December 07, 2004

• An interesting quote from Minoru Yamasaki: "I never thought people were that destructive. As an architect, I doubt if I would think about it now. I suppose we should have quit the job. It's a job I wish I hadn't done."
• What a complete fuckup from beginning to end. Stupidly, a model of design for apartment complexes throughout the 'West' for years. I recall similar designs, oppressive & depressing, in the UK, havens for ugliness in all forms.
• It put me in mind of the work of Colin Ward - I remeber reading his book A Child in the City. he was an anarchist and an architect/planner, and one of the pioneer advocates of people-centred planning in the UK. I guess comments that start with 'I never thought people..' make me want to ask - 'Well, did you try to find out what sort of place they'd like to live in?' Physical environments are so crucial to the well-being or otherwise of communities that surely extensive consultation is the best way. Mind you, the experience of the Byker Wall in north-east England shows that's not necessarily a panacea.
• That reminds me of the horrible housing development in Minneapolis which everyone used to call "The slums in the sky". It was a shudderingly bad experiment which still stands AFAIK.
• The median annual income of the project's 2,100 families is only $2,300, and more than half are receiving welfare payments. Of the 10,736 individuals living there, 98 per cent of whom are Negro, there are only 990 adult males. Missouri law prohibits mothers from receiving public assistance for their children if the father lives at home, and since the aid check is often a family's only stable source of income, many fathers live elsewhere. Father Shocklee considers - the absence of so many male heads of households a major cause of its disciplinary and crime problems: "This is the natural result when you drive out an of the strong men. When you remove so much strength from a community, it takes more than the police department to restore the basic structure." I'm sorry, but how freaking dumb is that? That's easily the stupidest, most harmful law I've ever heard.
• invoke, I think you're referring to Cedar Square West, also known as "The Crack Stacks," designed by Ralph Rapson. The AIA recently gave it an award.
• musingmelpomene: I agree. This is what happens when welfare law is written to be punitive rather than helpful. ("Stop being poor! *thwack*) Chicago is experimenting with some new housing programs after the demolition of Cabrini Green
• Here's a good aerial photo of where the Pruitt-Igoe complex used to be. It's interesting that the housing density there is unusually low for an urban area.
• I expect the thinking of the lawmakers was "If the household has an adult male in full-time residence, surely he will be able to support them, if only he works hard enough; it is households that do not have a full-time male in residence who need help." - They just didn't get that (a) it's not nearly that simple and (b) that the law would cause people to change their living arrangements to remove the male from the family.
• architects not having the foggiest idea (or giving a flying fig) for the people who will inhabit the space is a bit of a tradition, really. a good contemporary example is the redevelopment of the WTC. of the "sample users" offered by the Port Authority, all were male and none would actually live in the area (and forget about acknowledging any kind of mobility impairment, etc). not all architects are this way. i've just had to deal with too many who are.
• shinything, that's the one. I looked at the award page and read this: "The jurors critiqued the 10 submissions based on digital images and information assembled in a binder from the architect/ architectural firm. They were not allowed to visit the project sites." That makes sense in a crazy corporate world, and is the only way the psychic-death-knell of that place could be overlooked. Muggings and rapes in the hallways are (or were) common. "Why leave the building to experience all the slums have to offer?" seems to be the operating philosophy.
• I don't feel it's fair to blame the architect, the real problem was filling the building full of poor families and the retarded welfare laws that affected them.
• I think simply blaming 'retarded welfare laws'-- even though they are arguably crap-- is too simplistic. An architect should study the occupants and the uses (intended or otherwise) of the space they will be developing. Some simple research before the design process, combined with thorough vetting with the city who controls the checkbook, should have prevented exposed pipes, unpainted concrete and vistas of dirt and trash rather than the intended landscaping.
• That and the shortcuts the builders took to save money, like no shielding over the steam pipes leading to multiple cases of severe burns, or no railings against the gallery windows so three kids went through and fell to their deaths, or no outdoor communal areas for kids to play, so they come inside and break stuff. Wouldn't matter what the income level was in those cases, although maybe the council would actually pay attention if higher-bracket families spoke up about the safety issues. Looking at the photos does remind me of those awful English tenements, though. Or a hospital or similar institution. Who would want to live there if they had a choice?
