As large housing estates are being demolished and the age of great social democracies recedes, taking with it any notion of an architecture for the public, OMA partner Reinier de Graaf asks if there is any alternative to building capital — The Architectural Review
102 Comments
Too bad the liberal rag paywall is preventing me from reading it.
Use the incognito window in Chrome.
The pictures of demolition are hopeful. They show the creative destruction necessary for a healthy economy and society. If the quality of the restaurant down the streets goes to hell, people stop going and it is replaced with something better. Every time i see a politician go to jail, it makes me happy because the system is working. But architecture is so based on the particular that you extrapolate a failure of style or political regime.
jla-x, Spain and Italy (and others) are screwed because they exported their central banks to the EU. WTF did they think was going to happen when they gave up control of their economies to foreign bankers?
Swedes (and other Nords) hate their high tax rates but love their social services. By the time you add up all the taxes we pay here - federal, state, city / county, property, sales, payroll, user fees, etc. we're probably paying as much if not more than they are and all we get in return are utterly useless, broken $400m fighter planes and corporate billionaires who don't pay taxes.
Alternative, your "liberal rag" laments how affordable housing causes the loss of billions in development. As for public housing units causing a housing shortage, that's clearly why developers are tearing them down to build less density.
Miles, you're making two separate points. (1) Affordable housing requirements dis-incentivize private development. (2) The unregulated market arguably leads to less density in otherwise dense urban areas.
They're both problems, sure, but they're separable.
Also, I think your rendition of the Southern European debt crisis misses the mark. You kind of left out that whole part about sovereign debt obligations.
Affordable housing requirements dis-incentivize private development.
That's the point of the article in your liberal rag. I don't agree with it as a) municipalities outsource development to private concerns and b) low income people are not competing for developers attention.
Sovereign economies can be controlled by fiscal and monetary policy via taxation and spending, issuance of debt, interest rates, etc. If you give up that control you don't have a sovereign economy.
Private developers are usually beholden to affordable housing requirements, Miles.
Southern European economies didn't helplessly incur and misappropriate EU-originated debt, either.
as I take 15 minutes of unbillable hours to catch-up here....
What I don't see anyone asking or noting, and I would love to learn:
1. What did social housing designed by architects look like before Modernism? Let's say 1750 and 1050 for fun.
2. Maybe it's my interpretation, but Rainer is pretty much saying what was meant for social purposes, maximizing efficiency of cost via industrialization to enhance the living qualities of the poor, has now become stylized and made a method for increasing profits by doing very cheap construction and selling an inflated perception of a style called 'modernism'. See Donna's note about the tower in Chicago...
Real 'Traditional' architecture costs a fortune, just like back when it was done for the wealthy and the kings and queens... and survived to this day because it was costly construction and high quality of course and only the best craftsmen were hired.
donna posted a link somewhere, forget where, but in case someone else didnt notice, its part of a series: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/series/history-cities-50-buildings
thanks for the read, donna.
oldest social housing - Fuggerei, Augsburg, Bavaria (DE).....architect Thomas Kreb....1516
answering my own question.....long bus ride.........from wikipedia "Almshouses were established from the 10th century in Britain, to provide a place of residence for poor, old and distressed people. The first recorded almshouse was founded in York by King Athelstan; the oldest still in existence is the Hospital of St. Cross inWinchester, dating to about 1132. In the Middle Ages, the majority of European hospitals functioned as almshouses."
'........also from wiki "The first public housing project in the world[3]was at one of the most notorious slums of London – the Old Nichol.[4] Nearly 6,000 individuals were crammed into the packed streets, where one child in four died before his or her first birthday"
The argument perhaps can be cleaned up this way: Capital is no longer evenly distributed between the classes, therefore people no longer have power or education about architecture, or the power to decide/improve what architecture their community has.
A) People decide what is good architecture through use and education.
or
B) Capital (power) decides what is good architecture through the media/government/corporations. With or without the input of citizens.
