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P R AT TFOLIO
FINAL THOUGHTS Modernism Unfinished
By Deborah Gans, Professor of Undergraduate Architecture
Modern architecture once meant great design for good. How can we move beyond its mistakes and retool its concepts for the contemporary world? Good design for social benefit has recently burgeoned into a movement embraced by venerable institutions like the American Institute of Architects and blogs like Big Think, but it also has a robust history that offers both inspiration and warning. Consider that “housing project” was a Modernist term used to describe a project of great social aspiration—as exemplified in the now landmarked New York City Housing Authority’s Harlem River Houses (1936)—but that it has come to mean an identifiably impoverished architecture intended to suit the impoverished existence of people who lived there. Housing projects, like the infamous Marcy Houses of Jay-Z’s song “Murder Marcyville,” reinforce stigma in part because their “tower in the park” form no longer fulfills our idea of a good city, but also because our society as a whole had thought it allowable to underfund the design of housing for the poor. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s current call for a “total reset of public
housing” aims to lift its stigma through redesign. He needs this clarion because, confronted with the failure of many post–World War II housing projects to engineer social change, many architects and developers retreated into explorations of architectural form and finance beginning in the 1970s. Postmodernism may no longer be the current style, but its inattention to social issues continues in our joyful obsession with the algorithms of computer-aided design. The corrective to social inattention has arrived through new sets of problems so dire they cannot be ignored, and a new generation of designers who are eager to take them on: the energy crises, followed by rapid global urbanization and its housing crises, and climate change. These are the problems that catalyzed a counterculture to “go green” with solar technology in the wake of the 1973 gas embargo and embrace “resilient” design in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Initially, high-design architects would not be caught dead arguing for sustainability any more than they would go to a black-tie function in Birkenstocks, but the distinction between the humanitarian and the good finally seems to be fading. Shigeru Ban just won the Pritzker Prize, and he plays both sides, designing both disaster-relief housing and chic New York apartment buildings with the same aesthetic sense.
We increasingly understand that design can’t solve social problems but it can participate in that process by addressing the environmental futures that will affect us—all from the user’s point of view. Fueled by bottom-up movements like community-based planning and social media like crowd sourcing, our current idea of good design focuses on the needs and desires of the little-guy user who will actually inhabit the building, rather than the governmental agency or financier that commissions it. Postmodern cultural and anthropological studies have provided more nuanced understandings of personal and group differences and their impact on the ways we live. With these new social tools, we have reframed the Modernist ideal that everyone, regardless of economic status, deserves good design. This history of good design is also my personal history: from a Modernist childhood to a postmodern architectural education; from work on housing in the ’80s to refugee camps in the ’90s, New Orleans after Katrina, and New York post-Sandy. Designing for extreme situations has not meant eliminating immense inequities, but rather designing for the imminent “new normal” that will affect everyone—at the bottom and the top. Katrina and Sandy are our first tastes of climate change. The design of this emerging world had better be good.