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 60 61
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3.2.5 Real Estate Finance & Investm
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3.3 Schools developments in the fie
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1964 1967 1970s ject field (with
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1996 Stephen E. Roulac, Roulac Glob
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25. James A. Graaskamp, “Redefini
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3.4.2 600 Harrison Avenue, Boston,
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3.4.4 TerraSol, Salt Lake City, UT
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1. In the foreword to a publication
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dictionary of real estate terms glo
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Appendix 214 215
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Botein, Hilary. “New York State H
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Glaeser, Edward. “There are Worse
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Kopczuk, Wojciech, Emmanuel Saez, a
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Renner, Andrea. Housing Diplomacy:
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Weiss, Marc A. “Researching the H
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1939 1937 1934 1933 1932 FHA DENIES