What happens when a dream goes wrong? Alexander von Hoffman of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University described the various postmortems of something that was unquestionably dead: the Pruitt-Igoe Housing project. It was once regarded as the vanguard of public housing. In two decades it would be the symbol of urban failure. It died, but like many things deceased, there was debate over why it expired.
St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project is arguably the most infamous public housing project ever built in the United States. A product of the postwar federal public-housing program, this mammoth high-rise development was completed in 1956.
Only a few years later, disrepair, vandalism, and crime plagued Pruitt-Igoe. The project’s recreational galleries and skip-stop elevators, once heralded as architectural innovations, had become nuisances and danger zones. Large numbers of vacancies indicated that even poor people preferred to live anywhere but Pruitt-Igoe. In 1972, after spending more than $5 million in vain to cure the problems at Pruitt-Igoe, the St. Louis Housing Authority, in a highly publicized event, demolished three of the high-rise buildings. A year later, in concert with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it declared Pruitt-Igoe unsalvageable and razed the remaining buildings.
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Hoffman claims that nobody ever thought the project was a good idea in itself. Rather, this grandiose development was seen as a levee that would stop the tides which were slowly destroying the city of St. Louis. By building a glittering prestige project, the urban rot could be reversed and the city reinvigorated. With the confidence of those who believed that government money could make a losing proposition into a profitable one, Mayor Joseph Darst believed high quality, low-cost public housing was the answer and decided to build a “Manhattan by the Mississippi”, engaging an architect who was later to build the World Trade Center. So up went Pruitt-Igoe.
In 1951 Architectural Forum praised Yamasaki’s original proposal as “the best high apartment” of the year. … Architectural Forum praised the layout as “vertical neighborhoods for poor people” … Each row of buildings was supposed to be flanked by a “river of trees”. … “Skip-stop” elevators stopped only at the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth floors, forcing residents to use stairs in an attempt to lessen congestion. The same “anchor floors” were equipped with large communal corridors, laundry rooms, communal rooms and garbage chutes.
Being unable to live on its own merits, nothing worked out. The stairwells which were supposed to lessen congestion turned into places where muggers could lurk. The “community” whose lives were planned out according to the latest theories never attracted more than 60% occupancy. It became the victim of the “tragedy of the commons”. “When corridors were shared by 20 families and staircases by hundreds, public spaces immediately fell into disrepair. … I never thought people were that destructive.”
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By the late 1960s, the place had all but been abandoned. After it was demolished, the search for the cause of its demise went on. Was public housing itself bad? Surely not, for if so then a whole range of social remedies would by analogy prove ineffective. So the defect must have been in the kind of housing provided. It was badly designed. It must have been. According to some theories, the problem was that that Pruitt-Igoe was never nice enough for the poor. It was an insult to human dignity, a kind of animal warren whose density produced hostile behavior.
I have known, worked for and with, hired and fired architects. I have known some good ones, many mediocre ones and some who were so impractical as to be beyond mortal’s imagination. A lot of the problems in the field are the result of the education they receive. Unrealistic expectations based on theory not observation, they are the only technical field permeated with the liberal arts sensibility.
That said, many of them are smart, articulate and often witty. The good ones eventually figure out how things work and bring real insight into how buildings can be more than boxes. The rest mostly design things that do not work or, cannot be built within the budget available. Public projects sidestep this last obstacle by being able to raise or print more money to bail out the design.
Confession: I’m an engineer and I know that architects generally have a similarly dyspeptic view of my guys.
What works? Three or four story buildings with a stoop, and old people sitting on that stoop watching the kids, and a Cop walking a beat on the corner. In other words poor people need tenements.
Post WWII America let Smart Fraction ™ African-Americans escape from the ghetto.
When they left everything fell apart.
The only way that the ghetto poor are ever going to get back to where they were is if racial discrimination forces Smart Fraction ™ African-Americans back into constant contact with them. No other body of people will do.
Lacking any exposure to successful role models AND being juiced up with Neolithic gene groups courtesy of Big Man Alpha ‘donors;’ the next generation is even more dysfunctional than the parents.
The arrogant paternalism of skip-stop elevators is breathtaking.
——
The Spartans figured that a mother’s ability to control her son stopped at age seven. Off to the world of men, it was.
It’s totally un-PC but it may yet prove necessary to have segregated instruction for these boys and girls: by sex that is.
