About The LADG
Established in 2004, The Los Angeles Design Group (The LADG) is led by principals Claus Benjamin Freyinger and Andrew Holder, with offices in Venice, CA and Cambridge, MA. The founders see their work as contributing to a long history of ideas and draw on this history to craft unexpected solutions to conventional problems in architecture and design. The firm works at all scales, with completed projects in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, and the United Kingdom.
Recent work includes a free-standing indoor-outdoor restaurant in Southern California and the installation of a contemporary picturesque garden in Loeb Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The firm has received numerous professional honors and recognitions, including the 2017 and 2018 Progressive Architecture Awards, the 2014 League Prize from the Architectural League of New York, and multiple citations from the Los Angeles Chapter of the AIA.
Claus Benjamin Freyinger is co-Principal and co-founder of The LADG along with Andrew Holder in 2004. The founders see their work as contributing to a longer history of ideas and draw on this history to craft unexpected solutions to conventional problems in architecture and design. The firm has received numerous professional honors and recognitions, including a Progressive Architecture Award Honorable Mention in 2017 and in 2018, the 2014 League Prize from the Architectural League of New York, and multiple citations from the Los Angeles Chapter of the AIA.
Mr. Freyinger has held positions at Mones and Partner, Architects in Munich, Germany, and Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects and Planners in New York. He holds a BA in art history from Boston College with a minor in fine arts from the Ludwig Maximilian’s University in Munich, Germany. Benjamin received his M. Arch from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2005.
Andrew Holder is co-Principal and co-founder of the The LADG and Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His primary research and design interest is the construction of architecture as an inanimate subject: how audiences come to understand buildings as like themselves. This has recently included writing on the late Baroque architecture of 18th century Germany and the English picturesque.
Andrew’s work has been published in Young Architects 16, a+t, Log, Pidgin, Project, Harvard Design Magazine, and RM 1000, among others. He is a frequent lecturer and guest critic at institutions across the United States and has held teaching appointments at the University of Michigan, the University of Queensland, UCLA, SCI-Arc, and Otis College of Art and Design. Andrew is a Harry S. Truman Scholar, and Oberdick Fellow at the University of Michigan, and a Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Fellow at Lewis & Clark College.
He received an M. Arch with distinction from UCLA and a B.A. in Political Science from Lewis & Clark College.
The Los Angeles Design Group (The LADG) has recently completed a transformative residential renovation in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, California, reconfiguring a hermetically sealed box into a light-filled,1,894 square-foot, three-story home. The design draws inspiration from the iconic stepped form of Marcel Breuer’s former Whitney Museum in New York, yet in reverse. Whereas Breuer cantilevers his building toward the busy Manhattan street to provide shelter for a sunken courtyard garden, the LADG cantilevers the house in three steps over the rear yard, bringing a sense of enclosure to the rear yard against a steep hillside.
Two of the house’s windows also nod to Breur, referencing his angular forms. The first window is a torqued cutout in the front facade that reorients the view from the master bedroom towards the Silver Lake Reservoir, providing a cinematic experience of the immediate surroundings. The second window juts out into the backyard, framing the hillside.
Programmatically, the house itself is upside down, with an unusual split-level configuration that results in two floors in the front and two floors in the back. These levels are filled with bedrooms, bathrooms, and the study, while the newly constructed top floor—a wide open plinth that sits atop the split levels—contains the kitchen, living, and common areas. As a result, the social space normally adjacent to the yard is instead perched on top.
The exterior facade of the house is predominantly charred cedar wood, with natural wood on select surfaces to emphasize the cuts made into an otherwise solid monolith.