No longer? When was it ever?
hey Alternative that is a neat trick, never realized that. it work for most paywalls...?
^ power has always been in the hands of a few. Power is maintained through whatever ism is in place. Some are worse than others but all are unsustainable. all centralized systems are flawed. nature is completely decentralised for a good reason...it works better that way... fuck politics!
The moment captured at the picture looks impressive!
Your right, it has nothing to do with architectural style... just the form, shape, disposition, articulation, aesthetic...just not style.
https://www.google.com/search?q=banlieues+paris&biw=1090&bih=1186&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=K4k_VamhMoWfgwS8oYCIAg&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&dpr=0.9
if they only would have put a sloped roof on the huge dormitories they overpopulated with people that don't have access to capital, it would have all gone so much better for everyone.
link for no good reason
Actually, that's what some of the residents of Pessac, and paint lively colors and decorate them generally. In other words, they tried to humanize them. This is called empirical observation. Learning from what's actually happening on the ground instead of just wishing reality would conform to some theoretical construct. It's called modern thinking, which modernists ironically, aren't to good at.
You know what else sloped roofs are good for?
.
Awesome Miles!
this is the kind of social housing Thayer-D would appreciate, it's 500 years old, thanks Teeter brah!
Fugazi housing
I do like that image Olaf, but I'd rather live in either the Cobble Hill Towers, the Warren Place Workingman's Cottages, or the Astral Apartments. Older housing meant for the working classes without treating them like sardines. It's not personal, it's just more humane.
http://cobblehilltowers.com/history
http://hdc.org/hdc-across-nyc/brooklyn/brooklyn-landmarked/dil-bk-cobble-hill
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astral_Apartments
Just to redirect this conversation back to the point of the article, and why I also wish I had written it...There is an issue inherent within the misguided notion of economic mobility that we have inherited and that this notion of economic mobility is integrally related to the role of architecture within modern life. For some time I have questioned the anomalous condition of 1950s/60s economic mobility and it's role in modern concepts of governance economic structure. There is also an inherent blindness within the architectural profession about its contextual relationship to these other forces which drive and direct design ideologies. I believe we cannot be so naïve as to believe that any single enemy exists within the current economic environment, in this manner "we" are all both the enemy and the solution. The question about how to propose an alternative to our current condition, I believe revolves around conceptualizing what "public" is. How is it created and maintained. What role does the "public" have within society and what voice do they have.
Inherently the "public" as a construct also inhabits space and has spatial implications...and as architects our role in aiding in defining that space and its implications can be instrumental in establishing/questioning/emboldening these redefinitions of the "public". I believe we are at the very early stages of this conversation. In many ways, there is no language yet constructed to describe this, as yet, undefined condition. So, I think that is a very interesting and fruitful discussion and mental exercise. And one that could have huge implications in the near future.
The latest transformation of the public sphere is on the internet or in physical space but mediated through the internet. Locative media, space-tagging, and eventually augmented reality could bring internet behavior and culture more into the realm of "real life" architecture.
I would propose that housing for the working poor, a sad classification that will only grow over time, will become necessary for urban communities to survive economically.
Someone has to do your laundry, fix your leaking roof and protect you and your stuff.
Eventually we will have to do one of two things raise minimum wage to allow these workers to live close enough to get to work or provide government owned and operated housing in close proximity to transit and or jobs.
Public housing of the future will be for able bodied people who can work service jobs, the real concern is will we revert to the early 20th century tenements with their notorious unhealthy unsanitary living conditions, or are we heading towards a new micro housing made possible with an ever widening array of technology and medical advances to help mitigate physical and mental health problems that come about from over crowding.
Service labor is as much of a commodity as real-estate and fits exactly to the article's premise on capital deciding things more than design in driving down cost while maximizing the sale value of the end product. Think if Starbucks paid each employee a commission instead of an hourly rate, how many $5 coffees does one make in a hour? Or hamburgers flipped? I think the only reason that capital is not intervening in providing housing is that labor is not owned like property but maybe we will witness the resurgence of the company town as an economic model of the future.
