Due: Building Study
Readings:
Sara Safransky Detroit, The City After Property: Chapters 3, 6, and 7 (prioritize 6 and 7)
Zachary Violette’s book, The Decorated Tenement Intro, 1, 2, and 6 (all priorities)
Feb. 19.
Due: Building Study
Readings:
Sara Safransky Detroit, The City After Property: Chapters 3, 6, and 7 (prioritize 6 and 7)
Zachary Violette’s book, The Decorated Tenement Intro, 1, 2, and 6 (all priorities)
There is so much to respond to across all the readings for this week, but I found the Safransky chapter “Conjuring Terra Nullius” to be the most compelling/exciting. Using the *nain* as an entry point for understanding the role of ritual and mythology in colonial urbanism is brilliant and potent, and a few things were particularly interesting for me. The first was how doctrinaire colonial attitudes codify either absolute truths or moral binaries. Manifest Destiny and *terra nullius* are concepts that embody both legal and theological frameworks that imply a moralization of space. This invention allows for moral gymnastics that justify – that is to say, colonization invents through these structures to rationalize and validate work that is objectively violent, immoral, etc. In all of this, I was most interested in the role of myth-making. Safransky talks about the use of natural metaphor as a reductive descriptor that allows for discriminatory and punitive policy and action. The characterization of a city through pejorative natural metaphor is no different than the myth-making of settler colonialism in the 18th c. What we can condemn with conviction in hindsight bears a remarkable resemblance to the way we discuss contemporary urban issues. Myth-making and metaphor, in general, allow for a critic to spin off one small narrative that carries with it a litany of hidden meanings. It is a proxy critique, a lazy critique because it lacks specificity and intention and brings with it a fantastical and fabricated narrative, often rife with bias and ulterior motives
On a separate note, I found the quote from Denis Wood on p. 40 to be incredibly powerful. Safransky writes: “If maps, in the words of geographer Denis Wood, “blossom in the springtime of the state,” then the remapping of Detroit did not merely reflect a new urban order defined by state emergency power, hyper-surveillance, market totalitarianism, and austerity but was also instrumental in its making.” There is an agency given to drawing/mapping that I think we can all understand as students in architecture, and it is an excellent reminder of the contextual nature of a map, even when it masquerades as an absolute.
For this week’s readings, I was particularly struck by how the transition from the ramshackle, dilapidated Federal row houses gave way to the more solid and imposing tenements mirrors the transition on Yale’s campus. After moving to New Haven, Yale College constructed what is now known as Connecticut Hall in 1752. For the time, it was a totally appropriate building, it was quite literally a colonial building. And over the next decades, Yale College was filled in with an alternating series of long brick dormitories and taller chapel and library buildings known as the Brick Row. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, Yale began to tear down the Brick Row in favor of the solid, austere Old Campus we know today. Just as the Federal rowhouses of the colonial American city fell out of aesthetic favor, so did the Brick Row. But as Violette illuminates, the Federal rowhouses as an architectural type could not keep up with the growing demands of the nineteenth century city. Hence the need for the decorated tenement to house more families per square foot. And while similarly Yale’s student body was growing and Brick Row was aging, a key difference is that Yale did not change the programmatic arrangement of its dormitories. In plan, the Old Campus is almost completely identical to Connecticut Hall– except its entryways face inwards towards the campus, versus spilling out towards the New Haven Green as Connecticut Hall did. So in other words the transition from Federal row houses to decorated tenement was an inside and out architectural change, but the transition from Brick Row to Old Campus was primarily an exterior transformation.
I really enjoyed the Dingbat piece and was particularly interested in how it frames housing modernist development as a branding exercise. The way developers marketed these buildings at the time of their creation, focusing on small features like “modern” kitchens and ample closet space is a tactic that is still very much alive and well. It may be the building project blinders that I’m currently wearing, but It’s acutely fascinating to me how something as simple as a nice closet could make someone overlook the building’s bigger flaws. It turns out nobody cares about fenestration if every wall is thickened with storage.
