Lehrer Architects' latest project, the Aetna Bridge Home was opened this week by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti as part of the city's A Bridge Home initiative. The design team converted an under-utilized quarter-acre parking lot into a vibrant 70+ bed facility for homeless Angelenos. With a tight timeline, the complex was designed in a mere three weeks and built in only four months.

"For us, projects like this are exhilarating," said Michael Lehrer, FAIA, Founding Partner of Lehrer Architects in a statement. "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."

Lehrer and the team worked closely with multiple city agencies led by the Bureau of Engineering and the Department of Public Works. One of the most intense constraints for the project was the mandated use of pre-fabricated trailers, a stipulation that forced the architects into a refined level of creativity and innovation.

"Every move is conceived to add significant value and be cost-neutral," Lehrer continued. "In that vein, color is used extensively to create a sense of community and places of respect, dignity and joy. It is also used to take a very basic and often unappealing building typology, a mobile home, and actually make it beautiful. 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."

The focused and dynamic use of color throughout the facility brings a unique quality to the space uncommon in prefabricated developments of this kind. Moreover, existing trees were used to create a contrasting lushness to counter the more rigid geometry of the trailers and hard-scaped areas. The facility opens to residents this month.

Make sure to check out our Studio Visit with Lehrer Architects.