International Housing Studio: 2017-2019 (Washington University in St. Louis)

2017–2019

International Housing Studio Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design at Washington University in St. Louis

419 International Housing Studio

2017–2019

International Housing Studio Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design at Washington University in St. Louis

Contents

4 Potentiality Heather Woofter 8 Position in the Curriculum Mónica Rivera 12 An Uncertain Refuge: Granularity, Indeterminacy, Relationality Philip Holden 18 The Threshold Image Mónica Rivera 22 Cities 28 Rotations Diagram 30 Rotations F17 Xiangchuan Kong Liqiang Huang John Coats Yuejia Ying Kathryn Karl Jiaao Yu Mengru Wang F18 Muzi Dong Chi Zhang Jiankun Chen Yu Chen Zhuoxian Deng Minzi Zhang F19 Nick McIntosh Yixuan Wang Rubo Sun Yi Wang Bing Zhao Qingshan Hu

62 Projects F17 Hui Yang Shiyao Li Samuel Bell-Hart Jennifer Hohol Man Gao Howie Chen Dylan Draves Jiaao Yu Yanliang Li Yuejia Ying Chong Zhang Mengru Wang Lingyue Wang Rachel Reinhard F18 Yunxi Zhang Xiaoyu Yang Jing Chen Anna Friedrich Larissa Sattler Yifan Sun Zhuoxian Deng Zhao Yang Jiankun Chen Peiyao Li Xuan Li Wenxi Du Muzi Dong F19 Junhao Li Ke Chen Qingshan Hu Qiyu Zhang Dylan Sabisch Huzefa Jawadwala Bing Zhao Yixuan Wang Gary Lee Zheyi Yuan Naitian Tian

218 Essays 220 Visited Walkways Emiliano López & Mónica Rivera 244 Body, Atmosphere, and Climatic Typology: Toward an Architecture for Everyday Life Javier García-Germán 258 Incomplete by Design: Reconsidering the Death and Life of Pruitt-Igoe Michael R. Allen 278 Instructors & Contributors 284 Bibliography 288 Colophon

Potentiality Heather Woofter Sam and Marilyn Fox Professor Director, College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design

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I struggled with this introduction because of the anxieties surrounding recent world events that accumulate and converge to rouse the social foundations of design education, pivotal to understanding the moment we inhabit. We find ourselves in a world that is laced with uncertainty, affecting us in profound ways. Social and political views, environmental distress signals, and public health disparity name only a few of the transformative events unraveling in front of us, a culmination of longstanding urgencies insufficiently addressed. Yet because of these challenges, we are forced to confront many injustices that have blanketed our world ubiquitously.

How can we begin to address these shared concerns of our profession and community? What kind of agency do we have as students and faculty? I have been thinking of our longstanding commitment to housing issues in light of the importance this program brings to individuals’ rights. Housing is a basic human need, an essential element of the social contract and the right to live.1 In The Right to Adequate Housing, the United Nations recognizes the difficulty in addressing other economic, social, and environmental disparities and links positive housing experiences to people’s likelihood of enjoying these fundamental rights.

“Housing is a foundation from which other legal entitlements can be achieved.” The World Health Organization further asserts that we must protect and improve houses and neighborhoods rather than damage or destroy them because “housing is the single most important environmental factor associated with disease conditions and higher mortality and morbidity rates.”2 According to the U.N. Centre for Human Settlements, an estimated 1 billion people live in inadequate housing, and over 100 million are homeless.3 In our International Housing Studio, faculty and students’ concerns transcend any one location to consider the many forms of housing worldwide. We look at places outside our midwestern home—for example, San Juan, Dublin, Barcelona, and Seattle—to consider the necessities that provide citizens a dignified, full life through thoughtful responses to problems found in unique cultures and urban environments. Faculty and students examine culture alongside housing typologies embedded in ecological and social systems. They consider the individual and collective program within a framework of domesticity. The work projects our world’s realities into the studio by exploring the changing conditions of nuclear families, economic pressures, natural disasters, and political crises.

Sir David Adjaye states in Living Spaces, “the private realm of a person, a couple or a family, [is] a distinct marker that operates differently to the way in which public architecture works.… I [find] WashU

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1. U.N. General Assembly, Article 1, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” U.N. General Assembly 302, no. 2 (1948).

2. U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), The Right to Adequate Housing [Fact Sheet No. 21/Rev. 1], 2009, http://www.un.org/ ruleoflaw/files/ FactSheet21en.pdf.

3. Ibid.

myself increasingly fascinated by the duality of these worlds.…

Designing houses is about creating relationships with fundamental aspects of being on the planet, about how we construct and understand where we are in the world.”4 The land of East St. Louis, formerly named Cahokia Mounds, was the first known city built in North America. Settled by the Mississippi Mound Builders in the American Bottom, the mounds and dwellings organized around celestial beliefs that governed civilization.5 As Joseph Rykwert writes in The Idea of a Town, “we have lost all of the beautiful certainty about the way the world works. [It] is no longer likely that we shall find this ground in the world which the cosmologists are continuously reshaping around us … so we must look for it inside ourselves: in the constitution and structure of the human person.”6 The pages herein are harbingers of essential questions from a time just preceding significant changes to our world.

This past year was historic in St. Louis. Our community suffered health disparities resulting in even higher degrees of separation between many different ethnic communities. The memory of 2014 Ferguson and the origins of Black Lives Matter were still close in our minds as protests amid a pandemic spoke to our community’s urgency and resolve to voice their concerns. I witnessed firsthand the “Ken and Karen” moment where empathy and equity were undeniably discounted as protestors stood to face weaponized ground in a wealthy enclave blocks away from the Delmar Divide, an urban manifestation of this very separation. As designers, we collectively reflect on this racially charged midwestern landscape with humility, knowing there is much work to be done.

Critics often credit architects with social housing failures and urban designers with polarizing visions that are meant to address all citizens’ needs yet are embroidered in policies that challenge to dismantle them. The demolition of Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis is often cited as the death of modernism, failed social housing victim to a lack of political and infrastructural support. The physical design of our cities and landscapes responds most prominently to these invisible forces. Yet we, as designers—urban designers, landscape architects, and architects—are in unique positions to advocate for sustainable, systems-oriented thinking and housing solutions that extend beyond the building into the public realm.

While these student projects were focused outside of St. Louis, they share common aims and ask essential questions relevant to our home. Many of us are transplants in a city that we love because of the diversity of its people, breadth of its cultural events, its unique urban environments, and in particular its feeling of latent potential. I often think of international and coastal faculty and our efficacy in the city we wish to impact. We have most recently 419 International Housing Studio

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4. David Adjaye, Living Spaces (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), 9.

5. Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2020), 15.

6. Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy, and the Ancient World (Boston: The MIT Press, 1988), 202.

Heather Woofter

added St. Louis to our list of studied places in this global context.

With awareness of community representation’s importance, each of the housing studios operates with faculty from the region studied. Moving forward, I hope we can share our work with community members and offer students the tools, awareness, and potential to create future generations of holistic, quality-driven, compassionate design work. By regaining a deep understanding of the architectural discipline, comprehensive systems that affect those works, and most importantly the people who inhabit our communities, we can make relevant architectural works reflect the society in which we live. There is much at stake.

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Position in the Curriculum Mónica Rivera Professor of Practice Chair, Graduate School of Architecture

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The 419 International Housing Studio is the third core studio in Washington University’s three-year, first-professional Master of Architecture degree program, and the first semester in the twoyear, advanced placement degree of the same program.

The three-semester core sequence begins with the 317 Studio, where students focus on the material, poetic, and useful dimensions of objects and spaces through a tectonic understanding of assemblies as part of broader ecological and social systems and the natural forces that act upon them. Through iterative processes, students acquire core skills through making by hand and translating analog explorations into digital media.

In the second semester of the core sequence, the 318 Studio, students explore the relationship between concept, program, and place through the making of spaces for collective and public use with a particular focus on spatial sections in relation to both program and the ground.

T he 419 International Housing Studio decidedly embraces the urban context in cities around the world. Housing, as the predominant building type in our cities, has often been described as both intimate and generic. Its generic quality suggests its value lies in how well it can accommodate diverse occupants through time and changing situations—evolving family structures, aging, natural disasters, financial adversity, and crises. Students explore the complex arrangement of individual and collective programs through the development of frameworks that can host intimate domesticity, yet be open-ended enough to absorb change and future uses.

Within a common framework and shared group discussions, several student sections led by different faculty undertake the development of a collective housing proposal that is attentive to the particularities of the climate, culture, history, and social and physical contexts of the featured city. Contemporary issues around housing are explored through the floorplan as the primary organizational instrument that negotiates adjacencies for minimizing conflict and celebrating the benefits of sharing.

Following the core sequence, after the housing studio, students choose from several advanced architectural design studios that examine diverse conditions, sites, and technologies. Our faculty and visitors from abroad offer Options Studios. These studios are vertical, with students from different stages in the curriculum working alongside each other. Some of these studios are comprehensive, wherein projects develop a holistic, conceptual, and practical understanding of structures, energy, and systems. All students are required to take at least one Comprehensive Options Studio during their studies.

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In their final semester, and after having worked during the previous semester in a preparatory Design Thinking seminar, students in both the two- and three-year programs author a Degree Project based in St. Louis. Students are charged not merely with creating an advanced, comprehensive work of architecture, but also with establishing the unique intellectual space in which to work as an architect. Just as the 419 International Housing Studio is the gateway to the Options Studio sequence, Degree Project is the transition to professional work after graduation.

Through these different architectural methodologies offered by our diverse faculty, students find their place within a vast constellation of ideas, approaches, and possibilities in architecture.

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Mónica Rivera

WashU

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Position in the Curriculum

An Uncertain Refuge:1 Granularity, Indeterminacy, Relationality 2 Philip Holden Professor of Practice

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A note to the students— Among a great many possibilities, it has long seemed to me that architecture is the best possible endeavor. I know other architects who share this somewhat Panglossian view of their vocation. But recently, while reading a book about statistics by David Hand, the author claimed without irony, “Statistics is the most exciting of disciplines.”3 Wait. What? What about architecture? Or astronautics, sociology, medicine, politics, engineering, quantum physics, or anything else?

Maybe something is going on here. Maybe these different fields, including statistics, all make connections to the things we most value. Maybe they all offer a comparable route to understanding and a quality of fulfillment. “Modern statistics enables us to see through the mists of confusion of the world about us, to grasp the underlying reality.”4 Perhaps in some psychologically important way seemingly unrelated disciplines are all, in fact, topologically identical.

In this universe of immeasurable complexity, of different careers, of different ways to think about architecture in particular, of different cultures, cities, personal philosophies, random contingencies of place and program, and even of thought itself—the most labyrinthine place of all—perhaps we can find a way to be secure enough to move forward. Leonhard Euler uses the insights of mathematical topology to gain a clear understanding of the confusion embedded in a labyrinth, and we also try to lift ourselves above the confusion for an overview.5

The 419 International Housing Studio is designed to further your understanding of the function of different design methodologies through researching specific sites and their social and cultural dimensions, and to develop your capacity to advance effective architectural constructs that engage and support both a cultural understanding and a social frame. Sounds simple enough. As all philosophies are relational, personal, and even autobiographical,6 this studio invites and challenges highly capable architects from around the world to construct a unique project framework based on their own ideas and experiences of housing and architecture that is immersed in the cultural conditions of their home cities.

Within this aggregated studio structure, faculty dynamically constellate all these sets of differences, encouraging interactions to help understand and sustain these distinctions, and allowing both students and faculty to test ideas and learn from each other and from the overall work.

Extending the granularity of the universe of disciplines and architectural culture itself is the granularity of the studio’s structure. The indeterminacy of your experiences and positions, WashU

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1. Michael Zapata, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau (Toronto: Hanover Square Press, 2020), 86.

2. Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017), 109.

3. David J. Hand, Statistics: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 1.

4. Ibid., 2.

5. Hugh Kenner, Mazes: Essays by Hugh Kenner (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), 251.

6. “Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.”

From Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: The Modern Library, 1992), 203.

and the relational nature of the multiple scales of interactions within the studio, creates a sense of limitless possibilities and sometimes offers up surprising outcomes. Perhaps we do not fully exist except in our interactions with others, and our ideas do not exist at all except in the moment of their interaction with other ideas.

The implicit requirement for you to both respond to and independently initiate helps construct a way of thinking that you can eventually take into the world of architectural practice, where the architect both listens and speaks.

And then there are the rules of the studio. The word rule, like its cousins rigor and responsibility, points to an often unnamed authority. You would do well to be very suspicious whenever you hear these words. But they are compromises deployed here with your interests in mind. With a few guidelines we are again, as architects, attempting to make a place, a physical place in which to share what we each discover amongst ourselves: to learn more than we can learn on our own. At the outset of work in each city—based on exposure to and research of the place and its culture—each of you prepared a cultural image: a standalone work expressing and proposing an experiential engagement with the culture of the place, inventing a meaningful space of habitation.

Bringing all projects to the same level of development, each of you worked to the same set of presentation expectations, including rigorously scaled plans, sections, perspectives, and models, for the rotations and for the more thorough development of each home studio project. In the shared methods of representing your projects, we were all better able to share one thought with another, one art with another, one set of personal responses with others’, your nascent philosophy with your colleagues’, each initiative containing limitless other possibilities.

All of this relied on your full immersion in this process. The uncertainty of the outcome considers probabilities as our only refuge. And an awareness that all outcomes, thoughtfully and interactively gained, have an enduring personal value.

Yet I wonder still, isn’t architecture different? Architecture’s fundamental impulse is not only one of discovery or personal or shared fulfillment, but also one of asserting or negotiating actual places, worthy places in which to live our lives.

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Philip Holden

WashU

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An Uncertain Refuge

Rotations Review and Exhibition, Steinberg Hall Gallery, Fall 2018.

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WashU

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The Threshold Image Mónica Rivera Professor of Practice Chair Graduate School of Architecture

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Housing makes up most of our built environment, the facades playing an essential role in forming a city’s character. Openings in these facades reveal and support political, social, and cultural manifestations, such as balconies that allow citizens to protest collectively or talk to each other in times of isolation. They express climatic adaptations, such as overhangs that shade interiors in the tropics or large panes of glass that capture light and heat in northern latitudes. These openings are also indicators of a place’s relation to technique and tradition, whether introduced by colonial practices or developed through time as craft or industry.

When designing openings, architects are faced with the task of establishing priorities about what to allow to pass through and with what degree of intensity. These priorities may be informed by, among many other things, the imagined uses adjacent to those openings, the level of involvement the users may have in their manipulation, or of the devices within them, as well as by the climate and sociocultural context they connect or shield occupants from. The choice of priorities will ultimately influence how a space might be used and appropriated, its energy balance, thermal comfort, and sense of shelter.

With project sites located in different parts of the world, students in the 419 International Housing Studio explore—through the making of a single drawing, the Threshold Image, during an initial exercise—how a city’s climate, history, and sociocultural particularities inform the thresholds between interior domestic spaces and a dwelling’s exterior in the context of a collective building or group of buildings.

The studio begins with a set of rotations, where students work for two weeks on one city with one instructor before moving to another city with a different instructor with whom they will develop their project for the remainder of the semester. Working with two different instructors on two different cities, students propose two threshold situations for each city. One mediates communal and private spaces, either between the entry to the dwelling and shared areas, such as corridors and landings, or between the entry and the street. The other mediates between the interior of the home and the outside boundary, where natural light and air enter the building.

Entry and facade were defined as sociospatial moments rather than objects.

Students develop a single 24-by-24-inch image for each threshold, reworked through iterations over two weeks. Each instructor directs the representation method—for instance, axonometric, one-point perspective, or large-model photography— to expose students to different techniques. These threshold mages are produced alongside a brief analysis exercise where students WashU

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represent a cultural aspect of the place. Final images are presented during an exhibition of the drawings, during which students compare how the particulars of each city shaped their approaches in a group discussion. This exercise serves as a point of departure for developing a position about the culture of living, which grows into concepts of aggregation and ultimately gives shape to a building and a dialogue with its city.

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Threshold Image in progress by Mengru Wang, fall 2017. Final version on p. 45.

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WashU

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The Threshold Image

Cities Project Sites: Climate Data Average Monthly Temperatures | ºF (ºC)

Barcelona Spain

Jan.

48.2 (9.6)

Feb.

49.8 (9.9)

Mar.

53.2 (11.8)

Apr.

Coordinates: 41°23′N 2°11′E Elevation: 39 ft (12 m) Area: 39.2 sq mi (101.4 km2) Population: 1,604,555 Density: 41,000/sq mi (16,000/km2)

54.5 (12.5)

May

62.4 (16.9)

Jun.

69.6 (20.9)

Jul.

75.0 (23.9)

Aug.

75.9 (24.4)

Sept.

71.1 (21.7)

Oct. Source: wikipedia.org / Agencia Estatal de Meteorología

64.0 (17.8)

Nov.

55.4 (13.0)

Dec.

Berlin Germany

Jan. Feb.

50.0 (10.0)

33.1 (0.6) 34.5 (1.4)

Mar.

40.6 (4.8)

Apr.

Coordinates: 52°30′26″N 13°8′45″E Elevation: 112 ft (34 m) Area: 344.3 sq mi (891.7 km2) Population: 3,670,622 Density: 11,000/sq mi (4,100/km2)

48.0 (8.9)

May

57.7 (14.3)

Jun.

62.8 (17.1)

Jul.

66.6 (19.2)

Aug.

66.0 (18.9)

Sept.

58.1 (14.5)

Oct. Source: wikipedia.org / World Meteorological Organization Berliner Extremwerte

49.5 (9.7)

Nov. Dec.