I found the stark contrast between Scott Bond and George Sallow to be pretty satisfying. Bond’s approach, which played up luxury and available amenities, promised to not only meet the housing demand but also raise property values in communities like El Cerrito who had a vested interest in maintaining suburban order. His marketing was all about easing fears of overcrowding and assuring buyers that these new apartments wouldn’t disrupt the status quo. A promise with plenty of baggage. Interesting then to consider that the demographic that moves into the dingbats after their initial rollout was, and still is, largely families of color. On the other hand, Sallow’s focus was on practicality and affordability, maximizing space within zoning rules without the glossy appeal. There’s something more trustworthy about that approach.
I also loved the mention of carports and kidney-shaped pools—are they genuinely charming or just quirky relics of a bygone era? Do we as architects love them for the modernist past that they remind us of or are they worth saving?
Side note to revisit branding:
My wife and I play a game of our own creation on long car trips. We choose a locale (not nesecatily where we happen to be) and come up with many names for condo complexes as we possibly can. If we were to choose the area surrounding palm beach, for example, our list might include names like “Long sands” “Palm Court” or “The Point ”, etc. Level 2 involves naming gated communities. Highly recommend.
Hey Paige – I also found Viewpoint: New in Town to be a really enjoyable read, especially when it comes to the discussion on the differing viewpoints regarding the effects of multi-family buildings on communities. From “suburban parasites” to increasing land values, multi-family dwellings, or dingbats in this example, continue to be a questionable and confusing method of attempting to build, house, and enhance communities in my head. As I’ve mentioned on the Field Methods page before, I’ve been working on multi-family projects professionally for the last few years and I think Paige’s point about branding has become extremely prevalent in relation to the way we live. Marketing blinds us to the potential disparities of our surroundings to where a community pool, a cramped gym, or a nice amenity view guides our decisions, yet they never get used, nor create community and the surrounding neighborhoods likely become less connected due to these multi-family behemoths full of unfamiliar people. I believe we’ve all likely experienced this disconnection, especially as new professionals in growing cities. For me, it was when I toured my first apartment fresh out of undergrad, where I was amazed by the downtown views, the rooftop pool, the beautiful gym, and the decent cost of rent, yet I was blinded and did not see that these rooftop views were adjacent to the main homeless shelter of downtown Dallas… This multi-family building was placed with complete disregard for the existing community and unquestionably felt as if it was trying to drive out all notions of homelessness in the surrounding area. I believe Bond attempted to resolve some of these issues in a capitalistic way, and we can see the eventual downfall of his methods – basically using profit forecasting to decide the site’s unit density, while stating “We wish to build these Luxury type units because they will help elevate the standards of the area and bring a high-class, permanent type of resident to the city that will support both the merchants, by buying locally, and city developments. We have provided twenty-eight garages and carports for the twenty-eight proposed units. This should eliminate any parking problem here…” – a very hypothetical claim. I guess I’m mostly interested in trying to understand what makes a successful multi-family building – from financing and profit to parking and streetscapes, as well as density and community engagement – each building is a beast of its own, but how can we have a higher guarantee of its outcomes and effects?
Safranksy introduces the intertwined relationship between intangible* cultural practices and physical* spacemaking through the Nain Rouge. She traces the meaning of the figure (and mythmaking in general) from reflecting the early settlers’ sense of threat, to fostering a sense of white belonging, to justifying the violence of manifest destiny. I was interested in the myth’s ability to contain and carry underlying cultural attitudes across generations, until they become obscured/ingrained/taken for granted. Traces of the nain metaphor survives in various forms from the frontier, to the jungle, to the rewilding/sublime wilderness, to disease. At their core, these various metaphors all serve to create a narrative of lack—often saturated with exoticism— whether that be physical emptiness, ruination, underutilization or the idea of being legally unclaimed, unpossessed, etc. they all frame the land as an open opportunity for “the right people” to settle and consume. I was especially drawn to Safranksy’s examination of these narrative metaphors and their range of expressions. Some were overtly hostile, such as the DBRTF’s likening of blight to cancer, while some appear more benign and even alluring. The narrative of natural reclamation stood out to me particularly because of its very successful infiltration into contemporary visual media. Featured repeatedly in dystopian TV shows and movies, photography/artwork and the rise of “urban exploration” as a hobby, the alluring image of healing and rejuvenation seems to obscure/make unconscious its misguided narrative of emptiness.
