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A decade ago the only way to secure a bed in Sydney’s brutalist icon, the Sirius building, was a proven need and time on the social housing waitlist. Now the price of admission starts at $1.55m – for a studio apartment. [...]
Advocates who fought to save the building from the wrecking balls and from being sold see it now as the pinnacle of privatisation that failed the state’s most vulnerable.
— The Guardian
The fate of Sydney’s martyred Rocks mirrors closely that of London’s Trelick and Balfron Towers, and the future of Singapore’s once caste-busting social housing system. As of our last reporting, the brutalist landmark has (finally, and forever) been saved from the wrecking ball — only... View full entry
Even though record prices on the secondary market have heightened anxiety about the rising costs of living in Singapore, one of the world’s most expensive cities, public housing remains broadly affordable — at least for those who qualify for government subsidies to buy units.
Today, close to 80 percent of Singapore’s residents live in public housing, and about 90 percent of the units are owned on a 99-year lease.
— The New York Times
The architect of Singapore’s successful “social engineering” campaign after 1965, Liu Thai Ker, is a Malaysian-born Yale graduate and former understudy of I.M. Pei, who told the New York Times recently that he was “sad” to see the city-state’s current market dynamics affecting some of... View full entry
Studio Libeskind has inaugurated its new social housing development in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, called The Atrium at Sumner, after a three-year, $132 million construction. The 11-story, 132,418-square-foot development yields 190 total units, with an 8,309-square-foot community space located on the... View full entry
Cobe is joining fellow Danish architecture firms Dorte Mandrup, Tegnestuen Vandkunsten, and JAJA, alongside Sweco engineers, to deliver a new mixed-use residential district in Copenhagen’s South Harbor. The one-million-square-foot design is set to include 1,000 new units of housing (25% of which... View full entry
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... View full entry
Jerome Markson, the 2022 RAIC Gold Medalist and modern social housing pioneer whose influence was felt widely across Canada, died in Toronto on Saturday, November 18, The Globe and Mail reported. He was 94 years old. Markson will be remembered as a progressive architect who affected the... View full entry
German company PERI 3D Construction is collaborating with construction printer manufacturer COBOD on what the team describes as the “first 3D printed social housing apartment building in Germany and Europe.” The three-floor building will contain six apartment units ranging from 670 to... View full entry
A pair of new interventions commissioned for East London’s Becontree Estate have debuted this summer as an artistic effort to provide space for residents of the historic community that was at one time considered to be the largest social housing development in the western world. The first, spread... View full entry
Noted French modernist and social housing pioneer Renée Gailhoustet passed away on January 4th at her home outside of Paris, the nation’s largest newspaper, Le Monde, reported earlier on Tuesday. Known for creating the master plan for Ivry-sur-Seine; the 1972 Cité Spinoza housing complex... View full entry
Paris’ PietriArchitectes has shared images of their new 15-unit social housing development in the northern suburb of Aubervilliers. Completed towards the end of last year, 36 Ferragus is the key cog in a requalification operation for the city’s center. Currently, about two-thirds of... View full entry
New legislation aimed at enacting a countrywide mandate for the use of passive house design standards in all new housing developments is gaining traction in Scotland after Labour MSP Alex Rowley’s bill was endorsed by the national government earlier this month. The new Domestic Building... View full entry
There is no housing shortage. There are over 400,000 empty homes in the UK, and about 200,000 homeless people. The vast majority of empty homes are in parts of the country which have become depopulated because of economic decline – in the Midlands, the north, and coastal cities. So the solution to the housing crisis isn’t building tons of homes. It’s about reviving the economy in those places, launching a massive retrofit campaign, and bringing people back.” — The Guardian
“We could end the housing crisis overnight, if we wanted to,” Barber told Oliver Wainwright in a recent interview, referring to the private grab on council housing that has developed unabated since the Thatcher administration's Right-to-Buy laws came into effect in 1980. “We should... View full entry
MVRDV has shared details on its just-completed Gaîté Montparnasse block renovation in the French capital. The project transformed Pierre Dufau’s once iconic 1974 Ilôt Vandamme design into a more welcoming mixed-use site just south of the Tour Montparnasse facing Avenue du Maine. “This piece... View full entry
Brooks + Scarpa has released images of their recently-completed Rose Apartments complex, a community housing initiative for formerly homeless teenage youths transitioning into adulthood in Venice, Los Angeles. The 20,900-square-foot, four-story design includes some 35 units of highly affordable... View full entry
A public rebuke from the UK-based activist group Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) has triggered an enlivened debate online around greenwashing and the 2022 RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist after the initial group of projects was revealed last week. Two London area residential projects... View full entry
