A fence started it. SPEEDBOAT's Elliptical Fence had been sitting in the neighborhood long enough to make the neighbors happy and catch the right client's eye, and that was enough. The commission that followed was an opportunity to build something genuinely new in Crenshaw: a mashup of Tschumi's programmatic violence, Gehry's material honesty, and the computational geometry circulating through Columbia and SCI-Arc in the early 2000s. Books sourced from Hollywood Books on Melrose. Lumber from Ganahl. A project assembled from the neighborhood outward.

The design resisted the smoothed-over, filter-ready aesthetic that has come to dominate residential architecture. No precious finishes, no moody PR angles. The formal moves and the materials are direct, in the tradition of architects who were more interested in ideas than in being fashionable. The result is a fence that operates simultaneously as boundary and sculpture, a built contribution to the block. The plants aren't in yet. It came out pretty awesome anyway.