One Santa Fe is a mixed-use development in downtown Los Angeles that reclaims a long-neglected industrial corridor and reimagines it as a civic and residential landscape. Situated directly northeast of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), the project occupies a four-acre, linear site once tied to the Metropolitan Transit Authority rail yard, positioning itself between the city’s infrastructural past and its evolving urban future.

Operating across the scales of building, urban design, and infrastructure, the project translates its context into architecture through a layered, horizontal composition. Residential, commercial, and public programs are stacked and interwoven to create a dense yet porous environment. The development includes 438 affordable and market-rate apartments spanning a broad range of unit types, active street-level retail and commercial uses, and a network of public open spaces that vary in size and character. At the northern end of the site, above-ground parking is conceived as a temporary condition, designed for future conversion into housing as urban needs evolve.

Stretching more than a quarter mile along Santa Fe Avenue, from First Street to Fourth Street, the building’s elongated form aligns with the linear logics of the surrounding infrastructure—the Los Angeles River, the adjacent rail lines, and the former freight depot that now houses SCI-Arc.

As the project extends southward, its form begins to separate and open, allowing light, views, and movement to pass across the width of the site. These openings establish visual and physical connections to the railways, the river, and a potential future Metro station. Near Third Street, the building lifts from the ground to create a bridge-like gateway linking Santa Fe Avenue to the future station location. Beneath this elevated connection, flexible ground-level parking doubles as event and civic space, adjacent to a large public courtyard animated by specialty retail, restaurants, cafés, bars, ice cream shops, and a neighborhood market—anchoring the project as an active social and urban destination.