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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Despite the title of this list, several of these housing projects were designed by some of the world’s most famous architects and lauded at the time. The undeniable squalor of 19th Century slums combined with modernism to produce and attempt to clean things up and create a crystalline utopia. The end result was often an anti-septic vision of hell, a place devoid of organic spaces and evolved social interaction.

Le Corbusier, nee Charles-Edouard Jenneret-Gris

Through this review of real and alleged atrocities against urban living will run themes of modern architecture and its most famous (and, alas, most influential) proponent Le Corbusier.  Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, like Madonna, Prince, and Le Notre he adopted a nom de guerre, Le Corbusier.  Thus reborn, he set out to remake the world of our inner lives by changing the world of our outer spaces.

Hazard a guess why he named himself ‘the nostril’?

In 1933, aboard a barge sailing from Marseilles to Athens, Le Corbusier and many fellow modernist architects convened and founded:

The Congres International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) was enormously influential on the mid-century visions of urban planning, particularly at the level of dense multifamily housing.

If we design the buildings, ran the reasoning, why not design the whole city?

Here the group discussed concentrated on principles of “The Functional City”, which broadened CIAM’s scope from architecture into urban planning. Based on an analysis of thirty-three cities, CIAM proposed that the social problems faced by cities could be resolved by [1] strict functional segregation, and [2] the distribution of the population into tall apartment blocks at widely spaced intervals.

Although arrogant nonsense, it helped (grotesque thought) that the world was then distracted, first by a global depression that led to an infatuation with the ‘efficiency’ of Fascism (the Lewis Mumford vision) –

[Le Corbusier] drifted into a fascist-like philosophy and his and similar authoritarian architecture is often seen as the backdrop for fascist political thinking.

– and then by its bastard offspring a global war, leaving the intellectual field empty for Le Corbusier, who sat out the war from the comfortable perch of Switzerland:

Have we got our relative importance clear, common man?

These proceedings went unpublished from 1933 until 1942, when Le Corbusier, acting alone, published them in heavily edited form as the “Athens Charter.”

It took thirty years before the New Urbanists, led by feisty squat cackling Jane Jacobs, were able to refute such arrogant nonsense with common sense, and in the meantime, Le Corbusier and his friends held sway, with postwar urban planners throwing up block after block of Brutalist high-rises that nobody actually wanted to live in.

Its principal feature is de-humanizing alienation. Vote for your worst.

1. Mass Housing in Ixtapaluca, Mexico

Ixtapaluca, Mexico

The problem with dull alienating social housing has nothing to do with modernism per se, but to do with mindless design. This scheme uses non-modernist styles but the result is terrifyingly soul-less like so many McMansion developments.

As someone who’s visited many slums throughout the global south, studied them extensively, and systematically, and worked on slum upgrading around the world, I disagree with this view.  Ixtapaluca has to be seen as embryo housing and the subdivision as a neighborhood in development no different from Levittown 1949 or Daly City 1965.  While I don’t like the monomania for housing rather than retail or commercial, come back in five years and see how many shops and work-at-home businesses have sprung up, how much home improvement has taken place, and how the subdivision has become part of the formal city.  The Oobject authors are wrong about this one.

2. Cabrini Green, a roach infested slum in a wealthy neighborhood, Chicago

Cabrini Green, Chicago: RIP

About Chicago’s Cabrini Green, however, neither I nor anybody else will ever have much good to say;

Badly designed, badly located, overly dense, excluded from the remaining city, it was built to shoebox ‘those’ people out of sight, out of mind, out of our city. 

Across the expressway, visible yet inaccessible**

Add to that management by the Chicago Housing Authority – for decades among the nation’s worst – and a financing structure that was and is a dependency trap.

At one point the garbage piled up the blocked chutes to the 15th floor and rat and roach infestations were common.

No different from the slums inside the Paris banlieuex, where l’horloge orange turned the city of light into a city of flames.

The thing that differentiated Cabrini Green from other failed projects, however, was its location in a relatively wealthy part of Chicago.

