Vishaan Chakrabarti is the author of the new book "Architecture of Urbanity." (Images courtesy Princeton University Press)
With the nation in the midst of a seemingly intractable affordable housing crisis, new possibilities are becoming visible. Vice President Kamala Harris has proposed a number of policies to make homes more affordable, including the potential to construct over three million new housing units in her first term should she be elected. Amid a severe supply shortage, this is welcome news, but questions abound: What kind of housing? Where? And, most critically, for whom?
Given the federal government’s history of promoting segregated and carbon-intensive suburban development in the past, it is instructive to consider more promising and far more urban housing projects being conceived and built globally.
In recent times, several groundbreaking social housing projects have emerged worldwide that desire to advance social mobility by providing stable, permanent housing in partnership with low-income residents.
One example is the Ciudad Acuña Housing Project, built in 2015 by the architect Tatiana Bilbao for Mexican families whose homes were damaged in a devastating tornado. Also rooted in Habraken, Bilbao’s houses are expandable and divisible to accommodate multiple rooms all while embracing the streetscape and reflecting the scale of the surrounding context. Bilbao’s diagrams explain the ability for residents to expand and change their homes in multiple ways as their needs change.
While the architectural expression of the housing can be understood as regional, Bilbao’s careful composition of the facades and the spaces they hold are indicative of an elevated vernacular that is also evident in Doshi’s work. Both reject the notion that low-income housing must feel cheap or announce their social mission and instead grant dignity through the use of durable materials, elegant proportions, and unambiguously urban relationships to the street.
Among the most innovative social housing projects in the world is Lacaton and Vassal’s 2011 Tour Bois le Prêtre renovation in Paris. Rather than demolishing an existing structure and building anew (as is sometimes but not always necessary), the architects, who collaborated with Frédéric Druot, took on a banal modernist tower and transformed it by layering a sequence of luminescent and liminal spaces at the exterior wall, changing the experiential and performance characteristics of the existing structure without squandering the considerable embodied energy that went into its construction. They successfully added outdoor space for residents, changed the bleak appearance of the original, and decreased power consumption by half, all in an effort conceived and implemented alongside the residents.
This inventive, co-designed approach to both the space within dwelling units and the building’s overall appearance is not only a tremendous advancement for residents; it speaks to a different kind of future for postwar public housing worldwide. Consider that across the Western world in particular, some of society’s most vulnerable live in this type of housing, and as we witnessed during Superstorm Sandy in New York City, the combination of poverty, climate change, racism and societal neglect has left these populations in ever more dire precarity.
Unfortunately, far too many of us have become inured to these circumstances, watching tragedies like London’s Grenfell fire and television shows like “The Wire” with discomfort from a comfortable distance, imagining that the situation has become too intractable in these public housing projects for anyone to do anything about.
Tour Bois le Prêtre should serve as a wake-up call to every mayor, governor and national leader, particularly across Europe and the United States, that change undertaken in cooperation with residents is both possible and necessary. Because many of these projects were built around Le Corbusier’s “tower in the park” framework, which more often than not became tower in the parking due to the suburban nature of this morphology, the rethinking of such projects includes the possibility of densifying the housing sites to introduce more mixed uses and incomes if existing residents agree. With most public housing worldwide facing immense budget shortfalls in the wake of neoliberalism, strategies that both urbanize and radically improve public housing must be considered.
One of the more urban social housing projects completed in recent memory is Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey’s Timberyard Housing, built in 2009 in Dublin, Ireland. Through its streetwall, material expression, and creation of intimate public space recalls the social imperatives of Team 10, the porous material gravity of Louis Kahn, and the scalar ambiguity of what William Wurster called “the large small house.”
The project connects its residents in a dynamic courtyard animated by balconies and doorways. This semi-public space is cleverly situated just off the sidewalk at the narrowest point of the courtyard, providing the residents with both privacy and an openness to the city beyond. Both the scale and materiality of this project weave it into its context without any further nods to contextualism—the color of the brick alone resonates with neighboring buildings from eras past. From this perspective Timberyard is neither classically modern, in the sense that it embraces rather than rejects the street, nor postmodern in that it is not the slightest bit historicist or nostalgic. This “both-and” quality is indicative of a clear path forward for urban social housing in cities composed of tight-knit blocks and pedestrian-oriented streets, a path illuminated by innovative architecture that respects the city and its communities.
Within the United States, given the historic withdrawal of the federal government from social housing, far more limited examples are available.
Among the best is the work of Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan, whose 2013 Star Apartments possesses noteworthy sectional complexity while providing much-needed housing for the formerly unhoused. The project is unabashedly urban, with storefront glass facing the sidewalk and an elevated courtyard framing the skyline. Maltzan, who has completed a number of accomplished social housing projects across the city, has an uncanny ability to use low-cost materials in a way that feels rich, and while such expressions would never feel right in O’Donnell and Tuomey’s Dublin, they exude the exuberant qualities of Los Angeles as extolled by Reyner Banham as the city’s “freedom of movement.” The negative spaces in Maltzan’s housing dance around and through their structures, creating a territorial ambiguity that fully resonates with the climate and culture of the city of angels.
If there is an opportunity for the federal government to promulgate new housing, might it be the affordable, low carbon, multi-family housing that our citizens need in villages, small towns and big cities across America? Such housing would not only be good for the planet but for the people it houses by becoming a platform for a more joyful, less divisive form of living. Dignified, communal housing for us all is within reach — if we have the will to build it.
Excerpted from THE ARCHITECTURE OF URBANITY: DESIGNING FOR NATURE, CULTURE, AND JOY. Copyright © 2024 by Vishaan Chakrabarti. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.