Housing—What Next?

So, good evening and welcome. Just a few words from me before we get going. There's a lot that is happening tonight, and I really want to be as brief as possible. But there are lots of little things that I'd like to just mention. First of all, tonight we'll have a chance to have a reception outside in the gallery. In a way, to celebrate the official formation, opening of the exhibition, Living Anatomy. And this is an exhibition that's been going on for quite some time in terms of its preparation. It falls under the rubric of our Druker projects focusing on housing. And it was a real pleasure for me to actually get the chance to also collaborate with their curatorial team. I want to acknowledge them. Megan Panzano, Daniel Rauchwerger, Matt Gin, and Patrick Herron, who were-- in different ways-- responsible as members of the curatorial team. A very special thanks also to Dan Borelli, the head of our exhibitions, who collaborated with David Zimmerman-Stuart, to make the exhibition possible. So we have invited the curatorial team to be here, so that afterwards, also, they can participate in the conversation and discussion with all of you. For those of you who have had a chance to look at the exhibition, you see that the focus of the exhibition is really to try and present some of the best possible thoughts related to the topic of housing today. There is, of course, a certain amount of precedent study, but the focus is really, what are the kinds of things that are going on that are important contributions? You see that those thoughts are happening under a certain set of titles to try and establish a certain focus on the particular topics or ways or manners in which the issue of housing is being dealt with. We, as a school, have a long history of dealing with the topic of housing. Many of you who are new might not know that we actually have a wonderful center here at the GSD, in collaboration together with the Kennedy School, which is a center for the study of housing. It's the nation's-- America's-- really foremost center for the study of housing. There have been many, many courses taught by various faculty members, and lots and lots of studios. More recently, we've had a whole variety of option studios under the rubric of the Dunlop visiting critic, taught by Sergison Bates from London, Gina Zuki from Italy, Spela Videcnik from Slovenia, and so on. And these projects continue. There are lots of other ones. There is a very long history of housing under the rubric of modernism. Obviously housing has been a very, very critical part of architecture. And we have seen-- just to give you a very short synopsis-- we have seen really a kind of period where there has been a critical reception or reaction to modernist housing. And now we see a different kind of opening up and diversity of approaches towards housing. In the process-- as we have been discussing, also, with the members of our panel tonight, and our speakers-- there's also a way in which architecture, in some way, has partly disowned and has been disowned by others, in relation to this project of housing. So that the way in which architecture was such a critical part of the modernist project doesn't seem to be such a critical part of the contemporary practice of architecture. Why is that? Still, we've tried to-- of course-- figure out, pull out the best practices. But part of our intention tonight in discussion with you is really to find out, what is the next? What is the next thing in terms of housing? Where should it go? Why is housing so critical? And what are the topics and issues that we need to focus on? In order to regain, in a way, a different kind of perspective, a different kind of position for architecture, design, planning, landscape, in relation to the discussion of housing. Which is always part of a bigger discussion of urbanization. I also want to show you this beautiful booklet that has been produced by the members of the exhibition. It's made up of two pamphlets, and I welcome-- ask you to, if you wish-- to take some of these. They are on the doughnut outside, and you'll see it when we go out into the gallery. Tonight, we're going to hear four brief presentations here from our speakers. And the first speaker will be Niklas Maak. Niklas Maak has been teaching for us, in fact, last semester in Berlin. He's an expert on housing, specifically mass housing. And he is the art and architecture editor of the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. And we also hope that Niklas will be teaching a seminar for us in Rotterdam in the spring, as part of the Rem Koolhaas's option studio that will be offered in the spring semester in Rotterdam. Niklas has written many publications, many books, and did a PhD which focused on the work of Le Corbusier and Paul Valery. The second speaker will be Hilde Heynen. And Hilde is actually spending part of this semester here with us. She's a Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Leuven in Belgium. And her work focuses on issues of modernity, modernism, and gender in architecture. She wrote a beautiful book, published by MIT Press, called Architecture and Modernity, which was published in 1999. In which she investigated the relationship between architecture, modernity, and dwelling, arguing that critical theory-- such as those of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno-- offer crucial insights when revisiting the modern movement. More recently, she's written on issues of gender. She has also been working on other publications, some of which, I think, will be forthcoming. I know she spent time here, also, at Harvard, working at Radcliffe as a visiting professor. Then we'll hear from Irenee Scalbert. Irenee Scalbert is an architect and a critic who is based in London, but also teaching in Ireland and in Italy. I was lucky enough to be able to collaborate on a variety of different things with Irenee. One project involved an exhibition, and eventually a publication that Irenee authored on the work of the French architect Jean Renaudie. And that is a very interesting architect who focused on housing. Irenee has also taught for us here at the GSD, so I'm very happy that he's back here with us. Lastly, we'll hear from Eric Bunge. And Eric is not a stranger to the GSD. He studied here with his partner, Mimi Hoang. They have an office in New York which is-- their practice is called nArchitects. He teaches at Columbia, and has been involved in a variety of projects. A regular visitor to the GSD. Eric is here to talk specifically on their practice's involvement with microunits. Recently, as you know, there's been a lot of emphasis on trying to build smaller and smaller dwelling units. A kind of return to the idea of minimum existence, but in a different way. And so we will also hear from Eric as an architect who's practicing on this topic of housing. So, the plan is that each speaker will talk for ten or so minutes. We will try to be good timekeepers. And so, after the first 50 minutes or an hour or so, we will then invite them to sit here and engage with you in a discussion before we go to the gallery for a reception. So please welcome Niklas Maak. Thank you very much. I'm very happy and honored to be here tonight. And I'm very happy to discover my Berlin crew in the audience. Let me quickly start with a picture which has a lot to do with architecture and housing. This was taken some days ago on the motorway in Hungary. These are 10,000s of people, refugees from the Balkans, from Syria and Africa, walking on the motorway to the Austrian border and then further on to Germany. Germany alone will have to accommodate more than 800,000 asylum seekers per year now, and the numbers are rising. And of course, the question is, how do we respond to that task? So far, the only two responses are tent villages and container villages. And as this is not enough anymore, people are even brought into empty houses in dying East German villages, where they have to deal with an almost hostile population of people who are still in these villages. So this creates a lot of tension and problems in Germany now. At the same time, it's clear that many of these refugees will stay longer in Germany. So there is an interesting tendency that the proposals that were developed for a more hedonistic context-- like the transformation of multi-story car parks-- are repurposed now as emergency shelters. You see a proposal by Augustin Ernst, a Berlin-based office, that proposed this two years ago as a form of urban dwelling for less-affluent young families and singles. And now this model is repurposed as a model to-- of course, reduced in terms of the quality of apartments and materials used. It's repurposed now as a shelter for refugees. So these parking lots in Berlin-- multi-story car parks-- will be transformed to accommodate refugees. I think it's important, when we talk about the very large field of housing, that one does not confuse the two crises of housing we're actually facing. In one case, it's about mere survival. In the other, about what society you want to live in, and what the society prioritizes and how it defines privacy and publicness, in general. And what new spaces for this could look like. But then again, I think these distinct problem areas have a lot in common, including the lack of ideas for fundamentally new, inexpensive dwellings that could conform to change social conditions. Or-- and this is also important, I think-- encourage such change. And I think, when we talk about housing and units, that the discourse on housing-- at least in Europe-- suffers largely from the imposition of the terms that we use to describe the situation. This starts with the notion of the unit. State-funded programs in Germany and France mostly focus on providing as much units as possible for young families or singles. But of course, a unit is not a natural given. And even before the asylum crisis, there was not much discussion-- beyond the academic field-- about how our idea of a unit or of privacy or of the public space is affected by the shift in social rituals, by demographic change, and by the dissolution of the nuclear family. Because-- I think it's also important for this discussion here-- in most European cities, families are not the majority of population anymore. In Berlin and Munich, in the city quarters-- not on the outskirts, but in the inner city quarters-- families are now almost a marginal group. Their share of all households is between 15% and 20% only, which is not reflected in housing policies. And we do not hardly know a setting that will accommodate a group of, say, 80-year-olds who do not want to move into a retiree home, nor any apartment type design to house, say, two single mothers that share rent and a gay couple. Though this is sometimes wished by the people. So the question what a unit could be and how it could produce is important already in this setting, but is also a pressing one given the fact that-- according to an analysis of the UNESCO-- in Africa, Asia, and India alone, 1 billion new apartments would be needed over the next 25 years to house migrants who move to urban agglomerations. 