40.5 (4.7) 35.6 (2.0) 14 ºF (-10 ºC)

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84 ºF (28.8 ºC)

Average Monthly Precipitation | inches (mm)

Monthly Sunshine Hours

Jan.

1.46 (37.0)

Jan.

Feb.

1.38 (35.0)

Feb.

Mar.

1.42 (36.0)

Mar.

Apr.

1.57 (40.0)

Apr.

May

Dec.

1.57 (40.0)

Dec.

Jan.

1.66 (42.3)

Jan.

1.59 (40.5)

Mar.

Apr.

1.46 (36.1)

Apr.

Aug. Sept.

220 222

2.29 (58.2)

Aug.

0 inches (mm)

211

Sept.

156

Oct.

117

Nov. Dec.

2.17 (55.3)

Cities

159

217

1.71 (43.6)

Dec.

121

Jul.

1.47 (37.3)

Nov.

74

Jun.

1.77 (45.1)

Oct.

47

2.18 (55.5)

2.70 (68.7)

Jul.

137

May

2.12 (53.8)

Jun.

196 153

Feb.

1.31 (33.3)

Mar. May

264 229

Nov.

2.32 (59.0)

Feb.

293

Oct.

3.58 (91.0)

Nov.

287

Sept.

3.19 (81.0)

Oct.

258

Aug.

2.44 (62.0)

Sept.

239

Jul.

0.83 (21.0)

Aug.

206

Jun.

1.18 (30.0)

Jul.

171

May

1.85 (47.0)

Jun.

157

16 inches (410.2 mm)

23

51 37 0 h.

400 h.

Average Monthly Temperatures | ºF (ºC)

Cagliari Italy

Jan.

49.8 (9.9)

Feb.

50.5 (10.3)

Mar.

53.2 (11.8)

Apr.

Coordinates: 39°13′40″N 09°06′40″E Elevation: 13 ft (4 m) Area: 32.99 sq mi (85.45 km2) Population: 154,460 Density: 4,700/sq mi (1,800/km2)

56.7 (13.7)

May

81.9 (17.7)

Jun.

71.1 (21.7)

Jul.

76.5 (24.7)

Aug.

77.4 (25.2)

Sept.

72.1 (22.3)

Oct. Source: wikipedia.org / Servizio Meteorologico

65.1 (18.4)

Nov.

56.8 (13.8)

Dec.

Dublin Ireland

51.8 (11.0)

Jan.

41.5 (5.3)

Feb.

41.5 (5.3)

Mar.

44.2 (6.8)

Apr.

Coordinates: 53°21 0″N 6°16′0″W Elevation: 75.45 ft (23 m) Area: 44.40 sq mi (115 km2) Population: 525,383 Density: 1,764/sq mi (4,569/km2)

46.9 (8.3)

May

51.6 (10.9)

Jun.

56.5 (13.6)

Jul.

60.1 (15.6)

Aug.

59.5 (15.3)

Sept.

56.1 (13.4)

Oct. Source: wikipedia.org

Halifax Canada

50.9 (10.5)

Nov.

45.3 (7.4)

Dec.

42.1 (5.6)

Jan.

24.6 (-4.1)

Feb. Mar.

25.5 (-3.6) 31.6 (-0.2)

Apr.

Coordinates: 44°38′52″N 63°34′17″W Elevation: 793.6 ft (241.9 m) Area: 90.63 sq mi (234.72 km2) Population: 316,701 Density: 3,495/sq mi (1,349.3/km2)

40.8 (4.9)

May

50.2 (10.1)

Jun.

59.4 (15.2)

Jul.

65.8 (18.8)

Aug.

66.4 (19.1)

Sept.

59.9 (15.5)

Oct. Source: wikipedia.org / Environment Canada / Nova Scotian Institute of Science

49.8 (9.9)

Nov. Dec.

40.6 (4.8) 30.6 (-0.8) 14 ºF (-10 ºC)

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84 ºF (28.8 ºC)

Average Monthly Precipitation | inches (mm) Jan.

Monthly Sunshine Hours

1.96 (49.7)

Jan.

136

Feb.

2.10 (53.3)

Feb.

139

Mar.

1.95 (40.4)

Mar.

Apr. May Jun.

0.16 (4.1)

Jul.

Aug.

0.30 (7.5)

Aug.

1.92 (48.8)

Feb.

Mar.

2.07 (52.7)

Mar.

Apr.

2.13 (54.1)

Apr.

3.11 (79.0)

Oct.

Nov.

2.87 (72.9)

Nov.

Dec.

2.86 (72.7)

Dec.

Apr.

4.66 (118.3)

Apr.

May

4.69 (119.1)

May

Jun.

4.40 (111.8)

Jun.

Jul.

4.34 (110.3)

Jul.

53

109 127 143 157 193 221 235

Aug.

3.80 (96.4)

227

Sept.

4.28 (108.9)

Oct.

102 72

Mar.

5.22 (132.5)

Sept.

158 129

Feb.

4.33 (110.1)

Aug.

164

Jan.

5.50 (139.7)

Mar.

192 174

Sept.

Oct.

Feb.

159

Aug.

2.89 (73.3) 2.34 (59.5)

Jan.

108

Jul.

2.21 (56.2)

Sept.

76

Jun.

2.63 (66.7)

Aug.

59

May

2.34 (59.5)

Jul.

127

Jan.

2.46 (62.6)

Feb.

Jun.

198 147

Dec.

1.93 (48.9)

May

246

Nov.

2.30 (58.4)

Jan.

335 310

Oct.

2.07 (52.6)

Dec.

288

Sept.

1.37 (34.9)

Nov.

269

Jun.

0.47 (11.9)

Jul.

Oct.

213

May

1.03 (26.1)

Sept.

186

Apr.

1.56 (39.7)

181

Oct.

4.89 (124.3)

158

Nov.

5.96 (151.4)

Nov.

107

Dec.

5.71 (145.1)

Dec.

105

0 inches (mm)

Cities

16 inches (410.2 mm)

25

0 h.

400 h.

Average Monthly Temperatures | ºF (ºC)

San Juan Puerto Rico

Jan.

77.6 (25.3)

Feb.

77.9 (25.5)

Mar.

78.9 (26.1)

Apr.

Coordinates: 18°24′23″N 66°3′50″W Elevation: 26 ft (8 m) Area: 77.0 sq mi (199 km2) Population: 395,326 Density: 5,100/sq mi (2,000/km2)

80.3 (26.8)

May

81.9 (27.7)

Jun.

83.3 (28.5)

Jul.

83.4 (28.6)

Aug.

83.7 (28.7)

Sept.

83.4 (28.6)

Oct. Source: wikipedia.org / National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration / The Weather Channel

Nov.

Santiago de

Jan.

Compostela Spain

82.6 (28.1) 80.6 (27.0)

Dec.

78.7 (25.9)

45.32 (7.4)

Feb.

46.76 (8.2)

Mar.

49.1 (9.5)

Apr.

51.08 (10.6)

May

Coordinates: 42°52'49.9''N 8°32.741'W Elevation: 793.6 ft (241.9 m) Area: 84.94 sq mi (220 km2) Population: 97,260 Density: 17.02/sq mi (440.89/km2)

55.22 (12.9)

Jun.

60.8 (16.0)

Jul.

65.3 (18.5)

Aug.

65.48 (18.6)

Sept.

62.6 (17.0)

Oct.

56.12 (13.4)

Nov. Source: wikipedia.org / Agencia Estatal de Meteorología

Seattle United States

Coordinates: 47°36′35″N 122°19′59″W Elevation: 175 ft (53 m) Area: 142 sq mi (368 km2) Population: 608,660 Density: 8,973/sq mi (3,464/km2)

Dec.

Jan. Feb.

50.36 (10.2) 47.12 (8.4)

37.94 (3.3) 42.08 (5.6)

Mar.

47.66 (8.7)

Apr.

48.56 (9.2)

May

53.24 (11.8)

Jun.

61.34 (16.3)

Jul.

67.28 (19.6)

Aug.

63.5 (17.5)

Sept.

56.12 (13.4)

Oct. Source: wikipedia.org / National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration / The Weather Channel

Nov. Dec.

46.94 (8.3) 41.9 (5.5) 38.3 (3.5) 14 ºF (-10 ºC)

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84 ºF (28.8 ºC)

Average Monthly Precipitation | inches (mm) Jan.

Monthly Sunshine Hours Jan.

3.76 (95.5)

Feb.

Feb.

2.39 (60.7)

Mar.

Jan. Mar.

5.70 (145)

Mar.

Apr.

5.55 (141)

Apr.

Aug.

2.24 (57)

Aug.

Sept.

5.00 (127)

Sept.

Oct. Dec.

Feb.

3.5 (88.9)

Feb.

Mar.

3.72 (94.5)

Mar.

Oct.

71 110 180 207 254

Jun.

1.55 (39.6)

267

Jul.

0.70 (17.8)

313

Aug.

0.88 (22.4)

282

Sept.

1.44 (36.8)

222

Oct.

3.48 (88.4)

72

Dec.

5.35 (135.9) 0 inches (mm)

142

Nov.

6.57 (166.9)

Cities

88

May

1.92 (49.0)

Dec.

138 106

Apr.

2.70 (68.8)

Nov.

246 180

Jan.

5.55 (141.2)

Sept.

261

Dec.

11.06 (281)

Aug.

235

Nov.

7.87 (200)

Jul.

190

Oct.

7.63 (194)

Nov.

Jun.

170

Jul.

1.53 (39)

May

154

Jun.

3.22 (82)

Apr.

108

May

5.78 (147)

Jan.

102

Feb.

8.77 (223)

Jul.

217

Jan.

10.19 (259)

Feb.

Jun.

202

Dec.

5.02 (127.5)

May

227

Nov.

6.36 (161.3)

Dec.

235

Oct.

5.59 (142.0)

Nov.

267

Sept.

5.77 (146.6)

Oct.

280

Aug.

5.46 (138.7)

Sept.

259

Jul.

5.07 (128.8)

Aug.

255

Jun.

4.41 (112.0)

Jul.

268

May

5.90 (149.9)

Jun.

282

Apr.

4.68 (118.9)

May

231

Mar.

1.95 (49.5)

Apr.

237

16 inches (410.2 mm)

27

53 0 h.

400 h.

Rotations Diagram Group Number of Students Home Studio Home Studio Instructor Rotation 1 Rotation 2

A 11 San Juan Mónica Rivera Seattle Dublin

B 11 Halifax Donald Koster San Juan Seattle

* This diagram illustrates the Rotations held in 2018.

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Halifax

San Juan

Mónica Rivera / FA17–FA18–FA19 Donald Koster / FA17–FA18–FA19 Emiliano López / FA17–FA18–FA19 Sarah Cremin / FA18 Max Memberg / FA18 Antonio Sanmartín / FA17 Jan Ulmer / FA17 José Morales / FA19

Seattle

Home Studio | : 10 weeks Rotation | : 2 ½ weeks FA17 Cities FA18 Cities FA19 Cities

Cities

D 10 Dublin Sarah Cremin Barcelona San Juan

E 10 Seattle Max Bemberg Halifax Barcelona

Cagliari Berlin

Dublin Barcelona

Santiago de Compostela

C 11 Barcelona Emiliano López Dublin Halifax

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Rotations:

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Selected Cultural & Threshold Images

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Santiago de Compostela Emiliano López

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Xiangchuan Kong Cultural Image

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FA17

Rotations

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Barcelona Emiliano López

Muzi Dong Cultural Image

PUBLIC

COMMUNAL

NEW PROTOTYPE OF COMMUNAL SPACE

PLAN

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FA18

PRIVATE

N

Pla Especial La Barceloneta 1981 Manel de Solà-Morales Antoni Font

Rotations

35

Santiago de Compostela Emiliano López

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Liqiang Huang Threshold Image

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FA17

Barcelona Emiliano López

Rotations

Muzi Dong Threshold Image

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FA18

Halifax Donald Koster

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John Coats Cultural Image

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FA17

Rotations

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Halifax Donald Koster

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Yuejia Ying Threshold Image

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FA17

John Coats Threshold Image

Rotations

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FA17

San Juan Mónica Rivera

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Kathryn Karl Cultural Image

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FA17

Rotations

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San Juan Mónica Rivera

419 International Housing Studio

Jiaao Yu Threshold Image

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FA17

Mengru Wang Threshold Image

Rotations

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FA17

Dublin Sarah Cremin

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Chi Zhang Cultural Image

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FA18

Rotations

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Seattle Max Bemberg

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Jiankun Chen Threshold Image

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FA18

Dublin Sarah Cremin

Rotations

Yu Chen Threshold Image

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FA18

Barcelona Emiliano López

419 International Housing Studio

Nick McIntosh Cultural Image

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FA19

Rotations

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Barcelona Emiliano López

419 International Housing Studio

Nick McIntosh Threshold Image

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FA19

Yixuan Wang Threshold Image

Rotations

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FA19

Halifax Donald Koster

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Rubo Sun Cultural Image

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FA19

Rotations

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Halifax Donald Koster

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Yi Wang Threshold Image

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FA19

Bing Zhao Threshold Image

Rotations

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FA19

San Juan Mónica Rivera

419 International Housing Studio

Zhuoxian Deng Cultural Image

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FA18

Rotations

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San Juan Mónica Rivera

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Qingshan Hu Threshold Image

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FA19

Minzi Zhang Threshold Image

Rotations

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FA18

Projects Selection

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Final Reviews FA17

FA18

FA19

Faculty Donald Koster Emiliano López Mónica Rivera Antonio Sanmartín Jan Ulmer

Faculty Max Bemberg Sarah Cremin Donald Koster Emiliano López Mónica Rivera

Faculty Donald Koster Emiliano López José Morales Mónica Rivera

Faculty Critics Julie Bauer Kathryn Dean Nathaniel Elberfeld Catalina Freixas Valerie Greer Derek Hoeferlin Eric Hoffman Phil Holden Anna Ives Sung Ho Kim Alex Waller Heather Woofter Hongxi Yin

Faculty Critics Ryan Abendroth Valerie Greer Patty Heyda Eric Hoffman Philip Holden Zeuler Lima Robert McCarter Antonio Sanmartín Aaron Schump Constance Vale

Guest Critics Dennis McGrath Juan Miró Whitney Moon Peter Rose Carrie Strickland

Guest Critics Martin Cox David Dowell Amadeu Santacana

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Faculty Critics Wyly Brown Sara de Giles Edward Ford Valerie Greer Philip Holden Sung Ho Kim Stephen Leet Robert McCarter Jonathan Stitelman Constance Vale Heather Woofter Guest Critics Carlo Atzeni Javier García-Germán Jesús Vassallo

Barcelona Spain

Antonio Sanmartín Visiting Professor

FA17

ON, OVER, UNDER “Barceloneta” This studio pondered architecture as/if transcription: transcription of ways of life, transcription of cultural specificities and universals, transcription of the already known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible. It focused on sites in the Barceloneta neighborhood of Barcelona, Spain.

Not exactly Barcelona, Barceloneta is a privileged yet dense seafront location under intense pressure from tourism. This rather obsolete neighborhood was built in 1800 when the city of Barcelona lost its local administrative and political power.

A new “ciudadela” at the northeast edge of Barcelona was built to “protect” the city, meaning to monitor and subvert it.

As a result, a large portion of the medieval city was demolished and residents were relocated closer to the shore. Designed by military civil engineer Juan Martín Cermeño, the neighborhood is based on an 8.40 by 8.40-meter grid.

A very successful consequence of the 1992 Olympics was the transformation of the existing slums, unoccupied beaches, fishing harbor, and industrial buildings into meaningful urban public spaces along the sea edge from the Besos to Llobregat rivers.

However, a new economic and cultural situation has challenged the traditional system of community housing in Barcelona.

A recent city election debated the political commitment to work for adequate housing rights, a key point that was somehow forgotten between the economic boom of 419 International Housing Studio

the late 90s until the worldwide housing bubble burst in 2008. The incoming mayor, Ada Colau, campaigned for housing rights and against evictions. This challenging polarity between individual interests, community interests, and city interests was an ongoing theme throughout the design process.

What is the character of a city or a place? Is everything that defines a sense of place always palpable, tactile, or even visible beyond precise data maps? Is our experience of the city a compendium of emotions, of momentary circumstances that qualify a particular territory, rendering it memorable? Is it possible for a transcription to share and to hold—as scaffoldings do—the invention, description, and construction of the architecture we live in? Community housing involves a certain level of density, an urban context, and particular qualities for living spaces. The studio craft includes urban strategies and architectures to be grafted ON, UNDER, and OVER the current state of “Barceloneta.” How to keep the memory of the place, how to maintain social balance and diversity, or how to avoid gentrification for both Barceloneta and BARCELONA are architectural issues students assessed, challenging faculty with professional experience and academic vocation.

64

Hui Yang

Projects

65

Barcelona

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Antonio Sanmartín

66

FA17

Hui Yang

Projects

67

Barcelona

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Antonio Sanmartín

68

FA17

Shiyao Li

Projects

69

Barcelona

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Antonio Sanmartín

70

FA17

Shiyao Li

Projects

71

Berlin Germany

Jan Ulmer Visiting Professor

FA17

BERLINer: Situational Diagram The ideal Yes, that’s what you want: A villa out in the field with a grand terrasse Front yard the Baltic Sea and back yard Friedrichstrasse; —Kurt Tucholsky, “Das Ideal,” 1927 (author translation) This studio focused on the Berliner block structure and its situational modifications around Schlesisches Tor, a dense urban neighborhood surrounding an elevated train station near the riverside. While in close proximity, the sites have varied geometries and relationships to the street and city.

Architectural interventions are additions to the existing, they are urban fillings, turning block fragments into whole parts of the city.