The authors are wrong to call Cabrini-Green’s neighborhood wealthy.  It wasn’t.  Forty years of increasing urbanization have improved the neighborhood, and that is always a good thing, but when Cabrini-Green was built, the neighborhood chosen, Chicago’s North Side (west of the expensive gold coast neighborhood)*, was in decline, so much that the University of Chicago built a little fortified village around itself, paying substantial private-security costs to protect the students from the hordes just over the expressway.

Isolated, underfunded, financially infeasible, Cabrini-Green was doomed to fail.

As, we will see, were so many other public housing properties.  Brutalist monolithic isolated communities and financial insolvency went together hand in hand.

Which dynamic completely explains the next celebrated implosion, perhaps the most famous failure of all:

3. Pruitt Igoe

Pruitt Igoe, St. Louis: RIP

For all its pretense at modernism, the fact that the Pruitt Igoe was built in two complexes, one for white people and one for black, speaks volumes of its primitive ideology.

Actually, I wouldn’t condemn Pruitt-Igoe for that, because it was of its time, the mid-1950’s.  Many other properties before, and others for over a decade thereafter, were similarly segregated, and while the segregation was abhorrent, other properties nevertheless survived it, later being successfully integrated.  Their physical structures – like Columbia Point in Boston – were able to overcome a racist heritage even as America overcomes ours.

When the Pruitt Igoe was demolished, Charles Jencks declared it as the death of modernism.

Reports of modernism’s death, however, were greatly exaggerated.

“Shut up and write a line-o-type about losing money on new technology, okay?”

Pruitt-Igoe’s legendary both in architecture and in my own past, because I remember its demolition from my callow college days.  Unlike Cabrini-Green, it was not built-to-fail; rather, it was built in genuine hope of succeeding:

Does this look like a slum to you?

Pruitt-Igoe, 1956

Pruitt-Igoe died of social isolation – wrong side of the expressway, just like Cabrini-Green – income concentration, and the fundamentally flawed public housing dependency schema. 

Without maintenance money, anything can look like this: Pruitt-Igoe

A property that needed to go somewhere to die, in only 17 years, it went from completion to demolition.

We had to destroy the buildings to save the community

The demolition sequence itself features in the movie, Koyaanisqatsi.

While we’re on the subject of Paris, consider:

4. Aillaud Towers, Nanterre Paris

Are you trying to look like a termite mound?

Aillaud in Paris

For that matter, are you trying to look like public housing?

The word suburb, ‘banlieue’, conjures up something very different in France to the US. Burning cars and desolate tower blocks, rather than SUVs and low-rise strip malls.

As I’ve previously posted, European cities invert the normal US-style Greenfield development.  The poor are on the outside, looking in.

These superficially rather interesting looking towers are visible from Paris’ financial district, La Defense, and are a reminder of what lies outside of the Peripherique.

By now readers will have noticed the strong correlation.  When housing fails, it’s not just what was built, but where it was built.  What used to be the wrong side of the tracks, is now the wrong side of the expressway.

So we can’t blame just the architects; someone else is blameworthy as well.

[Continued on Monday, August 3, in Part 2.]

Ed – Thank you for pointing out the errors in this article, they have been amended:

* Corrected: Original said “Chicago’s North Side”.  

** Corrected: Image with the caption “Across the expressway, visible yet inaccessible” showed the now demolished Robert Taylor homes.

Note: We presume that photos from second-hand sources are accurate, but they’re not always …

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Though housing is the output of an enormously complex, ever-changing, hugely capitalized value chain, unlike other abstract capital-markets products like Credit Default Swaps, we all connect to it because we live in its results, and we all care about it because the equity in our owned homes drives our new business formation, our self-esteem, our family formation – you name a major life milestone and it is likely accompanied by a change in housing configuration or tenure, and hence in housing finance.

In that spirit, we looked in May at three very micro-level dramas, starting with that invisible informality, the in-law apartment, via Outlaw in-laws: Part 1, symbiotic replication, Part 2, creeping densification, and Part 3, quiet amnesty:

Ma, maybe you should have your own entrance?

“When in-law apartments are outlawed, only outlaw in-laws will have apartments.”

