The Sheltering Centre: A Skid Row Parking Tower Where People, Not Cars, Are Given Shelter

Every night in Downtown Los Angeles, cars sleep indoors while people sleep on the pavement. The Sheltering Centre builds its argument on that inversion. It takes the parking tower, one of the most familiar and least loved pieces of automobile infrastructure, and asks it to protect people instead. The proposal does not treat shelter as a final destination. It treats it as a station: a place where residents can metaphorically "park" themselves while they stabilise, receive professional help and prepare to move on.

Designed by Anastasiia Olkhovskaya and recognised as a People's Choice Award entry in the Parkx competition, the project sits at the edge of Skid Row, an area defined by concentrated homelessness and social vulnerability. Its premise is a forecast. As mobility becomes more shared and private cars lose their dominance, cities will need fewer conventional parking spaces. Olkhovskaya does not let that surplus become obsolete. Parking stays in the programme but loses its defining role, and above it rises an architecture of support, dignity and reintegration.

Timber Corridors Where the Concrete Decks Once Ran

The first interior view sets the emotional register of the whole scheme. White flush doors are set into walls of vertical timber slats, a slatted ceiling carries small spotlights, and the floor is polished stone. Nothing here recalls the raw ramps and exposed beams of a garage. The corridor reads closer to a hotel or a residence hall, and that is the point: a person arriving from the street enters a space that signals care before a single service is delivered.

The repetition of identical doors matters too. Each one stands for a private room, a threshold the occupant controls. For people who have spent long periods without a door of their own, that rhythm of enclosure is arguably the project's most important spatial promise.

Rooms for Casework, Not Just Beds

An office with an L-shaped timber desk, a laptop, an open book and shelving, lit by a tall window onto tall grasses, shows that Olkhovskaya imagines the building as a working institution as well as a dormitory. The brief behind the project is explicit: residents should gain access to services that address the conditions that make leaving homelessness difficult. Accommodation alone does not achieve that; consultation, paperwork and planning do.

The material palette carries straight through from the corridors, so support spaces and living spaces belong to the same calm world. The view onto planting rather than traffic is a small but telling choice, framing the work of recovery against something growing.

A Stepped Tower Rising Out of a Low-Rise Fabric

The aerial massing model shows a stepped tower with rounded concrete ends and planted roof terraces, set among grey block neighbours that stay low. This is a deliberate act of visibility. Rather than hiding a shelter on the outskirts, far from the community it serves, the proposal places assistance where it is needed and gives it a distinctive civic presence on the Skid Row skyline.

Verticality also does social work. By stacking functions, the tower consolidates services that are usually scattered across separate facilities into one architectural system. The stepped section turns each setback into a terrace, so the green edges are not ornament but outdoor ground for people who otherwise have none.

Tents Beneath the Slab: Shelter at the Threshold

The most provocative image places green dome tents in tall grass beneath a raised concrete slab, with cantilevered glazed volumes projecting overhead under a cloudy sky. It reads as an honest picture of where the project starts: the tents of Skid Row brought under the protection of the structure, with the finished rooms hovering above as the next step.

That juxtaposition dramatises the station logic. The building does not pretend homelessness ends at the front door. It offers cover first, then a route upward toward more permanent and private space, and the raised slab makes the transition between the two physically legible.

Laundry as an Infrastructure of Dignity

Two views of the laundry close the image set, and their prominence is telling. One shows stacked washers and dryers in timber frames before a glazed wall full of city lights at night. The other is a symmetrical hall, machines lining both sides, with a central doorway opening onto the corridor of private rooms. Hygiene facilities sit alongside housing in the programme, and Olkhovskaya gives them the same material attention as the bedrooms.

Clean clothes are a quiet prerequisite for job interviews, appointments and simply being treated with respect. Placing the laundry directly on the axis of the residential corridor makes it part of daily life rather than a basement afterthought, and the night-time glazing keeps residents visually connected to the city they are preparing to rejoin.

Why This Project Matters

The Sheltering Centre treats the parking structure as an adaptable framework rather than a single-purpose machine, and that shift in thinking is its main contribution. Cities hold vast quantities of parking infrastructure on valuable land, and if mobility changes as many predict, that stock will need a new job. Olkhovskaya proposes one of the most urgent jobs available: housing and supporting people experiencing homelessness, in place, close to where they already are.

The renderings could be pushed further on the structural logic of conversion, but the project's strength lies in its insistence on dignity at the scale of the corridor, the desk and the washing machine. By investigating the future of parking and the future of homelessness together, it shows that adaptive reuse can be a social strategy as much as a sustainable one, and that is a framing worth carrying beyond Skid Row.

View the Full Project

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: The Sheltering Centre Parkx (uni.xyz).