The Big Sleep

In 1996, Los Angeles architect Tim Smith built the first recorded instance of a five-over-one apartment building in the city’s Little Tokyo neighborhood. The structure consisted of a cement base with five “stick-built” stories above it; Smith’s innovation was to use fire-retardant wood instead of cement or steel, which allowed for near-high-rise density for far below the market rate. Bloomberg’s Justin Fox reported that this approach, which was used by Smith’s firm to construct an affordable housing complex called Casa Heiwa, could pack in a hundred apartments at 60 to 70 percent of the typical cost. The simple model now tends to include style choices that reference the typology’s California roots: open-concept floor plans; large, rectangular windows; and neutral color palettes reminiscent of Rudolph Schindler’s low-slung homes in the Hollywood Hills or the glassy Silver Lake bungalows of Richard Neutra.

A drive through the city conjures a kind of architectural déjà vu, with pseudomodernist five-over-ones on nearly every block. On one small stretch of Gower Street, a…