Appreciation: Architect Lorcan OHerlihy rethought urban housing and changed Los Angeles for the better

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Irish-born, Los Angeles-based architect Lorcan O’Herlihy, founder of Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, known as LOHA, died Sunday at the age of 66.His loss puts the spotlight on a brave, soulful and restless artist who changed L.A.

for the better — rethinking, among other things, dense urban housing and its relationship to the city.O’Herlihy’s and his firm’s work was widely published and won more than 100 awards.LOHA was named AIA Los Angeles Firm of the Year in 2018 and won AIA California’s Distinguished Practice Award that same year.

O’Herlihy received the AIA Los Angeles Gold Medal in 2021, and in 2023 he was awarded AIA California’s Maybeck Award, one of the state’s highest honors.It’s hard for me to think about O’Herlihy’s buildings without thinking first about the man himself: his buoyant voice, quick smile and sing-song enthusiasm.(“Hello, laddie,” he would say in greeting, making me chuckle every time.) How he radiated empathy and appreciation.

All of this shone vividly through his work, which shared his joy, artfulness and deep feeling, and most of all privileged human experience and social interaction.He built his more than four-decade career around the conviction that architecture was an optimistic, social art.A way to improve everyday life and repair a tattered urban fabric.

He also saw it as a means of disrupting the city’s frustratingly outdated status quo — seeking better possibilities for all manner of living.O’Herlihy was a leader of a generation of architects committed to expanding L.A.’s architectural thinking into a more collective place.In a city obsessed with the single-family home, Lorcan (who designed many stellar homes, beginning early in his career) became one of L.A.’s most prolific and inventive designers of multifamily housing.

Often traversing the difficult middle ground between luxury and affordability, his bui...