ARCHITECTURE

to sidebar commentary in lifestyle magazines. The housing
system is all of this and more. Understood most blatantly as
the form given to real estate, but also as an arrangement of
material things that makes real estate possible, architecture
thus becomes both evidence and instrument of growing socioeconomic
divides.
In its format and subject matter The Art of Inequality
refers indirectly to a historical document featured
in the series of exhibitions that form another part of the
Buell Center’s ongoing project, House Housing: An Untimely
History of Architecture and Real Estate. Released
in 1968, The Report of the National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders, better known as the “Kerner Report,”
was the result of an official investigation into the racially
charged unrest occurring in cities throughout the United
States beginning in 1965. Against the backdrop of a military
and foreign policy debacle, implicitly acknowledging the
limitations of his domestic “Great Society” programs, President
Lyndon Johnson asked the commission writing the
report to answer three basic questions: 1) What happened?
2) Why did it happen? and 3) What can be done? But if, in
the refusal of African Americans to accept police violence
in Ferguson, Missouri, Staten Island, New York, Baltimore,
Maryland, or elsewhere, this unrest seems to be repeating
itself, such pre-emptive questions as those in the Kerner
Report must not repeat along with it. Instead, alluding only
to their style, we modify these questions to confront assumptions
shared among many policy makers, real estate
developers, architects, and others regarding the rule of the
markets and the inability (or unwillingness) to link racial
justice with economic and spatial justice. We therefore began
by asking, in the present tense: 1) What is happening?
2) Why is it happening? and 3) How is it happening?
The report’s three-part structure reflects these
questions. Part 1 describes different conceptions of inequality
today, some expected and others not. In particular, we
focus on the roles of and interdependencies among real estate
development, housing, and architecture, and outline a
number of key ways in which inequality is produced in the
wider socioeconomic field that housing helps construct.
Part 2 reverses the perspective and considers inequality not
as a consequence but as an agent, describing its own techniques
of governance in architectural terms. Part 3 then
breaks down some of the specific tools required by real estate
development and architecture, both as discourses and
practices within this domain, comprising among others:
legal documents, marketing images, educational materials,
and terminology.
To further convey a sense of how inequality
plays out visually and spatially today, the report includes
commissioned photographs of the 125th Street corridor in
Manhattan (Columbia’s own immediate environs), as well
as representative floor plans of recent residential developments
across the United States. Throughout, the report
also points to the episodes in the House Housing exhibitions
to illustrate how policy, finance, and the design of housing
have intersected across the last one hundred years. These
brief stories are supported by graphic, audio, and video artifacts
that are accessible via the House Housing website
(house-housing.com). At no point, however, did we conduct
field studies or compile and analyze primary data; our
method has been to synthesize. If the result is incomplete,
that is partly due to the scope of the subject, and partly because
our aim is to point toward productive questions rather
than to definitive conclusions.
Our focus on architecture in relation to economic
inequalities enables a more cogent connection with other
disparities, including those related to race. We aim to complement
existing scholarship even as we draw on it, and to
enrich the current academic and public debate by offering
a slightly different frame. We have tried to limit what falls
within this frame to facts drawn from credible sources, and
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