Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from last Thursday’s Part 1 .]

 

In Part 1 of our tour of 15 housing projects from hell, via the passionate posters at the funky Web site Oobject, we indicted the architects, led by Le Corbusier, for throwing up concrete stack after stack of monoliths. 

 

Can you too be an urban planner?

Just try these plans and specs

 

Yet we also have to fault Le Corbusier’s other weakness, their love of homogeneity and enforced order.  There’s something ominous in Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation – the habitation unit, even the name echoes THX 1138 – actually being built not in Paris but in Berlin:

 

Somehow, it just goes there, doesn’t it?

 

Because markets are messy, if you really want people to live in monoliths, you need a monolithic government, and it seems to me no surprise that Le Corbusier – for that matter, many urban planners and theorists of the ilk of Lewis Mumford  – gravitate toward strongly authoritarian governments who can use the power of eminent domain to level neighborhoods and erect nicely gridded towers:

 

5. Housing and Development Board Project, Singapore

 

Looks like early Pruitt-Igoe, doesn’t it?

 

Singapore’s housing projects represent where European modernism was in the 50s – still hopeful and still better than a low rise slum. Clearly, however, one day these will be terribly vertical slums.

 

Actually, it may not be, for two reasons, one visible and one invisible.

 

Visible.  That’s public transportation running alongside the property.  When people walk from their homes to transport, they become pedestrians and active residents – what Jane Jacobs called eyes on the street.  They become, in a word, neighbors.

 

Invisible.  Singapore’s rich.  The housing will be mixed-income or better.  The city can afford infrastructure and law enforcement. 

 

I think the authors are wrong.  This housing will do just fine.

 

6. Hotel Iveria, Georgia

 

Hive or Borg cube?

 

Although this is a hotel converted to housing it demonstrates perfectly how people will do anything to individualize an oppressive modernist space with no identity.

 

Except, folks, that I’m pretty confident the individualization was planned and permitted.  Primates mark our territory; we personalize our space.  Fear of modern anonymity is why we find so frightening the Borg cube.

 

Will you be assimilated?

 

7. Badly Built Student Housing, Poland

 

Where’s the superintendent?

 

The origins of modernism were a reaction by the elite that the masses could afford decorative styles. The Barcelona Pavilion was built with expensive Onyx, Travertine and Stainless Steel. Modernism for the masses had neither the luxury of decoration or materials. This unbelievably badly built student housing block in Poland demonstrates the point perfectly.

 

True enough – I certainly will not quarrel with criticizing shoddy construction or second-rate materials on the mistaken theory that ‘those’ people‘ don’t need anything better – but to me the cause is simpler.  This property was not maintained.  And why not?  Lack of funding.  Communism never solved the problem of maintenance, which is why it lasted little longer than the lifespan of its first-generation oligarchs and their labor-conscripted edifices.  When they died, their buildings died with them. 

 

8. Coney Island Housing Projects

 

Coney Island

 

The Soviet style blocks with predominantly Russian inhabitants face away from the sea front.

 

Okay, I get it – but when it was built, the property housed Irish and Italians and Puerto Ricans.

 

There is architecture which ignores its context in the extreme, a sad situation at best and a crime when by the sea.

 

Calling this a crime dumbs down criminality into meaninglessness.  Further, to indict the property because it doesn’t maximize the sea views ignores the great location, something the poor are all too often denied.  Nor is it apparent that the sea is ignored, since by orienting the building this way, two long sides and one short one have views of the beach, leaving only one short side to face landward. 

 

Criticizing this property is an absurd over-reach.

 

9. Hong Kong Owner Occupied Housing Blocks

 

Wondering about the World Inside?

 

Anyone who has been to Hong Kong will have been, stunned, depressed to see these anonymous gigantic housing blocks.

 

Until you get inside, which are explosions of life.

 

The amazing thing is that these are owner-occupied rather than social housing.

 

Density, Oobjects authors, density.  If we want to live in tightly constrained urban environment, we must go up, and in going up, we create a sameness of some exteriors.  Yet no one would call Midtown Manhattan or the Upper East Side co-ops a dreary gray jungle, not once you’ve made it past the doormen into the flats and penthouses.

 

10. Red Road Flats, Glasgow

 

Ever seen Trainspotting?

 

The tenements of Glasgow epitomized urban squalor and modernism was a chance to scrub the dirt of Glasgow clean.

 

Scrubbing destroys the urban cryptobiotica – the people and businesses and culture that populate and hold together slums, and that in my view eventually grow them into communities.