With all of the Neolithic genes kicking around their schooling ought to be made very athletic. A focus on reading and writing need not be overdone — it should be much more important to develop social bonding and skills.
In particular, Smart Fraction ™ MALE teachers of an African American heritage must be considered essential for a fatherless son to learn by. I should think that military veterans would be ideal candidates for the need.
Current teaching credentials are a total joke and exist only to inflate the educational guild.
This is compounded by Leftist indoctrination rampant at all of the colleges cranking out our teachers.
——-
Of course, under current law and politics absolutely none of these proposals is going to advance an inch.
Instead the ghetto/ projects are going to endure as modern versions of leper colonies.
Thanks to Section 8, we have little Pruitt Igoes everywhere now.
The whole country, the economy even the Federal Reserve central planning is a ghetto.
I pray it all collapses. The state, the schools, the academics are the enemy. I’ve always read about revolts attacking the central core of what ever regime is being destroyed. I used to wonder why the masses went for the paper shufflers, the data centers, the counters and taxers. Now I know.
What happens when a dream goes wrong?
Get up, surf the net for an hour, go back to sleep and dream again.
I lived in a borderline community for 25 years before buying a post-war ranch house in an inner-suburb. We were lucky in that most of the folks were poor and most of the poor had personality. They worked, they told jokes, bragged about themselves, and welcomed each other into their homes.
It was a run down, seedy, turn-of-the-century neighborhood, 3 to 5 story walkups, with narrow streets and overcommitted parking about a mile outside of downtown. There was enough overflow of downtown’s daylight denizens to keep a few bars and restaurants in business. The neighbors worked in those places, met in those places, laughed in those places and walked a block or two home from those places.
The neighbors weren’t adverse to hard drinking, some drugs and loud parties, but they wouldn’t tolerate drug dealers and other criminals. The police didn’t really hang around the neighborhood, but would respond when called. And they were frequently called.
Some attempts were made at gentrification; but the gentry never really fit in. They were fearful of the neighbors and, at night, the neighborhood. They always walked fast and with their eyes fixed straight ahead. Their air conditioned condos had their windows closed against the night, and with the opaque curtains drawn, it was hard to get to know them.
The neighborhood went up slightly and down slightly; but it always held itself together. It wasn’t the buildings, it wasn’t the location, it was the people. People with plans, plans worked toward more often than met. Those plans, though, belonged to the neighbors; they defined the neighbors as much as the neighbors defined the plans. The neighbors changed, the plans changed, and the neighborhood sustained both and both sustained the neighborhood.
erc – We did not have a dyspeptic view of engineers. Loved them as a matter of fact. The only thing I found odd about engineers was that every structural engineer I worked with was named either Nick or Phil.
When I was practicing, way back in the day, some hi rises in Philly were torn down as well and garden type low rise structures built, with the same result. There may well have been members of the architectural profession who believed the liberal promise, I know I did in the beginning, until it was tried and failed. Eventually most of us came to the realization that it was not the fault of the buildings or their design, but the people who were put in them. As for the slums, there was a section of mid town Philly that was populated by drunks, whores and panhandlers and was gentrified by the horrified liberals, driving out all the poor, the hopeless, the whores, the drunks and the panhandlers, who spread out into the neighboring streets because they had no place else to go, living in boxes in the subway concourses, badgering passersby for money, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. These people liked where they had been, you could earn a couple of bucks washing dishes, buy a place to sleep for half a buck a night. That and a drink was all most of them wanted out of life, and they were uprooted by a caring liberal society. At that same time a judge in Philly shut down the mental instutions that she claimed were warehousing innocent people, with the result that the now unwarehoused inmates also took to living on the streets and in the subway concourses and added defecating on the sidewalks to the charms of center city. When the realization finally hit that liberal dreams were more than often turned into nightmares for the people they were designed for, it was shugged off with the comment, “Well, they meant well.” I don’t think so. I don’t think the Left means well. It can’t all be unintended consequences.
I believe clips of this demolition are featured in the film “Quoyannisquatsi”
Okay, I know the philosophy is heavy-handed and bugs some. Still, all that aside, it’s still an incredible piece of art – the Phillip Glass accompaniment to the demolition of Pruitt-Igo is brilliant!
and if you haven’t seen it, you can find it on the web – one of the few films I can watch over and over again, because it is much more like listening to a favorite album than watching a film. Directors have been copying its style and film sequences for 25 years now.
