Some Los Angeles Apartments by Ed Ruscha is among the lauded artists finest works. The 1965 book was published at a time when the photographer was enthralled with quotidian things like parking lots, gas stations, and throwing typewriters out of moving cars to see what happens next. Many of the deadpan photographs in Some Los Angeles Apartmentsare of midcentury multifamily residential buildings, charming art deco motifs, and other architectural elements that stand out in a city known for its sprawling, rather monotonous single-family milieu.Small Lots, Big Impact, a new architecture competition hosted by the City of Los Angeles, LA4LA, and cityLAB-UCLA could yield more new buildings like the ones Ruscha celebrated, helping plug a stifling housing crisis recent wildfires have only made more pronounced. The competetion is helmed by Dana Cuff, director of cityLAB and professor of architecture at UCLA.A GIS map by cityLAB showing the distribution of underutilized residential lots. (Courtesy cityLAB)Small Lots, Big Impactwill be broken up into two phases. The first challenges designers, architects, and students to propose new affordable homeownership models on any number of the citys small, forgotten lots. Jurors officiating phase one will look for staples like livability, cross-ventilation, efficiency, fire safety, and so forth, but also form, light access, and sense of identity.The second phase, through a Request for Qualifications (RFQ), will award small, underutilized parcels in Los Angeles to development teams. Cuff told AN that, out of the citys plethora of vacant lots, between six and 12 sites will be activated with new housing after the competition is over.Jonathan Tate, an architect with a portfolio of multifamily housing projects, is among the jurors. Other jurors will be critic Christopher Hawthorne, architect Hilary Sample, Los Angeles city planner Kevin Keller, planning professor Maurice Cox, and Related Californias Phoebe Yee. The winning development teams will get the chance to build the housing prototypes they ideated in the first phase. Competition officials added that the initiative will be open source, meaning they encourage participants to share development lessons, design approaches, policy know-how, and strategies for bringing these ideas to life.Gentle DensitycityLAB, under Dana Cuffs tutelage, wrote the policy which enables Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU) to get built in Los Angeles, a city where 75 percent of land is zoned for single-family. This means that architects can now build two units on a site previously slotted for just one.L.A. approved ADUs in 2019. Cuff said that, for this new competition, architects can find inspiration in the citys past to help fill its myriad gaps. In some ways, the new types of housing were looking for dont have to be very different from the pre-war period, Cuff told AN. Its just that, we havent been building anything like what Irving Gill used to in the interim.Apartments at 462 South Cochran Avenue designed by Milton J. Black (Marvin Rand/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)Cuff added that there once was a time when the economy incentivized multiple compact units to get built on single family sites, namely before World War II. These are the tract houses that are typically between 700 and 900 square feet. But the baby boom, auto industry, and other factors threw a wrench in this equation, changing the citys urban fabric in turn. Los Angeles kept expanding outward, outward, and outward, creating sprawl that kept producing small, affordable homes. These homes got further and further form the center, so commutes became longer, Cuff elaborated. This resulted in lots of single family houses on pretty big sites. This kept going until the 1970s, when Rayner Banham wrote Four Ecologies. It was up until that point we were still mistakenly thinking about the city without thinking about the environment, and the finitude of resources.Having an 800-square-foot apartment those days didnt seem small, especially if you had lots of glazing, balconies, and outdoor space, Cuff said. But since then, houses and apartments ballooned. Now, we either pack apartments onto a site, or we make luxury apartments that nobody can afford. The same goes for single-family houses.Landfair Apartments by Richard Neutra in Westwood (City of Los Angeles/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0)For Cuff, Small Lots, Big Impact is as much about generating good architectural form as well as challenging real estate developers to get creative and generate new ownership models, changing the status quo. A lot of this has to do with changing development culture, Cuff noted. She said this can happen by exploring concepts like gentle density, and staying power, which encourages multi-generational living inside good, compact housing. cityLABs methodology has been rigorous. The team conducted lengthy zoning research and land use analysis to inform the competition brief. While the competition is hyper-focused on Los Angeles, Cuff said she hopes architects from all over submit.We really welcome people from all over the country contributing, Cuff continued, because the best ideas may be ones that are coming from outside our city.Submissions for phase one are due April 20, and winners will be announced May 12. Stage two will run between May and July.Questions should be directed to: [emailprotected].