The figure-ground plan unveils the spatial layer of a city and describes its fabric as a relationship between street block and solitary building, continuity and fragments, inside and outside.

Students researched the typology and ideal scheme of the Berliner Mietshaus to adapt and transform it on the selected site, pondering: What are the differences and what are the commonalities? What is the city and what is the house? What is the relationship between the whole block and its individual parcels?

Based on another Berliner phenomenon—the so-called Baugruppe— students looked into different forms and

419 International Housing Studio

scales of community and shared spaces.

What are specific spaces, what are generic ones? They investigated existing typologies and sought contemporary answers to the diverse needs of urban densification, affordable housing, social mix, common spaces, and the spatial overlapping of life and work. Specific answers were created within a given vocabulary, and design layouts that allowed diverse forms of living between public and private focused on the cavities within a dense system to stage different situations between the inhabitants.

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Samuel Bell-Hart

Projects

73

Berlin

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Jan Ulmer

74

FA17

Samuel Bell-Hart

Projects

75

Berlin

419 International Housing Studio

Jan Ulmer

76

FA17

Samuel Bell-Hart

Projects

77

Berlin

419 International Housing Studio

Jan Ulmer

78

FA17

Jennifer Hohol

UNIT PLANS TYPICAL FLOORS 2-6 1/8” = 1’-0”

FLOOR 7 UNIT PLANS 1/8” = 1’-0”

Projects

79

Berlin

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Jan Ulmer

80

FA17

Jennifer Hohol

Projects

81

Halifax Canada

Donald Koster Senior Lecturer

FA17

“E Mari Merces”—From the Sea, Wealth I Halifax, the largest city in Atlantic Canada, is a vibrant and progressive city housing over 40 percent of Nova Scotia’s population.

Since its founding in 1749, Halifax Harbor has played a central role in the physical, cultural, and economic character of the city.

Its bustling port is home to the Canadian Atlantic Navy, hosts major container shipping operations, and is a frequent port of call for passenger vessels.

The Halifax Regional Municipality is an amalgamation of towns lining the harbor, with the urban core built on a peninsula anchored by the Citadel. A recent wave of development is transforming this regional center of government, commerce, education, and culture. Capitalizing on this renaissance, students investigated the design of new residential developments that embrace the city’s coastal legacy while adding to the vitality and density of the urban core.

Students were introduced to Halifax’s maritime culture through readings, lectures, and virtual visits to the city and province through internet-mapping programs.

They used this information to extract the character of the place by identifying dwelling typologies, settlement patterns, and the history and culture of material use.

This information was synthesized into a collage that fused drawings, photographs, and mapping. Informed by their virtual visits and research, students developed an experiential perspective drawing focusing on a threshold condition, either expressing 419 International Housing Studio

the relationship between the interior dwelling space and the city or the collective space of the building and the unit entry.

Architectural responses considered the city’s changing seasonal climatic conditions and the often harsh, wet, and cool coastal environment.

Following these introductory exercises, students designed a unit cluster prioritizing the spatial quality of the interior, natural light, and views. Emphasis was placed on designing through physical models to test the careful calibration of room size, organization, and proportion. After establishing the guiding dwelling principles, students were assigned to one of three waterfront sites in central Halifax and asked to design a minimum of 25–30 units of multifamily housing. The three sites—all occupied by municipal surface parking lots—were subdivided equally and shared by three or four students.

Over the remainder of the semester, students balanced the guiding priorities for the dwelling spaces—harnessing southern light and sea views—with the challenges of each site’s orientation. Students were responsible for designing collectively at the urban scale and encouraged to manipulate sites to enhance public interaction while ensuring solar and physical access to neighboring parcels. These complex interactions required collaboration among the designers and a focus, not only on the issues of each individual project, but on the sum of the collective.

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Man Gao

Projects

83

Halifax

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Donald Koster

84

FA17

Howie Chen

Projects

85

Halifax

419 International Housing Studio

Donald Koster

86

FA17

Howie Chen

Projects

87

Halifax

419 International Housing Studio

Donald Koster

88

FA17

Dylan Draves

Projects

89

71

Total Units

42

One Bedroom Units (700sf - 1000sf)

14

Two Bedroom Units (1200sf - 1700sf)

10

Three Bedroom Units (1800sf - 2300sf)

1

Four Bedroom Units (2400sf)

124,000sf

Total Building Area

17,000sf

Retail Area

Halifax

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Donald Koster

90

FA17

Jiaao Yu

Projects

91

San Juan Puerto Rico

Mónica Rivera Visiting Professor

FA17

Tropical Thresholds, Santurce Puerto Rico’s housing stock is mostly composed of low-density, subdivided developments of detached, single-family, modernist-style concrete houses. These uninsulated, flat-roofed, one-story houses with shallow openings and attached carports have become the most generic form of housing for all income levels since this model was massively introduced in the 1940s.

Since the 1970s, rising concerns over security dramatically transformed the urbanscape and social relationships between citizens who, seeking protection from intruders, installed gates and grilles in all openings, creating social isolation.

Vegetation was cut down to improve surveillance in detriment of shade, which is crucial in this latitude. These social, architectural, and urban realities led to car dependence, loss of civic life, and a hot and harsh built environment that conveys unsociability and fear. The idealized tropical image of open living—due to year-round warm weather and the lack of thermal boundary—is challenged.

This studio proposed mid-density, mixed-income housing in Santurce, one of San Juan’s first suburban neighborhoods.

An area currently struggling with physical and population decline, it has great potential to recover its once vibrant urban life. Students explored the economic, social, and climatic advantages of collective living in the city by creating housing with central patios that in turn enclose a 419 International Housing Studio

larger communal garden in the interior of the urban block. Projects examined the potential for deep intermediate spaces, such as patios, porches, and balconies, to passively regulate climate and recover the lost pleasures of tropical living. By carefully calibrating the adjacencies and sequences of these expanded outdoor thresholds between dwelling interiors, the neighbors, and the city, students explored how to encompass latent uses, create gradients of privacy, and recover a sense of safety.

92

Yanliang Li

Projects

93

San Juan

419 International Housing Studio

Mónica Rivera

94

FA17

Yanliang Li

Projects

95

San Juan

419 International Housing Studio

Mónica Rivera

96

FA17

Yuejia Ying

Projects

97

San Juan

419 International Housing Studio

Mónica Rivera

98

FA17

Yuejia Ying

Projects

99

San Juan

419 International Housing Studio

Mónica Rivera

100

FA17

Yuejia Ying

Projects

101

San Juan

419 International Housing Studio

Mónica Rivera

102

FA17

Chong Zhang

Projects

103

San Juan

419 International Housing Studio

Mónica Rivera

104

FA17

Chong Zhang

Projects

105

Santiago de Compostela Spain

Emiliano López Visiting Professor

FA17

Historic Pilgrim City Santiago de Compostela, together with Jerusalem and Rome, is one of the three main centers of Christian pilgrimage. Today the peregrination on foot to Santiago transcends Christian belief and has become one of the main cultural and tourist activities in Spain.

Santiago houses a 500-year-old public university that enrolls 30,000 students every year, and is the capital of the Autonomous Community of Galicia, hosting its government and parliament. In 1985, the city’s Old Town was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Santiago is a city with early Roman origins that reached its climax in 1075 with the construction of the Romanesque cathedral, which has been the city’s epicenter since the early days. From the 13th century, drawn by pilgrimage activity and the cathedral, many mendicant’s orders built monasteries outside the city walls.

The medieval city inherited today is shaped by ecclesiastical, geometric constructions around a cloister. Numerous plazas of diverse sizes and shapes surround the ecclesiastical buildings, which are connected to each other by the city entrances. On both sides of these entryways, terraced houses host the different guilds after which the streets are named. Santiago has two different faces: a public face with ordered facades, meandering streets, and piazzas, built in local granite and lacking vegetation, and an enormous, subdivided private face hidden behind the residential facades that are filled with vegetable gardens and orchards.

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The studio focused on the north edge of Santo Domingo de Bonaval Park. Designed by Álvaro Siza and Isabel Aguirre (1989– 2000), the park occupies the Dominican cemetery of Santo Domingo monastery and the site of ancient vegetable gardens. An old convent located near the French way today hosts the Museum of the Galician People along with the Galician Centre of Contemporary Art. Built by Siza in 1993, it is one of the city’s contemporary attractions.

Each student proposal was understood as a new “urban villa,”1 freestanding in the ever-green Galician landscape. Their challenge was to configure a new city neighborhood, one that maximizes the space with a dense plan.

106

1. Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas, The City in the City—Berlin: A Green Archipelago (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2013).

Mengru Wang

Projects

107

Santiago de Compostela

419 International Housing Studio

Emiliano López

108

FA17

Mengru Wang

Projects

109

Santiago de Compostela

419 International Housing Studio

Emiliano López

110

FA17

Mengru Wang

Projects

111

Santiago de Compostela

419 International Housing Studio

Emiliano López

112

FA17

Lingyue Wang

Projects

113

Santiago de Compostela

419 International Housing Studio

Emiliano López

114

FA17

Rachel Reinhard

Projects

115

Santiago de Compostela

419 International Housing Studio

Emiliano López

116

FA17

Rachel Reinhard

Projects

117

Santiago de Compostela

419 International Housing Studio

Emiliano López

118

FA17

Rachel Reinhard

Projects

119

Barcelona Spain

Emiliano López Senior Lecturer

FA18

La Barceloneta Grid La Barceloneta was the first neighborhood built outside the city walls of Barcelona.

Completed in 1779, it represents the first massive urban housing development in the history of Barcelona. The original military plan comprised two-story row houses forming a strict grid of linear blocks of 10 houses. The house dimension was established as 10 by 10 varas. A “vara,” meaning rod or pole, is an old Spanish unit of length used until the end of 19th century.

One vara equals 0.84 meters, almost 3 feet.

In its origins, the neighborhood hosted families, commerce, industry, and leisure activities related to the port of Barcelona and the sea. With relentless population growth and immigration, the 141.12-squaremeter (1.519 square feet), two-story, singlefamily row houses were divided into what is known as “quarter houses” of 35.28 square meters (379 square feet). The original twostory houses were proposed to be seven varas tall, but grew to six stories in height by the end of 19th century. This rapid increase in height created high-density buildings with 340 dwellings per hectare that continue to house the famous “quarter houses” next to Barceloneta Beach, which was redeveloped in 1995. Today, the dwindling local population coexists with uncontrolled low-cost tourism.

Each student designed a redevelopment of two parallel rows of 10 houses, conforming to the original urban grid.

The proposed dwellings explored ways to strengthen community, recover and enhance the pedestrian ground floor, and harmoniously join with the close presence of the existing “quarter houses.” Students 419 International Housing Studio

researched and analyzed the qualities of sun, light, air, and views that have changed the neighborhood as it developed over 200 years. Their observations were significant in developing meaningful thresholds between the new and the old.

120

Yunxi Zhang

Projects

121

Barcelona

419 International Housing Studio

Emiliano López

122

FA18

Xiaoyu Yang

Projects

123

Barcelona

419 International Housing Studio

Emiliano López

124

FA18

Xiaoyu Yang

Projects

125

Barcelona

419 International Housing Studio

Emiliano López

126

FA18

Jing Chen

Projects

127

Barcelona

419 International Housing Studio

Emiliano López

128

FA18

Jing Chen

Projects

129

Barcelona

419 International Housing Studio

Emiliano López

130

FA18

Jing Chen

Projects

131

Dublin Ireland

Sarah Cremin Visiting Professor

Dublin is low-rise and small-scale,1 more intimate than most capital cities, and “yet its architecture clearly lays claim to its status.”2 Eighteenth-century Dublin was the second city of the British Empire and its houses, built predominantly from redbrick with granite bases and details, still define the atmosphere and character of the city.

Most Irish people are obsessed with owning their own house. This drive for home ownership3 is ascribed to a collective, subconscious memory of the Great Famine (1845–1849) when one quarter of the population died. Traditionally, apartment living was deemed as inferior—for the poor or young. A current housing shortage has given way to a growing acceptance that it is necessary to build more densely.

In this studio, students set about designing mid-density housing, acknowledging Dublin’s idiosyncrasies while simultaneously questioning and addressing issues of contemporary living. The site was a large, sloping plot in The Liberties, a working-class area located just outside the walls of the medieval city. It has a strong identity and students studied its history, folklore, and songs through historic maps, texts, and film. History permeates the site, which is bounded to one side by the stone walls of a former prison with a view to the tapered, brick walls of St. Patrick’s windmill and the Georgian house, the setting of James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead.”4 Students began by studying a twostory, terraced house. The “villa” typology presents a single story to the street and steps down to create two stories at the rear.

Between the street and front door, a series

of landings, steps, and small “gardens” separate public from private. The terrace presents a unified, austere facade. The ornate fanlight and door color distinguish one house from the next. Within are wellproportioned, interconnected rooms with tall, timber-sash windows that afford outdoor views and fill the interior with light and fresh air. These houses were cold and drafty, which preserved the building fabric, and this, along with the inherent flexibility of the interior, explains why many have survived.

Students walked the streets of Dublin virtually, representing their observations through collaged perspective views, before designing an imagined threshold, focusing on the sectional relationship between interior and exterior and the spatial possibilities within the walls’ thickness.

Housing projects grew from these studies and were grouped together in three or four.

Negotiations between students shaped and formed individual projects, leading to a series of urban proposals, which sought meaningful connection with the existing city and allowed for individual propositions about contemporary living.

FA18

A Door of One’s Own

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132

1. Population of 1.395 million.

2. Christine Casey, The Buildings of Ireland: Dublin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

3. Jack Horgan-Jones, “The Changing Face of Home Ownership—Who Wins, Who Loses?” Irish Times, April 6, 2019.

4. “The Dead” is the final short story in Dubliners, a selection of short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914.

Anna Friedrich

Projects

133

Dublin

419 International Housing Studio

Sarah Cremin

134

FA18

Anna Friedrich

Projects

135

Dublin

419 International Housing Studio

Sarah Cremin

136

FA18

Anna Friedrich

Projects

137

Dublin

419 International Housing Studio

Sarah Cremin

138

FA18

Larissa Sattler

Projects

139

Dublin

419 International Housing Studio

Sarah Cremin

140

FA18

Larissa Sattler

Projects

141

Halifax Canada

Donald Koster Senior Lecturer

FA18

“E Mari Merces”—From the Sea, Wealth II* * For a complete description of this studio, please see page 82.

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142

Yifan Sun

Projects

143

Halifax

419 International Housing Studio

Donald Koster

144

FA18

Yifan Sun

Projects

145

Halifax

419 International Housing Studio

Donald Koster

146

FA18

Yifan Sun

Projects

147

Halifax

419 International Housing Studio

Donald Koster

148

FA18

Zhuoxian Deng

Projects

149

Halifax

419 International Housing Studio

Donald Koster

150

FA18

Zhuoxian Deng

Projects

151

San Juan Puerto Rico

Mónica Rivera Professor of Practice

FA18

Tropical Thresholds, Hato Rey In San Juan, increasing concerns over security have dramatically transformed the urbanscape and social relationships.

Seeking protection from intruders, citizens install gates and grilles in buildings and homes and cut down vegetation to improve surveillance to the detriment of shade, which is crucial in this climate. Noise also presents a challenge for guaranteeing privacy and conviviality, especially in this intensely social and musical culture. These physical and social conditions, combined with a warm and humid climate and natural hazards such as hurricanes, have led to a hostile built environment that conveys unsociability and fear.

The site was located in Hato Rey at an intersection in the city where several segregated uses come together: the financial district, a highly commercial avenue, a university, an underused urban park with an elevated train station, and a low-density residential subdivision.

Several adjoining plots surrounding the park currently occupied by single-family houses were chosen to accommodate all the student projects, with the intention of forming a mid-density, connected neighborhood rather than a series of isolated and unrelated objects.

This studio explored the safety, social, and climatic advantages of collective living, as well as the potential conflicts that arise from sharing space in a society accustomed to detached, single-family homes. Students engaged these conflicts and concerns as a 419 International Housing Studio

fundamental way of questioning the cultural codes embedded in our living environments.

Successful designs developed an attractive living option with a passive and resilient construction capable of contributing to a sustainable model for a more compact, walkable, and dense city.

152

Zhao Yang

Projects

153

San Juan

419 International Housing Studio

Mónica Rivera

154

FA18

Jiankun Chen

Projects

155

San Juan

419 International Housing Studio

Mónica Rivera

156

FA18

Jiankun Chen

Projects

157

San Juan

419 International Housing Studio

Mónica Rivera

158

FA18

Peiyao Li

Projects

159

San Juan

419 International Housing Studio

Mónica Rivera

160

FA18

Xuan Li

Projects

161

San Juan

419 International Housing Studio

Mónica Rivera

162

FA18

Xuan Li

Projects

163

Seattle United States

Max Bemberg Lecturer

FA18

Yesler Congregation This studio focused on growing cities sustainably, considering the impacts of tech booms, the nature of community building and urban placemaking, and the types of housing that thrive in our current housing market.

One of the fastest growing cities in America, Seattle’s population has increased almost 19 percent since 2010. To keep up with demand, developers battle for efficiency, leading to the renaissance of congregate housing. Also known as communal residences or co-living spaces, congregate housing is a place where residents share amenity areas like kitchens, dining spaces, living rooms, storage, and, on occasion, bathrooms. A resident’s private space becomes a sleeping room with enough space for a twin bed and small desk.

Critics of congregate housing decry its lack of connection with the community.

They see out-of-scale, dense, insular boxes where residents seem isolated from their natural environments, neighborhoods, and city. There are concerns over how these buildings will adapt with the ups and downs of the global economy. If—or when— Seattle’s boom subsides, will the city’s most central neighborhoods be filled with unrentable micro-housing for an abandoned workforce?

