What does resident control of housing mean?
Flexibility in social housing. Plus, the problem of “spatial justice” and looking at the Bechers anew
Our print issue is popping up all over the place. If you haven’t already, subscribe today.
Open House
Unlike the city’s current modes of participatory planning, a recent City College exhibition seems genuinely concerned with realizing the desires of residents.
by Samuel Stein
Beyond the vapidity of -IMBYisms, the exhibition sparked two questions that kept me thinking for days after my visit. The first is one of labor. Prefabrication and off-site production were a huge part of the SAR project. As soon as you say these things in the US context, though, they raise questions around unionization and pay standards. Developers here have frequently used prefabrication as an explicit union avoidance strategy. For mass prefabrication to be acceptable to me and many others, that part of the industry would have to be unionized. In the best-case scenario, this could push construction unions to finally make the shift from AFL-style craft unions (which tend to be more exclusionary and hierarchical) to CIO-style industrial unions (which tend to be more expansive and, at their best, solidaristic).
The second is the question that opened this review: How far can resident control of housing go?
An Imperative Mood
As if the concept of “justice” alone weren’t complicated enough, adding “spatial” to it moves things into labyrinthine territory.
by Carlos Ortega Arámburo
Invitations to architects to participate in the imparting of spatial justice sometimes feels like arm-twisting: an insistence that, regardless of the monetary precariousness affecting the profession’s salaries, architects should, as Cuff suggests, “work pro bono, renouncing financial remuneration for some cause.” To clarify, volunteer labor is necessary for any cause, but these particular calls for altruism feel especially bleak when there’s currently so much ongoing organizing about fair wages in the profession, demonstrated by, for example, the emergence of Architectural Workers United.
Grids and Gas Holders
The Bechers didn’t edit their photos the way contemporary photographers might, making the aesthetic continuity between each frame that much more impressive.
by Emily Conklin
Düsseldorf School founders Bernd and Hilla Becher were finally given the retrospective they deserve: an eponymous exhibition at The Met, which closed in early November. Their famous “portraits,” which turn industrial infrastructures into objets d’art, are stunning on the level of photography, their toned blacks, grays, and whites even and soothing. But the Bechers’ photography transcends the medium. It reads not as single images, but rather in layers, almost like an architectural drawing. The photographs’ gridded arrangement on the gallery walls and in the pages of their books only emphasized this effect, vaguely recalling an architect’s iterative process. Taken as a whole, the work also hints at the larger social and economic history in the landscapes and buildings captured by the camera.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc. For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Thomas Phifer.
To support the work and receive NYRA by post, subscribe here.