Los Angeles-based Lehrer Architects converted an overlooked, oddly-shaped infill lot into a Tiny Home village of 40 individual shelters, offering an innovative and experimental template for tackling Los Angeles’ homelessness and housing crisis.
The Chandler Boulevard Bridge Home Village, with its cheerful and colourful design, offers a template for rehabilitating the homeless. Designed by Lehrer Architects and the Bureau of Engineering for the City of Los Angeles, this innovative community project, transforms a forgotten, oddly shaped infill into a 40 unit facility for the homeless in the Los Angeles using prefabricated “pallet shelters”. The intent was not just to create a humane and welcoming environment for the residents, but also to enhance the overall aesthetics of the neighbourhood.
Working in conjunction with multiple city agencies led directly by Engineering and Ford Construction, Lehrer Architects designed a plan of spatial character, colourful details, and logistical efficiency to create a model community space with a level of design sensibility and beauty not often seen in these types of projects. Talking about this project Gary Lee Moore, City Engineer and General Manager of the Bureau of Engineering says, “As the lead department in the planning, design and construction of temporary homeless housing for the City of Los Angeles, the Bureau of Engineering was able to use our extensive experience to make the new, tiny home concept a reality. We were able to overcome numerous challenges in this first-of-its-kind facility, coordinate with numerous other departments and deliver the facility in record time. We are extremely proud of our work on the Chandler Tiny Home Village, which not only gives shelter to those in need, but provides a sense of community and dignity for the residents.”
This project is one of the centerpieces of the city’s emergency response to getting people into safe and healthy “bridge” shelter en route to permanent housing. The Chandler Boulevard Bridge Home was constructed on an awkwardly shaped, leftover infill site that could have been easily looked over , if it weren’t for hawk-eyed City officials looking to find land to create bridge homes. This particular solution, using pallet shelters instead of large trailers, opens up a flurry of sites across the city previously deemed unviable for development as their size allows for them to be configured into a variety of different shapes. These 8×8’ Pallet Homes are swift to assemble, provide private, autonomous conditioned space for the people who live in them , and, like pixels fitting an odd shape, they add real value to a heretofore underused property.
The architects brought the functional space to life with low cost design details like modernist paint highlights to create ample visual variety, delight and sense of community. Colour is used on the ground areas to enhance the individuality of the trailers while creating a coherent sense of a village and the visually stimulating and uplifting effect of a three-dimensional painting . Chain link fence, extensively required throughout, was enlisted to create graphic patterns while providing appropriate privacy and visual separation from the Orange Line. The project presented a streamlined and efficient arrangement of prefabricated modular units to create collective dining and gathering space, pet play area, showers, restrooms, laundry, pest control, secure storage, and assistance with accessing city services . The use of state pre-approved modular and even “mobile” buildings, not only simplified permitting, but also allows for rapid deployment due to off-site fabrication and specialized, excavation free foundations.
Looking towards a day when the housing crisis is solved, these pallet homes and modular buildings can be quickly removed from the site for future projects . Michael B. Lehrer FAIA, Founding Partner of Lehrer Architects says, “ For us, projects like this are exhilarating. Political, time and cost constraints were severe—demanding extreme design discipline and chops. Our focus was to honor, nurture and restore a modicum of wholeness and delight to our fellow our citizens without homes. Every move is conceived to add significant value and be cost-neutral: in that vein, colour is used extensively to create a sense of community and places of respect, dignity and joy. Projects for people at all levels of the social ladder, but particularly those near the bottom, remind us again and again that beauty is a rudiment of human dignity ”.
Chandler Boulevard Bridge Home Village , represents a lightning-quick, highly collaborative, inventive, efficient and beautiful solution to the LA homelessness crisis. Lehrer Architects believes that creating a home for someone – for anyone and everyone – is about providing human dignity, safety, love and respect, and Chandler is a model of how to enhance a community by caring for its most vulnerable residents with dignity through design.
DESIGN TEAM:
Architect: Lehrer Architects LA, IncBureau of Engineering
Nerin Kadribegovic, AIA, IIDA, Partner-in Charge, and Michael B. Lehrer, FAIA, Partner
Builder: Ford Construction
ABOUT LEHRER ARCHITECTS
Over the last 22 years Lehrer Architects LA has been working in professional and civic roles to get people off the streets and into decent housing. Driven by an abiding core tenet that “ beauty is a rudiment of human dignity ,” Lehrer Architects has been committed to creating affordable and ennobling respite, shelter, centers of community and housing for underprivileged and unhoused communities throughout LA. According to Founding Partner Michael B. Lehrer “Creating HOME for someone – for anyone and everyone – is about providing human dignity, safety, love and respect” through affordable housing solutions, shelters, community projects and thought leadership from their multi-award-winning <$200K starter home prototypes, to their community projects like Clinica Romero in North East LA and the 2020 AIA | LA Residential Design Award-winning East Rancho Apartments for formerly homeless teens in South LA and the Aetna Street Bridge Home which opened in July 2020. Lehrer Architects’ work has been in the vanguard of the movement in Los Angeles to give everyone a decent place to live.