– Bumper sticker from the National Relatives Accommodation Association (NRAA)

Despite all the emphasis we bestow on the visible and regulated forms of affordable housing – LIHTC, HUD Section 8, even inclusionary zoning – there are more forms of invisible affordable housing than are dreamt of in the typical policy maker’s philosophy.

Spot the affordable housing?

To mobile homes and triple-deckers we must add the modest creature with the unlovely name of accessory dwelling unit (ADU), more commonly known as the ‘in-law apartment,’ and featured in a bland but nevertheless thought-provoking little briefing primer, Accessory Dwelling Units: Case Study, prepared for HUD’s Office of Policy Development & Research by Sage Computing [Why them? No particular expertise in housing. – Ed.].

Even more fundamental than expanding or subdividing a house is building it or tearing it down, and in both cases the production paradox applies – whatever you want to do, your neighbors will oppose it.

We’re against it! … What are you proposing?

In England you can’t built it up, as we saw with the Travellers, who are blatantly exploiting British government’s inability to move quickly, in Whose side are you on? Part 1, the invasion, and Part 2, choose your side:

The Daily Mail provides a link to a previous article showing exactly the same tactics:

A Daily Mail photograph of Crays Hill in Essex, a Travellers’ community

Travellers tarmac a new camp in a bank holiday weekend as helpless villagers watch

Marching to the faster-than-government beat of their own drummer, the Travellers were determined to finish all their structures before the opening of business Tuesday morning.

Farm worker Matthew Davies, who lives near the site, said: ‘They changed what was a pretty meadow into a building site overnight. Who knows what it will look like a few days down the line?’

It’ll look like a community of people – informal, unzoned, but not unplanned.

Local councillor Len Lawton said: ‘Villagers were told the field’s owners only wanted to build temporary accommodation for horses.’

Horses yes, people no? Is something out of whack here?

‘When the owners started making small engineering changes earlier this year, such as laying pipes, the council reminded them that major building work required planning permission.’

That shivered their timbers.

Not another council reminder!

No, no, shooting an elephant, not an elephant shooting!

In America you can’t tear it down, as newly liver-transplanted Steve Jobs found out in Shooting a white elephant: Part 1, the elephant, Part 2, the blunderbuss, and Part 3, the human shields:

After this exhaustive exercise in proving the blindingly obvious, the Environmental Impact Report found that:

Things physically feasible cost lots more money

Things that didn’t cost more money neither

Built a new house nor

Stopped the current house from crumbling.

Ladies and gentlemen of the electronic Town Council, you have now heard the staff’s report.

How would you vote?

Remember, then Friends of the Jackling House will be watching:

On May 12, 2009, the Woodside Town Council may vote to wiggle around a string of Court rulings AGAINST granting demolition of this historic mansion. There is still no adequate evidence to grant demolition.

Before you vote, let me add the most ironic part:

It is important to point out that in acting on this application, the Town Council’s authority is limited. The Council may approve or deny the demolition permit. The Council does not have authority to direct that one of the restoration alternatives described below be implemented.

Because directing such an action would be equivalent to a taking, and that would cost the town a lot of money.

I wonder, did Mr. Jobs realize that if he submitted plans for a big new house, such a projection might cost a high enough figure that it would make salvaging the Jackling house economically feasible? Might he have gamed the new-house price down?

Council members asked why cost estimates for renovation of the Jackling House appeared so high, while projected costs for a proposed new house for Mr. Jobs appeared preposterously low. Will there really be very low-grade surfaces in the new master bathroom? many wondered in disbelief.

Now you see it …

Remember, the demolition approval has nothing to do with the application for a new house. Mr. Jobs could then change his mind.

… Now you don’t

It’s my mansion and will die if I want it to

Die if I want it to.

Die if I want it to.

The end?

Housing affects health, both mental and physical, as we saw in Check out of the roach motel

Asthma is an urban disease, possibly affecting as many as one in four urban children, a much higher toxicology rate than in rural areas.  So naturally we deduce that something about urban buildings triggers asthmatic responses – but the causes have been much debated until a recent study fingers a likely culprit:

Hiding in plain sight?