How can a more socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable congregate community be re-envisioned? Can these residences satisfy current housing needs while also adapting to long-term expansion or decline? How can communal housing foster a more robust sense of community, 419 International Housing Studio

both internally and within the greater urban context? Can their design establish a stronger connection with the natural environment? Finally, how can these homes help foster the identity of the individual within a larger collective?

Students engaged with Seattle’s bipolar climate—summer months of temperate perfection bordered by dark and damp springs and winters when rain is omnipresent. They were challenged to provide shelter from these conditions while also embracing the potential for passive sustainable solutions. Students were asked to celebrate water through architecture, using buildings as instruments to gather, filter, and reuse this natural resource.

Students communal housing proposals were tested at the site of Seattle’s first public housing development, Yesler Terrace.

Built in 1941 as the country’s first racially integrated public housing, this historic development was built in concert with the topography, allowing for elegantly alternating bands of housing, covered porches, and yards that blended—and often eroded—areas of private ownership for the sake of collective engagement and shared space. Over the past decade, Yesler Terrace has been fractured by infrastructure and speculative development. As it faces its final days due to expanding market-driven development, students pondered what could be learned from Yesler Terrace’s engagement with the topography as well as its questioning of private and public space.

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Max Bemberg

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Muzi Dong

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Muzi Dong

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Muzi Dong

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Barcelona Spain

Emiliano López Senior Lecturer

FA19

La Barceloneta Port Working again within the framework of La Barceloneta explored in 2018, the 2019 studio proposed creating a new neighborhood between the consolidated urban grid and the port’s disconnected infrastructure. The goal was to engage the port’s everyday vitality with the pleasure of living in an urban, seaside context.

Each student’s proposal mediated the existing homes, fish market, and city infrastructure in dialogue with other students’ proposals. The space between the proposed buildings was crucial in framing the new community. Keeping in mind that the dimension and proportion of the remaining public open space defines the urban character of the new neighborhood, students proposed a sequence of public spaces linking transit from the city to the pier, a pedestrian-only area configured by public squares instead of streets.

This urban design methodology also served as a theoretical framework for developing the domestic interior spaces, understood as a sequence of rooms of varying sizes. Students avoided using passageways to link the rooms together, because “these thoroughfares were able to draw distant rooms closer, but only by disengaging those near at hand.”1 Where passageways were de rigueur, they were planned “as much like rooms as possible, with carpets or wood on the floor, furniture, bookshelves, beautiful windows. [They were] generous in shape, and always [had] plenty of light.”2 Units were developed as a matrix of different rooms, in which movement was produced by filtration, not canalization: 419 International Housing Studio

occupants move through the domestic space by passing from one room to another. Each room had a series of latent uses derived from its size, intensity of light, quality of air, and above all the rooms adjacent to it. Starting with the notion that these rooms do not have predefined uses and may be freely interpreted by the users, the sequence of rooms becomes an extremely flexible matrix. “Almost every room, like a philosophical system, was in itself an entry, or passageway to other rooms, and systems of rooms—a whole suite of entries, in fact. Going through the house, you seem to be forever going somewhere, and getting nowhere. It is like losing one’s self in the woods.”3

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1. Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” Architectural Design 48, no. 4 (April 1978): 267–278.

2. Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language: Towns, Building, Construction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 632–636.

3. Herman Melville, I and My Chimney & Bartleby, the Scrivener a Story of Wall-Street (1856; reprint, Somerville, TN: Bottom of the Hill Publishing, 2014), 28.

Junhao Li

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LMODEL 1/32’’ =1/32 1’ 0’’’’ = 1’ 0’’

LMODEL 1/32’’ = 1/32 1’ 0’’’’ = 1’ 0’’

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Ke Chen

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Ke Chen

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Cagliari Italy

José Morales Visiting Professor

FA19

Spaces of Relation and Privacy Climate, materiality, space, and ways of inhabiting architecture and the city are intrinsically related. The city of Cagliari, capital of the island of Sardinia in Italy, is strategically located in the heart of the Mediterranean between Italy, France, and Spain. Historically, it has been a place of transit for civilizations, cultures, and economies; therefore, this island has been a tactical place from which to control the “Mare Nostrum,” our sea.

These very characteristics have triggered important urban transformations and housing alterations due to the mass tourism that has emerged over time. The domestic architecture, both existing and new construction, does not meet the requirements of current residents. At the same time, real estate speculation is forcing many to move outside the city center.

The site for this course was an area located between the ancient walled city and the urban environment that evolved over the 19th and 20th centuries The extraordinary material and wealth of this place reinforces the value and environmental quality of the chosen site.

The house—the domestic space and interior distribution—was scrutinized to adapt a design for emerging economies related to tourism and living, such as room rentals or mixed commercial and domestic use, that affect private and public spaces. This involved reflecting on the relationship and limits between public and domestic spaces.

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Students’ exploration of the domestic space allowed for relocating functions in the home to the extent that space, culture, climate, and private economies could be balanced. The objective of the course was to interrelate all these conditions by projecting the organization of domestic spaces, calibrating the relationship between residents’ collective spaces and the city’s places of transit, on the border between the urban space and the private space of the collective dwelling.

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Dylan Sabisch

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Halifax Canada

Donald Koster Senior Lecturer

FA19

“E Mari Merces”—From the Sea, Wealth III* * For a complete description of this studio, please see page 82.

MASSING RESPONSE 1/32” = 1’

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HARBOUR -1.5 M Lvl BOARDWALK

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Bing Zhao

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San Juan Puerto Rico

Mónica Rivera Professor of Practice

FA19

Tropical Thresholds, La Puntilla San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital and the second oldest European settlement in the Americas, was founded by the Spanish in 1521 as a military outpost. Situated in the trade winds connecting it to Seville, Spain, the historic district of Old San Juan occupies the tip of a rocky islet at the entrance to the Bay of San Juan. This neighborhood, which is still surrounded by parts of the original defensive walls, is comprised of 16th to 18th century mostly one- and two-story buildings that form a grid of compact city blocks perforated by patios with underlying water cisterns. The site of this studio was in La Puntilla, a tip of low-lying land located outside and south of the city’s defensive walls. Once the site of the Spanish fleet and arsenal, it is now occupied by the U.S. Customs House, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, the National Guard, housing, and a large parking lot.

Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the island’s main tourist attractions, Old San Juan embodies an urban model of living that is diametrically opposed to the predominant suburban housing model introduced in the late 1940s, when the island experienced great economic and social reform launched by New Deal agencies. The sprawl of singlefamily, modernist concrete houses covers most of the island’s built territory and has slowly degraded its historic town centers.

Mostly residential and infrastructural, the sprawl has created areas of social and use segregation, as well as car dependence.

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This studio considered the design of collective housing, acknowledging the city’s rich historic heritage and incorporating passive design strategies—shading, cross ventilation, and orientation—to address the island’s tropical coastal climate.

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Yixuan Wang

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Mónica Rivera

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Gary Lee

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Gary Lee

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Gary Lee

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Mónica Rivera

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Zheyi Yuan

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Naitian Tian

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Naitian Tian

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Visited Walkways

Javier García-Germán

Body, Atmosphere, and Climatic Typology: Toward an Architecture for Everyday Life Michael R. Allen

Incomplete by Design: Reconsidering the Death and Life of Pruitt-Igoe 219

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In the 419 International Housing Studio, students look closely at moments of transition between public and private realms, particularly access to dwelling units. Because project sites are in different cities around the world, many discussions revolve around housing access types and how these respond to issues related to historical and cultural practices, climate, building codes, and advantages such as economy, surveillance, sociability, light, and air.

From the beginning of our practice, Emiliano López Mónica Rivera Arquitectos, we have been interested in discussions around the advantages afforded by open walkway (or gallery) access in housing. This is known by many names in Spanish and English, from Alison and Peter Smithson’s “streets-in-the-sky” to “deck access,” “access gallery,” “corridor street,” “open entry corridors,” “entry loggias,” and “elevated walkways.” We have chosen “walkways,” alluding to a stroll in a neighborhood and because some are not elevated or covered as are galleries.

According to professor Eric Mumford, “the idea of continuous pedestrian access galleries to individual dwelling units was a frequent feature of earlier social housing schemes extending back at least to the 1840s.” By then, some model housing in London presented this type of access and “although cold in the winter … were used for sanitary and daylighting reasons instead of internal, enclosed, double-loaded corridors.”2 Perhaps our interest stems from their ubiquitous presence in housing schemes in the temperate climates where we both grew up and where the importance of cross ventilation, economy, and community are valued. They are also familiar to us as common solutions found in vernacular Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial architecture, often surrounding a courtyard. We have attempted to understand what makes these access spaces successful or not by experiencing firsthand how these walkways feel, look, and perform and how people use and inhabit them. We also acknowledge the potential for these entry walkways to be climatic buffers in cold climates when further enclosed by seasonal layers of protection.

Although our interest has led us to visit many buildings outside Spain and in very different climates, Casa Bloc (1932–1936)—a 200-unit housing block for workers in Barcelona by Josep L. Sert, Josep Torres Clavé, and Joan Baptista Subirana—remains the most relevant.3 Firstly, we can observe how use is particularized in relation to both climate and character. And secondly, because it has been there long enough—built in 1936, it remains a thriving community today—to see how uses of the open access walkways have been agreed upon and consolidated by the residents.

We look at how the S-shaped block configuration favors collective use, and the territory of the community remains delimited Essays

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1 . An earlier version of this text was published in Domestic Thresholds (Lucern, Switzerland: Quart Verlag, 2016). . Eric Mumford, 2 “Courtyard Houses Versus Streets in the Air,” International Housing Studio 2014– 2016 (St. Louis, MO: Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design at Washington University in St. Louis, 2016), 180.

3. All images in this essay by Emiliano López and Mónica Rivera.

by the building yet maintains the possibility of relating to the city through open pilotis that connect the half patio to the street. Mainly, we look at the use and appropriation of the open walkway spaces at both the individual and the collective level. The uses we encounter reveal residents’ practical needs and desires, such as drying clothes in a sunny spot or planting a flower garden.

We take notice of how these appropriations of space come about thanks to slight features, such as the small space between columns and the 60 centimeters from the railing to the inner face of the column. It surprised us how such insignificant amounts of space were still enough to accommodate very different and intense uses in the shared areas, while still keeping the passageway clear.

The placement of the structure on the outer edge of the walkway invites one to move alongside the wall, where small recessed spaces enclose entry doors leading into a hallway where the kitchen and bathroom are located. Privacy, in this case, is solved by simply placing windows up higher. The space for movement along the wall interrupts the connection between the interior of the house and those 60 centimeters of extra space next to the railing.

These observations raise questions of adjacencies. What kind of space can be generated at the threshold between house and shared-access walkway? Can it be transformed into something else? From this building and similar projects, and from our interest in appropriated space, other questions arise. How can adjacencies be improved and intensified to provide a better relationship between the interior of the dwelling and shared, appropriated space? How can boundaries be designed to offer the possibility of communication, but also the option of privacy and anonymity?

The following collection of images, taken by us, traces our visits to different open-access walkways in places around the world. We still have many more to visit.

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Casa Bloc Architects: Josep Lluís Sert, Josep Torres i Clavé and Joan Baptista Subirana Site: Barcelona, Spain Year: 1932–1936 Visited: 11-06-2003

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Visited Walkways

Gallaratese 2 housing block Architect: Aldo Rossi Site: Milan, Italy Year: 1969–1973 Visited: 09-08-2006

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Justus van Effen housing block Architect: Michiel Brinkman Site: Spangen, Rotterdam, Netherlands Year: 1919–1921 Visited: 08-26-2005

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Visited Walkways

Robin Hood Gardens Architects: Alison and Peter Smithson Site: London, United Kingdom Year: 1966–1972 Visited: 04-08-2001

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Weesperstraat student housing Architect: Herman Hertzberger Site: Amsterdam, Netherlands Year: 1959–1966 Visited: 08-23-2005

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Visited Walkways

Silodam housing Architects: MVRDV Site: Amsterdam, Netherlands Year: 1995–2002 Visited: 08-22-2005

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Emiliano López & Mónica Rivera

Oost III in IJ Plein Masterplan Architects: OMA Site: Amsterdam, Netherlands Year: 1986 Visited: 08-24-2005

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Visited Walkways

Piraeus housing block Architect: Hans Kollhoff Site: Amsterdam, Netherlands Year: 1989–1994 Visited: 08-24-2005

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Milans del Bosch apartment block Architects: MBM (Martorell Bohigas Mackay) Site: Barcelona, Spain Year: 1962–1965 Visited: 04-06-2007

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Visited Walkways

Hotel La Rada Architect: Henry Klumb Site: Condado, San Juan, Puerto Rico Year: 1950 Visited: 01-02-2010

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El Monte apartments Architect: Edward Larrabee Barnes Site: San Juan, Puerto Rico Year: 1960–1969 Visited: 01-04-2010

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Visited Walkways

Housing in Hohenems Architects: Carlo Baumschlager, Dietmar Eberle, and Kurt Egger Site: Austria Year: 1984–1985 Visited: 06-21-2011

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River City II Architect: Bertrand Goldberg Site: Chicago, United States Year: 1983–1986 Visited: 12-03-2017

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Housing block Architect: Kazuyo Sejima Site: Gifu Kitagata, Japan Year: 1996–2000 Visited: 08-10-2010

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Housing block Architect: Akiko Takahashi Site: Gifu Kitagata, Japan Year: 1996–2000 Visited: 08-10-2010

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“La Vaquería” housing Architects: Víctor López Cotelo and Juan Manuel Vargas Site: Santiago de Compostela, Spain Year: 1998–2002 Visited: 04-12-2009

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Homes for senior citizens Architect: Peter Zumthor Site: Chur, Switzerland Year: 1989–1993 Visited: 04-12-2009

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Visited Walkways

Svartlamoen housing Architects: Brendeland & Kristoffersen Site: Trondheim, Norway Year: 2005 Visited: 02-18-2011

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Housing in Dornbirn-Ölzbündt Architect: Anton Kaufmann Site: Austria Year: 1997 Visited: 06-21-2011

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Visited Walkways

Social housing SAAL Bouça Architect: Álvaro Siza Site: Oporto, Portugal Year: 1973–1978, 2000–2006 Visited: 07-24-2019

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Emiliano López & Mónica Rivera

Wohnhäuser Rigiplatz Architects: Knapkiewicz & Fickert Site: Zurich, Switzerland Year: 2010 Visited: 05-19-2018

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Visited Walkways

Javier García-Germán

Body, Atmosphere, and Climatic Typology: Toward an Architecture for Everyday Life

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During the last two decades, architecture has explored design opportunities opened up by the fields of thermodynamics and ecology. However, beyond the quantitative and performanceoriented approaches that have prevailed in recent years, any committed attempt to connect climate, atmosphere, and architecture must focus on unravelling the existing connections between a climatic understanding of architecture and the everyday life of its users. As a result, thermodynamic approaches to architecture must address the interactions that exist between local climate, the spatial and material particularities of architecture, and the lifestyles of its users.

The work undertaken in the 419 International Housing Studio reflects on this important dynamic. The syllabus explicitly mentions the need to understand “the importance of the climatic, social, and cultural dimensions of a specific city in relation to forms of dwelling.” Interestingly, this is done not only through climatic data and other geographical tools, but principally through specific architectural drawings that explore the capacity of architecture to engage with the climatic culture of a place. Through experiential engagement with the climate and sociocultural particularities of a place, students explore the capacity of architecture to mediate between local climates and everyday inhabitation patterns.

Contrary to the parametric approaches that have dominated thermodynamic architecture during the last decade, it is necessary to find architectural tools for connecting climate and ordinary life.

A climatic approach to typology offers an encompassing tool for bridging the gulf that exists between a local climate and a specific inhabitant’s patterns of everyday life. Climatic types—both historical and contemporary—show in a very explicit way how architecture can interact between outdoor climate and the way people live and socialize, potentially connecting the spatial and material features of architecture with the specific physiological and psychological behaviors of its users, connecting the thermodynamic processes caused by architecture and the quotidian behavior of its inhabitants.

This essay explores the capacity for climatic types to engage the social and cultural commonalities of a place. Starting with the need for an experiential approach to architecture, an initial passage exploring the multisensory dimension of the human body leads to the everyday life experience of inhabitants of a given place.

Every place reveals common behaviors that are shared among its inhabitants, and climatic types offer disciplinary tools for attuning these questions to architecture. This essay tentatively aspires to redefine the concept of typology, overlaying the formal and material questions considered by previous definitions with performative, behavioral, and phenomenological ones.

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fig. 1. Reactions of the human body to climatic elements.

From Application of Climatic Data to House Design (Washington, DC: US Housing and Home Finance Agency, 1954), 11.

Body, Comfort, Pleasure: From Physiology to Phenomenology Over the past ten years a renewed interest in the human being has emerged, positioning man in the center of architectural discussions.1 Even though architecture is a field of knowledge with the ultimate goal of providing human shelter, over the past several decades, it has paradoxically focused on disciplinary discussions.

The human body was initially incorporated into the discipline of architecture through the field of public health and, decades later, through the paradigm of comfort. It is well documented that the Modern Movement fostered interest in hygiene and health and how the desire for a healthy environment deeply influenced its architectural outcome.2 From Willis Carrier’s “air-conditioned man” (1910s) and the Olgyay brothers’ “bioclimatic man” (1969) to Kiel Moe’s “radiant man” (2010), architecture has focused on the physiological dimension of the human body, overlooking other, equally important, perspectives [figs. 1-2].

