ARCHITECTURE

have been loosened, but predominantly in a direction that
domesticates sexual difference by binding it to reassuring
images of house and home, or reinforces gender stereotypes.
Something similar can be said for the misguided
announcements of a “post-racial” society that ignore
tensions between a multiracial (often suburban, or urban
professional) middle class and a largely African-American
and Latino/a (urban and suburban) underclass. Rather
than resolve underlying conflicts, such displacements signal
only the remixing—rather than the elimination—of racial
categories and biases related to sexuality and gender
with class differentials in the shifting, treacherous firmament
on which today’s inequality debates take place.
Mixed in this way with regulating social norms,
inequality drives the system forward by creating scarcity
and hence, as Stiglitz puts it, “incentive.” It also creates
tables, charts, and scales that correlate those norms with
the reigning economic hierarchy. Entire populations—in
the language of statistics, percentiles—are measured and
managed governmentally according to where they are located
on the inequality spectrum: patronage for the 1%,
morality for the ambiguous “middle class,” and austerity
for the rest. A real, underlying heterogeneity with respect
to social patterns like family structure dissolves into
smooth numerical rankings. Such seemingly inexorable
distributions belie an artfulness that thrives on a plurality
of actors, authors, and agents—including architects—
whose otherwise disparate activities in the ethical-moral
and economic spheres are synchronized by the relevant
techniques. Together, this plurality draws and redraws the
field of operations such that certain actions seem reasonable
while others do not. Through a back and forth movement
between artfulness and calculus, socioeconomic
equality is made to seem abstractly desirable but pragmatically
impossible, thus ruling out its objective possibility
from the start. The question then seems only to be: How
much inequality can the system tolerate? In consequence,
the system’s operators as well as its constituents are bound
by an artificially limited field of action, with limited concepts,
limited tools, and a limited vocabulary at their disposal.
Thus bound, they concede in advance.
2.1.2 New York by Gehry: A Case Study
The techniques by which inequality is harnessed,
managed, and reproduced do not come naturally.
They must be learned. A popular method involves the
“case study,” a staple of business schools since the 1920s.
By way of illustration, in 1971 the Urban Land Institute
(ULI), a multi-disciplinary real estate forum, began compiling
case studies that “showcase innovative approaches
and best practices in real estate and urban development,”
for use by practitioners as well as by business students
(and students in the still-new graduate real estate development
programs) [See 3.3]. 5 One such ULI study, which
dates from the fall of 2014, is devoted to 8 Spruce Street, a
residential tower in lower Manhattan. Originally named
Beekman Place, the building was rechristened New York
by Gehry by the time it opened in 2011. The details given
in the ULI case study are instructive, as much for what
they reveal about the tower as for the techniques of real
estate development—including the art of inequality,
broadly construed—to which both the building and the
report are dedicated.
Construction on the tower, which at the time
was the tallest of its kind in the city, began in 2006. It is
owned and operated by Forest City Ratner, the New York
division of Forest City Enterprises, Inc., a major real estate
developer. In October 2011, Occupy Wall Street protesters
marched past the tower chanting “We Are the 99%!” The
chants were not directed at the tower, which had begun
leasing units that spring. Rather, they were directed at the
real and metaphorical Wall Street located about six blocks
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