Perkins and Will Conceives Temporary Housing for L.A.’s Homeless
While full of superlatives, Los Angeles owns a painful statistic: It has the nation’s largest unsheltered homeless population. Roughly 50,000 individuals are spread throughout the city, from downtown to Venice, where Yan Krymsky, principal and design director of the L.A. studio of Perkins and Will, lives. Inspired by mayor Eric Garcetti’s A Bridge Home initiative, which identifies homelessness as the U.S.’s greatest humanitarian crisis, he decided to tackle the problem by creating temporary supportive housing for interim facilities. He and his team started with visits to such sites in Santa Monica, Pasadena, and Bell. They were shocked by their lack of privacy and security. “But we weren’t thinking a pod or micro hotel,” Krymsky notes. The resulting Dome is designed as a unit that’s stackable, collapsible, and portable. Each, encompassing 42 square feet and made of solid surfacing and birch plywood, has an extra-long twin bed with storage underneath, a lockable wardrobe, an aisle light, an outlet, and is enclosed on three sides. Residents can even select an optional fabric canopy.
Read next: 10 Questions With… Perkins and Will’s Brent Capron