 

“Choose life”

 

The crime is not so much in the building of new but in the tearing down of what is, and then its transplantation, as if pureed into undifferentiated gray goo, into an underfunded high-rise:

 

With broken elevators and desolate stairways, the view over the nearby Scottish countryside is as cruel as Marin from Alcatraz. Nothing quite shows the insanity of this scheme than the green surrounding it.

 

Again, as with Pruitt-Igoe, the fault is less in the building and in the under-maintenance, and for that we must blame not the architects (this time) but the government.

 

Speaking of government, what happens when the workers control the means of production?

 

11. Workers Housing Ukraine

 

Hey, are those real trees, or fake trees?

 

This image is from a postcard, proudly displaying the neat rows of workers houses as tidy and democratic.

 

Actually, not democratic at all.  Le Corbusier and his friends disliked democracy; at best they wrinkled their aquiline noses at the inefficiency and foolishness of the mob, at worst they wanted to lift from the masses the necessity for having to make decision – by making those decisions for them.  Autocratic, not democratic, is what those towers signify.

 

Everyone knows how these spaces deteriorate, with no sense of ownership or place.

 

Sorry gentlemen, if all you can produce is a half-century-old postcard that in fact shows the opposite of what you’re claiming it is, this indictment is thrown out of court for lack of evidence.

 

And take your pixels with you!

 

12. Tulou affordable housing project in China

 

Can you say, parking garage?

 

An innovative structure and a break from the mold, but nevertheless an arrogant architectural one-liner as a repository for people, that is reminiscent of a giant washing machine.

 

Aside from having a visceral reaction that this is a parking garage suitable for cars to spiral up and down, not a housing property, I have throughout my career have had terrible, absolutely terrible, results from enclosed-courtyard buildings.  The central space always becomes a performance arena, a convenient illegal open-air market, a redoubt for crime – everything but the happy safe playground the architects envisioned.  Interior courtyards work in places, like the Pentagon, where access is limited to people who have a long-term commitment and where the managers can enforce behavioral codes and keep the space clean and maintained.  In my experience, they fail in apartment blocks.

 

A Chinese architectural laundry.

 

You making fun of me?

 

I didn’t write that, they did!

 

13. Wohnpark Alt-Erlaa, Vienna

 

Skateboard ramps or jet noise baffles?  You decide!

 

This Vienna housing estate is often commended, with its terraced gardens that swoop to earth and Logan’s Run appearance. Ultimately, however, it entirely ignores the architecture of a city which gave birth to a sensible approach to modernism. The result is a blot on the landscape.

 

Everybody’s a critic.  Sorry, I can’t agree with this one; it blends into and rises above the human-style walkable streetscape, and it undoubtedly achieves much higher density than could be accomplished without going up. 

 

Finally, we will finish with two extremes:

 

14. Corbusier’s Criminally Insane Plan Voisin

 

Plan Voisin, Paris: thank God the architects weren’t in charge

 

The most grandiose of visions:

 

Jeanneret proposed razing the organic street pattern of the entire Marais district in Paris and replacing it with a half baked neo-fascist masterplan, the product of excessive ego.

 

It’s clearly the most Fascist, in the sense of binding together people at the expense of their individuality, in the manner of the original Roman fasces (from which the name Fascist derives), a bundle of sticks tied together into a club that holds and wields an ax.

 

Maybe you can be one of us?  The fasces

 

The fact that he was deadly serious almost entirely negates the undoubted talents that he possessed.

 

Fortunately, the fact that Plan Voisin never remotely got started is some small consolation, although as we’ve seen, it was echoed in Cabrini-Green and in similar public-housing urban renewal projects around the world, some few of which still have yet to be demolished.

 

And now, the piece de resistance, the most petty:

 

15. Glenkerry House, London

 

Want to live in the concrete ivory tower?

 

The architect of this housing scheme, Erno Goldfinger, is one of Britain’s most celebrated modernists and the model [vengeful namesake – Ed.] for a James Bond villain, having lived opposite Ian Fleming, who hated him.

 

The origin of NIMBYism?  Goldfinger’s imposition on Fleming’s Hampstead

 

Nancy and I have visited Goldfinger’s Notting Hill House (1-3 Willow Road), which is now owned by the National Trust.

 

His buildings are undoubtedly dramatic and sculptural, but when Architects brag about how many people want to live in the iconic Trellic Tower, this has more to do with the proximity of Notting Hill than an affection for bush-hammered concrete.

 

If you weren’t drawn by the location, would you want to live here?

 

Only a  brainless mannequin would question that

 

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