6,500 TREES AND PLANTS TO TRANSFORM A FORMER CAR PARK. NEW HOLLYWOOD CO-WORKING SPACE BY SELGASCANO

The Spanish architecture firm SelgasCano has completed Hollywood Second Home.

The Second Home Hollywood campus, that resemble a group of huge yellow lily pads from above, trucked 6,500 trees and plants, 700 tons of soil and vegetation and comprises sixty offices in circular tubes with yellow rooftops are built on the plot of a former car park, alongside the former Anne Banning Community House, which was completed in 1964, a Paul Williams-designed building that was renovated as part of the Second Home project.

Hollywood campus of Second Home by SelgasCano. Photography by Iwan Baan Open Modal

The project was designed by Madrid-based architecture firm Selgascano, with Downtown LA-based Omgivning acting as executive architect for the project.

Second Home campus in East Hollywood, Los Angeles, includes 60 circular acrylic pods united under a single yellow roof. Those pods are surrounded by a lush garden of over 6,000 plants, created on what was once a parking lot.

From the street, visitors pass through the formal facade to enter what feels like a different world: a low-slung, columnless lobby with a dizzying array of tropical plants, extruded tubular furniture pieces, and a mobile coffee cart.   Second Home has made the lobby and courtyard spaces accessible to the public without membership. Beyond this space is the courtyard, which has been redesigned as a casual workspace, shaded by a canopy of trees.

However, the real showstopper is beyond the perimeter of the Williams-designed building: Sixty office spaces with acrylic walls and lemon-yellow rooftops carpet the rest of the site, connected to each other by pathways that meander through a forest of over 6,000 trees and plants.

Every seat within the 8,361-square-meter complex feels like the best place to open a laptop and get to work, while use a wide range of public services. Each office space is lined with outward-facing desks underneath a yellow, steel-braced ceiling festooned with the ductwork of a central air conditioner (it comes as a mild disappointment that the windows are inoperable, ruling out the option of passive heating and cooling).

The campus will also include a bookstore (a signature element of Second Home locations), a podcast recording studio, a 200-seat auditorium, and a restaurant.

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