< img src="https://www.archpaper.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Wandering-Courtyard-House-1.jpg"alt= ""> A single-family house in Monterey Park, California, deals with the zoning obstacle– the mandated buffer between structure and home line– not as remaining space, however as a design medium. Reconstruct Collective and 1 +1+ Architects have actually finished Wandering Courtyard House, a house on a 0.15-acre parcel 7 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The task completed in August 2025 after 30 months of building. It was developed by De Peter Yi, founder of the Cincinnati- and San Francisco– based studio Rebuild Collective and assistant professor of architecture at the University of Cincinnati, in cooperation with Laura Marie Peterson, principal architect and founder of the Detroit-based 1 +1+ Architects.
The cooking area and living location opens straight onto the pool deck through floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors. Yi Kai’s paintings line the walls throughout your home. (Courtesy Rebuild Collective )For Yi, the project was personal: a retirement community for his uncle and aunt– the first-generation Chinese immigrant artist couple Yi Kai and Jian Zheng. It replaced a 1956 home that was destroyed, though the original kidney-shaped swimming pool was kept. The second-floor teak deck curves around the initial kidney-shaped pool, retained from the 1956 house that previously inhabited the lot.( Courtesy Rebuild Collective)In Los Angeles, roughly 78 percent of property land is zoned specifically for single-family homes. That pattern has actually produced a landscape most Angelenos know by rote: detached houses drifting on their lots like islands, separated by strips of dead yard and chain-link fence. The setback isn’t a designed space. It’s where the garden hose lives or perhaps a trash bin. Occupied by nobody, designed for absolutely nothing, it quietly imposes the idea that the best thing you can do with your next-door neighbor is disregard them. Yi has been arguing against that reasoning for years. His 2023 SOM Structure Research Reward, a cooperation with Gabriel Cuéllar titled”Block by
Block: Advancing New American Dreams and Housing Justice by Aligning Design with Zoning Reform,” studied how single-family zoned blocks could become brand-new types of collective architecture. The job’s central proposition is that zoning reform– especially California’s Senate Costs 9(SB 9), which allows single-family lots to be divided and restored with approximately 4 housing units– should not be adopted lot by lot, however coordinated across home lines at the scale of an entire block.