It wasn’t a visual spectacle, but it was handsome and dignified, standing out with its prefab metal facade not just in a neighborhood of empty lots, aging apartment blocks and derelict rail tracks but also against a backdrop of dreary, bare-bones affordable housing developments all across the city.
Most important, its goal was larger than itself: to reimagine subsidized housing for a new century. I promised in that column to report back on whether it succeeded.
Did it?
— The New York Times
The Via Verde redux is an interesting return to Kimmelman's very first Times column. He wrote the housing scheme’s developer Phipps “knows what it’s doing.”
Whatever is working has got to be scaled up and replicated rather quickly. As he points out, both the city and New York State failed to adequately fund and approve new housing starts to enter the construction pipeline in 2023 despite a present need for approximately 50,000 new units annually.
Kimmelman, whose personal mission to raise housing standards for New Yorkers is well known, is occasionally charged with promotionalism for writing such pieces. (It's worth noting that this is now the critic's second review of a completed Dattner project in as many years.)
1 Comment
Kimmelman has been milking that one review for ten years. His entire shtick is to have one building serve as a political example for all other cases but that's not how architecture works. Every building is a different situation.
In this case, it show how expensive it is to build anything in NYC. This project, with above average design quality, was a feeding frenzy for NY bureaucrats, coming in at over $100 million. But good design has little to do with cost.
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