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LAUREOLA OAKS
San Carlos, California

Architect: Seidel/Holzman
Owner: Mid-Peninsula Housing Coalition

The architect formed 16 units of below-market-rate housing around a courtyard in a neighborhood containing a mix of housing, industrial, and retail uses. The non-profit developer financed the project with grants, federal tax credits, and a state low-interest loan.


Malcolm Holzman, FAIA is a principal with Hardy Holzman Pffeiffer in New York City and was Jury Chairman for the 1997 AIA Honor Awards for Architecture.

Record: What did the winning projects have in common?
Holzman: A lot of modest projects received awards. These were not necessarily big, gigantic projects. Modesty and commodity were things that were apparent. People tackled rather complicated projects on modest budgets and still did things that were quite lovely. The architects and clients had to do creative thinking to get something that was going to be award-winning.

Record: Which projects did you like best?
Holzman: There was an affordable housing project—a very low budget project—about the shaping of development in San Carlos, California called Laureola Oaks by Seidel/Holzman of San Francisco. It uses geometry and shapes—all the standard mix you've seen in every development housing project—and has gone at it in a unique way. Someone didn't give up thinking about design, even though they had a modest budget and a rather confined site.


Margaret I McCurry, FAIA is a principal of Tigerman McCurry Architects in Chicago and was Jury Chairman for the 1997 AIA Honor Awards for Interiors

McCurry: Just as jury proclivities have changed over time, so have award criteris...In recent years, the program has widened to consider not only "design advancement," but to recognize "qualities of resolution," including exemplary responses to technical requirements, social progress, environmental progress, and historic preservation. In 1997, Laureola Oaks, an affordable housing community, exemplifies the kind of entry these criteria are designed to attract. In scale and character it also harkens back to the earliest Bay Area region winners.


David Dillon of Amerst, Massachusetts is the architectural critic for the Dallas Morning News and a contributing editor of RECORD.

Dillon: A few of the architecture winners display a similar sensitivity to placemaking in chaotic urban circumstances. At Laureola Oaks in San Carlos, California, Seidel/Holzman of San Francisco transformed an abandoned construction yard—likewise sandwiched between freeways and warehouses—into a 16-unit affordable housing project. Laureola Oaks has the intimacy and connectedness of an established neighborhood, although the proliferation of porches and white picket fences suggests, as does most New Urbanism, that the only way to create communities these days is through nostalgia. Instead of striving to be ideal subjects in space, the project accepts the edges as part of the urban condition and tries to work with them.








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