During May, it was our great privilege at AHI to be favored with two of the three parts of Sherlock Holmes’s long-lost and definitive Socratic dialogs on What makes a good consultant? Rules of engagement, Part 1a, Part 1b, and Part 1c, throughout which Holmes first established that though the consultant may be expert, the client is the decider:

A5. Never makes the client’s choice for the client

Although Holmes never truckled at setting himself up as judge and jury where John law was concerned, he had no delusions of grandeur concerning his clients.

“Well, it is not for me to judge you,” said Holmes as the old man signed the statement which had been drawn out. “I pray that we may never be exposed to such a temptation.”
The Boscombe Valley Mystery

He once said to me, in the course of the case of the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant, of whose particulars we were sworn to secrecy, that “a client, Watson, is owed our energy, our insights, and our wholehearted commitment to her problem – but neither our reproof nor our foreclosing her options. No client thanks us for superseding her right to choose for herself.”

The first thing I knew about it was when I saw you two gentlemen driving back in her dog-cart.”

“And I had my doubts about you gentlemen, I should add.”

Holmes rose and tossed the end of his cigarette into the grate. “I think, Watson, that in your medical capacity, you might wait upon Miss Smith and tell her that if she is sufficiently recovered, we shall be happy to escort her to her mother’s home. If she is not quite convalescent, you will find that a hint that we were about to telegraph to a young electrician in the Midlands would probably complete the cure.”
The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist

More truths will be revealed in due course

Good God, Holmes, they’ve posted your essay without paying for it

Later that month we offered the world the second volume, What makes a good consultant? Services and activities, Part 2a, and Part 2b:

B1. Protects his client’s interests

Clients, he once told me with great exasperation, have the annoying habit of acting despite our advice. Then he chuckled.

I heard a sharp rustle, the night air blew into the heated room, and the avenger was gone.

On occasion those ruined by evildoers received vengeance.

If they did not, if they always acted wisely, why then there would be no clients for me, no emerald stick pins, no continuing stream of challenges.

When given the opportunity to do the right thing, he acted:

Hardly had the woman rushed from the room when Holmes, with swift, silent steps, was over at the other door. He turned the key in the lock. At the same instant we heard voices in the house and the sound of hurrying feet. The revolver shots had roused the household. With perfect coolness Holmes slipped across to the safe, filled his two arms with bundles of letters, and poured them all into the fire. Again and again he did it, until the safe was empty.

The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton

When I later asked Holmes why he had done this, at some risk to ourselves, he looked at me as if I were daft, and said merely, Common decency warrants no surcharge.

Common decency warrants no surcharge

New York and Boston are an endless source of entertaining housing or real estate stories:

Good source of baseball stories, too!

– as we saw in Spot the culprit, and Better dead than read?:

As the unionized employees of the Boston Globe debate among themselves whether they will accede to the $20 million in annual wage cuts demanded by their owner, the New York Times Company, they might do well to ponder a grim real estate reality, as presented with clinical dispassion by the Boston Business Journal:

The Boston Globe might be worth more dead than alive to the New York Times Company.

A dismantling of the Globe’s assets could yield roughly $85 million.

Worth 85x that dead?

One who was worth much more alive regrettably died: Jack Kemp, 1935-2009:

Kemp was, I think, the first American who rode sports success into politics. Nowadays we think nothing of having Jim Bunning in the Senate, or Steve Largent and J. C. Watts in the House – back in 1971, for a football to win elective office was either a joke or a novelty (and, as Jesse The Brain Ventura later showed us in Minnesota, sometimes too much a novelty) – but his real success, at least in housing, was his single term as HUD Secretary under President Bush 41.

“Pro football gave me a good perspective. When I entered the political arena, I had already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded, and hung in effigy.” – Jack Kemp, 1996

Not to mention, “chewed out by the best”

Kemp’s predecessor was the narcoleptic Samuel Pierce, on whose soap-opera-fueled watch HUD experienced its worst scandals ever (and that is saying something), and he entered the building, under Pierce’s tenure as a place for being quietly irrelevant, in much the manner of the Tasmanian Devil in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He was a whirlwind of ideas, including:

1. Reorientation of public housing toward residents as principal customers.

2. Lobbying for an American version of UK stock transfer. Kemp promoted Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE), under which public housing would be sold to tenants. (Congress appropriated only a tenth of what he sought.)

