The Architecture of Community: Michael Maltzan on Plans for Bakehouse
Image by Ron Eshel.
On the eve of its 40th anniversary celebration and the opening of Bakehouse at Forty: Past, Present, Future, Cathy Leff sat down with Los Angeles–based architect Michael Maltzan, founder of Michael Maltzan Architecture, who has been collaborating with Bakehouse over the past five years on its future campus plans.
Maltzan is widely recognized for redefining the relationship between architecture, culture, and community, garnering some of the field’s highest honors, including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and multiple Progressive Architecture and American Institute of Architects design awards. Major projects include the Sixth Street Viaduct in Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, UCLA’s Nimoy Theater, Fresno Art Museum, MoMA QNS, and transformative permanent supportive housing communities such as Star Apartments and New Carver Apartments. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and LACMA, underscoring his impact on both practice and discourse.
Q. What makes the Bakehouse project important in the context of your overall body of work?
For me, personally, what Bakehouse has been doing—and what it’s looking to do —touches on the critical intersection of culture, arts, housing, affordability, and community, all of which have been such an important part of our practice. Early on, I had a deep interest in how art and culture could positively affect and support ideas of community. Eventually we began to work more with housing, especially affordable housing, because housing is key to the life of cities and how they evolve. Bringing together arts and culture with housing feels almost inevitable—and it’s an optimistic way to sustain and build real community. It doesn’t happen often enough, which is why Bakehouse is so remarkable. It’s not only about thinking differently about art or housing; it's also about thinking differently about the future of cities. And that has enormous resonance for Miami, a city evolving at an incredible pace.
Q. What does your master plan aim to convey?
The most profound ambition of the project is accessibility. That means access for artists—young artists, mature artists—to have the space and support to do their work. It’s accessible for people interested in the arts to not only see work when it’s finished but also in the process of being created, to understand more fully what the culture of making is. It’s access for neighbors, so Bakehouse is interwoven into the fabric of the community rather than separated from it. And then, it’s about access for the larger city—for Miami’s broader public— to engage both with the community and artists here. The architecture tries to support those goals, to be functional for artists and open and welcoming for others. At a time when our culture is so divided, creating a place that erodes those divisions and where people intersect instead of staying siloed is a simple idea in some ways, but also a profound one.
Q. What has it been like working in Miami?
Over the course of this project, we’ve really gotten to know the city. We tried to listen—to the artists, community around Bakehouse, and the city itself. Miami is in the middle of reshaping itself, and that comes with real complexities and challenges. People wonder: What will the city be like? Will it be inclusive? Will there be a place for me in it? Or, will I be left behind, given how quickly it’s moving? For me, it's a particularly exciting moment for architecture to play a role. Architecture reflects its own times, but it also proposes new possibilities—different futures. And I think this moment in Miami demands that kind of proposition; it demands that architects, designers, philanthropists, cultural leaders, all of us, put forward new models of accessibility and equity. That’s what makes Bakehouse so important right now. So, for me, this is an opportunity to make something that presents a positive future in Miami, given all of the changes and questions.
Q. What can we expect from your contribution as curator and designer of Future, a section of our upcoming anniversary exhibition, Bakehouse at Forty: Past, Present, Future?
When I design exhibitions around architecture, I don't try to replicate a project exactly. Instead, I try to give people a sense of what the realized project will feel like. For Bakehouse, that means capturing its scale, sculptural qualities, and transparency—where viewers can see into the life of the building, the making that’s happening inside. There will be, of course, some very specific and almost technical plans that people can burrow into more deeply. But we want to give a sense of what the campus will feel like—its openness, accessibility, transparency.
Q. What excites you most about practicing architecture today?
I'm excited that we’re still finding ways for architecture to be deeply relevant in culture. That happens in different ways—through community-based projects like Bakehouse, through housing that addresses accessibility and affordability, or through infrastructure like our Sixth Street Viaduct in Los Angeles, which shows how infrastructure can be more than a single-use structure. It can promote the life of the city, create destinations, and bring people together. At a time when cities are wrestling with issues of sustainability, equity, economics, and politics, architecture shouldn’t be passive. It should be an agent of engagement and positive change. That’s exciting for me personally, but also for the field of architecture as a whole.