To me, the readings this week all touched on a sense of belonging; the process of ‘earning’ it, the act of taking it away, and the justification for declaring it. In both “The Decorated Tenement” and “New in Town,” the subject where — and how — denser, more affordable housing belongs is contentious and a point of strife both between developers and NIMBYs but also within pro-housing groups. In the case of Californian dingbats, the question of belonging exists within the question of commodity: who deserves the porosity and greenspace of suburban life? Are these garden apartments parasites on their communities or at-home resorts or both? In the years since the advent of the coastal modern multifamily, it seems they have earned their place in their communities and in history, to the point that they are now icons of the area. They belong in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco as much as the palm tree does (another largely imported icon).
For tenements in New York and Boston, the question of belonging was less about where, as the neighborhoods occupied by tenements were already areas of large immigrant and working class populations, and more about how and how much. Who deserves quality housing, ornament, and modern amenities? The fear that investment in tenements would revitalize their communities and become “essentially permanent, vitally necessary, and … even a desirable feature of the landscape” shows the tension between not only singular developers’ ideals and beliefs about the working class, but between Old World and American ideals and the changing image of the city. “The Decorated Tenement” not only engages with belonging from the viewpoint of quality of life and community, but also with belonging in the academic, and questions what scholars have taken seriously as areas of study and what they haven’t.
And in “City After Property,” especially chapter 6, the violence and moralizing behind asserting new justification for belonging is repeatedly trodden through the history of Detroit. As Calder mentions above, “doctrinaire colonial attitudes codify either absolute truths or moral binaries,” and these truths and binaries are then used to secure “white supremacy and capitalist accumulation over generations” and erase the histories and communities surviving in opposition to their colonization and suppression.
The question of belonging is complicated and there are many claims to it — economical, cultural, historical, and humanitarian to name a few. Living in community, the claim to space and what an individual ‘deserves’ often overlap with other interests and abilities to exist within that space. It’s clear that a common theme between these three examples is the tension between the opinions of those in power and the lives of those that are not, and as often as not, those opinions prove to be a more powerful driving force than the lives and homes at stake.
I was quite interested in the agency that is embedded within ornamentation and decoration of buildings. In The Decorated Tenement, ornamentation and material choice are seen similar to tricked out cars and fake designer handbags — Violette’s comparison of marble steps to the more affordable slate tiles is an interesting analysis of these illogicies if viewed through the lens of practicality — symbols of an aspirational desire that reveal how the dwellers themselves rebel against their prescribed positions in society. While I wonder how arguments of commodification and how these tenements might embody a linear idea of economic ascension might complicate this more optimistic reading of ornamentation, the way that Violette has forced us to reread the role of the ornament in these buildings is a highly proactive argument that can be extended to many other situations.
These readings also made me think about the class relationships embedded within architectural and urban material culture. Slums and ruins in both readings are cast as voids, unoccupied, and undesigned spaces as there is no unifying style or are constructed in a piecemeal fashion. Architecture and urban design clearly divide labor between designers, builders and material suppliers, yet within these areas, the division breaks down and is less specialized and less uniformity, but has a greater relationship to the needs of the dweller themselves. The division between disciplines can also be seen as something that is non-neutral, perpetuating high and low class designs and reinforcing the need for specialization in order produce what might be useful for a nation’s future.
In both Sara Safransky’s “Detroit, The City After Property” and Zachary Violette’s “The Decorated Tenement”, I was struck by themes of myths, folklore and dominant cultural tastes and narrative’s roles in shaping both policy and urban form in the American city.
In chapter 6 of Safransky’s City after Property lays the groundwork for how colonial “myths”, “folklores” and “ceremonies” were manufactured in order to fake a fantastical relationship with violently stolen land and resources. Such myths are solidified through legislature and were used as nationalist symbols to justify colonial and capitalist extraction. It is interesting to see the evolution of the “nain rouge” from being an appropriated myth to being a method of control and racially charged moralization in a 1968 video. In both cases, the myth of the “nain” becomes a tool of oppression – evolving as the socio-political context of Detroit changes.
