Originally published in Issue No. 12
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At midnight one Sunday in October 1985, two hundred artists convened at three sites in New York City with spray paint and stencils in hand. The event was organized by New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture as part of its “Homeless at Home” project, a series of exhibitions and group demonstrations meant to rally collective action toward ending the homelessness problem. And so for the month of October, images and messages about homelessness appeared across the city, not only spray-painted onto city streets, construction site fences, and Storefront itself, but throughout the city’s network of art activist organizations. The stencil show was included in a special issue of Upfront, an art publication by Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PAD/D), and activist and art critic Lucy R. Lippard curated a window installation around the topic at New York’s Printed Matter, while a conference on shelter design was held at AIA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Storefront was founded by architect and artist Kyong Park in 1982 and would quickly gain a reputation for its compact yet formidable exhibitions tackling critical social issues. At the time, there were around 60,000 individuals experiencing homelessness in New York City (the number now hovers around 70,000). Homelessness was already a focus for the city’s conceptual artists, whose work criticized the systems that produced it. Storefront emulated these values, with one key distinction: it stressed both art andarchitecture as significant forces for change. For instance, Park and Glenn Weiss, the organizers of the “Homeless at Home” series, believed the root causes of homelessness—lack of public programs and mental health resources, unemployment, and the scarcity of quality, low-cost housing—had architectural solutions.
The project concluded in 1986 with an exhibition on alternative housing design, featuring 65 proposals from architects around the country. Storefront was not interested in simply exhibiting shelters that provided only superficial solutions, such as tacking on privacy screens, but rather designs that reimagined either an entire shelter or a small part of one. Participants were free to choose their site, length of stay, scale—it was all on the table for interpretation. At its core, the “Homeless at Home” project intended to close the gap between people who led lives of relative stability and those living in precarity. Park and Weiss believed that by seeing the homeless as kin, we would be prompted to act.
Beginning May 6 of this year, and for the first time in MTA history, the subway system shut down for nightly cleaning due to the coronavirus pandemic. These closures displace people who often sleep in train cars and raise pressure on homeless shelters, which are already operating at unprecedented levels due to the virus. It’s a catch-22: shelters are high-risk sites for spreading the coronavirus, but must remain open. The problems spurred by Covid-19 are only symptoms of a long-strained system. Many of the main causes of homelessness in the 1980s continue to this day. The question is whether architects are still up to the task.
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Ben Dooley is a New York-based writer and architectural designer in New York.
You can find him at bendooley.xyz
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