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Lorcan O’Herlihy, the founding principal of Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], died on June 15, 2026, at the age of 66, after a battle with glioblastoma. His loss is felt across a profession he spent three decades pushing toward a higher standard of civic responsibility. Born in Dublin in 1959, O’Herlihy studied architecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and the Architectural Association in London before working with Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, I.M. Pei and Partners — where he contributed to the Grand Louvre Museum Pyramid team — and Steven Holl Architects. He founded LOHA in Los Angeles in 1994.
Over the next thirty years, the firm accumulated more than 200 awards and completed over 100 projects across three continents, earning Fast Company’s number one Most Innovative Company in Architecture for 2025. That innovative spirit extended beyond the buildings (and watershed studies): before his death, O’Herlihy restructured LOHA into a collective ownership model, formalizing what he described as the studio’s longstanding culture of shared authorship and ensuring the firm’s future belonged to the people who had shaped it.
What made his work genuinely significant, though, was never the accolades — it was his insistence that housing at every income level deserved formal ambition and civic purpose in equal measure. By championing urban infill, he also put forward a vision of architecture that is inextricably bound to the impact it has on its wider context. “I’m convinced that social equity and cultural evolution are crucial issues to architecture,” he said. “Architecture is a social act, and the role of the architect is to do work of consequence, but not forgetting artistry.”
The ten projects below bear that conviction out.
Isla Intersections Supportive Housing and Paseo
By: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], Los Angeles, California
Jury Winner, Architecture +Prefab and Modular, 13th Architizer A+Awards
On a triangular remnant of land wedged between the 110 and 105 freeways — one of the world’s busiest interchanges — LOHA built 54 units of supportive housing using recycled steel shipping containers stacked into towers and connected by walkways. More than housing, the project is a living lung, where site-specific planting filters air pollutants and a public paseo prioritizes pedestrians and cyclists. Rooftop edible gardens, retail incubation spaces and job training facilities complete a scheme that treats one of LA’s most hostile pieces of geography as an opportunity to create spaces where people can flourish.
Sun King Supportive Housing
By: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], Los Angeles, California
In Sun Valley, LOHA designed twenty-six units of permanent supportive housing for formerly homeless individuals and families earning below thirty percent of the area median income. The design segments the building’s mass into three bands, drawing natural light and cross-ventilation into every unit while placing shared spaces on each floor to encourage daily interaction between residents. A widened entrance staircase opens the building toward the street — an articulate gesture of connection rather than containment — while an interior courtyard, children’s playground, rooftop terrace and edible garden complete an environment designed to support the transition out of homelessness.
Granville1500
By: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], Los Angeles, California
Jury Winner, Multi-Unit Housing – Mid-Rise (5-15 Floors), 11th Architizer A+Awards
Santa Monica Boulevard’s stretch through West LA was once the western terminus of Route 66. LOHA’s 153-unit mixed-use development treats that legacy seriously, breaking up what could have been another monolithic housing block into three wedge-shaped volumes (a remarkable and iconic building footprint, really) that lift away from the pavement and widen the sidewalk beneath them. A sequence of open-air plazas — defined by pyramidal carve-outs at the building’s corners and a landscaped triangle that folds down to street level — imbues the block with a strong civic presence. It is a building that looks outward rather than inward.
Bellevue53
By: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], Los Angeles, California
Silver Lake has changed dramatically over the past two decades, but its housing stock largely hasn’t. LOHA’s Bellevue53 addresses that gap on a corner lot just north of the 101 Freeway, proposing a densification model that genuinely engages its neighborhood rather than simply occupying it. A rhythmic stepped massing echoes the area’s steep hillside topography, producing a series of outdoor amenity decks at each level. Open-air exterior corridors provide cross ventilation without mechanical systems, while punched balconies ensure every unit has outdoor access. The building bridges the scale of its single-family neighbors without pretending to be something it isn’t.
South E8
By: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], Raleigh, North Carolina
As Raleigh’s growth has accelerated, so has the pressure on its residential neighborhoods to accommodate density without losing character. LOHA’s response on a single lot previously occupied by one house is South E8—four units arranged through a carefully considered massing strategy that integrates roof decks, inviting shared outdoor spaces, and a material palette that transitions from brick at the base to metal panel above. The project is a template for how infill housing can increase density while respecting the grain of the streets around it — and look cool while doing it.
MLK1101 Supportive Housing
By: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], Los Angeles, California
On a vacant lot, LOHA and non-profit developer Clifford Beers Housing transformed nothing into twenty-six units of LEED Gold affordable housing for previously homeless veterans and low-income families. An L-shaped plan ensures every apartment receives sunlight and cross-ventilation while enclosing an elevated green patio shielded from street noise. Street-level retail units are designed to generate income that subsidizes the housing and provides workforce training for residents. The building’s widened entrance stair is one of LOHA’s most deliberate gestures — a welcoming architecture that treats the act of entering as a civic event rather than a private transaction.
Canyon Drive
By: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], Los Angeles, California
Taking Los Angeles’ 2005 Small Lot Subdivision Ordinance as its starting point, LOHA designed a cluster of individual homes in Beachwood Canyon that use the ordinance’s efficiencies to produce something genuinely unexpected. From a shared maximum envelope, single masses are divided by tilting exterior walls at different angles, creating A-frame-like volumes that open outward for light and air while maintaining privacy between neighboring properties. Cedar cladding at ground level contrasts with aluminum panels and storefront glazing above; roof decks replace the traditional backyard. Notably, the project uses regulatory constraints as a design tool rather than a limitation.
San Joaquin Student Housing at UCSB
By: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], Santa Barbara, California
LOHA’s LEED Platinum student housing complex at the northern edge of UC Santa Barbara’s campus inverts the conventions of the dormitory typology. Where most campus housing pushes circulation to the exterior and leaves the courtyard interior dormant, LOHA brings all circulation inward — through a lively, socially activated courtyard containing reading rooms, gathering spaces and dining. The exterior-facing edge is deliberately reductive; corrugated metal panels, more typically found on industrial buildings, create a visually dynamic street presence. Inside, passive ventilation strategies and more than ninety percent permeable surfaces reduce heat island effects on a campus where the coastal climate is the most abundant resource.
SL11024
By: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], Los Angeles, California
Sited opposite Richard Neutra’s Strathmore Apartments in Westwood — one of the most architecturally sensitive addresses in Los Angeles — LOHA’s thirty-one-unit student and faculty housing project for UCLA’s campus edge had to earn its place in extraordinary company. It does so by splitting into two volumes that step down along the hillside to meet the Neutra building at its own height, while landscaped roof terraces at each level create a continuous public gesture that connects the building to the street below. White metal panels in solid, perforated, and ribbed configurations give the façade movement; a gradient of green-painted cement board grounds the base and lightens as the building rises toward the sky.
Formosa1140
By: Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], West Hollywood, California
In West Hollywood, LOHA did something most developers would never countenance: gave a third of the site back to the public. By relocating what would conventionally have been an internal courtyard to the building’s exterior, Formosa1140’s eleven units are organized along a linear plan facing a 4,600-square-foot park — subsequently leased to the City of West Hollywood as part of a network of pocket parks across the city. Every unit enjoys park frontage and cross-ventilation. The outer skin of perforated metal panels acts as a climate screen for west-facing units while creating a layered facade that simultaneously reveals and conceals. It is, in O’Herlihy’s own framing, a project whose genetic code carries the imprint of a larger urban design: one building contributing to a city it refuses to turn its back on.
The winners of the 14th Architizer A+Awards are live! Discover a global cohort of architects shaping the future of design, and subscribe to our Awards Newsletter for future program updates.