Beginning in the 1960s, this emphasis was complemented by an interest in psychology. The “medical” body gave way to the “psychological” body, introducing the concept of the “expanded field of perception.” Richard Neutra’s body of work focused on psychology, representing a clear example of architecture that mediated between the environment and the user’s perceptual experience.3

1 . See for example Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2016), or Kiel Moe, Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). For more on the current interest in neurophenomenology, see the books referenced in note number 5. . Over the past 2 few decades, several voices have researched the influence of public health and medicine in the history of the Modern Movement.

See Beatriz Colomina, X-Ray Architecture (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2019). . Richard Neutra, 3 Survival Through Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).

4. Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1979).

fig. 2. The human body as radiant system. From Kiel Moe, Thermally Active Surfaces in Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 71.

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Javier García-Germán

These ideas were further developed in the 1970s through books like Lisa Heschong’s Thermal Delight in Architecture,4 which searched for an alternative to the homogeneous environments Modern Architecture was delivering. In contrast to the isotropic spaces and air-conditioned atmospheres that pervaded the modern built environment, Heschong championed the multisensory aesthetic experiences offered by traditional architecture. Drawing on examples ranging from the Finnish sauna to the Islamic garden, Heschong argued that the human nervous system is programmed for changing environments rather than homogeneous ones, considering that thermal fluctuations—like those existing between north African summer temperatures and the conditions within the enclosed Islamic patio—have invigorating effects on the human body.

This multisensory approach was related to the interest in phenomenology that arose in 1970s architecture culture. Christian Norberg-Schulz’s interpretation of phenomenology focused on reintroducing an original, imagined authenticity to balance the rational abstraction Modern Architecture had revealed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology was interpreted by a group of architects who introduced wholeness, rootedness, and place into architecture through embodied multisensory experience. The work of architects such as Juhani Pallasmaa, Steven Holl, and Peter Zumthor exemplifies how these questions were introduced in the built environment.

A renewed interest in phenomenology5 has emerged in the work of a group of architects, historians, and theoreticians who are using cognitive science, neurophenomenology, and embodied cognition “to shore up architectural phenomenology’s ethical project with scientifically rigorous accounts of embodiment.”6 Unlike Freud’s understanding of the sharp separation of body and mind, neurobiologists like Jean-Didier Vincent7 have probed the idea that environment, soma, and senses are interconnected and form a continuous realm, unveiling the fact that human psychological emotions are connected to the body’s physiological processes. Present interest in phenomenology is being reinvigorated through a rigorous scientific approach, which enables more precise knowledge of the effect that specific design decisions have on the perceptive environment. This means designers will be able to create architectural environments with a complete understanding of the reactions specific stimuli will have on the human body.

The phenomenological project was based on the presupposition of another universal subjectivity—through embodiment—which would come to replace modernity’s Essays

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5. A number of architectural historians and theoreticians have resorted to neuroscience to reinvigorate the phenomenological project. See for example, Sarah Robinson and Jhuani Pallasmaa, Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015); Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (New York: HarperCollins, 2017); Harry F. Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment: The Implications of the New Sciences and Humanities for Design (New York: Routledge, 2013); or Alberto PérezGómez, Attunement: Architectural Meaning After the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016).

6. This renewed interest in phenomenology can, for instance, be found in the issue of Log devoted to this topic. See Bryan E. Norwood, “Disorienting Phenomenology,” Log 42, WinterSpring 2018, 14.

Body, Atmosphere, and Climatic Typology

objectivity. However, rather than provide a universal theory of architecture, a revival of phenomenology8 must use renewed tools as a way of unveiling the particularities of different embodiments.

Making clear that neurophenomenology will provide the practical knowledge needed to attune the human body to architecture—providing healthier, more varied, heterogeneous, and stimulating atmospheres—the real challenge is to understand how this physiological-perceptual paradigm can permeate architecture in everyday life. This question introduces the second part of this essay, which explores how ordinary everyday life atmospheres can help with understanding how the built form affects how occupants perceive, think, and behave.

Atmospheres of Ordinary, Everyday Life Ordinary life has been a continuous source of inspiration for architects. From Robert Venturi or Rem Koolhaas to Atelier Bow-Wow, the study of ordinary architecture and urbanism has enriched and transformed architecture culture. Architects typically turned to existing urban phenomena for redefining their own discipline. Learning from Las Vegas9 studied the strip mall to formulate the decorated shed principle. Delirious New York10 explored the architectural conditions of the Manhattan skyscraper to reinvigorate architecture through program hybridization. Made in Tokyo11 documented anonymous contemporary architecture in the city of Tokyo as an alternative to the sophisticated star-architecture culture. Unlike these books, which focused exclusively on the built environment, a new generation of publications analyze the connections between users, everyday life, and the built environment. Revealing an anthropological perspective, ordinary, everyday life is mapped to show how architectural and urban elements interact with non-architectural elements such as the human body, plants and animals, or atmospheric phenomena to define particular behaviors.

For instance, recent books by Atelier Bow-Wow 12 explore what they define as the “ecology of livelihood.” Through meticulous, detailed sectional perspectives, Momoyo Kaijima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto represent how users inhabit buildings. Overlaying the space of construction with the space of human interaction, the space of representation with the space of occupation, they show the interrelationships between diverse elements. For example, the drawing “Cherry Blossom Viewing”13 [fig. 3] depicts an annual Japanese event showing the precise interaction between the arrangement of cherry trees, cast shadows, the beauty of 419 International Housing Studio

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7. See Jean-Didier Vincent, The Biology of Emotions, trans.

John Hughes (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

8. Norwood, 11-22.

9. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Icenour, Learning From Las Vegas, rev. ed.

(Cambridge, MA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1977).

10. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1978).

11. Junzo Kuroda and Momoyo Kaijima, Made in Tokyo (Tokyo: Kaijima Institute, 2001).

12. See books such as Atelier Bow-Wow, Commonalities, Production of Behaviors (Tokyo: Lixil, 2014), Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, WindowScape: Window Behaviourology (Singapore: Page One, 2012), or Windowscape 3 (Japan: Film Art, 2016).

Javier García-Germán

blossoming flowers, a picnic, and social encounters, which together make this specific situation memorable. Tsukamoto explains that they listen to and observe user behaviors to understand what is happening in each place, claiming “[e]very place reveals unique behaviors that are shared among the people who are part of that place. These behaviors are not something we can design. They are already there. We can only encourage or intensify them by intervening in existing conditions that define the behavioral capacity of that space.”14 Photography is of great use in the search for ecological connections between inhabitants, the built environment, and climate. Modern and contemporary photographers—from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Frank Kappa, or Francesc Català-Roca to Joel Meyerowitz—have documented everyday life during the last century, showing the connections that exist between climate, architecture, atmosphere, and human behavior. Through their work, natural and built environments can be analyzed to further understand the relationships between places and people.

Pictures introduce everyday life, unveiling not only productive activities or social patterns, but also more mundane tasks— though equally relevant for understanding the connections between humans and climate—such as how people dress or interact with the built environment [fig. 4], revealing in which situations inhabitants are enjoying a good life. Interestingly, these everyday life circumstances are sometimes framed by architectural devices—a glass house or a porch—providing a first approximation of the architectural arrangement a particular climatic situation requires [fig. 5]. This enables architects to find the architectural elements that can deliver the same climatic effects, articulating a smooth and continuous thread between everyday life situations and the architectural frame that causes them.

However, this documentary evidence needs to be complemented by a parallel initiative that aims to understand the existing interactions between the built environment, the microclimate it causes, and the way it is inhabited. Relating these questions to each particular situation requires acknowledging the thermodynamic connections that tie the human body— both its physiological functions and psychological emotions— to architecture’s spatial and material features. This means understanding precisely which thermodynamic phenomena connect human behavior to its context, as well as understanding the physical interactions—haptic, thermal, acoustic, and so forth—at play in a specific situation and how these affect the human perception to make it intense and pleasurable. The goal Essays

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13. Drawing by a student at the Tsukamoto Workshop at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (2013–14), from Atelier Bow-Wow, Commonalities of Architecture (Delft, Netherlands: TU Delft, 2016), 52–53.

14. Atelier BowWow and K. Michael Hays, Architectural Ethnography: Atelier Bow-Wow. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017), 15–16.

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is to overlay ethnographic investigations of everyday life with the technical expertise provided by disciplines such as physics, physiology, or neuroscience with architectural tools to develop a wholistic approach that enables the design and build of successful spaces. This is done by searching for architectural elements that evoke such social and physiological behaviors.

Both historical and contemporary architecture culture offer examples of spatial, material, passive, and mechanical elements that can provide the comfortable and intense climatic effects found in specific situations.

Figures 6 and 7 show a proposal for a public, covered open corridor for an office building drawn for a competition. It depicts the interactions between the material space, its microclimate, its plants, and the behavior of its users. It is passively ventilated to generate a stimulating space that encourages social interaction. It can be argued that this space works at a social level due to its stimulating and passively generated atmosphere.

In turn, this atmosphere works because the psychophysiological processes have been properly designed.

15. Jean Dollfus, Les Aspects de L’Architecture Populaire dans le monde (Paris: Editions Albert Morancé, 1954).

16. Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to NonPedigreed Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965).

Climatic Type as Spatial Practice It is difficult to predict the architectural situations in which specific atmospheres will unfold. However, climatic types offer an invaluable knowledge for understanding how specific architectural solutions mediate between local climates and the everyday life of inhabitants. Present in different latitudes around the world, climatic types offer an extensive catalogue of basic architectural solutions that effectively adapt to the climate.

Classic books like Jean Dollfus’ Les Aspects de L’Architecture Populaire dans le monde15 or Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects16 are valuable references that distill the architectural and climatic strategies at work [fig. 9].

Climatic types offer a precise orchestration of spatial and material considerations for a specific microclimate [fig. 8].

Challenging the modern insulated-envelope paradigm, these types interact with climatic conditions, articulating an open-system thermodynamic approach to architecture.

Furthermore, climatic typologies display precisely how specific thermodynamic mechanisms, like a patio or attached greenhouse, overlay purely performative questions with other issues that are connected to the way in which architecture is used. For instance, Lacaton & Vassal systematically attach polycarbonate greenhouses to buildings, a great example of the powerful connection between specific thermodynamic devices, the microclimates they generate, and the everyday 419 International Housing Studio

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life that can potentially be experienced by its inhabitants. From post-occupancy photographs, it is also possible to understand the experiential engagement of users within induced microclimates, unveiling the capacity for climatic types to mediate between habitation behaviors and the physiological and psychological processes at work.

Interestingly, the idea that climatic types offer understanding of the connection between architecture, social behavior, and the human body, introduces a new concept of typology that supersedes past conceptualizations, suggesting a need to update its scope and definition.

Toward a Fourth Typology?

According to Anthony Vidler’s 1977 article, “The Third Typology,”17 the idea of typology has had three different conceptualizations.

Initially, it was connected to the natural order of the primitive hut.

An outcome of the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment, the prevalent idea during the 18th and 19th centuries understood the combination of type-elements as the expression of the underlying form of nature beneath its surface appearance. In the

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17. Anthony Vidler, “The Third Typology,” Oppositions 7 (Winter 1977), available at https:// monoskop.org/ images/5/50/Vidler_ Anthony_1977_1998_ The_Third_Typology. pdf.

fig. 3. Cherry Blossom Viewing at Tokyo Tech.

People’s behavior is synchronized with the cherry blossom.

(Atelier Bow-Wow, 2014)

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early 20th century this understanding gave way to a second idea of typology linked to technological production, best exemplified by Le Corbusier’s interest in the industrial “object-types.” Developed through a long optimization process, the concept of object-type became the basis for design.

However, in the 1960s the Modern Movement questioned these definitions, sparking an interest in the form of the traditional city and bringing forward a third understanding of typology.

Transcending former conceptualizations which found validation outside the discipline, the new idea of typology found its focus of interest in the traditional city and its architecture. According to Alan Colquhoun, modernity oscillates between “biotechnical determinism” on one hand and the “free expression” of the architect on the other, but leaves a void that had been previously filled by core disciplinary values.18 The new idea of typology that developed during those years bridged this gap. Connected to urban form, it was recognized as a disciplinary tool for understanding the morphological evolution of the city through time. Devoid of the ideological content of previous conceptualizations, typology

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now offered a set of objective architectural tools referring to their formal nature as architectural elements.

Interestingly, there is a symmetry between the idea of typology that appeared in the 1960s and the renewed interest that has emerged over the past several years. Contemporary architecture has also oscillated between two opposing positions: the performative ecodeterminism of sustainable practices and the delirious genius of the star system. Unfortunately, this polarization excludes several essential architectural questions, operating in a cultural and social vacuum that obviated not only core disciplinary values and the historical background of architecture, but also its human and collective side.

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figs. 4 and 5.

El miajón, 1967 (Courtesy of Fons Fotogràfic Francesc Català-Roca, Arxiu Històric del Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya [COAC])

Body, Atmosphere, and Climatic Typology

Similar to what happened in the 1960s, this vacuum must be counteracted by a return to core disciplinary values and social engagement. From this point of view, a typological discourse can potentially bridge the void between the techno-scientific and the social and cultural opposites required to interact in architecture.

Climatic typology—or the study of climatic types—has the potential to bridge this vacuum. Climatic types bring forward a new understanding of typology, which merges the thermodynamic, the cultural, and the social. This is done using concepts and tools belonging to the discipline of architecture.

From a performative19 point of view, climatic types are understood as material constructs that orchestrate space, matter, and program to generate specific climates. Unlike Dollfus or Rudofsky, who link climatic types to specific geographies and regions, this idea of typology is no longer understood in connection to a given place, but as thermodynamic schemes available for use in a variety of locations and situations—as long as they are compatible with local climates—paying tribute to Durand’s idea that architectural history offers a wide variety of solutions that can be recombined in novel ways. This concept circles back to the correlation between type and form that pervaded typological definitions until the iconographic turn dispensed with it.

Moving from the performative to the behavioral, this understanding of typology complements the formal idea prevalent

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18. Alan Colquhoun, “Typology and Design Method,” Perspecta 12 (1969), 71–74.

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in the 1960s. Integrating atmosphere with peoples’ behaviors, it conflates the architectural conceptualization and construction with its occupation,20 drawing architecture closer to Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “spatial practice.” This idea of typology combines architecture, anthropology, and psychology to deliver an understanding of architecture that overlays its spatial practice, the representation of space, and representational space.21 To put it simply, this understanding superimposes lived space, perceived space, and conceived space, designing spatial and material systems to provide an intense and stimulating atmosphere, where everyday life can unfold.

Transcending Le Corbusier’s industrial types, Nikolaus Pevsner’s functional types,22 Venturi’s iconographical types, or Aldo Rossi’s formal types,23 this understanding of typology also supersedes the notion of “behavioral typology,” which has been recently defined.24 In behavioral typologies, content prevails over container, human behavior and activity over space, habitability over structural consistency. Expanding on this idea, climatic types conflate the formal and material structure of the architectural type with the microclimates it elicits and the behavior of its users, superseding performative determinism to embrace an open ecological interaction between architecture, atmosphere, and the social with human bodies.

Unlike previous visions which understood that “type can no longer define the confrontation of internal ideology and

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19. Performative refers to the climatic performance that specific spatial and material features can elicit in an architectural interior.

20. Hays, 23.

figs. 6 and 7.

Physiological processes under the shadow of a bougainvillea trellis, Concytec office building competition, Lima, Peru. (Javier García-Germán/ TAAs, 2015)

Body, Atmosphere, and Climatic Typology

external constraints,”25 this interpretation unveils the fact that architectural tools like typology can be aligned with political endeavors. Delineating an inclusive architecture that complements the quantitative rigor unfolded by thermodynamic practices with a stronger emphasis on everyday life experience, this new idea of typology merges the quantitative, technoscientific thermodynamic and ecological discourse on sustainability with a disciplinary outlook to provide more intense and stimulating atmospheres for everyday life and a politically charged agenda.

21. Henri Lefebvre, La Production de l’Espace (Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1974).

22. Nikolaus Pevsner, A History of Building Types (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976).

3. Aldo Rossi, 2 L’architettura della città (Padova, Italy: Marsilio Editori, 1966).

24. See Marco Casamonti, “Architectural Typology vs.

Behavioural Typology,” area, Oct. 6, 2014. Available at https://www. area-arch.it/en/ architecturaltypology-vsbehaviouraltypology-2/.

25. Rafael Moneo, “On Typology,” Oppositions 13 (Summer 1978), 22–45.

fig. 8. Section through the Qa’ah of Muhib Ad-Din, Cairo (c. 1350), showing the malqaf and central location of the qa’ah. (Hassan Fathy/ American University in Cairo Archive, 1986)

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fig. 9. The air conditioners of Hyderabad. Martin Hürlimann, 1927 (Fotostiftung Schweiz), from Architecture and Knowledge, edited by Sonja Hildebrand, Daniela Mondini, and Roberta Grignolo (Milan: Mendrisio Academy Press, 2018), 126.

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Michael R. Allen

Incomplete by Design: Reconsidering the Death and Life of Pruitt-Igoe

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Even the most punctilious histories of St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe housing project have glided over one key to understanding its demise: most of its residents were children. One of the crucial opening statistics presented in sociologist Lee Rainwater’s oft-cited Behind Ghetto Walls is that, when Rainwater and his team of sociologists and student researchers were scouring Pruitt-Igoe for evidence of its poor quality of life, 69 percent of the residents (although certainly not those that were interviewed in depth) were under the age of 18, with 70 percent of those under the age of 12 [fig. 1].1 Somehow this reality has not widely resonated in architectural history nor in social histories that foreground lurid details of bottles hurled at police cars, criminal activity, stressed-out single mothers, and indifferent public officials.

