Stories From the Field: Michael Maltzan

You founded Michael Maltzan Architecture in 1995, and your work spans cultural institutions, city infrastructure, and some of Los Angeles’ most recognized housing. What drew you to work at the intersection of architecture and the public interest?

From our very first project, Inner-City Arts in Skid Row, Los Angeles, CA, our work has explored ways in which architecture can have meaningful consequences in every part of society and culture. I believe all architecture has a responsibility to serve the public interest, no matter its scale or budget. Working with organizations and individuals who share that commitment matters to me personally, but it’s also a way to test architecture’s ability to create positive change on some of our most pressing issues.
 

Much of your work, including permanent supportive housing, treats buildings as social catalysts, not simply structures. How do you see design’s role in making communities more resilient, both physically and socially?

The challenges many communities face aren’t one-dimensional; they’re numerous, complex, and interconnected. To create genuine, positive change, you often have to find solutions that work across those relationships. Architecture is a unique discipline because its very nature is to take complex inputs, synthesize and distill them, and propose a considered, designed response. That makes design a powerful tool for bringing economic, social, cultural, and even aesthetic potential together into a unified approach to problems that often seem intractable. Architecture thrives on complexity, and that’s a defining strength of the discipline.
 

The 2025 Los Angeles fires exposed how vulnerable even long-established communities can be. How has that moment shaped the way you think about rebuilding neighborhoods to be more resilient and equitable?

Designers and architects can do a great deal to make communities more resilient as they rebuild after the fires. Many of those approaches aren’t complicated; they may be technical, but much of that knowledge already exists. Making communities more equitable is the bigger challenge, because it requires a wide range of groups, from community organizations and government to finance and insurance, to agree that they want an equitable future. As designers, we can propose, plan, and hopefully build test cases that show what’s genuinely possible, but we need to create partnerships across all of these groups to move a vision for equitable development forward towards realization.
 

At the Milken Institute’s Financial Innovations Lab^® on community resilience, one idea was a stakeholder-driven community plan bringing residents, insurers, government, and investors together to identify and finance risk-informed projects, and your firm applied it to Altadena. What led you to propose this approach, and how could it change the way neighborhoods are rebuilt?

I’ve seen how essential all of these stakeholders are to moving any community plan forward. In Altadena, we’re working to rebuild an entire block, with multiple landowners and varied residential and commercial uses, around a forward-looking idea: an intergenerational village. There really isn’t anything like it, yet it has the potential to give physical form to a vision of Altadena’s future. It would provide a model for how we can be both ambitious and simultaneously rooted in a community.
 

What was one insight from the Lab conversations that surprised you or reshaped how you approach your own work?

What stood out to me was the extraordinary depth of talent and experience the other participants brought in government, economics, and finance. But all of that expertise needs a shared vision to rally around and move forward. That’s where architecture and design can be of great benefit, proposing a vision that acts as a catalyst to prompt collective innovation.
 

If the Altadena plan succeeds, what do you hope it proves to other communities, and what will it take for design, insurers, and private capital to come together at that scale?

If we can realize even a part of what we are proposing in Altadena, I think it proves, simply, that it’s possible: that ambitious plans can come from the community, serve the community, and offer a model for how other communities might build their futures. What struck me at the Lab was that the partners we need in insurance and private capital aren’t abstractions. At the end of the day, they’re individuals. It takes a group of people with the ambition and motivation to drive forward-looking, beneficial change. After the Lab, that seemed clear: it’s individuals coming together and leveraging their talents to make something great, something we can all be proud of, something we can participate in collectively with shared optimism.