3. Creation of Empowerment Zones.

4. Welfare reform with a temporary rent-increase freeze for people who get jobs, to get them out of the means-testing poverty trap.

Too bad more of them weren’t implemented consistently or sufficiently.

I’ve still got ideas!

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Once before, I posted seriously that you are what you live in:

I has a haddock

In Jungian dream interpretation, the house is the self:

A house in a dream generally speaks of one’s psychological house, the house of the “soul.” We often see different homes that we’ve lived in. Ask yourself, if the home in your dream is a childhood home, or a current home. Each of these may have different meaning that relate to an overall sense of what you were like or struggling with at that time.

Why do you have these fantasies of living in a shoe?

Perhaps that’s because the house is a shell around our selves, just as our skull is a shell around our minds. Certainly our childhood residence imprints itself indelibly on our minds – we learn about the universe as the world outside our front door, and within our house – be it single-family, condo, apartment, or shared – is the space that defines our family.

If so, then the individuals featured in this humorous rogue’s gallery listing from Web Urbanist are in serious trouble:

Top 15 Most Amazing Houses in the World

Written by Steph on December 9th, 2008 – Topics: Architecture, Travel, Urban

Little boxes on the hillside aren’t for everyone.

They’re identical … until the people move in (photo credit Oscar Ruiz)

While some people might be content with a cookie-cutter home in a bland suburban neighborhood, others create truly one-of-a-kind homes with incredibly imaginative shapes and materials. In addition to the 70 amazing houses around the world that we’ve featured before, here are 15 jaw-dropping examples of architecture from a decaying wooden skyscraper in Russia to a mushroom-shaped home in Cincinnati that looks like it was custom-made for Dr. Seuss.

There’s really not too much to say about these, except to present them:

Bart Prince House – Albuquerque, New Mexico
(images via: BartPrince.com)

Architect Bart Prince is renowned for his incredibly creative approach to designing structures. The homes he has created look nothing like the boxy houses you and I live in; they’re quirky, they’re organic, and they’re most definitely one-of-a-kind. Prince says his designs start from the inside out, and that every home he builds has an idea behind it.

Pictured are Prince’s own home in Albuquerque (top) and the Seymour residence in Los Altos, California.

Didn’t that thing eat Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black?

Oh, did I just step on your relative?

Space House – Signal Mountain, Tennessee
(image via: Coast to Coast AM)

The ‘Space House’ in Signal Mountain, Tennessee was built by Curtis King and his sons in the 1970s and is quite a draw for curiosity seekers in the area, who have been filing by and taking photos for decades. Six concrete support pillars look like landing gear beneath the main part of the building. The Space House sold on the auction block in March 2008 but the buyer defaulted, so it’s being offered for “whatever the public is willing to pay” on December 14th.

Previously owned by Gidney and Cloyd?

You mean you’re homeless now?

Inversion House – Houston, Texas (images via: Flickr user Kevin O’Mara)

When two old studio buildings owned by The Art League in Houston were set to be demolished, they decided to take the opportunity to turn them into a temporary art installation. Artists Dan Havel and Dean Ruck sculpturally altered the two buildings, peeling off the exterior siding of the front building to simulate the appearance of a funnel-like vortex. The opening was actually a tiny hallway (only kids could fit through it) that passed through the two structures and emptied out into an adjacent courtyard.

Made by the giant sucking sound of jobs moving to Mexico?

And speaking of giant sucking sounds …

Toilet-Shaped House – Suweon, South Korea (images via: Reuters)

The world’s one and only toilet-shaped house was built to mark the launch of the World Toilet Association, a campaign for more sanitary restrooms worldwide. Sim Jae-Duck, nicknamed “Mayor Toilet”, had the 4,508-square-foot concrete and glass structure built in his native city of Suweon, South Korea. At the center of the home is a glass-walled “showcase loo” that produces mist to make users feel more secure. Sim, who was born into a toilet and has made clean restrooms his life’s work, now lives in the home.