Pruitt-Igoe in fact was a neighborhood largely for children, and therein begins a crucial architectural error in its original design and a major cause for its ultimate destruction. The function of the built environment for children was never foremost in any evaluations, not in the initial program for the housing project and not in measures on most attempts to rehabilitate its 33 towers after distress became evident. Yet understated episodes in the life of the housing project remain in which diverse figures, including landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg and community activist Macler Shepard, acknowledged that its fate resided in its livability for children and proposed or implemented programs that could have reclaimed Pruitt-Igoe from its own death, as well as its historical image as unworkable, unresponsive housing design.

The history of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project often starts and ends with photographs: St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographer Michael J. Baldridge’s excellent capture of the falling, imploded mass of a tower in 1972; stills from an aerial flyover of a completely abandoned landscape seen most famously in the film Koyaanisqatsi;2 images of broken windows; or perhaps boastful views of the project’s earliest days that seem inspired by the work of Hedrich Blessing. The parade of images floats narratives of architectural hubris, feckless federal urban policies, concentrations of poverty, and the failure of design to remedy urban decline. Each image points to a larger narrative summarized by Peter Hall as one in which Pruitt-Igoe has become the metonym for “all that is wrong with urban renewal.”3 Images of Pruitt-Igoe supported attacks on the project’s design from environmental design theorists including Oscar Newman, Fred Koetter, and Colin Rowe; from critics of modernist design including Tom Wolfe; and from rising-star postmodernist Charles Jencks.4 Newman may have offered the most granular critique of PruittIgoe, while others simply profited from the utility of tendentiously selected images supporting simple theses against high-rise housing Essays

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1 . Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 13. . Directed by 2 Godfrey Reggio, 1983. . Peter Hall, Cities 3 of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, 3rd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 256.

4. See Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (New York: MacMillan, 1972); Fred Koetter and Colin Rowe, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1978); Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981); and Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977).

fig. 1. Most of Pruitt-Igoe’s residents were under the age of 18. Henry T. Mizuki, 1956. (Courtesy of Missouri History Museum Library and Collections Center)

or modernism. Corrective narratives have redirected the position of Pruitt-Igoe within architectural history to present its design as not merely a troubled symbolic project, but the subject of a set of contingent determinants. Among these factors are the actions of federal and local governments, social structures of poverty and race, and architectural discourses of environmental design and postmodernism that rejected modernist projects and superblocks.

Pruitt-Igoe remains far from exonerated of its critics’ worst charges, though. In order to reclaim Pruitt-Igoe fully, one must confront the prevalent imagery of the project and substitute accounts of the actual work of inhabiting and altering it. Pruitt-Igoe must be dislodged as a unitary form, and understood as a malleable system of buildings, outdoor spaces, and amenities that was never actually completed. One must confront the dominant argument that Minoru Yamaski’s building design is the start and end of Pruitt-Igoe, and instead study the ways in which the “completion” of Pruitt-Igoe in 1956 was simply the point from which to see the horizon of a fully realized, vibrant built environment. Accordingly, subsequent attempts to redress, rework, and rebuild the Pruitt-Igoe system are equally significant, not just as acts of administration, but as acts of social and architectural design practice.

The path toward completion at Pruitt-Igoe tests a recent thesis offered by curator and historian Martino Stierli. Reckoning with the ontological gap between the image of architecture, which inscribes it as a visual entity, and the bodily experience of architecture, which constitutes architecture as a transient set of perceptions, Stierli warns that the perceptual narrative of architecture requires an immersive understanding of space. In this immersion, the distance between a perceived object and a perceiving subject dissolves, thus collapsing architecture as a visual entity.5 However, there is an alternative conclusion to the conflict between image and experience as the verification of architecture.

The conflict may produce a perpetual contradiction between the different knowledges of architecture produced by seeing and by experiencing. This contradiction only exhausts all meaning if one finds the differences proof of failure, which is the case with many of Pruitt-Igoe’s narrators. Because images of modernist completion betray the agony of suffering in the space, the project failed. Because images of decay and decline betray passionate attempts to reclaim and repair the project, they too are proof of failure. Pruitt-Igoe failed because it was a contradiction. However, if Pruitt-Igoe was never actually completed—its destruction precluded any reconciliation of the knowledges produced by image and experience—then its historic contradiction does not document failure, but the ruin of an unfinished project.

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5. Martino Stierli, “The Urban Unconscious and the Visual Archive: On Architectural Image Culture,” in Make New History: 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, ed. Mark Lee, Sharon Johnston, Sarah Hearne, and Letizia Garzoli (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2017), 296.

Michael R. Allen

The Incomplete Project When the St. Louis Housing Authority (SLHA) completed construction of the Wendell O. Pruitt Homes (federally designated as MO-1-4) and William L. Igoe Apartments (MO-1-5), which were eventually merged, St. Louis celebrated what seemed like a promising solution to the public policy known at the time as “slum clearance” (subsequently used here to denote this policy, not to adopt the term slum). Funded under the Fair Deal legislation called the United States Housing Act of 1949, the project represented administrative perfection. The Housing Act created new funds for slum clearance (Title I) and low-rent public housing production (Title III). With the federal government directly financing condemnation and clearance of slums and the construction of replacement housing, cities now could envision implementation of urban renewal on a large scale.

St. Louis already had a large-scale program in place under its 1947 Comprehensive Plan, directed by planner Harland Bartholomew. Leveraging the 1949 Housing Act allowed St. Louis to advance its own local administrative goals and avoid crafting local plans in reaction to the newly available federal funds. Theoretically, St. Louis should have been able to harness the funds in a selfdetermined fashion. For the very site where Pruitt-Igoe would be built, Bartholomew had already envisioned completely erasing the DeSoto-Carr neighborhood and replacing it with modern mass housing. However, Bartholomew’s vision was based on the 1930s wave of experimental New Deal projects like Greenbelt, Maryland, and Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles.6 Bartholomew preferred clusters of low-rise houses anchoring a sweeping “green river” that would provide children with a park-like setting in direct contrast to the hardscape of the slums.7 Bartholomew’s plan for the new

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6. Alexander von Hoffman, “Why They Built Pruitt-Igoe,” in From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America, ed. John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Sylvian (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 187.

7. von Hoffman, 187.

fig. 2. Aerial view of Pruitt-Igoe, 1959.

(State Historical Society of Missouri Collections)

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DeSoto-Carr would separate automobile traffic by creating a series of superblocks, which would allow easily traversable, automobilefree paths between new apartments and planned amenities (a recreation center, swimming pool, elementary schools, and library).

Bartholomew seemed inspired by the work of New York’s Robert Moses, who, as parks commissioner in the 1930s, co-located parks and recreational amenities, and housing reformers including Catherine Bauer, who fought for communitarian, garden-like masshousing projects typified by low-rise modern buildings.

Of course, the 1949 Housing Act did not offer funding for recreation centers, parks, pools, or new schools; it just funded replacement housing. St. Louis would have to coordinate local public works with federal projects due to restrictions dictated by the new Public Housing Administration (PHA). Foremost was the strict use separation enshrined in the rule that land cleared under Title I and rebuilt under Title III could only include public housing and some public uses like schools: no commercial uses of any kind could be built. The DeSoto-Carr neighborhood may have been troubled, but it had circulation patterns based on small blocks with mixed uses.

Children could walk to buy candy and teenagers did not have to go far to work an after-school job. Services and job opportunities were integrated into the neighborhood. All of that changed with Pruitt-Igoe.

When Hellmuth, Yamasaki, and Leinweber contracted with the SLHA for its first projects under the Housing Act, the PHA made it impossible to implement either Bartholomew’s proposals from the 1947 Plan or the architects’ own ideals. The PHA’s administrative authority—and limits—set the stage for a project that would need additional sources of funding as well as adjacent urban renewal

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fig. 3. Automobiles dominated the Pruitt-Igoe landscape. Henry T. Mizuki, 1965.

(Courtesy of Missouri History Museum Library and Collections Center)

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projects with other uses to ever become a complete neighborhood.

The firm’s first project, the award-winning Cochran Gardens Apartments (MO-1-3), seemed to show that constraints did not preclude good design. Yamasaki was able to take the mandatory superblock and break the monotony with an asymmetrical traffic plan, staggered zeilenbau plan for the 12 apartment buildings, and height variations in building types (four each 12-, eight-, and sixstory buildings).8 Furthermore, each unit had a balcony directly extending the unit into the surrounding city.9 Architect Minoru Yamasaki could only shape the form for one of the parts needed to make a real neighborhood and approached the task with an underappreciated earnestness. Still, Yamasaki’s later assessment of Pruitt-Igoe was harsh. By 1956, he gave a lecture declaring that “[w]e have designed a housing project, not a community.”10 The architect went on to lament that pressure from the federal administration and his firm’s own faith in the “novelty of form,” expressed by their two 11-story tower types, betrayed the real promise that the design could provide an enduring solution.

If he had it his way, Yamasaki concluded, the entire project would have consisted of one-story buildings.

Yamasaki further stated that successful housing projects need to offer security and serenity, multiplied across the scale of the entire project. Before working in St. Louis, he had collaborated on a speculative design with Oscar Stonorov and Karl Van Leuven for a housing project in downtown Detroit as part of a planning effort led by Victor Gruen. Through this project, Yamasaki directly encountered Stonorov’s design ideals—his Carl Mackley Houses (1935) in Philadelphia was a highly influential prototype for subsequent non-federally subsidized mass housing.

At the Mackley Houses, Stonorov integrated built forms and landscape functions by using staggered and wrapped zeilenbau housing blocks to create two courtyard arrangements. Between these was a wide park for strolling and public use.11 Resident amenities, such as a wading pool and tenant swimming pool, were located within the courtyards, surrounded by four-story, modern low-rise buildings. Begun by a labor union, the project was governed by a resident cooperative association. The Mackley Houses integrated spatial and social senses of security and serenity, demonstrating that, within a superblock form, variable, useful open spaces could be created—even those sheltered from public view.

Stonorov’s influence is somewhat evident in an early concept for Pruitt-Igoe from January 1950, in which Yamsaki designed Pruitt with six-story buildings and Igoe with three- to five-bedroom units in two- and three-story row houses.12 The six-story buildings would contain smaller units for the elderly, single people, and Essays

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8. Dale Allen Gyure, Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 20.

9. Gyure, 21.

10. Minoru Yamasaki, “The Morality of Public Housing,” (unpublished papers, March 14, 1956; box 26, folder 10), Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University.

11. Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 130.

12. Gyure, 24–25.

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couples, while the row houses would be for families. In this scheme, children would live closest to the ground, with easy connections to the outdoors. The density would have been 30 units per acre, in line with Bartholomew’s 1947 Comprehensive Plan, which recommended de-densification of the inner city. Had this version of Pruitt-Igoe been built, it might not have become a wellknown project, but just another moderately successful low-rise development.

The PHA, however, could not assent to Yamasaki’s early idea.

Under pressure from St. Louis mayor Joseph M. Darst to develop a set of construction drawings as quickly as possible, the PHA urged Yamasaki to explore elevator buildings.13 In March 1950, Yamasaki began designs for buildings with elevators serving “units of three” floors each14—the incipient “skip-story elevator” plan that would define the ultimate built forms. PHA further pressured the architects to increase the density of the site to 55 units per acre15 and ensured its program rules would be followed, curbing imaginative arrangements for open spaces. Under the rules, one-story buildings had to be 50 feet apart, with another five feet distance for each additional story. Pruitt-Igoe’s rows ended up nearly 200 feet apart, the spaces between mostly filled with walkways around parking [figs. 3 and 4]. Each unit had to have two elevation exposures, a distinct living room and kitchen, separate enclosed bedrooms, a coat closet, general storage, and glazing equal to 10 percent of square footage.16 Somehow this all had to be achieved for $1,750 per unit or less. Value-engineered interiors at Pruitt-Igoe have been well-documented, but the larger deficit instantiated by the PHA was the lack of any flexible or adaptable layouts with mandatory fixed partitioning.17 Under the dictates of the PHA and SLHA, Yamasaki eventually created a design for two variants on the same building type: an 11-story concrete slab, elevator-served high-rise built at either 180 or 360 feet long [fig. 2]. The towers were 29 feet wide, with a slight dumbbell profile as the end blocks projected on the main, southfacing elevations. The ground floors offered exposed breezeways instead of enclosed lobbies that led to elevators stopping on the 4th, 7th, and 10th floors. At each of these floors was a large 85-by-11-foot solar gallery with a staircase at each end serving apartments on the floors below and above. These galleries were the towers’ only enclosed public spaces, although the ground levels had a laundry and small childcare rooms [fig. 5]. Yamasaki championed the towers’ circulation plans as an approximation of the old vernacular neighborhood, drawing skyward so people could have chance encounters with neighbors that would prevent a sense of isolation.18 419 International Housing Studio

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13. von Hoffman, 195.

14. von Hoffman, 195.

15. Gyure, 25.

16. Gyure, 25.

17. An early account of the value engineering can be found in Eugene J. Meehan, Public Housing Policy: Convention Versus Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1975) 35–36.

18. Gyure, 26–27.

Michael R. Allen

Although Tom Wolfe would pillory Pruitt-Igoe as the demon incarnation of the urbanist ideals of the International Congress for Modern Architecture (CIAM),19 Yamasaki clearly discarded its principles in key aspects of the design.20 Foremost, there were no common areas on the first floors or roofs, which eschewed any parallel with CIAM-influenced slab towers. The first-floor breezeways supposedly ruptured containment of the building so the site’s circulation would pass through freely, creating a twodimensional circulation pattern of horizontal and vertical, but it offered no sense of separation between the domestic and outside worlds. The lack of markers between public and private spaces provided no sense of security, and the heavy masonry walls failed to promote connection.21 Building entrances were as elegant as the undersides of highway ramps. The PHA also eliminated Yamasaki’s idea of providing public restrooms in each building, so the open spaces immediately around them could not be occupied for long periods.

Inside, the apartments were actually quite large for their time, a fact lost in popular memory. Rainwater determined that the Pruitt-Igoe apartments were, on average, larger than those in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood to the west, with a difference of between 2.9 to 1.9 bedrooms.22 However, the design seemed like a bureaucratic spreadsheet rendered into brick and mortar. Each unit was required to have a living room that could include a dining area,

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19. Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne.

20. Wolfe, 80–82.

21. Newman, 66.

22. Rainwater, 14.

fig. 4. The spaces between the towers at Pruitt-Igoe. (State Historical Society of Missouri Collections)

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but each of the 33 towers’ units had the exact same sized room regardless of whether the units were two or five bedrooms [fig. 6].

Additionally, the provision for one full bathroom for each unit meant exactly that: just one bathroom for a four- or five-bedroom unit. Although the provision of private bedrooms was new to many residents accustomed to shared quarters in city tenements or rural shacks, the fixed, concrete masonry unit walls (preferred by the PHA for durability) meant units could not be easily altered. There was no way to recombine units or connect them.

Yamasaki’s design met with largely positive critical reviews.

Progressive Architecture lauded the architect for displaying “the dexterity of a magician” in rendering monolithic buildings as something other than boxy and programmatic.23 Architectural Record hailed the skip-stop elevators and Yamasaki’s solar galleries, citing these features among those that allowed Pruitt-Igoe to “avoid the ‘project’ atmosphere so often criticized.”24 Locally, the new housing project landed in the “Home and Garden” section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which usually boasted of new suburban amenities. The occupation of the Igoe apartments (which were for whites, so perhaps normalized in this racialized newspaper section) featured alongside an announcement of new stores at Westroads Shopping Center, an image of a new retail development in St. Ann, and a story about the expansion of the St. Louis County Library system through two new branches.25 Pruitt’s towers featured with a large image above the fold, top right.

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23. “Two Housing Projects,” Progressive Architecture 34, no.

12 (Dec. 1953), 65.

24. “Four Vast Housing Projects for St. Louis: Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, Inc.,” Architectural Record 120, no. 8 (Aug. 1956), 185.

25. “William L. Igoe Apartments, Housing Authority Project, in Use,” St. Louis PostDispatch, Feb. 26, 1956, 1.

fig. 5. A completed gallery in one of the towers. Henry T. Mizuki, 1965.

(Courtesy of Missouri History Museum Library and Collections Center)

Michael R. Allen

A more sinister bureaucratic hand played into the decision by the SLHA to use the separate designations for Pruitt and Igoe as a mechanism to prevent racial integration. Not only was the project segregated, it was segregated by project—not by building— turning the lone street in the superblock, Dickson Street, into a racial dividing line. Atop that mechanism was the low provision of four- and five- bedroom units in the Pruitt (black) project and the comparatively high provision in the Igoe (white) project. The PHA did not specifically mandate racial segregation or inequality, but the SLHA chose to use Pruitt-Igoe to mimic the city’s polarity on a small scale until a local judge forced it (and all other SLHA property) to be integrated in 1955.

Beyond the racist territorializing built into site planning, the SLHA put few resources into the open spaces [fig. 8]. The PHA did not have strict requirements for its mandated open space beyond keeping it unbuilt. Many projects funded under the 1949 Housing Act received the same treatment: concrete paths through expanses of grass lawns and immature trees, with little else for delight or leisure. The SLHA contracted Bartholomew’s private practice, Harland Bartholomew Associates, for landscape design at Pruitt-Igoe. The landscape plans called for large concrete plazas at each entrance connected by undulating paths [fig. 9]. Adjacent to some plazas were spaces marked “tot lot,” where (not yet funded) playgrounds could be built. The tree planting plan was generous, but the landscapes were pretty binary and devoid of meaningful devices of play, encounter, or discovery. Circulation was mostly east-west because the towers were joined at their corners, making the only north-south passages in large lawns or through towers.

