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Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects. 7917 Willoughby Avenue, West Hollywood, CA. 2009.

While this is a condo building and not a single-family home, it is a big leap forward for multi-unit urban architecture. The pièce de résistance in this building is the push and pull effect created by the inset balcony mezzzanies and how the balcony system reverberates throughout the whole building.

Most architects will attach a balcony onto a flat building side and be done with it, but Lorcan made the balcony the crux of the building's design. Here we find that the outdoor area is still part of our living space, not annexed onto the outside. Not willing to compromise on lost space, the area that is taken by the balcony is added onto the other side of the building thereby creating a "pushed" effect whereby part of the building hangs. Even though the building is asymmetrical it remains balanced by weight, but not just by the building shape alone; windows assist in achieving this feeling of stability. The long window on the ground floor takes up as much area as the upper three windows and anchors the eye.

Again, since the balcony is the locus, the interior space makes use of an intererior -- and seemingly inverted -- balcony on the top floor. Sunlight enters into an atrium in which function could allow possibilities like a private garden, breakfast nook or sunning space. The balcony is again echoed in the interior by means of constructing the staircase to include a mid-floor hallway balcony that looks down onto the lower floor.

Why can't New York get some of these?