{"title":"Fast Forward into the Past: Frederick Ackerman’s Radical Banality and the Affordable Housing Future That Could Have Been","authors":"F. Biehle","doi":"10.1080/20507828.2020.1792126","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The design of affordable housing is a pursuit inextricably linked to the project of modernism. In New York City the achievements of its housing authority would become immediately recognizable for their uncompromised realization of modern architecture’s promise for the future – reductive appearance, essential interior arrangements, and a siting defined by the elimination of the preexisting urban fabric. Without the idealistic cover of modernism, the enterprise can now be recognized as anti-urban from the start. Today, the superblock sites of low-income housing continue to stand alone as stigmatized suburban anomalies. This paper looks back at the birth of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and asks what if in 1937, following the completion of both First Houses by Frederick Ackerman and Williamsburg Houses by William Lescaze, it was the radical banality of First Houses that had been embraced as the more appropriate template for the future? Could our future city have become more equitable?","PeriodicalId":42146,"journal":{"name":"Architecture and Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1000,"publicationDate":"2020-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792126","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Architecture and Culture","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2020.1792126","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ARCHITECTURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
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Abstract
Abstract The design of affordable housing is a pursuit inextricably linked to the project of modernism. In New York City the achievements of its housing authority would become immediately recognizable for their uncompromised realization of modern architecture’s promise for the future – reductive appearance, essential interior arrangements, and a siting defined by the elimination of the preexisting urban fabric. Without the idealistic cover of modernism, the enterprise can now be recognized as anti-urban from the start. Today, the superblock sites of low-income housing continue to stand alone as stigmatized suburban anomalies. This paper looks back at the birth of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and asks what if in 1937, following the completion of both First Houses by Frederick Ackerman and Williamsburg Houses by William Lescaze, it was the radical banality of First Houses that had been embraced as the more appropriate template for the future? Could our future city have become more equitable?
期刊介绍：
Architecture and Culture, the international award winning, peer-reviewed journal of the Architectural Humanities Research Association, investigates the relationship between architecture and the culture that shapes and is shaped by it. Whether culture is understood extensively, as shared experience of everyday life, or in terms of the rules and habits of different disciplinary practices, Architecture and Culture asks how architecture participates in and engages with it – and how both culture and architecture might be reciprocally transformed. Architecture and Culture publishes exploratory research that is purposively imaginative, rigorously speculative, visually and verbally stimulating. From architects, artists and urban designers, film-makers, animators and poets, from historians of culture and architecture, from geographers, anthropologists and other social scientists, from thinkers and writers of all kinds, established and new, it solicits essays, critical reviews, interviews, fictional narratives in both images and words, art and building projects, and design hypotheses. Architecture and Culture aims to promote a conversation between all those who are curious about what architecture might be and what it can do.
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