The SLHA’s insistence on large parking areas for automobiles made the superblock planning pointless: driveways and parking lots were placed in the 200-foot areas between rows of towers, often adjacent to the “tot lot” areas. The landscape design contradicted Yamasaki’s ideals of replicating traditional urbanist pedestrian flows and rejected CIAM’s ideas for separating pedestrian and vehicular traffic.26 City government coordinated resources to build a public library, elementary school, and health clinic at Pruitt-Igoe by 1959. Despite the intrusive presence of streets and parking areas, Pruitt-Igoe remained a better pedestrian environment for children than most parts of the city, and certainly far superior than in the growing suburbs. The Board of Education planned a new onsite elementary school before the towers were complete. On the superblock, children could walk to both an elementary school and a public library.27 Across one street was a public health clinic. Just two blocks south and east were two junior high schools. By 1961, a Essays

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26. American architects generally had rejected CIAM’s urbanism by the late 1940s, although urban renewal projects would be carelessly conflated with CIAM ideas for many decades to follow.

For more, see Eric Mumford, Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937–69 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 63–99.

27. “But a New St. Louis Also Needs Better Schools,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 15, 1955, 3.

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public recreation center with a gymnasium and swimming pool was located on 20th Street at the east end of the site. Pruitt-Igoe may have been rough for adults, but it was not hell on earth for children.

Nonetheless, by 1965 Pruitt-Igoe landed in Architectural Forum as the “case history of a failure.” Writer James Bailey noted that Yamasaki’s buildings were one-third vacant, sported many shattered windows, and contained deteriorating elevators. The lawns between the buildings were strewn with trash.28 Instead of noting the incremental progress made to fulfill Pruitt-Igoe with a school, library, and clinic, Bailey doted on the deterioration of the architecture. According to Bailey, Pruitt-Igoe was “simply too big” to work and had fallen victim to poor design, value engineering, and systemic racism. Yamasaki’s awkward galleries had become “gauntlets” residents ran through to escape robbers, rapists, drug dealers, and other outsiders.29 Monsignor John A. Shocklee, a local Catholic priest who ministered to residents, told Bailey that PruittIgoe offered no suitable spaces for harmonious social gatherings, so good people stayed in their apartments and bad people hung around the bases of buildings. Bailey’s pessimistic essay concluded that “Pruitt-Igoe also is a state of mind,” and not a good (or even ambiguous) one—it was a state of social and architectural depression.30 By the time Bailey’s article appeared, SLHA already had begun exploring redesign. The SLHA retained Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, the local successor to the project’s original architects, to study the project conditions and make recommendations for design interventions to stabilize the project. Project architect Albert Mayer was uncertain about the prospect of rehabilitating

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28. James Bailey, “The Case History of a Failure,” Architectural Forum 123, no. 5 (Dec. 1965), 22.

29. Bailey, 23.

30. Bailey, 24.

fig. 6. Floorplans for adjacent fiveunit apartments at Pruitt-Igoe. (St. Louis Housing Authority)

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the towers.31 For its part, in 1964 the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare placed Pruitt-Igoe in its national “concerted services” project, where social services were targeted to severely distressed urban areas.32 Bailey failed to note that Pruitt-Igoe was more than just a set of high-rise buildings, but a neighborhood still lacking adequate resources and the land uses necessary to truly succeed. The towers reflected some design deficiencies, but also demonstrated the pitfalls of concentrating poor people in a place lacking good playgrounds and parks, jobs, shops, and places for safe and joyful social assemblage.

Pruitt-Igoe’s reputation never rebounded after the late 1960s, but several strong calls for improvement and completion still lay ahead. Efforts to complete Pruitt-Igoe lay dormant in the historic record but show that images alone cannot account for the history of the housing project’s design. Architecture is not simply what is first built, but also what is evaluated and modified over time. The project continues to be judged by the initial design of its buildings, when those alone could never have fulfilled the vision for PruittIgoe. Some necessary elements were never built, while others were added. Still, the record attests to despondence by the end of the

31. Bailey, 25.

32. Bailey.

fig. 7. A family inspecting their new apartment, 1955.

(State Historical Society of Missouri Collections)

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1960s. In a letter to George Becht in 1972, Yamasaki glumly summed up his feeling about Pruitt-Igoe: “I am perfectly willing to admit that of the buildings we have been involved with over the years, I hate this one the most. There are a few others, but I don’t hate them; I just dislike them.”33 Finishing Pruitt-Igoe: Efforts at Repair and Self-Determination At the same time Architectural Forum published Bailey’s dismal account of Pruitt-Igoe’s architecture, Lee Rainwater began publishing his research on Pruitt-Igoe that would culminate in Behind Ghetto Walls. Unfortunately, both criticisms measured the success of a totally designed Pruitt-Igoe against the set of towers that had been designed as housing alone. Still, Rainwater’s account was damning and undercut the idea that Pruitt-Igoe served any public goals for providing decent public housing or improving the lives of low-income residents.

Rainwater, did however, identify some traits that could have led to a major redesign. According to Rainwater, by September 1965 the population at Pruitt-Igoe was not only mostly children, but also contained two and a half times women to men.34 Sixty percent of families housed there were headed by women; only 30 percent consisted of a traditional mother-father-children structure.35 At the time, occupancy was still 74 percent, though this would change quickly. Essentially, the population of Pruitt-Igoe was dominated by women who were mostly mothers, and by children. The spatial fixes thus required needed to support mothers and children, but the fixes later attempted largely abstracted the population and missed the mark on specific needs.

One early project created was the Pruitt-Igoe Neighborhood Station, located in a rented building across the street from the project on Cass Avenue. Operated by the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, the Neighborhood Station provided assistance on utility payments, resume writing, job placement, and other material matters.36 This short-lived initiative, funded by the Human Development Corporation, was open only from 1966 through 1969.37 By the time the Neighborhood Station closed, Pruitt-Igoe was, according to Bob Hansman, “entering another period in which upward and downward forces seemed locked in combat.”38 Amid the supposed downfall of Pruitt-Igoe, the SLHA commissioned landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg—later revered for projects such as the Billy Johnson Playground in Central Park, New York City (1985) and Peavey Plaza, Minneapolis (1975)—to design six new playgrounds and an amphitheater for a total cost of $350,000.39 Friedberg had just received acclaim for his projects 419 International Housing Studio

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33. Minoru Yamasaki, “Minoru Yamasaki to George Becht” (unpublished correspondence, Dec. 4, 1972; box 12, folder 6), Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University.

34. Rainwater, 13.

35. Rainwater, 13.

36. Bob Hansman, Images of America: Pruitt-Igoe (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia, 2017), 54.

37. “Nonprofit Group Is Proposed to Aid Pruitt-Igoe Tenants,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 1, 1966, 3A. 38. Hansman, 59.

39. “Playgrounds for Pruitt,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 25, 1974, 194.

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for the New York City Housing Authority, where he had dealt with similar circumstances. At the Carver Houses in Harlem, Friedberg designed a landscape of “outdoor rooms” that segmented wideopen spaces around towers into active recreational spaces.40 Then Friedberg crafted a plan at Riis Park Plaza to transform a dead, open space around towers described as “prison-like” into an outdoor park with an amphitheater, adventure playground, and water park.41 The PHA formula determined a key difference between Friedberg’s work at Riis Park Plaza and Pruitt-Igoe. The Riis site contained a total of two acres, while Pruitt-Igoe occupied 57 acres. At Pruitt-Igoe, Friedberg had to design scattered resources across a site where automotive traffic flowed freely. Still, by August 1967, the SLHA was optimistic that Friedberg’s plan would activate open spaces at Pruitt-Igoe. A 250-seat amphitheater and six playgrounds would be built of modular, movable wooden elements that could be relocated or reassembled based on future needs [fig. 10].42 Friedberg’s modular outdoor constructions were antithetical to the overdetermined PHA housing projects and were designed to enhance public life. If Pruitt-Igoe were a disaster, these projects never would have happened—they were designed to assist

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40. Marisa Angell Brown, “Radical Urbanism in the Divided City: On M. Paul Friedberg’s Riis Park Plaza (1966),” Perspecta 50: Urban Divides, (2017), 304.

41. Brown, 303, 308.

42. Robert Adams, “Construction Work Begins on Pruitt-Igoe Amphitheater,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 27, 1967, 3A. fig. 8. Children running at PruittIgoe, c. 1960.

Henry T. Mizuki, 1955. (Courtesy of Missouri History Museum Library and Collections Center)

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stabilization efforts. Around this time, Pruitt-Igoe resident Ella Taylor observed that “[t]here are many advantages to living here, but no one ever seems to notice them.”43 In 1969, the benefits of Friedberg’s designs were not strong enough to prevent upheaval. The SLHA closed 16 buildings in September 1969 due to continually declining occupancy.44 That same year, SLHA tenants went on a collective strike that largely originated at Pruitt-Igoe and the Darst-Webbe housing project (also designed by Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum) on the south side.

According to Teamsters union official Ernest Calloway, the rent strike was “by far the most meaningful engagement in social action that the St. Louis black ghetto has witnessed in recent years.”45 If playgrounds were a form of physical completion, the strike was designed to bring social and administrative completion.

Strike leaders Buck Jones, Jean King, and Ruby Russell sought to bring conditions of occupied units up to good standards and to have more power over how Pruitt-Igoe and other projects were governed. Although intimidation from the SLHA meant many tenants did not participate, and most black elected officials did not support the strike, it carried on with full force.46 By September 1969, 2,400 residents had withheld over $600,000 in rent and secured the acquiescence of the SLHA.47 Among the better outcomes of the strike were a new Tenants Affairs Board, a tenant bill of rights, fixed rent rates, and the adoption of a rule where rent could cost no more than 25 percent of a tenant’s income.48 In October 1969, tenants and politicians announced a new St. Louis Civic Alliance for Housing that would advocate for policies to prevent the conditions that led to the strike. Calloway called this a “small October revolution,” although he noted that both white and black middle classes had opposed the strike.49 The strike led to the federal Brooke Amendment,50 making the 25 percent incometo-rent ratio an official federal rule for public housing. However, the deprivation of revenue and the rent ratio resulting from the strike meant declining funds for physical intervention, because the only operating revenues for Pruitt-Igoe and other federally built housing projects consisted solely of rents collected.

Not long after the rent strike, the SLHA began moving PruittIgoe residents to other scattered sites, enough to be accused of moving residents “like cattle.”51 The SLHA set upon a major plan of reconstructing Pruitt-Igoe, which foremost pressed converting one- and two- bedroom units into larger family housing.52 SLHA director Thomas P. Costello stated that the agency aimed to combine the inventory of 1,310 one- or two-bedroom apartments, which accounted for 75 percent of vacancies. In contrast, the 220 four- and five-bedroom apartments were almost fully occupied.

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43. Hansman, 62.

44. Hansman, 87.

45. Ernest Calloway, “Creative SelfDeterminism,” St. Louis Sentinel, Aug. 23, 1969, as quoted in Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics & Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 214.

46. Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway, 214.

47. Lang, 214 48. Lang, 215.

49. Ernest Calloway, “A Small October Revolution,” St. Louis Sentinel, Nov. 1, 1968, as quoted in Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics & Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2010), 215.

50. Housing and Urban Development Act of 1969, Public Law 91–152 (12/24/69).

51. E. S. Evans, “Benefits Hoped for in Pruitt-Igoe Dispute,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 15, 1970, 40A.

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Costello seemed to understand that the residential social structure did not match the architectural program.

The SLHA engaged architect Charles Fleming in June 1971 to create a plan for revitalization. Fleming desired no more than 300 or 400 units on the site, as opposed to the existing 2,910.53 He prioritized the major needs as reducing density, adding social supports, and building more playgrounds, noting that 72 percent of residents were under 21 years old. Fleming pointed to one experiment that converted a tower to family housing, where 70 large units quickly housed 500 children, and asserted that entirely new forms were needed on the site.54 Fleming wanted to reduce density to 44 units per acre, build a 10-acre shopping center, and rehouse elderly residents in eight-story towers surrounded by 600 new family townhouses and three villages of walk-up, low-rise apartments.

Fleming’s proposal expanded upon the design principles of LaClede Town, a lauded 1960s mass-housing project in St. Louis’ Mill Creek Valley neighborhood. At LaClede Town, architect Chloethiel Woodard Smith crafted a strong rebuke to the American administrative modernism on display at Pruitt-Igoe. Harkening to Italian Renaissance vernaculars, Smith placed housing in twoand three-story forms with narrow fronts and shared party walls.

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52. E. S. Evans, “Pruitt-Igoe: The Problems of Redesign,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 8, 1971, 4.

53. Evans, “PruittIgoe,” 4.

54. Evans, 4.

fig 9. Part of the landscape plan for Pruitt-Igoe, designed by Harland Bartholomew Associates. (St. Louis Housing Authority)

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Smith differentiated the masses of individual homes, adding small backyards to create defined private spaces that opened onto shared streets, sidewalks, and plazas designed with well-wrought amenities and invitational distances between buildings. Smith stated her goal was to avoid LaClede Town becoming another “huge housing project.”55 Unlike Pruitt-Igoe, LaClede Town included a mix of incomes and races (60 percent white, 30 percent black, 10 percent foreignborn), but fundamentally it was a variegated, low-rise urban form without dead, open spaces.56 Smith previously had applied similar ideas to the Capitol Park project in the District of Columbia (1961, with Dan Kiley as landscape architect), where nine-story high-rises mixed with townhouses. Smith squarely blamed urban planners and government officials for urban environments where social engagement was lacking, stating that “all sorts of people except architects” had shaped urban renewal projects in the United States.57 Smith designed LaClede Town’s outdoor spaces to be ordinary, but well-programmed with desirable recreational uses. Additionally, Smith wanted the project’s open spaces to be protected by cul-de-sacs and pedestrian-only streets so it would be free of through traffic and feel like an “enclave.”58 In fact, the charismatic manager of LaClede Town, Jerome “Jerry” Berger, Jr., was one of the few voices to declare that

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55. Ellen Perry Berkeley, “LaClede Town: The Most Vital Town in Town,” Architectural Forum 129, no. 4 (Nov. 1968), 58.

56. Berkeley, 58.

57. Doris Deaken, “Gentle Architect With Whim of Iron,” St. Louis PostDispatch, Dec. 22, 1963, 59.

58. Berkeley, 61.

fig. 10. One of the modular playgrounds designed by M. Paul Friedberg for PruittIgoe. (State Historical Society of Missouri Collections)

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Pruitt-Igoe’s problem was not architectural. Citing Alison and Peter Smithson’s council housing estates with vertical streets in London (such as Robin Hood Gardens), Berger suggested that Pruitt-Igoe could be saved if basic needs such as drug stores and barbers were added within buildings. Berger told a reporter in 1971: “I think it will take a combination of things to put Pruitt-Igoe back on its feet, and I’m not so sure that the style of architecture is as important as people think.”59 Berger’s opinion was rare among St. Louis thought leaders, although his track record with making LaClede Town an eclectic racial mix certainly gave him credibility.

Within a few months, the SLHA had engaged the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) to take Fleming’s concept further. Hoping the plan would attract funding through St. Louis’ Model Cities initiative, the SLHA strenuously worked on a practical plan. Between October 1971 and June 1972, SOM set up a field office at Pruitt-Igoe to study behavioral patterns around the site.

Although Secretary of Housing and Urban Development George W. Romney began pushing for total demolition in 1971, the SLHA asked for assistance implementing its plans for a new PruittIgoe. One scheme for rehabilitating a single building into housing for large families was not supported by HUD.60 Ultimately, SOM recommended that the SLHA demolish parts of some towers and all of others to create a housing development dominated by twostory townhouses. The remaining tower sections, which would need new elevator shafts that stop at each floor, would house the elderly. New streets and open spaces would follow the traditional urbanism that Smith had introduced in LaClede Town.61 Demolition was a necessary part of the experiment to determine if the SOM plan could work. The first explosive blast of the PruittIgoe towers in March 1972 cut a 180-foot tower in half, and the second and third blasts took down entire towers. Unfortunately, these events created a set of images and film segments showing Yamasaki’s benighted buildings being blown apart that catalyzed a new discourse insisting upon total demolition of Pruitt-Igoe. In 1974, the SLHA relocated the remaining 800 residents, and the site sat as a ghostly place until demolition began in 1976 [fig. 11].

Given that the SLHA essentially endorsed selective destruction of the original buildings, perhaps it is not surprising the last plan for preserving any of them came from an outside organization.

In June 1975, the SLHA received a proposal from Jeff-VanderLou, Inc., the community organization for the neighborhood immediately west of the housing project site. Headed by the charismatic, contrarian radical Macler Shepard, Jeff-Vander-Lou asked to purchase the four towers immediately surrounding Pruitt Elementary School.

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59. Charlene Prost, “A Need for Imagination And ‘Something Excellent,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 8, 1971, 4.

60. Taylor Pensoneau, “Pilot Plan Drawn for Pruitt-Igoe,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 23, 1971, 3A. 61. Washington Correspondent of the Post-Dispatch, “HUD Will Not Approve New PruittIgoe Plan,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 2, 1972, 1.

