ARCHITECTURE

1.3 Designing Inequality
The narratives and data that make inequality
intelligible are made tangible through architecture.
That architecture both reflects
and helps produce the prevailing social and
economic order is not surprising. Buildings
embody the rules, regulations, and imaginations
that called this order into being.
Here we aim to identify some of the ways
in which architecture has intersected with
political and financial efforts through program
and form, types and styles. If architecture
contributes to socioeconomic disparities,
might it also do the reverse?
1.3.1 Easy Explanations
No building type or architectural style creates
inequality as such. Assuming so would be to grossly
over-estimate architecture’s power. The Pruitt-Igoe public
housing complex in St. Louis, designed in 1951 by Leinweber,
Yamasaki & Hellmuth and demolished beginning
in 1973, serves us well to make this point. Recent scholarship
has shown that it was not the high-rise elevators
or the open-air galleries that led to “failed architecture.”
Rather, it was the unemployment, racial segregation, and
the concentration of single-parent households among its
residents, as well as—among other factors—severe cost
limits in construction and operations dependent on minimal
rents which all led to its demise. 1
If architecture does not create inequality as
such, however, it does have the power to naturalize it. As
was the case with Pruitt-Igoe, architecture can provide
an “easy explanation,” and an excuse for the inequalities
that exist within it. Creating new architecture thus also
provides a relatively easy, if illusory, solution to social and
economic problems. 2 Projecting a new building is much
simpler than solving problems of poverty, substance
abuse, unemployment, and crime. Physical determinism of
this sort, common during the urban renewal of the 1950s
and 1960s, is no different than the assumptions underlying
the earliest New Deal clearance projects, where the
eradication of “slums” or “blighted areas” was imagined
to solve the social, economic, and public health problems
of the people living therein. In this sense they were no different
than the more recent redevelopments of high-rise
public housing superblocks as low-rise neighborhoods. 3
Although few of the people displaced by redevelopment
ever actually move into the new buildings, the proposed
new models of housing—based on minimum dimensions,
natural light and ventilation, and access to open space, to
cite just a few design indicators—have repeatedly been envisaged
as solutions to inequality in their own right. 4
So while new or modified architectural types are
often suggested as an easy response to inequality, in reality
the uses, associations, and meanings of building types
change. The story of the loft building is a well-known example.
A space for industrial production in the late nineteenth-century,
the high ceilings, large windows, and
open floor plans became not only the symbol of, but the
model for new construction of high-end residential projects.
5 Another telling example: seen as a sign of bourgeois
decadence in the postwar period, ornament was stripped
from nineteenth-century façades, only to return a few
decades later as a sign of human scale, friendliness, and
community values. 6 Even the high-rise tower and the slab
enjoy a new popularity. Had Pruitt-Igoe been privatized
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