This is the first of several, houses where the building configuration is intended as an explicit political or social statement, proving that not only do people use houses to cocoon themselves, but also to display their individuality. Improvability is a fundamental attribute of true homeownership, and just as tattoos and piercings are an assertion of self – it’s my body and I’ll decorate or mutilate it as I choose – so is the housing configuration an assertion of ownership over a space. This is where I live, and I state who I am by what I present.

When we said we wanted the walls flush, perhaps you misunderstood …

Mushroom House – Cincinnati, Ohio (images via: Agility Nut)

Architect Terry Brown created this much-maligned ‘mushroom house’, an unusual piece of architecture situated in a rather upscale area of Cincinnati. Brown’s architectural style developed when he began experimenting with materials like wood, colored glass, shell, ceramics and various metals to create irregular shapes that mimic those found in nature.  A professor of architecture and interior design at the University of Cincinnati, Brown frequently had to defend the unique design of the house against complaints by neighbors before passing away in 2008.

This is what we meant when we talked about houses springing up overnight …

Floating House – Ukraine (images via: Aphasia Design)

An optical illusion? Trick of Photoshop? Nobody really seems to know much about this supposed ‘floating barn’ which was reportedly located in Ukraine and may or may not still be standing. Cantilevered barns do exist – mostly in the Appalachian region of the United States – but usually aren’t quite this dramatic looking. Real or fake, it’s certainly pretty striking.

Imported straight from Laputa!

Wooden Skyscraper – Arkhangelsk, Russia (images via: The Telegraph + English Russia)

Nikolai Sutyagin, a former gangster, began building this ‘wooden skyscraper’ in Arkhangelsk, Russia with the intention of it being only a two-story building. But, a trip to see wooden houses in Japan and Norway convinced him that he hadn’t used roof space efficiently enough, so he kept building. “First I added three floors but then the house looked ungainly, like a mushroom,” he said. “So I added another and it still didn’t look right so I kept going. What you see today is a happy accident.”

Self-building is remarkably common throughout the world. The famous San Jose Winchester Mystery House of roughly 160 rooms was begun in 1884 by a wealthy widow, who never stopped extending and improving it until she died.

More than likely, she was obsessive-compulsive, as the house has neither rhyme nor reason, with among other things stairs to the ceiling:

And stairs to nowhere:

Building can be impoverishing:

The multimillionaire became a pauper after his possessions were destroyed during a stint in prison, and the house is now decaying around him, but he still lives in the bottom floor with his wife.

I may be cash-poor, but I’m house rich!

The Upside-Down House – Szymbark, Poland
(images via: Fresh Home)

Polish businessman and philanthropist Daniel Czapiewski built The Upside Down House as a statement about the Communist era and the end of the world.

Another example, like the toilet house, of using the building as a visible expression of a political view.

It took 114 days to build because the workers were so disoriented by the angles of the walls. It certainly attracts its fair share of tourists to the tiny village of Szymbark, who often become dizzy and ‘seasick’ after just a few moments inside.

We are so used to right angles representing horizontal and vertical that when we are encased in a titled environment, our brains seek to rewire the neurological impulses coming from our eyes and inner ears to make things align. As a kid, I remember visiting a tilted house where water appeared to run uphill, an illusion that never fails to draw attention.

Which brings me, in a slightly serious way, back to the original point: we are what we live in, and what home we inhabit in some way outwardly expresses ourselves and inwardly defines how we see ourselves. As I wrote in the original post:

Charles Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn’t apply to the poor. When we’re poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated.

My family never owned a new car. Not for me the 00000 odometer. It was always used cars of one sort or another – always bought cheap, always driven until they died underneath us.

Ours always had big numbers on it

[Snip]

Count me among those who think Karelis is on to something – and if you’re going to change something to help change people’s poverty, it starts with housing.

You are what you live in.

Change your housing, change your self

And they’re all made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same?

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