One of Los Angeles’s most successful modernist architects has devoted much of his career to serving a very specific clientele: the unhoused. Michael Lehrer sits down with Alta Journal editor at large Mary Melton to discuss the five tiny-home villages he’s thoughtfully designed, each built on an unused plot of land, that now provide temporary shelter and safety for hundreds of Angelenos. We’ll expand on Lehrer’s Q&A, featured in Alta’s Issue 24, to examine the concept around these very specific designs and his plans for more long-term solutions.

About the guest:

Michael B. Lehrer, FAIA, founded Lehrer Architects LA in his native Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1985. Its work—from the intimate to the monumental—is grounded in the idea that “beauty is a rudiment of human dignity.”

The firm’s projects consist of institutional, commercial, industrial, residential, and urban design. For the past two decades, Lehrer has been working in professional and civic roles to get people off the streets and into decent housing. His practice has been committed to creating affordable and ennobling respite, shelter, centers of community, and housing for underprivileged and unhoused communities in L.A. through affordable housing solutions, shelters, community projects, and thought leadership. He has served as either a board member or president of Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles for the past 18 years.

From his firm’s early Skid Row and community projects like Clínica Romero in East L.A. to the 2020 AIA Los Angeles Multi-Unit Residential Architecture Award–winning East Rancho Apartments for formerly homeless teens in South L.A., the recent Aetna Street Bridge Home, and the experimental Chandler Blvd. Tiny Home Village for homeless residents, Lehrer’s work has been at the vanguard of the movement in Los Angeles to give everyone a decent place to live. In 2020, the American Institute of Architects Los Angeles bestowed the Gold Medal, its “highest honor,” on Lehrer.

He is chairman emeritus of the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) Alumni Council where he created a leadership manifesto, “The Engagement Parti,” which is now a centerpiece of GSD’s 14,000-member, multigenerational lifelong community. He was vice chairman of the School Construction Bond Citizens’ Oversight Committee for more than five years, overseeing a now $27 billion repair and construction program for the L.A. Unified School District, and served on the Hollywood Planning and Design Review Board for over 25 years.

Lehrer was president of the American Institute of Architects Los Angeles in 1999 and founded its annual Legislative Day, which fundamentally changed the nature of the profession in L.A. and is in its 20th year. He started the AIA Los Angeles push to make Great Streets a central initiative in the city. Lehrer has been an adjunct associate professor at the University of Southern California, teaching all levels of design studio from first year through master’s thesis. Prior to 1985, Lehrer worked at Frank O. Gehry and Associates and other design offices. He regularly sits on academic and professional AIA design juries around the country, including the AIA Institute Honors and Awards jury for Architecture.

Educated at Berkeley and Harvard after attending LAUSD public schools, Lehrer was licensed in California in 1981 and was elevated to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 2004.•