Over and OUT
Peter N
Jason - as noted, we are neither fully outside these forces (market) or fully subjected to them, as Architects the immediate participation in defining the "public" is to provide them spaces, places,materials, forms, etc....that extract and create their independence form Capital's essential assessment of the "public's" existence - data. ............ Much like soliciting through Facebook your target audience ,or finding a compatible date on E-Harmony, quantification is the quickest and simplist step in manipulating any abstracted social entity into some form of eventual Capital. The goal on more levels than architecure is to define yourselves outside of quantity and within the realm of quality............... Perhaps this is why Phenomenonolgy, Hedonism/visceral and maybe even OOO is popular in theoretical circles.......yet these all seem Esoteric because you can not put it into a spreadsheet.....and maybe it only seems Esoteric because we have detached ourselves so far from quality with he illusion that amassed quanities (Capital) can enhance your supposed quality of life........... Kitchen countertop choices should be made not for resale but for reasons only the client understands.....I have had the luxury to work on quality jobs over the past few years, they are quality because decisions were often made well outside rational principles of cost and returns, and I call it luxury because everything else is just a quantifiable task......
the company town as an economic model of the future
Exactly. Indentured servitude for the lucky, the rest have to fend for themselves poaching on corporate reserves where they are hunted for sport.
you mean like this Mile?
city in Judge Dredd, and those who live outside it
Bernie Sanders for president!
Screw Bernie Sanders, we need Elizabeth Warren. All my right wing (business) buddies are scared shitless of her, by the way they insult her. She speaks straight English on complicated topics, a lesson some architectsrem could learn a thing or too. But all this econ aside, no matter what 'system' is in place, most people just see the day to day, and the shape of those earlier projects and isolating people is the problem. True, there are many 1960's white brick versions of these slabs in MYC that folks pay a ton for, but on a grid mixed in with the other buildings helps to mitigate how mind numbing banal they are. It's as if Corb thought all a person needed was light and space...
Elizabeth Warren is great but she isn't going to run. She and Sanders would both lose though. But at least we'll have someone on stage in the debates who will actually cut through the focus group tested BS.
Speaking of BS, you are way too obsessed with the aesthetics of 60s modernist housing projects. I personally think that New Urbanism and the faux history stuff you adore is much more "mind numbing banal". What gets built today, shouldn't look like what was built in 1960s or the 1860s. It should be entirely new and specific to the needs of our time.
From the cited piece, from Alternative:
"Interestingly, advocates for continued rent regulation and those who oppose it largely agree on what would happen if the programs were eliminated. It would be win-win-lose: great for landlords and the middle class and awful for people who benefit today. Mayer walked me through a likely result. Many of the people receiving some sort of government subsidy would have to leave their apartments, probably for the outer boroughs. The landlords of those units would invest in upgrades and charge higher rents. At the same time, the subset of apartments that had been market rate would see their rents fall, because there would be, suddenly, twice as many apartments in the market."
and the final paragraph:
"Rent regulation is very likely to go away, eventually, even without any explicit effort to kill it. Some 231,000 units have been deregulated over the last 30 years. Every year, thousands more leave the program or are torn down, replaced by new condo buildings serving the wealthy. The number of market-rate units has been going up more quickly lately, and the pace will, most likely, only increase. Barring some unlikely shift in the economy or policy, Manhattan will have fewer and fewer poor people each year and almost none whatsoever in a few decades."
So, without deregulation rental controlled apartments are disappearing, and more market rate condos have been built, and yet market rates haven't dropped?
It seems to me that the rich better get busy spending their money, or there won't be anyone to make their Triple, Venti, Half Sweet, Non-Fat, Caramel Macchiato.
Elizabeth Warren Sells Out
The facts are simple. You can't get to the Oval Office without licking the boots of those who put you there. You can't even play the game without at least half a billion or so in direct funding. They won't let you on the stage if your message conflicts with the script.
