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

Send post as PDF to

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 …

Send post as PDF to