• Reminds me of this Pythonian classic:"The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these..."
• I think the diagrams comparing highrise buildings to low rise and walk up are particularly important to understanding why these kinds of projects have such high levels of crime, higher levels of crime than equally poor low rise neighbourhoods. There is a real difference in the availability of private or semi-private space in a highrise - hallways can become places for crime, because there is little control on who is in the hallways. And in a small building (eg 3 floors), you might know everyone who is there, who belongs and who does not. I grew up in a public housing highrise - it was not as bad as these, because the surrounding neighbourhood was not public housing (so there wasn't quite the concentration of poverty and alienation). I was lucky enough to live on the first floor most of the time - so in some ways it was like being in a lowrise. But I still felt the kind of alienation in the interior spaces. I then lived in a row house. The neighbourhood was nearly as poor, but it was an entirely different experience. You had some garden that was your own (or at least, renting) - you wanted to take care of it. We had neighbours who introduced themselves to us. We gradually got to know some of our neighbours* - and we are private people who don't go looking to know neigbours much, but we did, because we saw them come and go each day. It was a very different experience. It's a funny mix - you have more private space, but at the same time you feel much more connected to the street and to the neighbourhood at large. You will never be able to solve all the problems of poverty - but there are things a society can do to aleviate the alienation of poverty. First of all - don't segregate by income so much - if kids grow up somewhere where people are poor whether they work or not, they will have no motivation. If they know some people who have succeeded, they will be more likely to imagine that they could succeed. But also - don't go building structures that have such alienating power as highrise buildings. They are fine for officee, even for many single people or couples who are looking for a condo. But for families and children, they are like living in stacked boxes, with prison-like hallways (for all the reasons show in the diagrams). Think traditional - there is a reason our houses and low rise buildings are that shape - it's tried and tested. Architechs should be studying how people live, how they move and use spaces, and design around those spaces. And think of a little beauty - The project from the original link looked like a prison before it was razed. You can't judge how a building is by artists sketches or models. You have to picture what it would be like with bad gardening, or in a rough winter, what the hallways would be like when the windows are dirty, and the floors haven't been swept. Last year, I lived in a dorm where the maintenance was as bad as my public housing building, and the hallways were dirty. But it was always beautiful - with leaded windows, stone work, floors of dark wood, with matching doors and picture rails, a sharp contrast against the cream (industrial paint colour) walls, windows set just at the right height for gazing out while sitting on the built in window bench. True - it wasn't cheap to build (just old), and Frank Lloyd Wright apparently hated it (it's kitchy Art Deco Gothic), but it was built with little pretty things (which did make up for the grody showers and questionably safe heating system), and most of all, human shaped (not symetrical, odd nooks, windows at viewing height rather than ridiculously high or low). *One was schizophrenic and tried to have us unfairly evicted, but that's another story.
• Sorry - I know I have totally blathered too much, but I have to share my inappropriate architecture stories: At the University of Toronto, they have terrible luck with architects. Their new graduate student residence lacked adequate lighting because the architect though grad students didn't read books anymore, just computers (I type this surrounded by a mess of books and paper). And then their new school of management was built by a prestigious firm - it's very elegant and impressive from the outside, and from the main atrium, but apparently no one mentioned that the majority of professors line their offices with books and/or journals: all of the lighting in the office space was based on large wall panels. They had to come back in to install ceiling lights.
• I was in St. Louis in 2002 for a job interview. I'd never been there before, and I was kerflummoxed by how many cities made up the City Of St. Louis (the civic demarcations are singular, far as I could find), and how completely the old downtown area was under construction. I had to wonder who was financing all that.
• goofyfoot -- Houston is like that, too. You'll be driving around, and all of the sudden, you're in this part of town that's another town! Different traffic laws, different cops (who really want you to break the traffic laws...). This is all within 5 minutes of downtown. It's kinda fun.