Habitat

Habitat is a mixed-use live-work campus at 3401 South La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, developed by Lendlease adjacent to the La Cienega/Jefferson Metro E Line station. The 3.5-acre project pairs residential and creative office buildings with roughly one acre of publicly accessible open space, connecting residents, office tenants, and transit users through a continuous landscape armature.

RELM’s design draws from the site’s former morphology as a cienega—a regional wetland condition. Meandering pathways and layered plantings create a constellation of open spaces that vary in density and character, from intimate respite to larger gatherings and outdoor work. Cienega Square anchors the campus as its ceremonial heart, an urban park experience screened by a thicket of trees that buffers the shared bikeway and elevated Metro platform beyond. Programming follows a park-to-plaza model that modulates verdancy and degrees of public and semi-public space. Published campus rooms include The Grove as a welcoming entry, Cienega Square as the communal heart, The Crossings as a landscaped transition toward transit, and The Clearing as a flexible plaza for community programming.

The landscape reconciles elevated transit infrastructure with at-grade office, residential, street frontage, and bike-lane uses. Paving unifies the site from the Metro portal outward, using landscape rooms to buffer noise and organize pedestrian movement across busy edges. Documented material expressions—timber logs, stone, and fractured concrete—reference the historic cienega while standing in deliberate contrast to SHoP Architects’ sleek building forms, with Steinberg Hart serving as architect of record. The result is a contemporary outdoor sequence where modernity and site memory meet without inventing a false pastoral setting.