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The plan struck at the need to make the towers work for mothers and children. Under the Jeff-Vander-Lou plan, all partitions would be removed in the four 70-unit buildings, which would be converted to 60 units in one and 58 units in the others.62 Families would be housed on lower floors with the elderly on higher ones. A gate and fence would be added, so open space around the towers would be programmed but accessible only to residents. This aspect echoed Oscar Newman’s recounting that, when one Pruitt-Igoe tower had been fenced off for construction, residents asked for the fencing to be retained. After work was complete and the fence retained, crime and vandalism at that tower dropped by 80 percent.63 The St. Louis Post-Dispatch quickly endorsed Jeff-VanderLou’s proposal, followed by Mayor John Poelker and booster group Downtown STL, Inc.64 The SLHA also supported the plan, despite the inherent acknowledgment that their endorsement was an admission of administrative failure. Ultimately, however, HUD rejected the proposal as “infeasible and unwise.”65 The Jeff-VanderLou plan would have necessitated HUD investing an addition $4.7 million, which it did not want to do. However, HUD’s discourse was centered on the symbolic nature of Pruitt-Igoe instead of the real viability of the Jeff-Vander-Lou plan. According to Assistant Secretary of HUD, H. R. Crawford, “[t]he stigma of Pruitt-Igoe has been such a blight on its neighborhood, the city of St. Louis and public housing nationally that it must be destroyed.”66 Besides, the SLHA already had signed a contract for demolition of the remaining 30 towers.67 By the end of 1977, all that remained of Pruitt-Igoe were paths, trees, and lampposts. The buildings were fully cleared and the site was an easy testimony to perceived failure.

62. “Group Wants to Remodel, Reuse Pruitt-Igoe,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 18, 1975, 1A. 63. Newman, 56.

64. See “Four Buildings,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 25, 1974, 14.; “Delay is Sought on PruittIgoe Razing,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 23, 1975, 3.

65. “HUD Rejects Salvage of Four Pruitt-Igoe Units,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 1, 1976, 1E. 66. “Salvaging Something,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 6, 1976, 4.

67. George E. Curry, “Public Apathy Blamed By Official In Pruitt-Igoe Failure,” St. Louis PostDispatch, September 10, 1975, 1G.

Never To Be Completed As a complete work of design, Pruitt-Igoe never will be fulfilled. The project could not have delivered on its promise of transforming urban housing without a total development of the site. Unfortunately, the original design commissioned only included some housing towers with placid spaces between them. Designs for playgrounds, new demands and designs for tenant involvement, and a rejected proposal for reworking four of the towers followed. Some could see a feasible path for completing Pruitt-Igoe, but those with real decision-making power stumbled.

The propensity of evidence that mostly children and mothers inhabited Pruitt-Igoe ought to inform today’s assessments. Even though the government intended the project as catch-all housing, a set of policies ensured it was largely the domain of single black mothers and their families. The federal government ensured Pruitt-Igoe would never be home to people from diverse classes, 419 International Housing Studio

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and local government conspired to make sure it began as a racially segregated space. Yamasaki never could have designed for these dispositions, because he was charged with designing generic mass housing. Yet, given funding and government support, subsequent designers could have reformed the project. Instead, the government joined with a legion of critics who ruled Pruitt-Igoe a failure and never gave it a chance to be completed.

The great project Lafayette Park in Detroit, by Mies van der Rohe and Alfred Caldwell, offers a view into what a reshaped ­Pruitt-Igoe could have been. Its arrangement of towers and townhouses distributes children closest to the outdoors and provides a 14-acre plaisance at the center where children and adults can openly play, explore, encounter each other, or just exist.68 The spatial codes of private and public are better defined there, and circulation balances interior and exterior worlds. Because Lafayette Park was not a 1949 Housing Act project, it did not inherit the binds of Pruitt-Igoe, yet its scale and ample open space are similar. Notably, like Pruitt-Igoe, its primary need for open space is for the development of children.

Pruitt-Igoe never had the opportunity to become a Lafayette Park. At Lafayette Park, the landscape and architecture designs were commensurate, so experience and image were not in open contradiction; the full system of the neighborhood was manifest from the beginning. The Pruitt-Igoe system was created in fragments, with several essential components deferred. The length of the deferrals ultimately shook any faith the project could be satisfactorily completed, despite several worthy designs for changing Pruitt-Igoe. Perhaps architecture as repository of deep contradiction is untenable in its ferocity, especially when the will to resolve it is absent architecturally, socially, and politically.

68. Alexandra Lange, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 313–314.

fig. 11. The desolate landscape of PruittIgoe after the last residents moved out in 1974. (State Historical Society of Missouri Collections)

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Instructors & Contributors

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Max Bemberg (United States)

Sarah Cremin (Ireland)

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Max Bemberg is a registered architect in Missouri and Washington state, principal of mbA—Max Bemberg Architect—and a part-time lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis.

As principal of mbA, Bemberg’s work focuses on adaptive reuse projects and creative interventions in the Midwest region, while also engaging in the design of high-density housing projects in Seattle, Washington. He acts as both curator and creator through research projects, small- and large-scale installations, architectural interventions, and collaborations with other designers, artists, and performers.

Bemberg is the cofounder and director of the Seattle Demo Project, a cross-disciplinary arts organization in the Pacific Northwest that utilizes soon-to-be demolished structures for spatial and cultural exploration. The Demo Project was awarded Honorable Mention for the AIA Seattle Honor Awards in 2014. Bemberg is also the cofounder and director of Hybrid Space, a community venue for art installations, performances, and discussions about urbanism, art, and architecture’s role in cities at large.

Bemberg earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 and his master’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 2011.

Sarah Cremin is a Design Fellow in Architecture at University College Dublin where she teaches design studio, technology, and history and theory. She was a visiting professor in the Sam Fox School for the fall semester in 2018. In 2017, she was awarded for her “Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning” at University College Dublin.

Cremin graduated with a first-class honors degree in architecture from University College Dublin in 1994 and with a master’s in architectural science in research in 1996.

After graduating, Cremin worked in New York City and became a licensed architect in New York state. She joined the studio of Herzog & de Meuron in Switzerland in 2000 and was project architect for Prada USA headquarters, Jindong New District in Zhejiang province, China, and “40 Bond” in New York City.

From 2007 to 2014, Cremin was director of CAST architecture in Dublin, an award-winning practice, which focused on residential, retail, and exhibition design.

Cremin has written about contemporary Irish architecture and has served as a jury member for the Architectural Association of Ireland and an invited expert for the Mies van der Rohe Award, and is currently an examiner with the Irish Architects Register Admission Examination.

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Donald Koster (United States)

Emiliano López Matas (Spain)

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419 Instructor and Coordintator FA17–FA18–FA19

Donald Koster AIA, NCARB, LEED AP, is an architect and educator committed to the design and research of contemporary sustainable environments, with experience working on a diverse range of project types and scales. Koster serves as the design practice leader at Arcturis, a multidisciplinary design office where he leads design efforts across multiple project markets.

Koster is also a senior lecturer in the Sam Fox School. Having taught for 18 years, his academic instruction spans a diverse spectrum of interests and student experience levels from foundational design to practicum-based graduate design studio offerings. While a member of the faculty, Koster has led several multiyear, multidisciplinary design research efforts related to urban redevelopment, neighborhood design, adaptive reuse, and contemporary housing. Believing that drawing is a fundamental language and expression of architecture, he has taught and served as coordinator for the Sam Fox School uniform drawing curriculum.

Koster is also the co-creator and founder of the Sunflower+ Project: STL, a winning entrant in the Sustainable Land Lab Competition. Koster has received numerous distinctions for both his academic and professional work.

Emiliano López Matas earned his Ph.D. in architecture from the Universitat Politèctina de Catalunya (UPC) in 2012. He earned a master of architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (Real Colegio Complutense de Madrid Scholarship) in 1999, a master in History: Art, City and Architecture from the UPC, Barcelona in 1997, and an undergraduate degree in architecture from the UPC, Vallès in 1996.

López has taught at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Vallès (2001–2004, 2008–2014); Univesitat Rovira i Virgili School of Architecture, Reus (2006–2008); Calgary University, where he co-directed the school’s Barcelona Architecture Program (2004–2007); and the Barcelona School of Architecture, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (2001–2004). He is currently a senior lecturer in the Sam Fox School, where he was a visiting professor from 2015–2017.

Together with Mónica Rivera, López established Emiliano López Mónica Rivera Arquitectos in Barcelona, Spain, in 2001. Their work has received international recognition, including the Young Architecture Award of the 10th Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, the 7th Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism first award, first prize in the AR Emerging Architecture Award (UK), the FAD Architecture Award for Iberian architecture (2008), and a nomination for the Mies van der Rohe European Prize (2009). Their projects have been featured in El Croquis, a+u Japan, Domus, I.D. Magazine, DETAIL, Interior Design (New York), and The Architectural Review (London), among others, and have been exhibited at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris (2009) and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2012).

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José Morales (Spain)

Mónica Rivera (Puerto Rico)

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419 Instructor FA17–FA18–FA19 Co-coordinator FA17

José Morales, Ph.D. architect, is professor at the architectural project department at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Sevilla (ETSAS) in Spain. In 2006, he received the FAD Award of Thought and Criticism first prize.

Morales has been a visiting professor at many universities, including the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya in Barcelona (Spain), Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Nancy (France), Universidad de Navarra (Pamplona, Spain), and the Bochum University of Applied Sciences (Germany).

In 1985, Morales founded the architectural firm MGM Arquitectos—now called MGM, Morales de Giles Arquitectos—with its main office in Seville and a branch office in Paris.

Morales has received extensive recognition for his work, including the 2017 International Spanish Architecture Prize, the 2013 Spanish Architecture Award, the AIT Award (2012, 2014), the 13th Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism Award, and the 10th Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism Biennial Award. His work is regularly featured in national and international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2000, 2002, 2006, 2014, 2016), “OnSite: New Architecture in Spain” at MoMA in New York (2006), and the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris (2008, 2009, 2019).

Morales’ work has been widely published in books and international architecture magazines, including El Croquis, Lotus, Casabella, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Bauwelt, and A&V. His work has also been published in monographic books such as 2G nº51 (2009) and TC Cuadernos nº104 (2012).

Mónica Rivera, professor of practice, has been chair of graduate architecture in the Sam Fox School since fall 2018. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1993) and a Bachelor of Architecture (1994) from Rhode Island School of Design, and a Master of Architecture with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (1999).

In 2001, Rivera co-founded Emiliano López Mónica Rivera Arquitectos together with her partner, Emiliano López, in Barcelona, Spain. Their practice is internationally known for carefully crafted works that understand architecture as a cultural endeavor that is deeply engaged with the environment. Working with circumstance and contingencies as positive values, their completed work ranges from public housing and schools to furniture, hotels, residences, and strategic planning consultancies. Rivera and López’s work has received numerous awards, including two Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism first awards, an Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism first award, an AR Emerging Architecture Award and a FAD architecture award. Their work has been published in El Croquis, DETAIL, Casabella, a+u Japan, Domus, QUADERNS, and Architectural Review, among others. A book featuring their work, Domestic Thresholds, was published by Quart Verlag (2017, Switzerland) in Spanish, English, and German.

Rivera’s teaching and research focus on constructing thresholds and places that mediate situations, use, and climate. Through design studios, her students explore the environmental, tectonic, cultural, and social dimensions of architectural openings—and the sense of safety they afford.

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Antonio Sanmartín Gabas (Spain)

Jan Ulmer (Switzerland)

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Antonio Sanmartín Gabas is an educator and architect. He is currently co-director of the critical design critical thinking master program at Escuela Ténica Superior de Arquitectura-Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (ESARQ-UIC) with Alfons Puigarnau. Currently a Ph.D. scholar at the Universidad de Alicante (Spain), Sanmartín earned his master of architecture degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He holds a degree and license in architecture and urban planning from Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de BarcelonaUniversitat Politécnica de Catalunya (ETSAB-UPC).

Sanmartín has taught at several schools, including as visiting professor in the Sam Fox School (1996, 2001, 2007, 2016–2017), Ralph Hawkins Visiting Professor at the University of Texas Arlington (2014–2015), visiting academic at the University of Queensland, Australia (2013, 2014), and associate professor of projects at ETSAB-UPC in Barcelona (variously from 1991–2018). He was undergraduate program director and degree project coordinator at ESARQ-UIC, Barcelona from 2002–2006.

Sanmartín is cofounder of Azcon Architectures S.L.P. with Guayente Garcia, and director of developing projects such as Tembo BCN Suites in Barcelona and the Gonja Savannah region Assembly and Community Palace in Ghana, as well as partner at Azcon–Kocher Minder Architekten in Thun, Switzerland. Sanmartín is also cofounder and co-director of aSZ arquitectes with Elena Cánovas.

In addition, Sanmartín is John Hejduk’s partner architect for Spain and was project architect at Eisenman Architects.

Sanmartín has received national and international recognition for his work, including the FAD (1992, 1998, 2002, 2004), Fernando García Mercadal (1997, 1999, 2002, 2008), and the ECOLA (2011) awards.

Jan Ulmer founded his Berlin-based studio in 2008. The firm has realized several residential commissions, exhibition designs, and building conversions. Current works include a multifamily residence in Switzerland and artist studios in Berlin.

Jan Ulmer Architects has been honored with several international design awards. The team won prizes in significant design-build competitions, notably the first prize in the international competition for the 2010 German pavilion in India.

Ulmer has taught at several universities, including as visiting professor in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis (2014–2018), Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (2013), and as lecturer and research associate at Leibniz Universität Hannover (2007–2011), where he co-developed the course curriculum and taught undergraduate and graduate studios along with degree projects and various seminars.

Ulmer earned his bachelor’s in architecture from ETH Zürich in 1997 and his master’s in architecture from Universität der Künste Berlin in 2001. He worked for six years as project architect with Kuehn Malvezzi where he directed several projects, including the Friedrich Christian Flick collection in Berlin and the Julia Stoschek collection in Düsseldorf, which was nominated for the international Mies van der Rohe award.

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Michael Allen (United States)

Javier García-Germán (Spain)

Essay contributor

Essay contributor

Michael R. Allen is as an academic researcher, historian, teacher, design critic, public artist, critical spatial tour guide, and heritage conservationist in private practice. He is a senior lecturer in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design in the Sam Fox School and also holds a courtesy appointment as lecturer in American culture studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Allen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Birmingham, where his dissertation focuses on the relationship between architectural and popular discourses of modernist mass-housing projects.

Allen directs the Preservation Research Office, a historic preservation and urban history consulting firm he founded in 2009. Projects range from adaptive reuse guidance to full intensive surveys of historic neighborhoods, Air Force bases, and cultural landscapes, including documentation of the last high-rise public housing towers owned by the St. Louis Housing Authority between 2012 and 2014.

For this work, the American Society of Landscape Architects St. Louis Chapter honored him with a Civic Stewardship Award in 2017.

Allen’s critical and scholarly writings on architectural history and historic preservation have been published in Buildings & Landscapes, CityLab, Disegno, Next City, and PLATFORM. He was co-convenor of the Pruitt Igoe Now competition, which yielded speculative designs for the site of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project. Fellowships include the Next American Vanguard, the Vacant Property Leadership Summit, and the New School’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. Allen’s research has been supported by the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and The Divided City, an urban humanities initiative in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Humanities, and the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis. Allen is an advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Javier García-Germán has been a professor of architectural design at the Escuela Técnica de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM) since 2007. He is also module director in the master’s degree in collective housing at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH Zürich) and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), and in the master’s in advanced ecological buildings program at the Instituto de Arquitectura Avanzada de Cataluña (IAAC, Barcelona).

García-Germán graduated with honors in architecture from the ETSAM in 2002, spent an exchange year at the Oxford School of Architecture, and earned a master’s in design from Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 2004, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He earned a Ph.D. in architecture from ETSAM in 2014.

In 2004 García-Germán founded TAAs—totem arquitectos asociados—an award-winning practice based in Madrid that explores the connections between climate, architecture, and users. TAAs is currently building an office and 159-unit housing scheme in Madrid. TAAs’ work was exhibited in the XVI Biennale di Venezia in 2018.

García-Germán has authored several books on energy and architecture, including Thermodynamic Interactions (2017, ACTAR), which received both the Pensamiento y Crítica FAD Award (2018) and the XIII BEAU Spanish Architecture and Urbanism Biennial award.

During the past two years, García-Germán has lectured at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Rice University (Houston, Texas), The City College of New York, Texas Tech University (Lubbock), Syracuse University (New York), Tongji University (Shanghai), Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico), Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Universidad de Málaga (Spain), Universitat Politécnica de València (Spain), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain), Instituto de Arquitectura Avanzada de Cataluña (Spain), and Universitat Ramon Llull (Spain).

Instructors & Contributors

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Editors Emiliano López, Mónica Rivera, Heather Woofter

Publisher Washington University in St. Louis, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design

Project Management Emiliano López

© 2020 Washington University in St. Louis. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the permission of the publisher.

Assistant Project Management Ellen Bailey, Audrey Treece Concept Desescribir, Emiliano López Copyeditor Melissa Von Rohr

© Texts: Authors’ own, 2020

Contributors Michael Allen, Javier García-Germán, Philip Holden, Emiliano López, Mónica Rivera, Heather Woofter, and Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Faculty and Students Book Design and Production Desescribir Printing Agencia Gráfica Binding Legatoria

Unless otherwise credited, photographs are authors’ own.

All efforts have been made to contact the rightful owners with regards to copyright and permissions. Please contact the publisher for any request. We apologize for any omissions and will mention, if noted, in any future editions.

ISBN 978-0-9885244-8-4 Printed in Spain

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In our International Housing Studio, faculty and students’ concerns transcend any one location to consider the many forms of housing worldwide. We look at places outside our midwestern home—for example, San Juan, Dublin, Barcelona, and Seattle—to consider the necessities that provide citizens a dignified, full life through thoughtful responses to problems found in unique cultures and urban environments. Faculty and students examine culture alongside housing typologies embedded in ecological and social systems. They consider the individual and collective program within a framework of domesticity. The work projects our world’s realities into the studio by exploring the changing conditions of nuclear families, economic pressures, natural disasters, and political crises.

Heather Woofter

Sam and Marilyn Fox Professor Director, College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design