Housing the Homeless: Cal Poly Contest Is Built on New Ideas

Architectural student Steve Prince called his first-prize-winning college project a “shopping cart shelter,” and eagerly demonstrated how the structure folds out like a chaise lounge, has a waterproof tent-like covering and can be packed back into the cart in minutes.

Nearby, a high school mechanical engineering student, who said homeless people need a “a nice, colorful place to stay,” displayed a long, low hexagon-shaped shelter covered with bright orange and yellow canvas, which also garnered a prize.

Eighteen other “homes”--some tall wood-framed structures, others resembling pup tents--dotted the main quad Saturday at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, as architectural and engineering students showed off creations they had entered in an unusual contest called “Homes for the Homeless.”

The purpose of the contest, part of a weekend conference for Southern California architectural students, was to teach that architecture is “more than creating wonderful objects for rich people,” said Marvin Malecha, the dean of Cal Poly’s school of environmental design.

In vying to build the perfect shelter for street people, some students, many of whom had never been to a Skid Row area, seriously took to the task by designing easy-to-assemble structures out of inexpensive materials such as cardboard and old sheets of plastic.

Others entrants took a text-book approach to design and used smooth aluminium frames, lightweight wood and Velcro to assemble modular, high-tech-looking structures.

“We wanted to make something that could be mass produced,” said Jared Pavlich, 16, of Alta Loma High School. He used clear plastic flaps so that the hexagon-tent dweller would be able to look outside.

Protested Contest

Cal Poly students, however, protested the contest by building a shanty-town shack out of ply board and cardboard to show what people “really live in.”

At first, the students said, they were going to design a shelter. But they changed their minds when they traveled from their rural Pomona campus to Los Angeles’ Skid Row to find out what the homeless needed in a shelter.

“We were shocked by what we saw. It seemed silly to try and build a tent or something like that for these people,” said Lisa Evans, 21. “We decided that there wasn’t an architectural solution to the problem.”

Instead, they gathered money and food from friends and said they fed 400 people in Pershing Square on Friday. Kenneth Frampton, dean of the Columbia University School of Architecture, said: “The whole thing could be seen as naive in terms that design can not address this problem. But I think the purpose is to raise consciousness.”