1 billion new apartments. And of course the question is, how will these units look like? As it's plain clear that it's ecologically and economically impossible to build these apartments in the way we do it today. So of course there were models-- and I have not much time, so I'm jumping through these models-- there were models to research possibilities. This is the nomad home by Toyo Ito. A more recent one is Liu Lubin's micro apartment, that investigates pressing questions of minimal dwelling of privacy and basic protection. A proposal that relates to metabolist structures could be stapled in Germany. The O2 village is a comparable effort to staple the microunits and create social spaces in between. We could discuss this later. I'm jumping through the whole history of experimental housing. We can come back to this later. One thing is plain clear that this model-- this is the former president of Germany, Christian Wulff, who had to step down because rumors came up concerning the illegal financial aid he took from entrepreneurs to finance his own dream of the nuclear family dream home. So this killed his career and was seen as a symbolic incident, that even the president cannot afford this form of dwelling anymore. So what are alternatives in Berlin? We have interesting-- this again, I don't have time for this-- the campaign. That's the campaign. The 19th century campaign for the nuclear family home. Here depicted is the nuclear family cave, as if this was the normal way to dwell in the Stone Age. But we don't have time for that. So I would focus, rather, on counter models, the joint building ventures, or Baugruppen in Germany. Which are interesting because A, they point a way for bottom-up strategies to change urban districts. And-- important point, also-- they point the way to self-empower people to be less dependent from state-funded projects or private developers. So this is really kind of a bottom-up movement where people say, let's put our money together, ask an architect, find something. Some land, a lot in the city, and built a house the way we want to dwell. These new collective housing farms do not exclude families, but they put a focus on other life designs and foster a new idea of social community life. This is R50 by Fezer, Heide & von Beckerath. They have, in the basement here, a two-story common room that can be used for meetings of the community. And then, as you can see, each floor has a wrap-around collective balcony that allows occupants to pass by all spaces. So clearly, a focus on the communal. The Berlin abroad studio students might remember this building by Arno Brandlhuber. It's a building erected on the ruin of an investor's project, which combines workspaces and living spaces. The Berlin studio abroad took place there. So this is an example for also a form of communal living merged into a workspace, a gallery space. Quite an interesting project. And this is another example for joint building ventures, by Fatkoehl Bar and Company. They're architects. Three houses where spaces are shared. You have a restaurant-sized living room, which is also-- as you can see here-- used for political gatherings, micro-communal events. It can also be used for parties and used as a restaurant-sized living room. You have these so-called option rooms in the basement. This one is used by a carpenter. Others are used by temporary micro-offices or used as kindergartens. They are quite open in their definition, which is interesting to see here other than some projects from the '70s. It works quite well, also, because many people are actually working in these buildings, and not only sleeping over. A person who owns a 540-square-foot apartment here can use 1,600 square feet of common space, including a roof terrace and these FLDAs. So you can argue that, here the key to affordable housing and an alternate form of housing is A, pre-fabrication. As you can see, these elements here pre-fabricated. It's timber frames. And also, the externalization of many functions. And in this case, also, a state-funded program for energy saving construction helped finance the whole project. It has a clear focus on communal spaces, you can see. This is a communal kitchen. This is a kind of communal living room, a communal terrace. This is also collective space, but at the same time, everybody has a toilet and a little kitchenette, so it avoids that you're forced into a community all the time. The architects were really influenced-- and I just can show some pictures here-- by a contemporary Japanese project. This is on designs office, Yokohama Apartments. Maybe the only project that I would miss in this fantastic exhibition that you've mounted here, because it also relates to questions that you're rising with the exhibition. It has a transitional hybrid space on the ground floor that can be separated from the streets only by curtains. So it's either a public roofed-over square with a kitchen in the center, or a more intimate living room with a kitchen when the curtains are mounted. So like the classic Engar One, the space allows both dissolution of the living room into a public space, or its protection from it. And it's, I think, an important example for a strategy of verticalizing spatial atmospheres. The kitchen becomes a cafe-like space of encounter for, say, erratically extended family, including the neighborhood. And the dwelling cells become even more intimate and cozy. This is another example from Berlin for a new form of communal housing. Kurfurstenstrasse by June14, Sam Chermayeff and Johanna Maya-Grohbrugge. It provides space for 23 housing units, but they're not units anymore. They're kind of different things. They interlock across multiple levels, and the occupants have the option to either completely isolate themselves or to merge spaces such as kitchens and living rooms together, opening the way for extended post-familiar settings or circles of friends living together. This, again, has a counterpart in Japanese architecture, Riken Yamamoto's community area model. Same approach, where open structures can incorporate patchworks of workspaces, offices, day care centers, restaurant-like community kitchens. And-- which is also important-- studio apartments can be attached like modules when children or older people are added, or when several people want to form a commune. Of course, this I don't have to mention. It's clearly a reference for all these projects, Moriyama house. But as we have not so much time, I would come to an end of this really very quick presentation by addressing one question, which is the question of privacy. All these new forms of communal dwelling and public living rooms authorize questions concerning our idea of privacy. And these questions are addressed mainly in sociology and philosophy. For example, the philosopher Raimond Gaita criticizes the modern conception of privacy that informs our idea of housing, where the individual self-evidently comes first as the autonomous starting point for theorizing and valuation. And community has, in a way, to find its role in promoting and defending the security and the well-being of the individual. And Gaita questions this view with reference to the idea of a society that commits this madness, to say it in a nutshell. But you have the right to retreat to a form of hospitality and generosity. And this approach fundamentally also challenges the view on housing of these philosophers. So the question here is, how does a house relate to the public realm? Is it hospitable? Does it foster community or does it include or exclude? And I think one of the most striking examples for exclusive urbanism, and exclusive housing in the double sense of the word, is Bond Street 40 in New York by Herzog de Meuron, where graffiti style fence shields the basement from being sprayed. So in a way, this fence achieves-- in a cynical way-- both, it advertises the flare of subculture while at the same time, it's the best protection against the real resentment of the culture it references. So I think this will be part of the architecture history of cynical urbanism. And when we look for examples for a more inclusive way of building houses and of housing, of course you find that, in the exhibition, it's Michael Maltzan's Star Apartments. Where you do not create a distancing form, but rather a porous, permeable zone where public life can spill into the house. Same with-- true, I'm jumping again-- for this project, The Colony, which was kind of an experimental model. How you could create a porous, permeable zone also under precarious circumstances after Superstorm Katrina, and other events. So maybe we can come back to this later. That was also part of The Colony, where you have this kind of permeable, inviting zone where the city can be part of the building And like nucleus cells, where you withdraw on the first level. So, I think I should-- I have my 10 minutes, I'm afraid. And thank you so much. And I'm happy to discuss it in detail later. Thanks. Well, good evening to you all. I was asked to provide a little bit of historical background to this whole discussion. So chronologically, I'm going back to the beginning of the 20th century, or at least to the '20s. And I thought I should make really three points that I want to get across. I do not address gender here. That's also an issue that we should talk about in relation to housing, but I thought these ones were more urgent. The first one is that housing really was at the core of the project of modernist architecture, of the modernist project. And the second point is that really was a story of success, even though it nowadays is often-- or it's in the '70s, '80s, '90s, it used to be framed as failure. I think it's a success story, rather. And thirdly, which is, I think, what is at stake in an event and an exhibition like the ones we are witnessing here. That there is a need to reclaim housing as a core concern for architecture. Let me start with that, first, housing at the core of modernist architecture. It's not always framed like that. But I do think, if you look at the history of modern architecture with an open eye and you see, for example, you put central what I tend to do-- efforts such as those of Das Neue Frankfurt. Then you cannot but say, yes, this was extremely important for modernist architects. Frankfurt, Das Neue Frankfurt, it still is, I think, an amazing accomplishment. In five years time, building 15,000 housing units-- back then it was still units-- 15,000 new housing units. Which meant that one out of every 11 inhabitants of Frankfurt could move into a new house. That's really amazing. I don't know of any other city that came near to that kind of performance, in terms of social and public housing, or even in terms of housing without the social aspect Involved. So that really was an important event, an important accomplishment, and it was-- the main work was done in the field of housing, but housing was seen as part of a much larger endeavor. It was the idea to establish a new modern, metropolitan culture that encompassed not just housing, but also sports