From ages seven to eighteen I was raised in public housing in three different locations, in London England. The first was a slum clearance project, where my parents and I and my sister all slept in one room because the primary occupants of the house were my Grandfather and Grandmother. The second was some apartment blocks and the third was a house. None of them were horrific disasters like all the ones that W. has linked.
In the first, some of the people who moved there had never seen a bath, so they kept coal (for the fire) in the bath. There was running cold water but not running hot. To get a hot bath we filled a big copper tank with water and lit the gas ring underneath it. When it was hot we used the tank’s pump to hand pump the hot water upstairs into the bath. But the houses were pleasant to look at with winding streets and the small ‘estate’ was surrounded by middle class houses. Everybody worked, many people kept chickens in the yard and every house contained a regular working family. When the milkman’s horse dropped a load of manure in the street some eagle eyed lady would dash out of her house and scoop up the steaming pile for her cherished roses. My generation of kids went on to have permanent jobs or careers in Britain or, like me, in faraway places.
The apartments were a group of about five blocks with three stories – walk ups. They were also embedded in a middle class suburb. As before, they housed working families. The third ‘estate’ was a mix of houses and high rise apartments. Once again it was small and embedded in a middle class suburb. Once again it was inhabited by working families.
These were not the horrific public housing failures that we see today. Maybe it was because the social unit was a normal nuclear family. For my Mom and Dad, the public housing was something for my sister and I to rise above and we did.
No, they weren’t intended to be luxurious but they were better than the riverside trailer that we moved from. They had electric lights that turned on with the flick of a switch! Way better than kerosene lamps. I had a good childhood there. I had grand dreams of foreign lands far beyond the public housing so off I went to chase them. Living in public housing probably made me more ambitious, not less.
These developments must have encouraged dependence on government but they were definitely not a disaster like the public projects that you see today. Was it the time (1950 – 1961)? Was it because they were small developments embedded in middle class surroundings? Was it because the family unit was still functioning then? Is it because society in general and people have changed?
Looking at today’s public housing, my conservative self agrees that it all seems to be one giant socialist mistake. Visiting my old haunts they seem to be much meaner now. So what happened between then and now?
okay, found the Pruitt-Igoe Koyannisquatsi clip on youtube.
See if you agree that this is a fitting Epitaph for Liberalism and the view that Man can be Molded.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRmrxYvm7iY&feature=related
awesomeness starts at the 5 minute mark – lots of other demolitions thrown in just for fun.
It’s always the people. I can’t remember who it was but I remember a professional poster once saying that you could take third worlders out of their country, put them in America and in a few years, America would look like any other third world country.
Then you could take the Americans, move them to that third world country and in a couple of generation, it would look like America.
This was pre-Obama. During the Clinton administration. I don’t think it would hold true today. Electing Oboma shows how much America has lost it’s way.
All the fancy rationalizations are simply excuses to use and manage public money, with all the attendant opportunities to feather their own nests.
I’m sorry guys, but I can counter all that is written with a single word: Singapore.
Of course, there are peculiar circumstances involved, but the question then becomes: why can’t those same conditions be recreated elsewhere? I would note that the Pruitt-Igoe Housing project eventually involved blacks only. Does anybody think the results might be different if it had been chinese instead, or would it be too politically incorrect to think about?
The Brits being so much more sophisticated than the Yanks have Council Estates, producing youths described as Council Housing And Violent, CHAVs. But if you strike the CHAV who enters your property and threatens or assaults you then you may get arrested. If you defend yourself with any weapon, including a club or kitchen knife then you will go to jail, where the Chav’s friends are waiting for you. The good news is that because the English are so polite if you knock one down a neighbor may close your gate for you.
I grew up in a 3-room flat in a crowded housing estate in Singapore among Chinese, Malays, Indians and the odd Eurasian. In 1960-70s Singapore, Pruitt Igoe would have been regarded as luxury housing. There is nothing wrong with public housing per se. What is required is good firm government, which we were fortunate to have under Mr Lee Kuan Yew. Any infarction – noise pollution, hanging out dirty laundry, littering, drugs and the rest were dealt with efficiently. The difference that good government made is plain for all to see as any visitor to Singapore can attest. I do not hold out any hope that the experience of Singapore can be repeated in the West. The fundamental difference is that in Singapore, the government did not tolerated excuses for bad behaviour from anyone be they rich or poor, black or white.
