Architecture Books – Week 13/2024
This newsletter for the week of March 25 is all about affordable housing.
Affordable housing isn’t the sexiest of subjects for an architecture book, but, like the typology itself, it’s necessary to make books on the subject: to explore issues at the heart of it and share commendable proposals and precedents. The contents of this week’s newsletter follow from Housing the Nation, a book on affordable housing being released this week.
Book of the Week:
Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture, and the Future of Affordable Housing edited by Alexander Gorlin and Victoria Newhouse, published by Rizzoli (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop)
For every architecture book devoted to multi-family housing there must be ten books about the design of single-family houses. Even though I’m partial to housing rather than houses, books in my library on houses outnumber those on housing three to one. Such is the appeal of houses, especially in the United States, where the American Dream equals owning a house; and owning a house means prettying it up to increase curb appeal and making renovations to align it with current technologies and make it comfortable. Books, in turn, help clients imagine what is possible and provide architects with inspiration.
Housing, on the other hand, is often seen as being occupied solely by renters, who are the minority in the US and are unable to reshape their apartments on par with house owners. While apartment floor plans are accordingly cookie cutter compared to bespoke single-family houses, architects still need books devoted to housing for inspiration and keeping up with trends, among other things. And while books on housing are less appealing to publishers than books on houses, as evidenced by the apparent number of books of each type, the unsustainable nature of suburban single-family houses means more books on housing — especially affordable housing, given the deficit that exists — should exist to help architects, clients, and local jurisdictions envision alternatives to single-family houses.
Based on the above generalizations, Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture, and the Future of Affordable Housing, released this week, is a welcome addition to the scant literature on multi-family housing in the United States. It is edited by Alexander Gorlin, a New York architect who has designed dozens of single-family houses but also around a dozen projects categorized as multi-family housing, and Victoria Newhouse, an architectural historian who has written books about museums, concert halls, and landscapes. Gorlin’s involvement is mildly self-serving, since three of the eighteen projects in the book were designed by Gorlin’s eponymous office, but it’s hard to be overly cynical in this regard given the subject of the book and the quality of the essays assembled by him and Newhouse.
Housing the Nation consists of seventeen essays in four chapters (“The Big Picture,” “Racial Injustice and Housing,” “Points of View,” “In Search of Solutions”) and the eighteen projects in a fifth “Portfolio” chapter. After a first read through some of the essays of the book in order, I initially felt that the portfolio would have been better spread throughout the book rather than put into the last chapter — alternating the projects with the essays would have given the book some visual interest and rhythm across its pages, I thought — but the book has a clear narrative arc that makes sense and ultimately works well: moving from general concerns and contemporary issues to positions, solutions, and, finally, (primarily) built examples of affordable housing.
Essay highlights include Dean Baker’s “Income Inequality and Affordable Housing” and Robert Kuttner’s “The Case for Permanent Social Housing,” both in the first chapter and both staking out the progressive positions often aligned with affordable housing (Republicans and affordable housing are strange bedfellows, to say the least); Margery Perlmutter’s “How Land-Use Policies Discriminate Against People and Neighborhoods” in the second chapter, which thoroughly recounts in just a few pages how zoning, especially in New York City, disenfranchises many people; the then-and-now look in the third chapter at Marcus Garvey Village in Brooklyn, a low-rise housing project from the 1970s designed, in part, by Kenneth Frampton and recently renovated by Curtis + Ginsberg (see also bottom of this newsletter); and “Wheel Estate,” an essay in chapter four by architect (Andrés Duany) and client (Fernando Pagés Ruiz) about manufactured housing.
This last essay surprised me because Duany, the father of New Urbanism and proponent of traditional architecture, makes strong arguments for what he calls the New Urbanist Mobile Home Park — and adopting, of all things, a modern idiom for the assemblage of manufactured housing. My shock was furthered in the fifth portfolio chapter, where a DPZ CoDesign project I was unaware of (Duany is the D in DPZ) sits alongside oft-cited works of contemporary affordable housing by Michal Maltzan, Brooks + Scarpa, Koning Eizenberg, Rural Studio, and others. Blue Water may look traditional with its distinct gabled parapets, but the courtyard site plan, which strives for accessibility and maximum density, is very commendable. While much of the book, including Gorlin’s projects illustrated here, focuses on LA and NYC, where affordable housing is an issue that has to be addressed, the DPZ projects show how “housing the nation” has to happen even more outside those coastal cities.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
Crafting Character: The Architectural Practice of CHYBIK + KRISTOF edited by Francois-Luc Giraldeau, published by Frame Publishers (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The first monograph on the fourteen-year-old Czech practice of Ondrej Chybik and Michal Kristof.
Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia by Lydia Kallipoliti, published by Actar Publishers (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The second book authored by architect, educator, and curator Lydia Kallipoliti follows her excellent The Architecture of Closed Worlds: Or, What Is the Power of Shit?
Laboratorio de Vivienda edited by Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample and MOS, published by Actar Publishers (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The latest book by MOS focuses on their master plan of, and the 32 contributions to, Laboratorio de Vivienda, an affordable housing project in Mexico.
Mecanoo: People Place Purpose Poetry by Francine Houben and Herbert Wright, published by nai010 Publishers (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Dutch firm Mecanoo’s latest monograph comes ten years after People, Place, Purpose, adding poetry to the mix.
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.
Book News:
Apropos of the “Book of the Week,” Dezeen’s Social Housing Revival series is “exploring the new wave of quality social housing being built around the world.”
Ditto: At The Architect’s Newspaper, Diana Budds reviews The State of Housing Design, a book from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard that shows how new architecture is grappling with America's dysfunctional housing system.
“More Than Curtains”: My review at World-Architects of Art Applied by Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse, written after I saw Blaisse in conversation with the book’s editors and others at Head Hi bookstore last week.
Another takedown of Thomas Heatherwick's Humanize that is too good to pass up: Andrew Russeth's “Thomas Heatherwick: The Architect of Our Neoliberal Hell” at Art in America.
From the Archives:
Back in July 2012, I reviewed Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, a companion to the MoMA exhibition of the same name that was organized by Barry Bergdoll and Reinhold Martin, and in which five design teams were invited to “develop proposals for housing that would open new routes through the mortgage-foreclosure crisis” that still impacted the US at the time (the teams worked in 2011 and the exhibition/book followed in 2012). I wrote that the five designs were “a grab-bag of formal responses that have been criticized for being too avant-garde when more practical solutions should have been proffered,” and its hard not to feel the same way flipping through the book again now. Yet, as I also pointed out, their designs were meant, not to fix the crisis, but to address the proposition — the so-called Buell Hypothesis — that the dream of homeownership had to change: “Change the dream and you change the city.” The need for change is apparent today in the widening economic gap that has been a source of attention in the years since and is a frequent topic in the essays in this week’s “Book of the Week.” But with home ownership equalling generational wealth and not owning a home meaning one is unable to do things in life that others can, a proposition/hypothesis today might be tweaked to look toward increasing homeownership for the widest spectrum of people, but doing it through forms of housing that are more affordable and considerably more diverse than single-family suburbia. Proposals along these lines would still embody some of the ideas explored by architects back in 2011, but they would probably look different than the five designs displayed in Foreclosed.
As mentioned above, one of the highlights of Housing the Nation is an essay devoted to Marcus Garvey Village, a low-rise housing scheme built in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1975 and renovated about a decade ago. Low-rise at the time of the project’s inception was reactionary, going against the high-rise social housing that had been preferred for decades but was decried by Jane Jacobs and other critics, Kenneth Frampton included. Frampton, well before he wrote the book that would make him famous, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (first published in 1980), was on a team that designed Marcus Garvey Village. Frampton was an editor at the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies in the 1970s, when the the IAUS and the Museum of Modern Art devised social housing proposals to exhibit and actually build. Another Chance for Housing: Low-Rise Alternatives is the catalog to the 1973 MoMA exhibition (a PDF via MoMA), which includes an essay by Frampton on the history of modern low-rise housing, documentation of a high-density low-rise prototype, and designs for the prototype applied to sites in Brooklyn and Staten Island, the latter never built. If anything, the catalog is exceptional as a document of a time when a museum was actually a client for social housing, not just incessantly expanding its own walls.
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— John Hill