and other kinds of the visual arts. About education, about affordable housing. Das Neue Frankfurt, the journal, has had team issues about many different topics-- the interior-- so it really was housing as a way to organize living. And that's, I think, also how we want to talk about housing today. Of course, you can argue that some of the models that were then presented by now might not be so ideal anymore. We have come to criticize the assumption that the suburban neighborhood, the suburban estate, would really be the answer to housing needs. But nevertheless, the Romerstadt estate that Ernst May and his team designed in Frankfurt remains a fantastic example not just of housing, but also of housing integrated with other amenities. Like schools and shops and so on were part of that whole thing. But you saw, also, in Frankfurt that gradually there was a loss of, let's say, aesthetic sensitivity or aesthetic standards. Westhausen is much more efficient, much more according to existence minimum standards. Much cheaper, much affordable because of that. So that was really the neighborhood where the blue collar workers could afford to live, not in Romerstadt. But already, part of that residentialization campaign that also boiled down to as much as possible for the least possible money. But existence minimum was at the core of the investigations of the research, really. I think what we hear nowadays about these micro apartments is indeed taking home that issue again. How to organize living on a minimal space. How to make sure that people do have all the necessary amenities, and back then in the '20s, it was social housing with built-in kitchens, built-in bathrooms. That was amazing for the time, that this was provided. So it was an enormous step ahead in terms of living standards. But it was done by minimizing the amount of space. And Ernst May really has an article where he says, what shall we do if-- we have a certain [? burchet. ?] We choose really to build as many units as possible for that particular [? burchet ?] rather than provide people with larger houses, but then have less people that we can accommodate. So it was a very, very rational choice that was made. And the choice, the option was to go for the minimum amount of space. But very cleverly designed, like the Frankfurt Kitchen by Grete Schutte-Lihotsky, which really was providing everything in a very small space. Very functional, but very well designed. I think the micro apartments of today will also be reminiscent of this type of existence minimum, where you had also research into furniture that could change a room from being a living room during the day to being a bedroom at night. That kind of thing was part of the whole experiment of Das Neue Frankfurt, and Das Neue Frankfurt also hosted the second CIAM Conference in 1929, which was focused on the existence minimum. The dwelling for the existence minimum was housed there. And that's why I think, also-- if you look at the themes of CIAM throughout its existence of 30-something years-- CIAM really was arguably the most important organizational of the modern movement in architecture. CIAM was very much focusing on housing. The first content-related conference, CIAM 2 in Frankfurt, the minimum dwelling, but also the next one in Brussels about rational lot development. That was really, how do you organize that housing? The functional city, that was about zoning, and housing was one of the four functions that had to be zoned. Dwelling and recreation, again about housing and how housing relates to other functions. Six, seven, eight may be less about housing, but CIAM 9 again says habitat. We want to make a charter of habitat. So again, it became a very, very pregnant and urgent issue in 1953. So for that reason, I say really housing was at the core of the modernist project. And I do also believe that, in many ways, it has been a success story. It's true that many of the projects were criticized and now are problematic zones. In, for example, France. To a lesser extent, maybe in the UK and elsewhere. It's true. But one should not forget the European welfare state-- and to some extent, also the American welfare state, and in far as that existed-- did succeed in banning shantytowns. Shantytowns were part [inaudible] were part of the Parisian urban landscape, for example, until the '70s. It's thanks to all these modernist housing projects that they were banned, that they were abolished. So that is a kind of achievement that nowadays, in all these new mega cities, is not always easy to accomplish. If we heard Niklas talk about how many housing units cities in the developing world need in the coming decades, well, they have be needing such housing units in the decades that are just behind us. But they were mostly provided through squatter settlements. So, in that sense, really the modernist housing projects did something. By now, we also now know a little bit better how the story of Pruitt Igoe, how to explain that. The postmodernist discourse tended to blame the design and say, look how badly designed it is, and that's why it failed and that's why it had to be demolished. No, we understand now that it was a huge mistake in terms of planning. That too many housing units were built for the amount of housing that was really dwindling. And of course, if you have a large estate with a lot of housing units, and there is no demand and there are not enough people really who are willing to pay the rent for these dwellings, then of course you cannot maintain it. Then of course you have problems, and then of course the ones that are still there tend to leave because the elevator would break down, et cetera. So there was a whole process of decay going on that really had to do more with economics and management and cultural issues rather than with the design itself. So I really don't like to hear about the failure of the modernist project like it so often is framed. And I do think-- I'm not sure that this book is out there. If it isn't, it should be there. Florian Urban has published this history of global mass housing, which contains a comparison of these modernist housing slabs and towers in Chicago, Paris, Berlin, Brasilia, Moscow, Shanghai, and Mumbai. Arguing that really the histories are very different in all these different places, depending on the local contexts, the social issues, the economic issues of affordability, and whether or not there are alternatives available, et cetera. So it's too easy to say it didn't work, we need to invent something else. My last point about reclaiming housing as a core concern of architecture. I think this is really what this event and this exhibition is also about, and I think we have been mistaken in architecture by letting that thing go. Letting housing go, disowning the issue of housing, and let it be the domain of other disciplines. I think that, that process started-- disowning housing as a core issue started in the '30s, when modern architecture was received here in the States. If I look at these two books that you are familiar with-- or at least The International Style you probably know-- you should also know the other book, Modern Housing by Catherine Bauer. The International Style, of course, has come to be the most dominant book, in terms of the framing and the reception of modern architecture, as seen here in North America. Nevertheless, if I look at these two books, I say Catherine Bauer knew much better what she was talking about than Philip Johnson. Her book, however, came out two years after Johnson, and she never made it into a very prominent voice on the scene of architecture. In the '60s, she was invited to a symposium in Colombia, where they were talking about decades of modern architecture, and about the decade in which her book appeared. But her book was listed-- in the bibliography that was provided for that event-- as being not about architecture, but about planning. So she was, on the one hand, acknowledged as being an expert, but on the other hand, she was pushed toward the side of sociologists and planners, and not really seen as part of the core discussion that architects were conducting. So that kind of operation has been going on, and you can point to many more instances of that. Housing was kind of pushed out of the discourse of architects. And that's indeed why-- it was mentioned already-- if you now look for-- if you're an architect and you invest work on housing and you want to publish in an International journal, well, the international journals of housing are about housing policy, are about housing and the build environment, about housing markets, endless kinds of thing. So real estate, sociology, and planning are now dominating the question of housing. And for architects, there is only-- in this type of publications-- architects only play a minor, minor role. So again, that's why I do think. And I'm very glad to be part of this event here, and to have seen and witnessed the exhibition. I think that's why it's really important that a school like GSD claims ownership of this issue, brings it back into the heart of the discussions. Because I do think that architecture is about the organization of every day life for many, many people, not just for the happy few. So that's what I really wanted to stress today. Thank you. OK. Is that working? Yeah, I think it is working. You can hear me? Yes? No? So I need this one. I thought it was one or the other. Yeah? Now, there clearly has always been housing, and there has almost always been housing designed by architects. But it's only, I think, in the 20th century that we find housing designed by leading architects, and by architects who become known for the design of housing. And these architects were modern, and the history of housing design broadly overlaps with the history of modernism. And this primacy attributed to housing by modernists is evident in the Charter of Athens, and also seen in four so-called functions. And the first function is dwelling, followed by recreation, work, and transportation. And I believe that the order is highly significant. And here I think I join the presentation of Hilde. Now, what we mean by modernism, I think, has been unfortunately confused. And historians have emphasized its association with industry and with mechanization and with mass production, but the essence of modernism-- in my view-- was a search not for industrial standards, but for actually living standards. And this is clearly represented by the Unite d'habitation in Marseilles. And at once, the high point of modernism. And also, I think, the most influential design in the history of housing, full stop. Now the apartment of the Unite became the standards by which other housing projects were evaluated, and, I believe, for good reasons. One thing, its duplex arrangement, its double orientation, the terrace or balconies, the spaciousness, the privacy, and many other things one could mention. But in the mid 19-- try to move forward-- no, wrong button. But in the mid 1970s, even the most celebrated architects appeared to be out of their depths where it concerned housing. Inspired of Aldo