Build high rises for the folks
Thinking they’re like normal folks
And find that much to your dismay
That those high rises soon decay
All right you say, apartments then
It’s crowded in a high rise den
But soon enough apartments too
Come falling down on top of you
But now you feel the problem’s solved
You have to get the folks involved
You build them houses nice and neat
And in a year you find they’re beat
You learn that we’re not all alike
And years to feel the lightning strike
It’s best to just leave folks alone
They hate you when you throw a bone
Some folks don’t want to live like that
For me I’ll take a high rise flat
And not complain, but that’s just me
Especially if it’s all for free
Wretchard seems to be channeling Jane Jacobs. She wrote an entire book about the follies of public housing (or top down housing) and argued that successful neighborhoods and living spaces are organic and not planned. In other words, they arise and assume their form based on those who live there and not some doofus in a three piece suit drawing up blueprints down at City Hall.
During their heyday I saw Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor Homes as well as the Oakwood Lakeside complex. Chicagoans would take pride in measuring any of them against Pruitt-Iago.
In New York the projects were different, at least at first. Some were built for the working class by unions and Stuyvesant Town – Peter Cooper Village was built and owned until recently by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Tenant demands that they be permitted to continue to benefit from below market rates led to the private investor who had purchased the development abandoning it to creditors last year. The distinguishing feature of all these projects and also of the projects owned by the City was that they were for working people. If you were unemployed you could not live there. That changed in the 1960s when under John Lindsay the welfare roles exploded and welfare recipients, including single mothers and their adolescent children and unregistered boyfriends, were moved in to the City owned projects. Several private projects, such as Lefrak City that had been built by real estate developer Sam Lefrak to be Middle Class paradise, also were forced to take in welfare recipients under the “scatter site” theory. This spread blight everywhere.
walt@16: Great poem. One point though – if you live in public housing you have to pay rent. Where I once lived it was all rental housing until Margaret Thatcher encouraged the tenants to buy their houses to get fee simple ownership. The girl next door to me stayed in the house and bought it when she got married. She’s still there but now she owns it. She got some equity, the government got some money back and also unloaded the maintenance costs.
bftp @ 2:
Right. It is the families. Those old folks sitting outside watching the kids. Colin Powell has written about how although he grew up in a slum, his huge extended family was checking on him all day long. He couldn’t get away with anything.
Pat Moynihan told LBJ he would destroy Black families with his new welfare program. The old sociologist was right. Most families then – including Black ones – had 2 married parents living at home. Not now, thanks largely to Welfare. Now over 80% of the poor are never-married moms and their children – and very dysfunctional too. These families are the major source of poverty in the U.S. Also the major source of violent young criminals, 70% of whom are fatherless.
I can tell you, from the very large homeless shelters I started and ran, that our poor not only litter profusely, they also vandalize until they ruin any structure not closely overseen. If allowed, they can create a slum out of anything. In a surprisingly short time.
But slums have their function. “Urban Renewal” (we shelterers used to call it “Urban Removal”) is responsible for much homelessness. City slums were torn down and replaced with new buildings – which the drunks, mentally ill, etc., could no longer afford. So they ended up on the streets. Fact: that is a population that will trash any structure they live in into a slum. But another fact: it is better for them to live in a slum than on the street! And better for us middle-classers too. (See Chapter 27 of my http://www.outoftheironfurnace.com, about 2/3 of the way down the page. Three paragraphs or so.)
blert @ 3.
Still, the key to slums and dangerous housing is not architecture, nor government programs. It is the 2-parent family. As you noted Blert, boys need a father badly, especially when they get bigger. (Girls do too, although for somewhat different reasons.)
That is where we need to focus. If the stable, 2-parent, enduring family built on marriage can somehow be restored, the slums will lose most of their horror.
Otherwise, each new generation of fatherless kids becomes a civilization-destroying onslaught of new Barbarians. (See Chapter 4 of my http://www.upandout.us.)
#19- You may pay rent for public housing some places but not so much in America.It’s all part of life on the liberal plantation.
If I recall correctly, I think that a read something by Mr Lee Kuan Yew, about when he was facing what he thought were unreasonable demands by the unions in Singapore he would arrange for paid trips to mainland China to see how it was done there. He said that when they got back they were much more understanding of his viewpoint. Apparently Singapore wasn’t all stick the carrot seemed to have been used also.
