Over the past decade, homelessness in the Pacific Northwest has increased at such an alarming rate that it’s become one of the most hotly debated topics in the region. So in 2015, when the city of Portland declared a housing emergency in response to soaring numbers of unsheltered people living on its streets, Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design decided it was time for a proactive solution. Teaming up with two local nonprofits, City Repair and the Village Coalition, the center launched the Partners on Dwelling (POD) initiative in the spring of 2016, inviting architecture firms to design 144-square-foot sleeping pods that could be easily assembled, disassembled, and moved as needed. Fourteen teams submitted pod prototypes for the pilot project. Once built, the structures were placed at a 1-acre site in north Portland and organized into the Kenton Women’s Village—a tiny-house community for the homeless, with shared kitchen and shower facilities and support services offered onsite, from leadership development to addiction treatment. A year later, the PSU School of Architecture’s Diversion Studio was preparing to design and build, for the fifth year in a row, the Treeline Stage for the Pickathon Music Festival in Happy Valley, Oregon. But then, inspired by the success of the POD initiative’s pilot program, the students hit upon a novel idea: they would create a stage that could be easily dismantled after the festival
and its materials repurposed to build additional sleeping pods. After reviewing the 14 prototypes at Kenton Women’s Village, the group chose the S.A.F.E. Pod, designed by Seattle- and Portlandbased SRG Partnership. The pod’s central appeal is its simplicity of construction—it is built from a series of gable trusses, each composed of two 8-foot-long 2x4s connected to each other with only a handful of screws—and the fact that it can be assembled with just a few tools and minimal waste. Additionally, the pod’s unique heptagonal shape allows the inhabitant to occupy the building frame’s edges, providing built-in opportunities to install shelving, a desk surface, a bench, or a bed without sacrificing the open floor plan. Using the S.A.F.E. Pod’s dimensions as a starting point, the student team developed a stage design using gable trusses, linked together to form vessel-like structures varying from 12 to 32 feet high. After the festival ended, the stage was deconstructed into its component 690 trusses, which are currently being used to construct sleeping pods in a new housing village for homeless veterans in Oregon’s Clackamas County. The students and their contractor partners, Lease Crutcher Lewis, began assembling the first wave of the SRG-designed pods in the fall of 2017, and Clackamas County officials hope to finish the project by the end of the year. ❈
COLLABORATORS Stage designer: Portland State University, School of Architecture (students: Kayla Anderson, Amy Peterson, Ossie Pleasant, Olivia Snell, Nick Vipond; faculty: Travis Bell, Clive Knights) Contractor: Lease Crutcher Lewis Structural engineer: Catena Consulting Engineers
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