ARCHITECTURE

ut the separation of residents of the same publicly subsidized
deal—that revealed the contradictions of a society
that continues to assert that its members are created equal.
The separate doors were too similar an image to the “separate
but equal” policies that segregated the public spaces
of black and white Americans for many decades after the
end of the Civil War. Residents without the resources to
“choose” to live in One Riverside Place, if they fall within
precise income eligibility criteria, can submit an application
to a city-run lottery. 34 Over 88,000 households did so,
and 55 were accepted. 35 That is 1 in 1,600. What originated
in a policy of invisibility—hiding both the cost to the public
sector and the stigma of low-income housing—imploded
when these issues were suddenly visible in the form of
two doors. In June of 2015, the zoning policy that allowed
for the poor doors was rescinded. 36
The policy debate, of course, is less about the
look of housing, and much more about the underlying socioeconomic
calculations. Those in favor of place-based
arguments might say: This segregation-by-building is
compensated for by the fact that the residents will enjoy
the benefits of the Upper West Side—high-quality public
schools, parks, employment, transit, and retail—all of
which are the hallmarks of an inclusive society of equal
opportunities. 37 Others will argue that the taxes collected
on these units, had they been sold at market-rate, could
have generated twice as many apartments in parts of the
city with lower land prices, or alternately, through cash
transfers that give recipients choices on the open market.
38 A further argument pits maximizing the number of
units produced against better design, or more colloquially,
“beauty” against “cost,” 39 —the old argument advanced
when stripping down basic features and quality of construction
in low-income housing, which returns the discussion
back to a building’s “look” on the basis of its cost,
or, inversely, cost on the basis of its look [See HH: 1946,
1960, 1982]. The debate about the role of David Adjaye’s
non-standard exterior design in securing philanthropic
funding for Broadway Housing Communities’ supportive
and low-income New York housing project Sugar Hill is a
case in point. 40
As a profession, architecture provides a service. 41 Whether
the project in question is the HOPE VI-funded Roosevelt
Square in Chicago, the 421a-tax-abatement facilitated
One Riverside Park in New York, or the philanthropically
enabled Sugar Hill in Harlem: architecture serves
the interests of those who pay the fees. Therefore, for an
architect who objects to the inequalities built into the
profit-driven system that enabled all of the above-mentioned
projects, the only unambiguous action available is
to turn down those commissions. The movement within
the profession to refuse to design prisons due to the
violence of the incarceration system represents one instance
of such an objection. 42 The increasingly common
provocation that an architect can “subvert” the client’s
brief, or creatively maneuver loopholes to create public
benefit, can by definition only go so far. The same is true
of the belief that architectural strategies that reduce construction
cost will increase affordability. Minimizing size
through efficient floor plans, or rationalizing construction
through industrialization—ideas recently advanced
in the “Making Room” initiative—are traditional strategies
in this vein [See HH: 1918, 1946]. These efforts can, of
course, reduce construction cost, but they will not lead to
increased affordability if they are not also accompanied
by a will to reduce the price (and hence profit) at which
the product is offered.
Participating in one of the many organizations
advocating pro-bono work or socially relevant architecture
is another option for socially oriented designers,
but one that has also its limits. Initiatives devoted to this
78 79