Just look at the current example, the Nobel Peace Prize winning war monger, champion of the banking industry and military industrial complex. Before you blame congress remember that they too are on the same corporate payroll, and that many districts have been so gerrymandered that the opposition party - funded by exactly the same people - will never have a chance. Those 6 and 7 term diaper-wearing octogenarians are still fighting the Cold War in their advancing dementia as they personally profit from all manner of legal bribery including insider trading. And when they're done? Fat jobs on their benefactors payroll.
It's bait and switch (Obama) or misdirection (closed debates, no third parties) or outright fraud (Supreme Court denies recount, Ohio result manipulation), etc. it is a thoroughly and completely corrupted system from the top to the bottom.
^look what happened to JFK.
only way to fix politics is to remove the money...elections should be publicly funded...charge every american 5$ per year in election tax...thats alot of cash every 4 years...more than enough...overturn "citizens united"....or start really treating corps like people and execute them when they kill us with their toxic product...
"Speaking of BS, you are way too obsessed with the aesthetics of 60s modernist housing projects. I personally think that New Urbanism and the faux history stuff you adore is much more "mind numbing banal". What gets built today, shouldn't look like what was built in 1960s or the 1860s. It should be entirely new and specific to the needs of our time. "
davvid,
At least we have similar politics...I'm a sucker for getting along. As to the "needs of our time" we've been around this rodeo several times. That sounds like a marketing line to me. If I have a good hammer, or a nice sweater or am eating a great meal listening to nice music, I don't give a shit what time some butt head (not you) thinks they belong to. In fact, whatever I chose belongs to my time because I decide what I want (in real time), it's inescapable, even if morally corrupt;). The same goes for my clients who roughly are 4 trad for every 1 mod. Clearly there are infinite gradients of what trad or modern means, but you get the drift. Weirdly now I have two mod clients and it's a whole lot of fun simply because it's a change of pace, but I've never understood modern people worrying about where their choices lie in the zeitgeist spectrum. You want a baby, you want a career, you want to be a firefighter, shit...go ahead, that's what all us libs have fought for. Worrying about what something should look like is stupid if something works well or simply because one really likes a certain aesthetic. If we worried less about aesthetic decorum and more about human emotional needs, I wonder what this world would look like, but to each their rules of decorum.
Beta, the article says that the middle class-- not just the rich-- would benefit. Problems would likely linger for the urban poor— I guess the question is, what do you see as an effective fix?
Thayer,
" If I have a good hammer, or a nice sweater or am eating a great meal listening to nice music..." All of these objects and activities have changed and continue to change. Even things that appear to be constant through the ages have changed and will continue to change.
Even Elizabeth Warren has changed (she used to be a Republican).
Now, we (as designers/makers) can choose to own up to the change in the world and create architecture related to it, or we can choose to deemphasize the change or we can choose to completely pretend that the change never occurred (this is what faux historic architecture does, IMO). People and organizations always have their reasons for how they respond to change. That is sometimes where marketing comes into the picture.
Changes to the physical world, to fabrication technology, economics, to politics can always be observed visually. Even without the involvement of an artists or a designer, these phenomena have an aesthetic that emerges naturally. Designers (as creators of visible things) can choose to find inspiration in that aesthetic of change/agenda and highlight it. Or a designer can choose to repress that change and work conceal its aesthetic.
davvid,
I just don't have your world view that aesthetics can so easily be distilled from changes in fabrication technology et al. I also think the modernist aesthetic is historic at this point, so your criticism would be valid to many current modernist styles. If I build well today, it can be recycled tomorrow regardless of aesthetics, which is why I don't subscribe to the endless stylistic "upgrades" offered by the media and academia, but I don't begrudge them as long as I can make my bread.
Peace.
Jla-x, courts have found election taxes to be an unconstitutional barrier to voting rights. In the past, they were used as a barrier to prevent indigent blacks from voting.