What irritates me about the concept of public housing, schools, and whatever method to shape mankind as espoused by the left, is that despite repeated failures of these approaches, it seems like every decade someone will try the same old thing again. This time though, as has been pointed out, the economy and the perceptions are starting to get very unforgiving of this approach. You can rewrite history or ignore it, you can fudge the statistics, but eventual the records and the math rear their ugly heads and bite you.
On the connection between Section 8 housing and high crime rates, below is a link to an article titled “American Murder Mystery,” from the July/August 2008 Atlantic. It discusses the findings of a criminologist and housing expert (a married couple) studying changing crime patterns in Memphis:
“Janikowski [the criminologist] might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. . . . Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal ‘Section 8′ rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community. . . .
Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section 8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (‘He has a better imagination,’ she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section 8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.
Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed— and deflated— to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a ‘hard thing to say or write.’ Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down.”
Full article here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-murder-mystery/6872/
Does anyone doubt that if you put a bunch of middle class white people from the affluent suburbs in the same building there would be no problems?
What does that mean?
I think there are many poor families that wouldn’t cause problems. Ynfortunately too many “undesirables” uncivilized uncultured people were living there too. The fact is that many people are uncivilized and many of them are poor. It’s no coincidence. Being uncivilized makes you poor. Being poor doesn’t necessarily make you uncivilized.
That project could work but it would be politically incorrect to enforce the discipline on the tennants: you have to evict the muggers, vandals, etc. But of course this would be racist. Anything for the real benefit of the deserving poor is racist. Anything that recognizes the fact that some people are uncivilized (which the experience of the project proves) is racist.
One of the funny things about those housing projects was the setbacks required under town planning regulations in many places for such tall buildings resulted in a lower population density than the slums they replaced.
But with less of a feeling of community because no one was sitting out on the stoops any more socializing.
blert #3
“Post WWII America let Smart Fraction ™ African-Americans escape from the ghetto.
When they left everything fell apart.
The only way that the ghetto poor are ever going to get back to where they were is if racial discrimination forces Smart Fraction ™ African-Americans back into constant contact with them. No other body of people will do.”
Not just let, blert, but encouraged.
I believe that the social planner class thought that this would drag the rest of the black community up along with them. They were wrong, of course. Pulling the best and brightest out of the community was never the answer.
And the means of the “pulling out” was largely by giving away public sector jobs via affirmative action and its precursors. The growth in the black middle class particularly since the ’60′s has been largely due to public sector employment, as much as 80% according to some yardsticks. It’s a factor (a minor one, not major, but a factor nontheless) in leftist fears of a cutback in the size of the public sector work force, IMO – the exposure of the myth of the growth of the black middle class as an organic progression rather than an engineered edifice.
I say face the truth, and move on, but that’s me.
Also agree with your point regarding teachers. The problem is that women have taken over education and turned it into a club (or ghetto?) of their own and are loath to let men have much of a say. Add to that the fact that in 2011 the education industry’s definition of the word “boy” is “defective girl” and you are making the problem you described in your post even harder to solve.
Un-effin-believable!
http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2976/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/03/eveningnews/main20039031.shtml
http://www.publicintegrity.org/blog/entry/2977/
Well, whod’a thunk it?
Maybe you can give the planners a pass for coming up with this in the early 50′s, since possibly there wasn’t ample evidence that their modern theories are full of it.
A lot of things that seem like good ideas have unforseen consequences that can turn them ugly, but the problem is that the lesson never seems to be learned, as #22 points out. The same approach is taken over and over regardless of past experience. I have a hard time believing they’re that stupid, but since the people who come up with these types of things repeatedly are liberals, you never can tell.
Most likely many of them realize their solutions suck, but could care less. It’s about posturing, graft, and vote-getting, not results.
A lot of it also stems from the fact that enough of the voting public likes touchy-feely solutions, and doesn’t want to take the hard look at things that is necessary to understand them. I think that may be changing a bit, but I guess we’ll see.
Liberalism has a lot of problems, but one of the worst is their seeming inability to realize that most of their theories tend to lead things to sink to their lowest common denominator. Disperse the ghetto to lower middle class and working class neighborhoods via Sec. 8, and soon those neighborhoods are likely to join the ghetto. Allow the troublemakers to dominate the urban school systems, and watch their effectiveness plunge.