Rossi's interest in typologies, and you see his Gallaratese project here. The apartments of the Gallaratese building seem impoverished and regressive. And those designed by James Stirling at Runcorn fared little better. And, actually poignantly, they have actually been demolished 15 years after they were completed. Now, the idealism and the desire to follow through the design of the actual dwellings, I believe, had gone. And the interest shifted instead to the space around the home and the form of urban space. Now, since then, the contribution by architects to the field of housing have been, in my view, negligible. The singular exception is in response to the growing individualism and the corresponding demand for diversity in the housing offer. The most extreme example, in this respect, is the work of Jean Renaudie here in the screen. And here you see is the plan corresponding to that project. And in it, no dwelling, and no space in the dwelling, is the same. Nevertheless, Renaudie upheld anything that is important, the principles set out by Le Corbusier-- namely, multiple orientation, duplex, spaciousness, and the provision of a garden or a terrace. Another figure also played a role. Hammond Hasberger, though he builds little housing, had a contribution which was, I think, significant. And he proposed-- as you probably know-- a generic form, which he compared to a musical instrument. One that could be played upon by inhabitants. Last, there was, of course, the advocacy of participation. Always, I think, a marginal option-- and that's something which might be worth bearing in mind-- and for which Lucien Kroll was an eloquent spokesman. Now, these three examples I have just mentioned I think represent three themes, you could say. Respectively, difference, appropriation, and participation. And they have been revisited 20 years later in the 1990s in Holland, but the context has changed. Developers, not the States, were the providers, and the social motivation too, have changed. The drive for greater individuality-- which in the 1970s had been a legacy from youth culture-- became, in the 1990s, the spontaneous expression of the market. Now at Borneo Sporenburg in Amsterdam, for instance, within a generic type developed by West 8, a family could-- in theory-- buy or rent a unique architect-designed house corresponding to their needs. And at Silodam by MVRDV, a theoretically infinite number of apartment types were offered to satisfy a theoretically infinite housing demand. Now, in a privatized housing industry, the offer necessarily precedes demand. And the design of dwellings is-- I think in a fundamental way-- arbitrary. But then, how could it be at all evaluated, you might ask. Now in hindsight, it is hard to escape the sense-- especially when compared with the best achievements of modernism-- that this design lacked substance and commitment. Too much difference, I think, was spread too thinly. And a comparison between the so-called Unite type at Silodam with the real Unite in Marseilles and elsewhere would, I think, be enough to make the point. Now the recession in Holland, then the crisis of 2008, derailed this train of thought. The issue became how to reconnect the design of housing with residents, or-- in the language of the 1970s-- with the users. And what one, I think, is witnessing at the moment-- in Europe, at least-- is a re-socialization and re-productization of housing. Here I'm talking about, of course, what is happening in the architecture world. Now, for the sake of this discussion, three trends can be identified today. The first concerns rehabilitation of the modern housing stock, as such it is literally an extension and a deepening of modernism. And the best example I know is a project by a London-based office-- the office of Adam Khan Architects-- for the upgrade of this estate, the Ellebo estate in Copenhagen. And it consists in the replacement of the existing facades, and in careful modifications of the floor plans-- and here, a simulation of before and after-- and in the addition of an extra flow of dwellings with terraces towards the top of the building, and in the provision of a so-called garden room offering a collective focus to the project. Now the approach is socially and spatially sensitive, and the details-- which are partly inspired by the architecture of Peter Markli-- I think are unusually fine. Certainly for this kind of commission. The second trend-- which is actually shown in the exhibition-- is more radical in its politics, and it draws from the cooperative movement which is currently enjoying a revival in Europe. And this project entails a renewal of terrace houses in Toxteth, an impoverished district of Liverpool. And here is the proposal, also in the exhibition. And the architects called [? mison ?] mentioned them, but called Assemble, an architect's collective based in London, are involved not only in the design, they're also actively participating with future tenants in making the project happen, and in actually building it. The ones in yellow are architects, but perhaps we could have guessed that. Now in this, the project, I think, recalls this quarter movement of the 1970s. But in the upholding of radical principles and the insistence on the purity of the process, the approach of the architects recalls, I think, the Occupy Movement. And, unusually in a project of this kind, the care in the design and in the craft of building is very high. Something which I think is very unusual, and very promising. This project in Santa Fe is under way. I mean, indeed these last two projects are under way. The third trend places less demands on consultation and participation, and it may have-- for this reason-- a wider influence, I think, in the long term. It aims to establish a universal type, or at least types that would have a wide appeal. And in Amsterdam West, the office called [inaudible] designed a terrace of identical dwellings, in which individuality is deliberately limited in order to achieve higher standards in design and construction. And inscribed in a long tradition of rationalism, the approach draws equally from the classical tradition and from modernism, leading to what the architects call classicism for the IKEA generation. And here is one. Whoops, there has been a mix up here of the slides. Can I move this? Let me see if I can. Well, no, two have gone missing, I'm afraid. You'll have to trust me, that I'm telling the truth. So to this-- OK. All three trends, which I have shown, I think bears the marks of modernism. And I cannot actually help feeling that the issue today is less what makes people-- the issue for architects building housing is less what makes people different than what people have in common and what they actually decide to share. And for instance, the so-called Garden Room in Copenhagen. For instance, a collaborative work in Liverpool. And for instance, the IKEA classicism in Amsterdam West. And so to this extent, at least, in emphasizing what is common rather than what is different, housing after modernism will-- in my view-- be modern again. And of course, it goes without saying that housing doesn't have to be modern. And in most cases, I believe that it will not be. But in respect to housing design, modernism, I think, is our beginnings. In our profession, it is our antiquity. It is Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome combined, and its influence, I believe, will be felt for decades to come. Thank you. Good evening. 20 years ago today, I was sitting in this room, waiting for my second semester-- second year to start. Very good to be back again. So why are we talking about housing now? It was a discussion we were just having before this talk. It seems that there is a kind of confluence of many changes and different frameworks that are making this an exciting time-- also, a challenging time-- for architects to insert themselves back into the agency that we need to be claiming. And these probably exist across different frameworks, such as the social framework. We are seeing a great change in demographics-- as we heard from Niklas. Also, in the programmatic framework, we are now seeing many changes in how we live and work. And therefore, the typologies that we've been trusting for so long are being eroded. In the economic framework, we are now considering different models of ownerships, like the Baugruppen that Niklas has also mentioned, co-housing, and so on. And finally, the sort of physical framework or the constructive one is also interesting to consider in terms of new fabrication or construction technologies that might change, again, the way we think about housing. Perhaps it's obvious to state that housing is probably the most constrained of all the endeavors of architects. Hemmed as it is between the market forces on the one hand, and of course, the codes on the other. Very constrained. And so one could say that it's a physicalized-- if you will-- datascape that reflects the rules and other influences more clearly than other types. But however, the clarity of this framework is kind of exciting, too, because it's also possible to be disobedient, or cleverly obedient, within the framework that is clear. Certainly a little bit less so in the United States, perhaps in other countries, and New York especially. So, in our work, I think we situate our own housing production, or our work on housing, within several larger questions, which are opportunities to instigate or adapt to changes. We've been interested in how architecture can adapt to climatic changes or demographic ones. Secondly, thinking about creating different skills of interaction between different publics, or rethinking who the public is. There's not a general idea of public. And finally, as an opportunity to affect a macro-scale with a minimum of means. And in this case, a minimum of micro-units, a minimum of spatial means. So we've only worked on four housing projects so far. We're now working on a 250-unit tower in Hong Kong, but it's still an important part of our practice. And the ones in Hong Kong, by the way, are smaller than the ones in New York. And they don't call them micro-units, they just call them apartments. And an article in the South China Morning Post last spring referred to our project-- our micro-unit project-- as Hong Kong-style apartments arrive in New York. So they irony that we're now working in New York is not lost to us. So in 2012, we were invited by the developers, Monadnock Development, to join them in a competition for Mayor Bloomberg's adAPT NYC competition to design the first new micro-unit prototype in New York City. It had to be a developer-architect team. So we can talk about agency afterwards. We can't do these things alone, can't even enter these competitions alone. We were-- my partner Mimi and I-- were a little bit horrified at first, to be quite frank with you. We've sort of drunk the Kool-Aid a little bit now that we understand the larger context of this issue of micro-housing, but we were a bit horrified about the idea of designing apartments that ranged from 250 to 350 square feet. I'll explain a little