It's only 8 feet by 8 feet.But for Stephen Smith, the tiny red house in North Hollywood is the place he calls home.Until early last month, Smith had been living out of his car in various parts of the San Fernando Valley, collecting cans in city parks as a way to earn money.He ended up on the street not because of a single event, but because of a slippery chain of them: the death of his mother last year, followed by the pandemic, which left him emotionally and financially overwhelmed.“My mother and I were the best of friends,” he says."I felt very bad".However, after a year on the streets, Smith was ready for a change.When a caseworker from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority approached him with an offer of housing for the winter, he accepted it."I said, 'God helps those who help themselves.'The caseworker put him in touch with Chandler Street Tiny Home Village in North Hollywood, a shelter that is the first of its kind in Los Angeles.Instead of a bed in a bedroom, Smith was assigned his own tiny but self-contained house.The house does not have a bathroom, which is shared, along with the laundry and the kitchen.But otherwise, Smith's space is yours.“I wouldn't change a thing,” he says of the structure's design."I don't see any improvement I could make."Although he does say that the small village could use more bathrooms.The wait is over: Universal Studios Hollywood, the popular entertainment park located in the city of Universal City, California, reopened its doors this Friday, after being closed for more than a year due to the pandemic.Chandler Street, operated by the Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission, is a temporary shelter designed for stays of three to six months, a place that helps clients get back on their feet while looking for other housing.The center's caseworkers help with the basics, like securing paperwork to retrieve lost identity documents, connecting people with basic services, and providing them with a fixed address while they apply for jobs or benefits.“It's a stabilization point,” says Laurie Craft, director of programs for Hope of the Valley."So that when people move into permanent supportive housing, the outcome is good."The first thing Smith has to do is turn his cell phone back on so he can work.His dream is to work in car restoration.His specialty: "Anything GM."The pandemic has brought with it numerous reflections.Among them, the moral question of how a society as rich as ours gives shelter to the homeless.In this sense, policy and design are essential to create lasting solutions.Design is a critical part, as how a drop-in center looks and functions can help determine whether the client stays.And in Los Angeles, there couldn't be a more critical time to address these issues than now.Is a tiny house really a glorified toolshed?Does living in a shipping container feel like...living in a shipping container?In late March, the eviction of some 200 people from an encampment on Echo Park Lake generated national headlines.This was followed by a report, commissioned by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, showing that decamping is not only extraordinarily expensive, it doesn't work.As one camp is razed, others spring up elsewhere, turning the already tenuous existence of the evictees into a vicious cycle of relocation.Additionally, the Los Angeles City Council appears on track to settle a federal lawsuit that would force it to provide shelter to thousands of homeless people living around freeways.It is not yet known what form these shelters will take.But whatever their form, they will have to be built quickly.Very quickly.For the city and county, this means finding land and cutting red tape so projects can be approved and built faster.Modular homes and recycled shipping containers are already being experimented with at some locations in Los Angeles.These systems can save months in the construction process, as they can be erected on site, sometimes over parking lots and other terrain that would have otherwise required extensive preparation.Chandler Tiny Home Village, which was designed by Los Angeles-based Lehrer Architects, opened in February.The villa, which cost $4.4 million to build, occupies a teardrop-shaped piece of land along the Orange Line bus line at Chandler Boulevard and Tujunga Avenue.Previously, the plot was a patch of overgrown land."It was a useless piece of land, made more useless by its shape," says architect Michael Lehrer, founder of his company.Now the site is home to 39 light-filled homes made by Pallet, a company based in Everett, Washington.The pitched-roof units look like fairytale houses and sleep up to two people.They are arranged around a forked path that also contains a picnic area and dog run.(A critical component to being more hospitable to the homeless: don't force them to be separated from their beloved pets.)Lehrer Architects is also working on a project in Alexandria Park, in North Hollywood (with 103 tiny houses), which will accept clients by the end of the month, and another in Alvarado Street and Scott Avenue, in Echo Park (39 units), which should open its doors in May.In addition, Lehrer has designed community shelters, such as the Aetna Bridge Homes project in Van Nuys, which offers dormitory-style housing within a series of interlocking portable buildings.But the architect is more excited about the possibilities offered by tiny houses."Each person has his own house, which has a door and can lock it, and that's very important," says Lehrer."It's a safe space."Architects are also experimenting with shipping containers.On Vignes Street in downtown Los Angeles, construction crews are putting the finishing touches on a county project formally known as Hilda L. Solis Care First Village, a $57 million temporary housing project that includes a mix of shipping container apartments and portable buildings (each with private bathroom) that can house 232 people.The project, which occupies industrial land that was recently a parking lot for the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, has been designed by NAC Architecture and the containers have been refurbished by Crate Modular, a company based in Carson.It's up in record time: County Supervisor Hilda Solis kicked off the project in late September.In October it was already under construction.This month, Care First Village will accept its first clients.The area of ​​​​Marvel superheroes at the Disneyland Resort announces its opening date with extreme income measuresIn South Los Angeles, nonprofit developer Clifford Beers Housing is transforming a triangle of government land on Imperial Highway, near the intersections of the 110 and 105 freeways, into a shipping container development that will contain 54 housing units. permanent support.Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects is designing the $12 million project, called Isla Intersections, which is in the early stages of construction and should be finished by the end of the year.“The critical aspect is timing,” says O'Herlihy.“We were able to build the modules while the foundations were being laid.They save about eight months.”Time is of the essence, as is cost.But my biggest question has been: What exactly are these living spaces like?Is a tiny house really a glorified toolshed?Is living in a shipping container like... living in a shipping container?And are we asking the underdog to serve as guinea pigs in design experiments that look great on architecture websites, but are perfectly awful once you step foot in the door?With these questions in mind, I went to visit these sites, all of them.My first impression: I am impressed.As for the shipping containers, I expected them to be damp and steely.I'm glad to find out I was wrong.Once the shipping containers have been plastered with drywall and windows cut out, they look and feel just like any other domestic construction.Although the spaces are small - Care First Village's 135-square-foot rooms look like a compact bedroom - the architects took special care to cut large windows into the units to make these modest spaces brighter.The tiny houses, while more ephemeral in nature, are cleverly designed: Each one features four sets of windows that allow light in and cross ventilation, as well as individual heating and air conditioning units.Additionally, pitched roofs give structures a fair amount of clearance.In Alexandria Park, I lay down inside one of the uninhabited units expecting a coffin-like atmosphere.Instead, the dimensions were more like those of a small rustic cabin.Henry E. Huntington destroyed unions and exploited Mexican labor.His leadership of the museum was white for a century.Now the guardians of his collection are changing with the museum at a critical time.Even with limited time and even more limited resources, the architects have found a way to introduce aesthetic play into this work.As Nerin Kadribegovic, partner at Lehrer Architects says: “How do you fit all of this into a constrained site and then add a little something to make a place desirable?”That desire stems from the preservation of existing trees for makeshift park areas and bright color palettes.Splashes of red, pink, yellow and blue give the sites an air less of a FEMA shelter and more of a quaint village.“Asphalt and chain-link fences are tough things to get over,” says Lehrer.“If there is asphalt and chain links, it is not a place that honors and respects people.”"Color is not trivial," he adds."It's fundamental".Architects have also pushed the city and county -- along with private sponsors -- to do more.Lehrer Architects arranged for a private donor to supply umbrellas to Chandler's common areas, a must in the San Fernando Valley, where the summer heat is epic.When O'Herlihy began work on the nearly 20,000 square meters that will house Isla Intersections, it soon became clear that the narrow triangular lot couldn't accommodate much green space.So his company, along with the management of Clifford Beers Housing, lobbied the city to convert an adjacent lane, whose sole purpose is to allow cars to turn right onto the Imperial Highway, into a pedestrian park.They then got the Annenberg Foundation to finance the construction of the park with $2.5 million.O'Herlihy then staggered the layout of the containers in order to fill the intervening spaces with vegetation, which will function as a critical acoustic buffer.“This is an asphalt jungle,” he says."If you can take back the space from the road, the space will be better."Creating humane outdoor spaces was also central to architect Louise Griffin, who worked as project manager for NAC Architecture on the design and construction of the Care First Village in the city center.“The rooms are small, so it was important to make the patios a place where you could socialize,” she says.The patios will include trees and raised pots with aromatic herbs such as rosemary.As in small house towns, color plays an important role.The architects painted the shipping containers in shades of yellow and orange."Containers are industrial," says Griffin."We wanted to make them less industrial."Michael Pinto, director of NAC Architecture, says it's about creating an environment that feels like home, not a punitive institution."What options do we have other than jail?" he asks rhetorically. "Can we stop criminalizing the homeless?"Lehrer says that good design is not an accessory to these issues.“Excellence in design is essential,” she says."It's important to the people that [shelters] serve and it's important to the neighborhoods that they serve and it's important to the culture — that we can honor our sisters and brothers and bring them into the community."A vulgar and misogynistic statue made by a hack artist will spoil the plan for downtown Palm Springs.But how does our art critic really feel?After all, it is an architecture that, at some point in our lives, for reasons that may be beyond our control, we may inhabit.Smith, for example, never imagined that he would live in his car."This can happen to anyone," he said convinced.To read this note in Spanish click here.Carolina A. Miranda is a Los Angeles Times columnist covering culture, with a focus on art and architecture.