It’s hard to believe they can’t see that, so the only logical conclusion is that they don’t care. Or you can take the dark view and say that the LCD is part of their plan, and on my bad days it’s kind of hard for me to dispute that.
Red-Green’s New Model AGW Army.
The Diggers and the Levellers redux.
…-
“YNoKyoto: What Would We Do Without Failed Models?
Guardian;
After five years of camps, composting toilets, vegan curry and run-ins with the police, Climate Camp is calling it a day.
There will be no camp for the climate activists this year and the loose-knit organisation will be disbanded in 2011. The decision follows a five-day meeting to reach a consensus.
[...]
Leo Murray was at the very first camp outside Drax coal-fired power station in 2006. “I remember just feeling so relieved that here were hundreds of other people who felt the same way that I did. Even though in the end we didn’t shut down Drax, we left on a real high, because now we had a model.”
h/t Tim Blair
Posted by Kate at March 3, 2011 1:03 AM”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/016220.html#comments
…-
“Climate Camp disbanded”
“Climate activists decide to end annual camp and focus on tackling broader ecological, social and economic issues”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/mar/02/climate-camp-disbanded
Huge high-rise apartment buildings were the innovation of Le Corbusier, the famous Swiss/French architect of the 1950/60s. Le Corbusier was also a fascist and an admirer of both Hitler and Mussolini. His striking ugly buildings litter the landscapes of both Europe and America.
Philip Johnson, another famous bad architect who produced dozens if not hundreds of hideous buildings, was also a fascist.
Jane Jacobs got the neighborhood thing right. Fascist architecture brings out the worst in people.
no mo uro@26
The problem is that women have taken over education
I agree.
The only women administrators I ever felt were effective were former coaches. I thought former coaches were the best administrators on the men side as well.
They were able to react properly when the ‘game plan’ became derailed, they didn’t react officiously to ‘conflict’, and they were able to trust the kids when it was necessary for them to make decisions independent of the ‘system’ when they were faced with unexpected tactics.
Here locally, a few years ago a church group bought a set of duplexes in a nice location, saying they would be a kind of halfway house for the poor. They got a county government grant and also took out a mortgage.
Now, 4 years later the place is in disrepair, the property taxes and mortgage have gone unpaid, the value of the property has decreased to less than that of the mortgage and the head of the church group keeps getting arrested for DUI.
The church group blames the impact of hurricane damage. The problem is explanation that we have not had a hurricane since they took over….
But not to worry. For only another $500K another group says they will take over the place and convert it into housing for poor elderly people. And at least one of the county commissioners is arguing that we have to fork over the money because “we have to protect our investment.”
I worked in HUD HQ in downtown Washington DC as a contractor for a short while about 2000. Andrew Cuomo was still the head of the dept. The employees there were 90% black.
The impression that I came away with was that HUD was not designed for the projects people but rather for their administrators.
This is a legacy of the Johnson’s Great Society where government
was reordered as an institution that provided jobs.
Leftists though they were, The Clash nailed the London housing projects in their song “Up in Heaven”. They could see the problem, though I’m sure their solution would have been entirely wrong. Good song anyway.
The towers of London, these crumbling rocks
Reality estates that the hero’s got
And every hour’s marked by the chime of a clock.
Whatcha gonna do when the darkness surrounds?
You can piss in the lifts which have broken down,
You can watch from the debris the last bedroom light
We’re invisible here just past midnight.
The wives hate their husbands and their husbands don’t care
Their children daub slogans to prove they lived there
A giant pipe organ up in the air.
You can’t live in a home which should not have been built
By the bourgeois clerks who bear no guilt
When the wind hits this building this building it tilts
One day it will surely fall to the ground…
Fear is just another commodity here
They sell us peeping holes to peek when we hear
A bang on the door resoundingly clear.
Who would really want to move in here?
The children play faraway, the corridors are bare.
This room is a cage, its like captivity,
How can anyone exist in such misery?
“if you put too many of any mammalian species in a given area, they react poorly and engage in destructive behaviors.”
How then to explain Kowloon Walled City? It took Hong Kong officials years to finally evict the last person so they could tear it down.