bit later why now we're less horrified. So in the beginning of the 20th century, Jacob Riis focused his camera on the urban poor, shocking a nation and galvanizing, basically, the nation to revisit some of the laws that would provide proper sewage and proper ventilation to a city of over 3 million. And so the housing reforms that followed over the next decade really encouraged a set of new legal standards for light and air and health and safety. Now meanwhile, after the Second World War, housing-- the average size of a home has practically doubled from about 1,000 square feet in 1940s to its apex in 2007-- just before the crash-- at about 2,700 square feet. Kind of like large cars from the '70s, they seem now a little bit like relics of another time gone by. Because these were tailored to nuclear families, which as Niklas has mentioned, is really a minor aspect of our society. In Manhattan, we have 46% of inhabitants are really single. And the single one-to-two person household is a very large proportion. Dark blue is one-to-two person households. And you see that-- if you compare it to Boston, for instance-- 33% is one. It's a trend across the United States and across the world, even more so in European capitals and in Tokyo. So this is also something that has been increasing substantially in the last couple of decades. A 30% increase, I believe, in the last decade alone. So what are the options to people in at least New York City, where there's a large number of illegal apartments that are in fact micro-units by another name? Where one might have no view, or a really insecure situation, or very little space. And the other option, I guess, is to move out and put an extra burden on our transportation infrastructure and continue to contribute to sprawl. So the Bloomberg administration-- in conjunction with the Citizens Housing and Planning Council in New York-- initiated a study and exhibition called Making Room, in which they created a body of research that was then used as a reference for the competitors in the competition that we subsequently entered. So that competition basically challenged developer-architect teams to come up with a micro-unit type on a very small lot, owned by HPD-- Housing Preservation and Development-- right next to a NSCHA site. And we won this competition by basically following a brief, and doing something very straightforward, I think. The site is on 27th Street in Manhattan. So this is First Avenue and 27th Street, on a dead end, small pedestrian street. And this is our project. So our big challenges, as we saw it, was to design a building that was somehow generic in that it would be a prototype-- a replicable prototype. It wouldn't really be a standalone building, per se, but that would insert itself within the legacy of housing in New York. For which reason we chose a brick, just to give an example. But at the same time, they would express something about micro-living in terms of its dimensions, without expressing the individual. So unlike Moshe Safdie's Habitat or other subsequent projects that have tried to equate the idea of the physical unit with a social unit, we were very interested in, in fact, thinking about how people who live in small apartments need to be nested into different sets of scales, of social scales. For this project to occur, we were granted several mayoral overrides, the most important of which were to lift the minimum number of dwelling units, which is called density in the zoning code. And to lift the minimum area, which in our current code is 400 square feet. The rest were just minor ones to do with our project. So again, we thought of the project or the resident as living in a variety of scales in a nested way. And the very important one is the amount of social space which we are able to contribute in a project-- which is not very much but substantial for maybe this type. In New York, in any case. And here you see them distributed. It's a very small building. It's comprised of 55 units. It's nine stories tall. It's built with modular construction. And normally developers won't even let you do these things, but we were able to provide quite a few little amenity spaces-- which, of course, we wish there were more. Another thing that we thought was quite important was-- since people are living in very small units-- to connect them very clearly to their context by providing very large windows and great ceiling height. So the typical unit, which is about 300 square feet on average, has a nine foot eight ceiling which allows for overhead storage, and also very tall sliding glass doors which lead to-- or don't really lead, but reveal-- a Juliet balcony. We have about five to six basic types. Seven are shown here, but they're basically similar. This is the most dominant one, which is quite straightforward. It's very difficult in such a small lot to come up with many different orientations and configurations, as it were, that meet the code. And one thing about our code in the United States that differs from other countries is that the interior of the apartments has to be accessible-- fully accessible-- to wheelchairs. The one we're designing in Hong Kong does not. Right at the threshold between the corridor and the unit, you can dispense with that and have kitchens that are 600 millimeter space between the counter and the fridge, for instance. So what it results in is a disproportionately large bathroom and kitchen for the size of the apartment, but we've tried to somehow make it efficient. This is the current plan of a typical floor, where you see basically four similar apartments facing the south, and then the grain shifts to the west. And we have an efficient core. At the end-- this is very small, I grant you, but at the end of every quarter we have a shared storage. A vestige of something, a grander idea we had, which was to have at every end of the quarter a social space. But this was eroded bit-by-bit-- not so much by the developers as by the kind of very tight site and the redundancies of modular construction, which requires a certain thickness of walls. We're on track to finish the project in December. This is a rendering, which people have thought is a real photo, but it's a rendering that we submitted as part of our competition. If you want to make something look real, render it under construction, I guess. It looks a lot less beautiful under construction in this photo because we have all this ugly insulation on it. But just to describe quickly how we built it was kind of interesting. We used traditional construction for the basement and the first floor, and modules produced in the factory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for everything else, including the core. It's about as high as one can go with this system. I think about 135 feet before one needs to have a braced core, as I understand it. And so basically, they're modules comprised of steel pipes and a chassis like a car, and a redundant floor-ceiling assembly. So these are where they're tight and they stack on each other. This is an interior of one of the modules under construction. They feel luminous and spacious to me. So this is a typical day in the factory. It's a short video-- I'm not sure if I'll show it all, it's maybe two minutes-- but it shows you how the modules advance along the assembly line, just like in a Model T Ford. With different trades all unionized, working, doing the same thing over and over again really efficiently. Which, in principle, should really speed up construction and give it a much higher level of finish. One thing we were able to achieve is a high level of tolerance, which is very important to this project. We are building to three millimeters, which is an eighth of an inch, beyond which we would, in fact, not comply with code. We're in such a small site that if we were to have a slightly smaller width of apartment, it would basically not comply. So this would have been very difficult with traditional construction. So this actually is taking a long time, this building, paradoxically. But what was very fast was the stacking, which happened in three weeks and was kind of breathtaking. And I guess one thing that was really nice was that it really had a very low impact on the neighborhood, because it's a very quiet construction. You just hear welding as these things go into place. Of course now we're back to traditional construction as we skin this with brick. We had decided to do that for many reasons, one of which was just in terms of making sure we had a good envelope seal, and so on. Just quickly-- I forgot to put two slides here. But the four points I wanted to make about thinking about units-- Niklas approached this topic. The housing studio that I'm teaching this semester is dealing precisely with this issue, that we're sort of prisoners of language in that sense, and am inheriting a lot of preconceptions about housing. Which is the type that it has probably the most number of-- the largest baggage, shall we say. Which is a great thing, too. So what we're trying to do in the studio is consider what is a unitless house, or unitless housing? And reconsidering the idea of units in four frameworks. The first is the social unit. For whom are we designing if, in fact, 37% of Bronx residents are comprised of single mothers with a child? Just to give an example. And co-housing is introducing new types. I think it's-- even though we speak about it-- we don't really design for something outside of a nuclear family. Most of the types that we see in the exhibition are still adhering to that, with the exception of a few. And perhaps it's just opportunities we have. The second is the programmatic unit. Why call it housing if we now work at home, and if we shower in the office, or if we work in a cafe? Is it possible now to think more of amenities rather than program? In fact, take the discussion out of the idea of a dwelling, per se, but thinking about new connections that adapt to a more contemporary and fluid lifestyle. The third is the economic unit. Somebody owns housing at one point, and you either rent or sublet from the person or the agency or the company that owns the housing. But the Baugruppen that Niklas also has shown-- which I'm taking my students to see in three weeks-- offers an interesting model of bottom-up, Arctic-led initiatives, but also new models of ownership. In a time where we share cars to go, or Citi Bikes, or Ubers and so on, is there a new model for securing one's right to a dwelling, rather than thinking about owning or renting? And then finally, the constructive or physical unit. Even though we don't build with modules or think about modules all the time, I sense also-- not just in student work but in general-- that we tend to think of housing as a combinatorial game. In which we take preconceived ideas of units-- whether it's a one bedroom, a two bedroom, or a townhouse-- and we put them together like Rubik's Cubes or puzzles. But what if the units really are plumbing or shared spaces or balconies or some other scale, is something I'm interested in kind of unpacking. And I think the correlation between