Detroit’s rebranding as a new American frontier – a ruined, rewilded and “empty” land adds a new layer to this myth. This new “emptiness” was exploited by investors aiming to “resettle” the city and push out either long term residents or places important to them. In the context of this myth, I was struck by the community map produced by local activists that marked the map of the city in different colours to convey the interests of long-term residents. Here the rouge dot became a warning and a protest – it was meant to represent a threat to the community or the environment. Safransky’s closing remarks speak of facing what haunts sites of violence and colonial legacies. In this case the community went a step further – by reappropriating the map and the myth, it found a way to validate and represent its own history and folklore.
It was refreshing to read Elihu’s research on the California garden apartment, as it takes an anthropological approach that is both sincere and challenges the conventional way we conceptualize the role of architects in an academic environment. While the article is ostensibly about garden apartments, its true focus lies in the actors and agents surrounding these spaces. The structure of the article itself follows the people rather than just the buildings.
Elements often dismissed as shortcomings in an architecture school setting—such as limited budgets or the omission of site visits—are instead taken seriously as catalysts for uncovering the deeper layers of meaning behind garden apartments. The chapter on George Swallow begins by describing him as “the favored architect of John Carter and Paul Rago, two carpenters turned developers.” Rather than placing architects at the center of form-making and the assignment of meaning, the article presents their role in a more pragmatic light—one that also shapes the perspective needed to engage with the reading.
Reading The Decorated Tenement excerpts, I appreciated his intentional flipping of the narrative of tenement housing by both contemporary housing reformers of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries as well as retrospective historical work. Violette’s reinforcing the choices of the builders and architects as intentional, aesthetic design choices are present in these first chapters’ analytic of vernacular architecture as well as the methodological approach, where the book subverts typical sources for the topic and instead considers the tenement building sites themselves. It’s an important reminder of the need to disturb and complicate common narratives, particularly about the historical poor, where often academic and popular work submit to the harmful ahistoricization of the working/lower-class subject as outside of timeline or way behind. This especially strikes a chord given the emphasis on privacy by reformists, a consequential reminder of the centrality of WASP values to the formation of the United States. Its motivating mythos is the obsession with the American pastoral and property ownership, while also maintaining an insistent claim on leading progress and humaneness (ironically so given the tensions between modernity and progress at this time period). Violette nails this when addressing the housing reformers’ concern with the spacious potentials of New World (an upkeep of Manifest Destiny’s romance, despite the near completion of its continental project) and leaving behind a “struggling” Old World. As I read considering position within time and history, I was often thinking about the role of decay in the real and imagined narratives of the tenements, where buildings were left to age advancedly and stick out as an aberration in the desired timeline of a street or block.
I found Safransky’s book extremely interesting, especially after growing up in St. Louis, which experienced similar conditions (post-industrialization, blight, cleansing, urban renewal etc.). Safransky’s acknowledgment that the race relations of Detroit shifted from white colonizers vs. Native Americans to white vs. black was interesting, as both eras in history illustrated the same type of savior complex and urban renewal—the sentiment that this space is “underutilized” / dirty / etc. and therefore must be revitalized, or even worse, become an opportunity for new life. This idea new life is always at the expense of the current inhabitants, suggesting that their way of life is not enough to even exist; that this area is a “clean slate” rather than something that has existing complexity.
I was also especially disappointed by Matthew Stinton’s (MVA team lead consultant) statement that “Even though what we’re talking about is more than vacancy, it’s easy” regarding the shift to use the term “vacant” instead of “distressed” because it’s “less political” when Safransky later says that these areas were, unsurprisingly, not vacant at all. These ideas, of course, remind me of the narrative surrounding Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis, claiming that this was a failed project, residents were unhappy, etc. but in reality, interviews with the residents show that many loved their lives there and have many happy memories in this building that was deemed a failure.