Also, what are your thoughts on the ACLU's support of the Citizens United decision, and its opposition to any constitutional amendment with respect to corporate speech?
Chris,
I don't believe the concept of public is inherently reducible to data or a recalibration to either complicity or resistance. I think the point I was getting at, and believe very strongly in, is that the architect's role can no longer be purely in service to a singular client and in many case's the architect must become a savvier developer of projects, not for financial return (per se), but as a means of creating alternatives that meet larger demands. I think the work we were doing in AFHny was inherently a mode of this, to work with existing public entities (community groups, environmental activists, after school programs, public art centers) was to develop an alternative infrastructure that could provide alternatives that are financed in a manner outside of current privatized models of development. Sometimes this would require working with private forces/developers as it would become a means of leveraging an outcome....but inherently the work was not only in developing architecture, but also in developing fundraising and operations systems within these organizations so they would become stronger organizations along with providing architectural vision. I think that a model such as that one (it really was an experiment) is a means of raising our own awareness of how we interact with society, how we utilize resources, how we leverage design, and how we either resist or intensify existing modes of operation.
Jason, was only suggesting that is how Capital interpets the "public". what you are suggesting, if I continue in my more mechanical view of the social, an alternate filter for the flow of capital in which Architects help create this infrastructure that attempts to offer alternate modes for the re-distrubution of Capital.............my argument was more in the realm of space, form, and material..........to merge the two, the architect could approach projects in a manner to redirect the flow of Capital in a construction project, to find alternate materials relevant to perhaps a social cause that is indirectly tied to the material selection etc.....to bring in various social programs to somehow contribute to the execution and experience of the architecture. I guess I am leaning towards a NOT so directly social approach, one more based on practice and the production of design for construction. to extract qualities beyond the product could be done through direct public interaction I guess.........the original article suggests Architecture as a direct to tool of Capital, as if to flatten it into real estate, for this reason an AFH approach is a counter as it moves the Architecture out of real estate and into a more 'qualitative' existence realm......which makes me think of religious buildings and civic centers......i guess avoid the flattening into real estate by engaging the immediate public to he architecture?
divert the river.
Interesting piece in the WSJ: World Awash in too Much of Almost Everything.
Article is behind a paywall, some choice bits:
The global economy is awash as never before in commodities like oil, cotton and iron ore, but also with capital and labor—a glut that presents several challenges as policy makers struggle to stoke demand.
...
The current state of plenty is confounding on many fronts. The surfeit of commodities depresses prices and stokes concerns of deflation. Global wealth-estimated by Credit Suisse at around $263 trillion, more than double the $117 trillion in 2000-represents a vast supply of savings and capital, helping to hold down interest rates, undermining the power of monetary policy. And the surplus of workers depresses wages.
...
The classic notion is that you cannot have a condition of oversupply," said Daniel Alpert, an investment banker and author of a book, "The Age of Oversupply," on what all this abundance means. "The science of economics is all based on shortages."
...
Producers have their own share of the blame. In a lower commodity price environment, producers typically are reluctant to cut production in an effort to maintain their market shares.
In some cases, producers even increase their output to make up for the revenue losses due to lower prices, exacerbating the problem of oversupply.
"Generally, this creates a feedback cycle where prices fall further because of the supply glut," said Dane Davis, a commodity analyst with Barclays.
Alternative, In the future citizens united will be regarded as the final nail in the coffin. Money is not speech and corporations are not people who have the right to speech. I could care less what the aclu thinks or what the supreme court ruling was. A voting tax alone does not prevent anyone from voting, as it does not need to be a prerequisite to the right to vote any more than paying school taxes need to be a mandatory prerequiste to attending school. People will still maintain their right to vote whether or not they pay the tax, and a 5-10$ a year fee to income tax is hardly a burden on even to poorest americans.
I also feel that political parties should be abolished.
Take the coke vs pepsi labels off and let the people see the ingredients...what they are really made of...so they then weigh their choices
I mean, for the price of a happy meal we could solve alot of corruption
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