these four frameworks of units-- the social, the programmatic, the economic, and the physical-- has led to a standardization of thinking about housing at a time when we can really think about new things. Thank you. So we're going to go straight to questions, because I think it would be really interesting to open this up as quickly as possible. I think, in the interest of getting a conversation also going between our presenters, perhaps I could ask you-- to those of you who would like to ask a question-- maybe we can collect two or three questions at a time. And then have our panelists basically address those questions amongst themselves, and also in response to your point. So can I just see-- there are microphones here-- can I see if anybody has any comments or questions that you would like to make? Otherwise, I'll have to start and I'd rather you do it. Any thoughts, please? Back there. Wait until you get the mic, please. Thank you. Hi. So I guess this is specifically for the micro-unit as being a really viable option for cities like New York, who are facing extreme housing crises. And it seems like this project was primarily a market-rate project. But how do you think that type of construction could be manipulated to start being an option for addressing the affordable housing issue? Great. Any other comments? Please. Oh. Hi. Thank you for the presentation. I think the common framework in all four of your presentations is that, there's this point in the history of housing and in architecture where the main focus of the discussion changes from the notion of hospitality or the quality or the actual domestic condition of the house, into more about the discussions of statistics and real estate and how the housing has to adapt to the market. And so I was just wondering, where do you identify that shift from that kind of architectural discussion of the dwelling to a more almost engineering or statistic-based discussion of housing and the urban? Great. Anyone else? OK. Well, maybe we can start with those two points. It would be great if you just-- not only Eric, but others maybe if there are comments about that. I know Irenee is already ready to go, so-- Well,I could address the first question. Sure, sure. Just a clarification, actually. Is this microphone on? It's supposed to be on. Yeah, now it is, I think. So, actually 40% of the units in our project are, in fact, allocated to affordable-- are affordable, and can only be acquired through a lottery depending on one's income. But I think the question of-- and probably this building is not a great example, because it's sort of a one-off, and one would have to understand the impact of the scale if one were to introduce many of these micro-unit buildings throughout the city. But I think the framework through which one measures these issues and impact on affordability has to be various, on many different scales. One of which is looking at the broader issue of sprawl and transportation networks, and sustainability from that framework. But I think what the administration is trying to do is just provide a few more choices, so that you don't end up with people sharing illegally. Apparently it's not legal for more than three unrelated adults to live in an apartment in New York City, for instance. Can you imagine? Other that students in dorms. So there are a lot of things that the administration was trying to maybe address in terms of affordability. But it will take years-- and maybe many examples-- to really, I think, assess whether it has an impact. Irenee, you were-- Well, it goes without saying that when one designs and builds a house, the relationship between the actual design is contingent. Circumstance does matter, inevitably. However, I think in the context of what I understand this exhibition and this discussion, I think that the question is, how can one actually place housing at somehow the forefront of at least one of the main concerns among architects, in the architecture culture? And I think if this were to happen, my feeling is that architects need to look not only at satisfying what some market may demand or what tenants may demand, but they need to be some steps ahead and consider what actually constitutes good housing. And I mean, I think-- and perhaps Hilde will correct me if I'm wrong-- but in some periods which I can think of which have been exemplary in housing, and in the experiment which I would regard as exemplary in housing, it has usually entailed a group of architects or an architect to ask that fundamental question. What constitutes a good dwelling? What constitutes a good apartment? And then it is the responsibility of the architect to actually promote it. Promote it to whomever is a relevant person to promote it. Le Corbusier was thinking about captains of industries, and he was always fighting-- like so many architects in the movement-- fighting to actually make this situation possible. What strikes me very much at the moment is that architects are quite passive. We're what one could call not captains of industry, but captains of the economy. I Saying, well, all right, say I have the power. We are going to give them what they want. Well, if you want to make housing which is generally good, I think this is not the right approach, in my view. I think if-- just to come back to what you said-- it turns out that one of the main points we're discussing here is the question, how can market interests-- with also playing a role in micro-units and efforts to preserve the social city-- can be reconciled? And I think that's also something that we are discussing in Berlin. A lot of the students who have been there have done beautiful proposals to solve that question. And for example, we have one proposal that is to increase the maximum eaves height-- which is currently at 72 feet-- to 85, which would allow private investors for the construction of luxury penthouses. With the condition that they always, in turn, have to commit to renting one floor out at 60 Euro cents per square foot. So that was one proposal to create affordable space at the same time and get a social mixture, which is also desired. And I wondered-- coming from this background-- when I look at your project, I think it's beautiful. Beautifully, the economic pressure-- which was also on this project. But I saw in the exhibition two years ago, where your project was-- rightly so-- awarded the best one, that others collapsed. Other architects collapsed under the economic pressure to create micro-scale apartments, and then this turns into kind of a hyper-capitalist worsening of the situation. That people are forced to squeeze more apartments into the same shape. So my interest would be-- once you're here-- to tell us a little bit more about how could you create these social-communal spaces, and why? My only question that might be a little critical with your project-- coming from Berlin with all these communal kitchens and option spaces where you have carpenters doing something with the kids, and you have a gym in the basement. Which, at first sight, looks even as if it would worsen the situation of the poor New York person who, after work has to come home and exercise in his gym to be fit for the next day. So coming from this hippie-ass Berlin background, you would say, why do you not have a communal kitchen where you invite people from the neighborhood to experience community? The gym is in the best part of the building. It's not in the basement, it's the ground floor. The first floor. So it's even more-- It's very public. --questionable to-- hang out and party. The original idea, in fact, was to have a creative communities center that would have programming, with dance classes and so on. But our partner pulled out. We had an idea-- when we went into the competition with The Actors Fund-- was the idea that it would have dance performances and so on. They would be half for the residents, but also for the public. Unfortunately, this was removed. And this is a question of the agency. I mean, we have safeguarded many aspects of the project. And thankfully, it was because we won at competition. I think the developers would have crushed us completely, had we not won the competition. We were able to protect some key ideas like the great ceiling heights, like the amount of public space, the having this public main ground floor rather than retail, for instance. Because it was public, it was made public through the competition process. But no, you're right. One can criticize the context. And the architect, we're part of that context. As I said, I think you-- Can I begin on that? Because I think the question, as it was posed, was in terms as if architects have to provide quality rather than quantity. And of course, architects have to think about the quality of living, absolutely. But in saying an architect's business is quality and not quantity, you avoid to pose the question also in political terms. Housing is a political issue. It's a decision of a society. How to provide for housing, how much budget is allocated for housing. Is it just the market forces? And then, of course, there will be no affordable housing for a lot of people. Or is there a correction to the market forces? And then the politics step in. The politicians decide to allocate a certain budget for making affordable housing. There is a kind of logic to that, that has everything to do with politics and not with architecture. And so, this political context is absolutely crucial. That's why the decision of the mayor to make this exceptional circumstances was very necessary to make this experiment possible. But still, also there, I think we also-- I hear also voices that say, well, is this not a very dangerous spot to follow with these micro-apartment? Because now you say, it is meant for single-person households, and they make up the majority of the people living in Manhattan. That's true at this moment, but who says that maybe in a couple of year's time that there will not-- families or households of more than one or two people move into these apartments and recreate slum circumstances that we didn't know anymore since the beginning of the 20th century. That kind of questions are also asked, and I think it's right to ask them. It's true. It's a question of regulation, actually. It won't be permitted to live in this apartment if you're more than people. And I've asked the question, what happens if you have a child? How much notice do you have? But I did have one opportunity to try to intervene as an architect within the spectrum of politics, which is when I testified to the City Planning Council about the micro-units, and was asked for my recommendations on what the zoning changes should entail or include. Because we are very worried that the city will relax these restrictions on the minimum dwelling size and the density of the apartment, without requiring developers to add something back. Which we were able to do by giving, because we're trying to say, look, it's the same volume. So in fact, if we can get greater density in terms of height-- which is fine in New York-- we can get a lot more apartments. And I