For this week’s readings, I was interested in the development and alteration of the decorated tenements throughout different periods to accommodate the needs and expressions of immigrants during the Gilded Age in New York and Boston. Each tenement reflects the sociocultural values and preferences of the immigrant community. One point that particularly struck me is that while new housing laws aimed to improve living conditions—especially regarding light and air in tenements—developers like Weinstein strategically focused on and marketed aesthetic upgrades and amenities. This indicates a disconnect between the priorities of reformers and the perceptions of builders regarding what was marketable, as well as what tenants truly valued (p.86). This reflection makes me consider the architect’s role in balancing community needs with their own ideologies. These decorated tenements also acted as a form of resistance against social control and the ideologies that sought to shape a specific lifestyle. In a somewhat similar fashion, I can see the parallel in the notion of austerity drawn by Sara Safransky’s chapter, “Ecologies of Austerity,” in her book, “City after Property.” She points out that austerity is a justification used to erase essential social programs, thus disproportionately impacting marginalized communities. This was reverberated in the reformers’s view of the tenements, who believed that the working class should be content with simple, austere living conditions. However, many immigrant tenants appreciated the stylish respectability of this decoration since they dignify their existence within the urban landscape and speak to their cultural heritage. The decorated tenements symbolized an enhancement of identity and dignity of the immigrant working class, allowing immigrants to embrace ornamentation and beauty rather than conforming to the puritanical standards imposed by reformers. It stands as the symbol of contrasting cultural values surrounding aesthetics and social expectations during the Gilded Age.
In this weeks readings I was struck by two overarching themes. Firstly, the idea that for a city to grow it must shrink; and secondly algorithm as a tool for discrimination. These two themes were particularly relevant in the “City after Property” reading. In the reading, Safranksy talks about cities such as Detroit which as we all know suffered from huge financial and social upheaval throughout the 90s and 2000s. Like many city planning at the time, mid-sized and small cities that wanted to grow approached urban planning as a linear trajectory. One must go from big to small, rural to urban. To accomplish this goal, cities pumped large amounts of new infrastructure into their environment to become the “urban metropolis’s”. However, like many cities that approached urban development in this manner, Detroit suddenly had an issue of too much infrastructure for too few people. With this, the Detroit Works Project represents the shift to shrinking to grow. The idea of shrinking to grow at first made me say “huh,” but then when I thought about, I have been to once prosperous cities such as Fall River MA. These types of cities expanded exponentially when at their peak, and now much of their infrastructure is underused or just unused. Their linear approach to expansion in many ways became a hindrance years later.
However, in no way am I giving this Shrink to Grow approach a pass. As Safranksy wrote, in shrinking to grow, city plans become so mired in this algorithmic code for consolidation that they do a full circle maneuver back to redlining maps. Obviously red lining maps have and continue to be tools of discrimination against Black and Brown people. When, the plans cities make look like maps of discrimination one could say they become maps of discrimination?
A couple of themes have stuck out to me, especially in regards to narrative-making and myth-making .
I’m interested in Violette’s description of slums as “fallen places.” There is a lot to unpack with this – what were these buildings expected to be to begin with? What city services were or were not reaching these neighborhoods that led to deteriorated conditions? What are the values of maintenance for the people who live there? But, I want to point out the alignment between this idea of “fallen” and Safransky’s description of the expectation of “linear” growth in U.S. cities, where de-growth becomes synonymous with failure, and neighborhoods are chosen to be decommissioned, for lack of a better word.
I also am thinking about the way similar “decommissioning” conversations are playing out in modern discourse, for very different reasons. In my climate adaptation class this week, we debated the idea of planned retreat as an early-offered solution vs. a last-resort option. While the underlying motivations for these decisions are quite different, I can’t help but clock the familiarity of systemically de-planning and un-doing a neighborhood, even if for different reasons than city financing. Yet, as came up today at the Bauhaus Earth conversation, municipal economics apply strongly in climate adaptation.
Lastly – when thinking about the visuals of “slums”, I’m noticing the way that the idea of “makeshift” comes through. Even in images of slum buildings that have limited dirt / grime / litter still come across as slum buildings just by their nature of using spaces / objects differently than their intended purpose. In class today, we saw the image of the streetscape. What gave the visual queue of “slum” classification was the makeshift use of street space. In other building photos, we see different materials used to bolster a siding or a roof. It’s clearly a sign of both need and ingenuity (necessity is the mother of invention, etc) but in this case, the emphasis is on the need, rather than the invention.
I don’t know what to make of this idea of the makeshift yet, but I want to keep trying to parse it through.