The Vienna Model 2 – Housing for the City of the 21st Century

accomplished architects, and community services agencies. Via
Verde proved that the city can achieve results nearly as good as
those produced in Vienna. The architects for the 1.5-acre project
Grimshaw Architects and Richard Dattner Architects were
selected in a competition process that is unusual in the United
States, and they were teamed with two developers, Jonathan
Rose Companies and the nonprofit Phipps Houses, which are
anything but traditional organizations. Rose is a developer who
works in low- and moderate-income communities with the mission
of “designing meaningful additions to the urban fabric,”
and Phipps is a 125-year-old nonprofit developer and owner of
hundreds of affordable residential units. The project’s narrowerthan-usual
tower wraps around a green courtyard and allows for
residential units with cross-ventilation to reduce electric use for
air conditioning, public meeting rooms, a ground-floor medical
clinic, and rooftop fruit and vegetable gardens designed by landscape
architect Lee Weintraub. In a neighborhood with high
asth ma and obesity rates, Via Verde is more than just a housing
development; it is a model of how to organize, design, and develop
a healthy city. It should not be a one-off project whose creative
problem solving is forgotten in newer developments. Sadly,
however Via Verde’s design innovations and development process
are doing just that — going unheeded by city officials, architects,
and developers alike.
Fig. 2 Project Via Verde. Source: Architectural team Dattner Architects
in association with Grimshaw and the clients Philips Houses &
Jonathan Rose Companies. Photo: David Sundberg/Esto
The city has announced La Central as the second phase of
development a few blocks from Via Verde. Like the earlier project,
La Central is the result of a competition, but unlike Via
Verde it was only a competition to select the development team,
for architects seem not to be involved early in the process. The
project is a massive five-building complex that includes 992
mixed-income affordable apartments. The need and demand for
these apartments is overwhelming, so it is hard to criticize the
project size, yet Robert Moses built massive developments for
thirty years that met a similar demand in New York but were
far too large in scale and banal in design and are now seen as
benevolent scars by their surrounding communities. In short,
the new project is lacking the vision, architectural creativity,
and response to specific problems that good design can bring
to a project. The overall aesthetic of the project is not horrible,
but it is designed very much in the fashion of contextual New
York de veloper buildings. It claims to be “specifically tailored to
meet the needs of our community” and does provide a valuable
street presence, with shops and services that the area needs,
but its high- rise profile, curtain wall, and details are ordinary
and do li ttle to elevate the city around it. Further, it claims to
have roof top gardens “accessible to residents and the community,”
yet these spaces are mostly occupied by solar panels and
are post age-stamp size compared to Via Verde with its rooftop
vegetable gardens. In short, La Central meets the immediate
demands for affordable housing but falls far short of the housing
that results when it develops from a thoughtful process like
Vienna’s four pillars model. What a lost opportunity!
1940–44 Creation of Parkchester, Stuyvesant
Town, Peter Cooper Village, and Riverton.
These four projects built by the Metropolitan
Life Insurance Company created 25,000 moderate-rental
housing units.
Further, the only way the current New York government
can imagine creating thousands of desperately needed new lowincome
housing units is to work alongside private developers
and offer them incentives to participate in inclusionary zoning
programs where they receive development bonuses and rights
for including a percentage of affordable units in their projects.
The city government hopes to make them so attractive that private
developers would not think of building without taking
ad vantage of these bonuses. The city is currently constructing
new housing above retail storefronts in open spaces surrounding
Robert Moses era public housing projects, which despite
their lack of elevating design do at least have green open space
surrounding them, and this is now valuable land in a city with
little area in which to build.
A part of Brooklyn called East New York is being up-zoned
along its wider major boulevards to encourage higher-density
projects and is being met with resistance from local community