think it's a very important issue. Without sacrificing Floor Area Ratio-- FAR-- without that. So that plus more storage-- we have three levels of storage in the building. There's in the basement, there's-- in your units, you have more than in a three-bedroom apartment, and then you have every floor. That's very important for people in a small apartment, in our current Amazon Prime economy. And then finally, the social spaces, which are so important. The best spaces were given over to the public. The ground floor, but also the eighth floor, which has the setback, which is the salon for communal kitchen, actually. The communal space for eating. So each one is programmed. There's an office space, there's a library with a pool table. And this is marketing consultants who are all over this and trying to establish exactly what people want. But actually, in a sense, they've done a good job because they've realized there's a spectrum of uses that are typically not provided. This is what we fear will not make it into the zoning code when they make the changes. I know, Irenee, you want to come-- I also want to give Daniel, Megan, and Matt-- if you have, I wonder, do you want to make some remarks or contribution? There. You're nodding your head. So maybe we can give them the mic here, and then we'll go back to Irenee and if there are any other thoughts. Hi. One of the things we were most interested in, in our work with the exhibition, was representing the simultaneity of scale that is inevitable in housing. The search for the kind of living standard, putting the occupant or visitors at a one-to-one scale of living within these spaces, registering some sense of personality, potentially. Sort of filling these things at the same time as registering how aggregation or organizational logic might actually produce a form that has a more urban resonance. And I'm wondering-- because we are interested in the simultaneity of scale-- where you all feel the greatest potency is for architectural design agency in what's to come for housing? Is it in the kind of mediation between these two scales-- the space of seclusion or the space of engagement, perhaps? And I saw that maybe playing out in examples across all presentations. Or are we now in a realm where we're surgically adopting what we're inheriting? Sort of where new meets old. So I'm wondering specifically, what is the raw material of the design world in terms of what we can actually manipulate with housing to come? Where do you see the kind of greatest potency or where does that live? Ireene, do you want to answer that and raise your earlier point? No, I'll just wait for the next question. Which also will-- So thank you. And I think-- just to continue what Megan was saying-- I think this exhibition really stems from an understanding that what we're dealing with is an inheritance of modernism and the modernist idea of housing. And in a way, what my question would be-- maybe more towards you, Niklas-- are we reinventing this wheel, or are we simply redesigning it? And when we see something like the Moriyama House-- that to an extent works or doesn't work today-- what is this? Is this really something new, or are we just redesigning the same thing? Well, just to answer this question quickly, we're not reinventing the wheel or redesigning it. I think we're hovering now without wheels because it's something completely new. The situation is completely new, and I thought you gave a beautiful talk on the so-called failure of modernist proposals. And I think, for the first time, these modernist proposals could actually work, because for the first time, people are working-- to a large extent-- at home. And if you go to a [? spafeld-- ?] which is architecturally not the most advanced project, but it is working beautifully well-- because these option rooms are, for the first time in architectural history since the starting of modernity, people are enabled to work at home. So there's a social control over these option spaces. So whereas all these spaces that we find in the Robin Hood gardens were not used by the people because most of the people had to work all day long in factories or wherever. They came home, they were tired, they were not using these spaces. Now in this situation, people are working in these structures, they're working and living there, and this leads to the fact that you don't have these slum-like corners, which are undefined and not accepted by the population and by the inhabitants. But for the first time, people are actually working in these spaces, and so for the first time, if you repurpose these sometimes old models of the whole house, of early modernist communal spaces, there's a chance that they could actually work because our working conditions have changed. And the conditions under which we raise children have changed. And this also a thing that these new communal structures-- larger extended families are able to look after children while others are working. So I think that demographics, the change of life rituals, might lead to the fact that these models that were already called dysfunctional could finally be the germ for a new form of architecture. And again, I told this to the students in Berlin. This here, I think it's a very exciting moment that we are forced to develop forms to accommodate up to a billion people. And I told that before, in Asia, India, and Africa alone-- which is not counting Latin America and America and the industrialized countries of Europe. So this is not a apocalyptic number, but this is a fantastic task for architects and planners to work together to speculate how these forms could be produced and how they could look like. And again, we see in East Germany, it's not sufficient to provide units for migrants and for refugees and put them on the edge of little villages and say, that's fine. There you are, you have your units. But you have to create social spaces where people could meet each other, and spaces of encounter, and new forms of communal activities that bring together newly-arrived refugees, old inhabitants, and so on. So we are forced to develop solutions, and that's a big chance for architects to start now their practice. So I would be very happy if I'd be as tuned and know that I should be part of this committee to find solutions for that. I would be very positive about all these developments. But we will-- we're behind the question of the wheel. We're now in the air. This is more about aerospace and aeronautics, where you are now. So-- I like very much the kind of optimism that is in the air. I'm totally optimistic. But at the same time, I'm not completely at ease with the optimism, in the sense that in the '90s, we talked about the end of public space as if the social media and internet and so on diminished the need of people to go out and participate in public space. I think it was a very real issue. It still is a real issue. That there is a [? leaf ?] in the [? quarter-calls ?], this tendency of [? capsulitization. ?] That people tend to insulate themselves from others by in their bedroom, looking behind their computer, doing a lot of things through Facebook, but not going out face-to-face. I wonder if that's true. I mean, many of us are together alone. It's like the discussion at the end of the 80s about information technology displacing the need for public space completely. And in fact, they've just superimposed new kinds of media, new uses upon the ones we have. And now libraries are community centers or work-- they're like offices, basically. But my point was, I'm very happy that you all pick up these tendencies and say, this is where the future is. And I absolutely hope it's true, but I'm not sure that maybe we are mistaken. A lifestyle that is very much a lifestyle of a particular part of the population-- young, urban, still single-- that we take this lifestyle to be the lifestyle of the future. Is it not the case that 80% of the people do not live in this way? In research-- Even in North America and Europe? Some research by the CHPC-- Citizens Housing Planning Council-- showed no correlation between family size and age or any other kind of social indicator like income and so on. In fact, you have a lot of elderly people, of course, who are now alone, or a lot of divorced people. Apparently that's a huge new segment of the single or the one-- And who hate to go to retirement homes because they do not want to give up their privacy? And retirement homes are an example of micro-apartments with a lot of social space around, no? But people hate to go to retirement homes. So there is a tension there. --formal take on retirement homes, because retirement homes are basically hospitals where people have to stay for the rest of the lives. And if you look at the redesign of homes for the elderly, it's interesting to see that you come to this communal model again and that works beautifully. To come to the second point you mentioned, I'm not sure whether we do not have to differentiate more what's happening with the impact of electronics. Also, in the third world, if you look at Africa, the chances that are given to people who have internet access-- this changes not only the industrialized countries, but also it changes Africa to a large extent. And so I think we have to rethink and redefine our definitions of private life, public life, because even in Nigeria or in Kenya-- where I was recently-- many things that were done on the marketplace in a physical way 20 years before-- like selling goods, buying goods, exchanging information-- is done via the internet now in Africa. And that helps largely to develop areas and villages. And so I think that we have a superimposition of these two levels, which is very productive. And the only thing that is challenging is that you cannot really tell anymore, when someone worked for eight hours in his bedroom on a computer selling things, buying things, exchanging information. If he leaves his apartment to have a walk in the street, is he going from a private sphere to a public realm? Or is he rather doing the opposite? Is he escaping the realm of communication to have a moment of immersion in what we still call public space? I think the binarity of these positions-- private and public, inside and outside-- it's not working anymore. --movie where the guy goes into a very small cubicle to quickly eat. Yeah. And I think it lies a chance-- and you said this, I think-- just to finish that shortly. You said that we're trapped in language. And I think this is a crucial thing. We cannot repeat this often enough, that architects-- when they're asked to design a four-story high building-- they think of stacking and aggregating four boxes of three meters high. And then you have the example of the house NA by Fujimori in the exhibition, where he says, no, four stories could also mean 20 levels. And I think, this is a liberation of fault from the constraints of language, which is very important in that time where we have these changes. I mean, my theory in that is conversations, that housing actually can respond to very specific circumstances to do with, for instance, disability. For