on a brave, soulful and restless artist who changed L.A. for the better — rethinking, among other things, dense urban housing and its relationship to the city.
O’Herlihy’s and his firm’s work was widely published and won more than 100 awards. LOHA was named AIA Los Angeles Firm of the Year in 2018 and won AIA California’s Distinguished Practice Award that same year. O’Herlihy received the AIA Los Angeles Gold Medal in 2021, and in 2023 he was awarded AIA California’s Maybeck Award, one of the state’s highest honors.
It’s hard for me to think about O’Herlihy’s buildings without thinking first about the man himself: his buoyant voice, quick smile and sing-song enthusiasm. (“Hello, laddie,” he would say in greeting, making me chuckle every time.) How he radiated empathy and appreciation. All of this shone vividly through his work, which shared his joy, artfulness and deep feeling, and most of all privileged human experience and social interaction.
He built his more than four-decade career around the conviction that architecture was an optimistic, social art. A way to improve everyday life and repair a tattered urban fabric. He also saw it as a means of disrupting the city’s frustratingly outdated status quo — seeking better possibilities for all manner of living.
A view of the San Joaquin student house complex at UC Santa Barbara, which opened in 2017. Designed by L.A. architect Lorcan O’Herlihy (LOHA), the units feature cross ventilation and direct access to the outdoors.
(LOHA)
O’Herlihy was a leader of a generation of architects committed to expanding L.A.’s architectural thinking into a more collective place. In a city obsessed with the single-family home, Lorcan (who designed many stellar homes, beginning early in his career) became one of L.A.’s most prolific and inventive designers of multifamily housing. Often traversing the difficult middle ground between luxury and affordability, his buildings leaned into the city, using screens, shared balconies, expanded exterior stairs, courtyards, pocket parks, and layered facades to turn tight sites into jubilant places of connection. He always saw density not as a compromise but as an architectural opportunity.
His architecture exhibited a self-assured fluency first honed at the Architectural Assn. in London, then from stints with giants in the profession such as Kevin Roche, I.M. Pei and Steven Holl. O’Herlihy employed color, material and texture with unusual force, creating an unapologetic civic presence. He well understood the city’s brightness, harshness, improvisation and fractured essence.
As the son and brother of actors, O’Herlihy had more than a little intuition for drama. (He liked to say that his dedication to making social spaces came from traveling around Europe with his father on acting gigs.) But his flourishes were both expressive and eminently practical. They shaded you from the sun, protected your privacy, drew you toward other people while still making even the most constrained sites feel alive.
Formosa 1140 by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects was one of O’Herlihy’s breakthrough projects.
(Lawrence Anderson)
One of his breakthrough projects, Formosa 1140 in West Hollywood, exemplified that approach, shifting the typical courtyard apartment’s U-shaped open space to the edge of the site to create a soft, elegant pocket park that served as an inviting space for residents and the public. With its layered red metal skin, graceful pathways, and choreographed framing of space, the building gave generously to the city and received vibrancy and meaning in return.
O’Herlihy branched into more challenging terrain — like affordable, transitional and student housing — where he continued to link architectural invention with a keen sensitivity to place, and insight into how people actually wanted to live. He was especially interested in thresholds: the moment you move from sidewalk to entry, street to courtyard, apartment to terrace; from solitude to community. Those in-between spaces, so often treated as afterthoughts, became one of the emotional centers of his work.
The Isla Intersections supportive housing development by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects has a pedestrian walkway that serves as a buffer to neighboring buildings on a cramped site near the 110 and 105 freeways.
(Eric Staudenmaier)
At Isla Intersections, a supportive housing project in South Los Angeles, he transformed a barren triangle of land, once marooned by chaotic roads and distant freeways, into a vibrant, multi-scaled village of steel shipping containers packed with congregation spaces on every level. There were outdoor hallways, planted patios, a sculpted and porous internal courtyard, and even a new “paseo” next door — a closed street turned into a lovely space for farmers markets and other gatherings.
“All of a sudden, it’s much more welcoming, right?” O’Herlihy told me, with his typical unfiltered enthusiasm, when we visited the site in 2024. He added: “I really like this place. What can I say? I always feel good about being here. I feel this is what I want to do as an architect, yeah?”
O’Herlihy was intellectually hungry — always probing new territory, questioning why things had to be a certain way. In 2015 he opened an office in Detroit, where his firm would author emphatically modern buildings that felt textured by the Motor City’s industrial legacy, celebrating both its past and its new promise.
