Designing Housing in a State of Crisis: Chapter One

This little diagram was tucked into the RFP issued by the Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering a couple of years ago for an interim-housing facility on a city-owned property. As one of the architects on the Bureau’s pre-approved bench, we were invited to propose a plan to convert the vacant floor of the existing Department of Transportation building into a homeless shelter for men and women together. You can see it resembles a basic office plan, only instead of rows of cubicles, it’s a sea of beds.

I’ll be honest, we struggled with the density, the inherent lack of privacy, and the lack of daylight or views to the outside. Few of us were familiar with interim housing and even fewer had worked on a project like this. That said, Miguel Rivera, our senior marketing coordinator, was already out in front of the issue. Drawing on his early training as a landscape designer, he had been exploring how the L.A. studio might get involved by attending Downtown community meetings and observing first-hand how our city was addressing the crisis.

As much as we wanted to get involved, we just had really mixed feelings. Between the plan and the site visit, we knew this was going to be a really oppressive environment for people. We weren’t sure whether we wanted to be involved in something that led to this.

So we tabled it for a minute and gave it some thought. And when we went back to the plan and really looked at it, that was the moment. Our perspective suddenly changed. Our moment of truth as designers was when we realized, This is an emergency. That’s why this plan is like this.

Because you don’t do this in any other circumstance. You just don’t do this. We don’t do this. Everything we learn about, everything we try to do as architects goes against this. Our work is about light and views and privacy and social interaction. All of that was absent in this plan.

And once we had made that mental shift, we went all in. Miguel dug up similar work our Seattle studio had done and began seeking out strategic partners and setting up tours of their facilities to learn how they operate and what the residents need. We did submit a proposal to that RFP and got short-listed. By the time we went in for the interview, it had changed in scope to become Bridge Home, the mayor’s interim-housing program. Two years later, we’ve now worked with the Bureau of Engineering on seven sites, two of which are in construction, others in various stages of design.

What’s more, going all in meant we were nowhere near the end of our story. Once we started digging into Bridge Home and learning all about the interim-housing market, its players and stakeholders, and its state of design, we immediately started working on other solutions.

Only by looking at that plan in our nerdy architect way were we able to confront just how real our city’s emergency is. Only then could we say to ourselves, Yeah, we absolutely do want to do this. And we don’t want to just do this. We want to do a lot more than this. 

So that’s what we’ve started to do. We’re working on the widest possible range of housing typologies, including interim housing and permanent supportive housing. We’re even looking at models that have had success in other West Coast cities, like “tiny home” villages. Within each of these approaches, we’re exploring innovations in prefabrication, specialized furniture, and new materials that will make these places more comfortable, more dignified, and easier to operate.

Over the next few weeks, chapter by chapter, we’re taking you through our work, from a stackable mobile-housing product called DOME Unit to a tiny home village concept we’re still developing. Each project has deepened and enriched our studio’s design practice and connected us with our city in personal and eye-opening ways.

Today is World Architecture Day. The theme is “Housing for All.” What better time to start telling the story?