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LOS ANGELES—TCA Architects has unveiled the design plans for the Neptune Marina, a 526-unit apartment development on the waterfront in Marina del Rey from Legacy Partners. The project started 16 years ago, and has been hugely delayed due to a lengthy entitlement process and legal issues. With entitlements finally secured, TCA has revealed a mid-century-modern-inspired aesthetic with clean and linear lines for the waterfront apartment community.

"Marina del Rey was born in the midst of a significant design movement. The project is a tirst effort to synthesize the vernacular tradition with a modern language to create an architecture that is firmly rooted in its own place and time," Tim Mustard, studio director and the architect of record at TCA Architects, tells GlobeSt.com. "The goal was not to change the coarse and culture, meaning the mid-century movement when this was born in the 1950s, and not to produce a stylistic replica of times past, but rather to fuse the current social realty and current social reality and the current expressions with the physical experiences of the site's history."

This is the third round of design plans that TCA has created for the project. In 2013, the firm was designing an adjacent project for AMLI Residential. Legacy Partners challenged the firm to create something unique and timeless that would be a staple in the community, and the mid-century modern design was the perfect answer. "This is an interesting project because the client originally came to us with this project in 1999 and it has been redesigned three times," says Mustard. "We went through 15 years of a long entitlement process and some legal battles that caused a tremendous delay. That gave us a lot of time to go back and think about how we were redesigning our communities. The client challenged our team to come up with a better concept than what we were doing next door. It is so important to give a nod to Tim O'Brien and his team, who stuck with us for 15 years. Without them, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

The mid-century modern design, however, wasn't without challenges for the team. They wanted to create something that melded current design trends while using a modern aesthetic that was meant for a smaller building. "The challenge for us was taking a classic and timeless architecture and applying it to a building that is much larger than what was typically built in the 50s and 60s," says Mustard. "Then, most buildings were single-story residences, or two- maybe three-stories at most."

With the design completed, the project is officially in pre-construction stages. It is expected to deliver in the summer of 2018.

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Kelsi Maree Borland

Kelsi Maree Borland is a freelance journalist and magazine writer based in Los Angeles, California. For more than 5 years, she has extensively reported on the commercial real estate industry, covering major deals across all commercial asset classes, investment strategy and capital markets trends, market commentary, economic trends and new technologies disrupting and revolutionizing the industry. Her work appears daily on GlobeSt.com and regularly in Real Estate Forum Magazine. As a magazine writer, she covers lifestyle and travel trends. Her work has appeared in Angeleno, Los Angeles Magazine, Travel and Leisure and more.