Archinect - News

Historic preservation and its (many) American discontents

2022-05-09T16:57:00-04:00

It seems incredible that a mid-century marvel like Geller I should fall victim to redevelopment while a government agency nearby intervenes to prevent someone from replacing an old front door with a similar-looking new one. In the world of historic preservation, however, a loose relationship between a building’s historical value and its likelihood of being protected is all too common.

The recent loss of Marcel Breuer’s first post-war Geller I design on Long Island is used to highlight the tension between developer-friendly preservation laws in smaller communities like Lawrence, and the prevailing approaches to preservation controlled predominantly by city dwellers and their “superficial attempts to reframe historic preservation as a progressive endeavor.”

Harvard Doctoral candidate Jacob Anbinder takes a broad look at the (highly political) history of American preservation efforts, which, he says, have shifted in recent decades to become an exclusive domain of the Democratic Party and its “growing base of white-collar professionals attempting to reconcile their material interests with their egalitarian ideals.”

Long Beach Mayor addresses DNC convention from the offices of Studio One Eleven

2020-08-20T13:11:00-04:00

If you caught the second night of the Democratic National Convention on August 18th, you might have seen Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia address the nation as one of the Democratic Party's 17 "rising stars."

The address, it turns out, was filmed at Long Beach headquarters of Studio One Eleven, an architecture and urban design firm that has long been involved with revitalizing the city's urban fabric. The firm's 34,300-square-foot offices, which are shared with the commercial architecture firm RDC and development support firm Fathom, are located in an former big-box department store that has been adaptively reused by the architects to achieve LEED Platinum and WELL Gold certifications. The office renovation, which opened in 2016, kicked off the revitalization of a former 350,000-square-foot pedestrian mall in the Downtown Long Beach area led by Studio One Eleven, and includes a flexible community room, which allows for collaboration and hosting community events, according to the arch...

Bernie Sanders lays out an ambitious plan on affordable housing

2019-09-15T13:19:00-04:00

Sanders railed against Trump’s housing policies and explained his own, which calls for federal investment of $2.5 trillion over the next decade and a national rent control standard. He said he will pay for the policy by establishing a wealth tax on the top tenth of one percent — or, according to his estimate, the wealthiest 175,000 families.

Major points of the $2.5 trillion plan include:

Establishing a national rent control standard that would cap rent increases at no more than 1½ times the rate of inflation or 3 percent, whichever is higher.
Promoting legal protections for fair housing and taking steps to eliminate racial discrimination and gentrification.
Expanding the National Housing Trust Fund, which allocates money to states to build and maintain affordable housing for low-income Americans.
Fully fund Section 8 rental assistance program and eliminate lengthy wait times that plague those seeking those vouchers.
$70 billion of investment to build and rehabilitate 7.4 million of affordable housing units.
Build 2 million mixed-income units.
$50 billion in grants for states, cities and towns to establish community land trusts.
$32 billion over five years “to end homelessness in America and provide critical outreach services to those who are experiencing chronic homelessness.”