Urban Operations

A contemporary second story addition in Sherman Oaks, Ca.

Designed and constructed by Urban Operations, the Clip and Shift House is a contemporary hillside home ,featuring a multi-tiered cascade of domestic volumes.

The Fast-Twitch ADU is a 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom unit tucked behind an existing duplex in Silver Lake. Its street elevation reads as a white stucco mass caught mid-motion — projecting frames, ledges, and balconies that slip out of alignment floor to floor, as though the building were breaking apart into its own components. Completed in 2022 on a tight infill lot, the composition draws on the slipped-plane language of R.M. Schindler — giving a small building the formal charge of something much larger.

The Sparrow Addition reworks an existing single-story house from the inside out, inserting two new volumes that each create a dialogue with the old roof rather than erasing it. At the center, the kitchen massing is extruded upward and outward — gaining height for a series of faceted lightwells that pull daylight deep into the plan, and conjoining living, dining, cooking, and entertaining into one continuous space. The new master suite takes the opposite strategy: an angled ceiling folds up to allow for paired clerestories, its pitched roof reaching out over the existing hip to trace the original ridgeline without ever touching it.

The Cove Avenue ADU’s are an infill project on an existing multi-family property in Echo Park. Urban Operations was able to produce three 800 SF ADU’s for the parcel and retain ample space around each unit for future landscape opportunities.

Designed as a “hillside hustle,” this 2400 SF home digs into the terrain at ground level and bridges over the slope on the second floor, thereby reducing building mass and foundation costs simultaneously. The resulting architecture produces a seamless connection between interior and exterior, carving out garden terraces at each level.  

Carve House begins with the full zoning envelope and works subtractively, removing volume to create cantilevered balconies that produce outdoor space for every room in the house. What reads from the street as a stack of projecting planes and volumes is in fact the opposite gesture — mass eroded away rather than added on. Inside, the same logic turns additive: an open plan where individual rooms are articulated by drop soffits, and a stepped, continuous volume that visually links the ground floor to the pool in the rear yard beyond.

The Wedge House occupies one of the narrowest buildable slivers in its Silver Lake hillside — hemmed in by zoning regulations, pinched between two existing neighbors, and falling steeply toward a downtown skyline view. The house answers these constraints at once: rather than standing plumb within the tight envelope, its walls cant and taper, leaning the living spaces and their glass toward the view while shaping the plan to the slope and setbacks that define the site. Entry is from above — the street face reads as a single quiet story — and the section then steps down the slope, each level opening to the vista as skylights and pillbox strip windows pull daylight through the narrow plan.

Urban Operations Skyscraper Zines