Sandi Simon Center for Dance by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects is a unified space alive with glowing light that evokes the graceful, flowing movement of the dancers inside.
(Eric Staudenmaier)
Back on the West Coast, Canyon 5, a multi-unit development just south of L.A.’s Beachwood Canyon, reconsidered the typical housing model, splitting a single mass into angled, sculptural volumes that feel like individual homes, filled with space, light and life. At Chapman University in Orange, he uncovered massive hidden trusses and blasted through the concrete floors of a former orange packing warehouse, creating the Sandi Simon Center for Dance, a unified space alive with glowing light that evokes the graceful, flowing movement of the dancers inside.
That kind of unique engagement with history and setting was a driving passion. Be it the creative restoration of Raphael Soriano’s home and studio for photographer Julius Shulman, or the formation of confident, multi-layered housing projects next to landmarks by Rudolph Schindler (Schindler House) and Richard Neutra (Strathmore Apartments), O’Herlihy’s curiosity pushed buildings forward while his empathy preserved their spirit.
The exterior of Jeffrey Hamilton’s condo in West Hollywood, which was designed by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects.
(Kit Karzen / For The Times)
Some critics were skeptical before the completion of each project, fearing they would overwhelm the landmarked buildings or erase essential history. But those controversies largely evaporated after the work was done, proving O’Herlihy’s familiar optimism to be well founded.
“It gave him the sense that what he was dedicating himself to had meaning in its own right. And that it had a place in Los Angeles,” said my friend and colleague Greg Goldin, who worked with O’Herlihy on multiple books.
Nonetheless, O’Herlihy never achieved the kind of mass recognition and celebrity enjoyed by predecessors like Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne. Perhaps because he was better at delving into the social and urban fabric than at creating popular spectacle.
But his warmth, purpose, and daring creativity are all now embedded into the city’s DNA.
O’Herlihy’s many L.A. buildings are full of motion and discovery, reflecting his restless intellect and optimism, a sense that even the most compromised urban site was capable of producing something valuable. In a city still struggling with affordability, homelessness, sprawl, and social fragmentation, his work and his spirit are reminders to be more generous.
Architecture, O’Herlihy insisted through his work, is an act of faith in the people who will use it, and in the city around them.
Irish-born, Los Angeles-based architect Lorcan O’Herlihy, founder of Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, known as LOHA, died Sunday at the age of 66. His loss puts the spotlight on a brave, soulful and restless artist who changed L.A. for the better — rethinking, among other things, dense urban housing and its relationship to the city.
O’Herlihy’s and his firm’s work was widely published and won more than 100 awards. LOHA was named AIA Los Angeles Firm of the Year in 2018 and won AIA California’s Distinguished Practice Award that same year. O’Herlihy received the AIA Los Angeles Gold Medal in 2021, and in 2023 he was awarded AIA California’s Maybeck Award, one of the state’s highest honors.
It’s hard for me to think about O’Herlihy’s buildings without thinking first about the man himself: his buoyant voice, quick smile and sing-song enthusiasm. (“Hello, laddie,” he would say in greeting, making me chuckle every time.) How he radiated empathy and appreciation. All of this shone vividly through his work, which shared his joy, artfulness and deep feeling, and most of all privileged human experience and social interaction.
He built his more than four-decade career around the conviction that architecture was an optimistic, social art. A way to improve everyday life and repair a tattered urban fabric. He also saw it as a means of disrupting the city’s frustratingly outdated status quo — seeking better possibilities for all manner of living.
A view of the San Joaquin student house complex at UC Santa Barbara, which opened in 2017. Designed by L.A. architect Lorcan O’Herlihy (LOHA), the units feature cross ventilation and direct access to the outdoors.
(LOHA)
O’Herlihy was a leader of a generation of architects committed to expanding L.A.’s architectural thinking into a more collective place. In a city obsessed with the single-family home, Lorcan (who designed many stellar homes, beginning early in his career) became one of L.A.’s most prolific and inventive designers of multifamily housing. Often traversing the difficult middle ground between luxury and affordability, his buildings leaned into the city, using screens, shared balconies, expanded exterior stairs, courtyards, pocket parks, and layered facades to turn tight sites into jubilant places of connection. He always saw density not as a compromise but as an architectural opportunity.
His architecture exhibited a self-assured fluency first honed at the Architectural Assn. in London, then from stints with giants in the profession such as Kevin Roche, I.M. Pei and Steven Holl. O’Herlihy employed color, material and texture with unusual force, creating an unapologetic civic presence. He well understood the city’s brightness, harshness, improvisation and fractured essence.