instance, old age. For instance, evolution of households over the years, and so on. This, in my view, is a luxury of certain questions, certain countries in the west and elsewhere. What strikes me at the moment is that there is an absence of a general theory of housing. There is no, for instance, book. Which I'm not saying that this is one, but I mean, there is no book which is equivalent, for instance, to the book-- which was written presumably here-- by [inaudible], can our city survive? Which was an attempt to actually theorize how we might approach the problems in cities, and specifically in housing on a very large scale. And I think, in my view, architects have perhaps a responsibility to think about those things. Now to my mind, this kind of work needs to take place upstream, and after that, [inaudible] one wants to have a generally significant impact on the future of housing. And that everything to do with being specific in addressing the offer happens afterwards. I mean, in those instances where other guys have had really significant effects on the development of housing. We didn't answer Megan's question. We're getting there. I think, without actually fundamentally changing the structural things that define housing as organization-- the ideas of the family, the units-- we're just chiropractors. We're just moving things around and compositionally changing things. But can we sketch out and imagine, just take on the issue of organizational concepts? What organizes housing, right? Orientation, solar orientation, horizontal distribution of circulation, structure, plumbing. If you just take those things. What if we come up with a new idea of plumbing? Or what if we don't use water to evacuate waste? Would it actually liberate cores to become not vertical anymore? Would it liberate repetition of floor plates? New models of structure. I mean, we can think of a lighter building, more lightweight ways to build buildings, and so on. I think there's an optimistic way to go in and look at every sort of structural thing that's defining housing as we know it now, and that can be the social-- dimensionally can be the idea of program. And we can just take the physical elements. I'm optimistic. Great. Any other thoughts or comments? Maybe we'll have-- there are a couple of hands. Three hands, four hands. Can we ask you to be brief? I really want everybody to still be able to go outside and mingle and see the exhibition and have a glass of wine. So please, go ahead. I actually had a direct question to Hilde. Hilde, you were talking about this concept of isolation that's been more prominent ever since social media set in, and the whole use of public spaces become obsolete, almost. And I guess my question to you is-- as a designer, as an architect-- would you think of responding to that isolation, and in the future, designing for spaces that support that kind of living as just a reality that we're accepting? Or would you think about-- as an architect-- stressing more on community spaces, or more communal spaces, where people get to actually go back to that sort of social interaction? I think I would go for the second option. I think this tendency of individualization is something-- an insulation of the individual is something that is very characteristic of modernity. The fact that we have so many single households is evidence of that. Why do you have single households? Because people can afford to no longer live with their parents, to have a divorce. If the economic situation is very, very bad, you don't have as many divorces. Because yeah, for a long time, women simply could not afford to leave their husbands. So they didn't. They stayed, and then there were less single families or single households. So the tendency clearly isn't that direction, and as architects, we should not ignore that. But I do believe that it's very important. As people, we have this need to be ourselves, to be our own person. We do desire an amount of individual space. Apparently many of us want to inhabit our own space without bothering about other people living with us. Apparently that's what we do. But at the same time, we are, of course, social beings. And I think that's why I found one of the most interesting common issues here-- that all of us addressed-- is this need to make interactions possible between the private space and the public realm. And to make intermediary spaces to encourage people to be part of a larger community. And that's where architecture-- in terms of organization of spaces-- have agency. It makes a difference, whether you really make isolated bubbles, where people have trouble getting out of, or whether you give a similar amount of space but in a way that is much more transparent and much more encouraging to have this ferocity and to engage with the intermediate spaces, the outside world. And I think it's very important to have all these different scale levels. That it's not private and public and nothing in between, that you have these communal spaces that are this gradient of private towards public. I think that's very important, and that's an architectural issue. So in that sense, I think the things that have been on the table today are very important, because they show different ways of organizing this contact between the private realm and the public realm and everything in between. So I would not go for the option of well, OK, if people want to be individual, let them be individual. But I'm not sure that the terms private and public-- as useful as they have been at a particular time-- I think those terms were introduced in the '70s in architecture speak, and they actually replaced a term which seems to me much more useful-- at least at the present time-- which previously people were talking about things being social. How social is a housing project? And already, in this idea, you don't have this contrast between-- on the one hand, the private and the public, and therefore that you can address the public, but you can't address the private because private is, by definition, private. I think one is a big issues is, of course, is the seamlessness of those two domains. And there is also something that is very nice about the idea of the social, in that you can address housing in the context of the whole society or the whole social development. And I think it's important for you to remember that this is a highly idealogized and political discussion we're leading. And if the city of New York and the mayor of New York decides to go for micro-apartments for singles, this is kind of a normative decision which excludes the idea of creating similar structures for communes. And you could argue that if you have a large part of the population being single, that you could foster buildings that could accommodate groups of six. And I know it from some of my students who spend a summer with six people in a single-bedroom apartment in Manhattan-- which sounded exciting and chaotic to me. But there is clearly a demand in society that consists of single-- exist does not necessarily demand for single apartments and providing single apartments. And again, I think your project is a seminal and important project, but I wish you would have been demand, also-- apart from what you did-- to create communal buildings. Because I could imagine that all you said about the unit-- which is replaced by a dwelling form which is not separated into units-- could be a valuable thing to respond to the need to dwell together. Singles might live together. And this also relates to what you say. Of course people are, in a way, insulated by their technology, but that could also mean there could be a demand for communal forms. And if you foster this demand, then you could come up with new dwelling forms beyond the classic decision either to have a nuclear family apartment, or an apartment for the single person. And I think this is far too few addressed, and it's the political decision to say, we define a society of consisting of singles or families, and not to propose that people might live together by [inaudible] or a circle of friends. That's what we see in Berlin now, that people are responding to that by saying, we tried to self-empower us by buying some land and asking an architect to build something for us. And we pour money together, and then we have this communal project. And this is a-- But this kind of project-- at least in Belgium, and I think in similar other elsewhere-- are very often made very difficult because there is no legal format for this kind of communal property. How do you construct the legal aspects of property if you decide-- with a group of 40 people-- to buy land and to build a communal building like that? That's not easy. That's quite a challenge. In New York, you're not allowed to live like that, right? Well, I think you can create a cooperative. But it's true. We'd like to find a way to do what [? spafeld ?] has done in Brooklyn. Sure. So, as you can see, our panelists have been so wonderful that I'm sure they've answered all the questions that the other people were going to ask. So I'm going to use my executive authority to thank them at this point, and let you know that three of them-- that is, Irenee, Niklas, and Hilde-- will actually be back at 10 AM in the library, for those of you who are interested to continue this discussion. As you could also see, Niklas has plenty of slides, a lot of other things that he would like to share with you. So come back then and let us continue the discussion in the morning. That will go on from 10 hopefully until 11, 11:30 in the morning. If you can. I do want to thank all of you for being here. I really could sense some enthusiasm and energy in the room, and I think we're very lucky to have had these presentations. And of course, many thanks to also all of you who helped with the exhibition, and the curators. I do like what Hilde tried to make sure that we don't forget-- which was really at the heart of this particular project and exhibition. Which is for the school-- especially at the beginning of the academic year-- to place really significant resources and focus on the topic of housing. And this whole phenomenon of reclaiming housing, in a way, is a key part of the project of the school because it is true that-- for such a long time-- the topic has been recognized as being very iconic, very symbolic, and something that we recognize as a significant part of the history of modernism. But I think it's also the time that we as a community, in a way, embrace and reclaim this particular topic. And I think the quality of the exhibition and the quality of the conversation, in some way, tonight, is a very good beginning for us to, in a sense, embrace that particular project. So once again, thank you very much. I hope you enjoy the reception and engage our panelists in further discussion. And come back tomorrow morning, to the library, at 10 o'clock for more images from Niklas and more discussion. Thank you.

Channel: Harvard GSD

Views: 22,321

Keywords: discussion

Id: xBslmQ0yDYM

Length: 111min 31sec (6691 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2015