As the son and brother of actors, O’Herlihy had more than a little intuition for drama. (He liked to say that his dedication to making social spaces came from traveling around Europe with his father on acting gigs.) But his flourishes were both expressive and eminently practical. They shaded you from the sun, protected your privacy, drew you toward other people while still making even the most constrained sites feel alive.
Formosa 1140 by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects was one of O’Herlihy’s breakthrough projects.
(Lawrence Anderson)
One of his breakthrough projects, Formosa 1140 in West Hollywood, exemplified that approach, shifting the typical courtyard apartment’s U-shaped open space to the edge of the site to create a soft, elegant pocket park that served as an inviting space for residents and the public. With its layered red metal skin, graceful pathways, and choreographed framing of space, the building gave generously to the city and received vibrancy and meaning in return.
O’Herlihy branched into more challenging terrain — like affordable, transitional and student housing — where he continued to link architectural invention with a keen sensitivity to place, and insight into how people actually wanted to live. He was especially interested in thresholds: the moment you move from sidewalk to entry, street to courtyard, apartment to terrace; from solitude to community. Those in-between spaces, so often treated as afterthoughts, became one of the emotional centers of his work.
The Isla Intersections supportive housing development by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects has a pedestrian walkway that serves as a buffer to neighboring buildings on a cramped site near the 110 and 105 freeways.
(Eric Staudenmaier)
At Isla Intersections, a supportive housing project in South Los Angeles, he transformed a barren triangle of land, once marooned by chaotic roads and distant freeways, into a vibrant, multi-scaled village of steel shipping containers packed with congregation spaces on every level. There were outdoor hallways, planted patios, a sculpted and porous internal courtyard, and even a new “paseo” next door — a closed street turned into a lovely space for farmers markets and other gatherings.
“All of a sudden, it’s much more welcoming, right?” O’Herlihy told me, with his typical unfiltered enthusiasm, when we visited the site in 2024. He added: “I really like this place. What can I say? I always feel good about being here. I feel this is what I want to do as an architect, yeah?”
O’Herlihy was intellectually hungry — always probing new territory, questioning why things had to be a certain way. In 2015 he opened an office in Detroit, where his firm would author emphatically modern buildings that felt textured by the Motor City’s industrial legacy, celebrating both its past and its new promise.
Sandi Simon Center for Dance by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects is a unified space alive with glowing light that evokes the graceful, flowing movement of the dancers inside.
(Eric Staudenmaier)
Back on the West Coast, Canyon 5, a multi-unit development just south of L.A.’s Beachwood Canyon, reconsidered the typical housing model, splitting a single mass into angled, sculptural volumes that feel like individual homes, filled with space, light and life. At Chapman University in Orange, he uncovered massive hidden trusses and blasted through the concrete floors of a former orange packing warehouse, creating the Sandi Simon Center for Dance, a unified space alive with glowing light that evokes the graceful, flowing movement of the dancers inside.
That kind of unique engagement with history and setting was a driving passion. Be it the creative restoration of Raphael Soriano’s home and studio for photographer Julius Shulman, or the formation of confident, multi-layered housing projects next to landmarks by Rudolph Schindler (Schindler House) and Richard Neutra (Strathmore Apartments), O’Herlihy’s curiosity pushed buildings forward while his empathy preserved their spirit.
The exterior of Jeffrey Hamilton’s condo in West Hollywood, which was designed by Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects.
(Kit Karzen / For The Times)
Some critics were skeptical before the completion of each project, fearing they would overwhelm the landmarked buildings or erase essential history. But those controversies largely evaporated after the work was done, proving O’Herlihy’s familiar optimism to be well founded.
“It gave him the sense that what he was dedicating himself to had meaning in its own right. And that it had a place in Los Angeles,” said my friend and colleague Greg Goldin, who worked with O’Herlihy on multiple books.
Nonetheless, O’Herlihy never achieved the kind of mass recognition and celebrity enjoyed by predecessors like Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne. Perhaps because he was better at delving into the social and urban fabric than at creating popular spectacle.
But his warmth, purpose, and daring creativity are all now embedded into the city’s DNA.
O’Herlihy’s many L.A. buildings are full of motion and discovery, reflecting his restless intellect and optimism, a sense that even the most compromised urban site was capable of producing something valuable. In a city still struggling with affordability, homelessness, sprawl, and social fragmentation, his work and his spirit are reminders to be more generous.
Architecture, O’Herlihy insisted through his work, is an act of faith in the people who will use it, and in the city around them.