Walt,
I worked for the welfare Dept in Philly in the late 60s. My unit consisted of me, with a caseload of 200+ in Strawberry Mansion, and my 5 male co-workers who all had caseloads in the Raymond Rosen project. Women were never assigned there because it was too dangerous, although I did go there later when I had a different job. It was terrible–all concrete. Strawberry Mansion had changed too. Once it was a middle class Jewish neighborhood. Later the 2-story row houses were occupied by working-class blacks, and then as I was there, the unmarried mother became the standard. Rapid turnover meant that neighborhood connections were hindered or destroyed. Although Fairmont Park was right across the street, you never saw any parents or kids there.
I’ll never forget one summer when the in food place for the radical chic attending concerts at the Robin Hood Dell was a soul food take out. I had a client who lived above it on the second floor. The place had the largest concentration of roaches I had ever seen. I’m glad those cultured folks enjoyed their food. I also suspect that police presence was increased on concert nights because my clients told me never to be in the area after about 3PM on Friday afternoons. That’s when the gangs took over.
“No matter how often it is explained to urban planners the proposition that slums may actually be better than their dream housing, they can never believe it.”
Human Free Will.
There have always been poor. There are poor. There will always be poor. They are not victims, they are co-conspirators to their fate. This is why the left fails and will continue to fail because they absolutely refuse to accept that many humans can and do make poor choices. Regardless of the poster children shoved in our collective faces, the real roots of poverty to America are choices made by those who will not be ‘saved’. Alcohol and drug abuse, making children without the means to support them, wasting aka zombie’ing one’s time in school, and keeping to the old ways accounts for the vast bulk of the causal factors for poverty in America. The old phrase is just as applicable today as back in Ben Francklin’s day – you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
In the early part of the last century, my family escaped the pogroms and hatreds of eastern Europe and came to Manhattan. After working menial jobs, my grandparents managed to buy a beautiful, small, apartment building just north of Central Park. It even had an elevator! Oh, it was fabulous for about 30 years. Then the neighborhood changed. The residents threw a burning mattress down the elevator shaft. They poked holes in the ceiling with broomsticks. Not paying for heat, they left the windows open in the winter. There was urine and fecal matter in the marble hallways. I saw this as a small child when my father would go there desperately trying to collect rents to maintain the building, but time and again the PR super appropriated that money for his own use.
Draw your own conclusions.
IMHO part of the problem in inter cities is we have changed the police policy of responding to crime rather than preventing crime. We took the police off the street and put them in cars and then they waited until they were told to respond to a crime. #27, same idea we will just send them 1700 guns and then we can go after them when the cartels use the guns we sent, very smart?
There is something endemic to an architect’s psyche that predisposes him to try to corral, confine and conduct human beings. Why else would someone enter the field?
And don’t answer with, “To create something beautiful.” Because, even if the architect’s goal is to create an aesthetically pleasing statue or garden or promenade, and not to simply create living spaces, he’s still made you turn your head to ponder his construct. Goal accomplished!
Pocket Hitlers. Briefcase Maos. Heck, even Frank Lloyd Wright knew his buildings forced behaviors onto their residents. The fact that even wealthy, actualized folks would deign to bend, twist and grunt their way between the bathroom sink and the sunken living room in a FLW home, just so they could say they live in one of the “vaunted” designer’s fabrications, says a lot about the power of celebrity fashion to confine and mold human behaviors.
And, believe me, the allure of this power is not lost on the governing claques of cities like Chicago, New York or Paris. Architecture, like dress-fashion and street “attitude,” it could be said, is the most rote of community organizing techniques.
We shouldn’t be surprised either that, once the people are “organized” by these rote modes, their organizers move on quickly to their next projects, with little care about the ultimate outcome of their organizations.
Didn’t Obama cut his teeth organizing Chicago’s projects?
Consider that the liberals who urge building such edifices do so to make their own wretched souls feel better. Like the over pious Christian earning his stripes for a cushy after life.
These people have a deep searing hatred for their neighbors and for humanity as a whole. Building public housing bottles up the ‘mud’ people and gets them off of the street so they do not stain the city park like atmosphere while keeping Joe six-pack engaged working in the salt mine earning the tax base to pay for such follies. These kinds of projects are born of the worst kind of hatred cloaked in sanctimonious moralizing.
What are the demographics of the people in failed housing projects vs. non-failed?
What is the success rate of projects where the city sold the individual apartments to lower-income familiies? I remember seeing 60 Minute type segments on a couple of those over the years, and in those examples, they were fairly successful in turning them around once people had ownership
To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke: It’s never a good idea to stack poor people.
I live near the City of Toledo, Ohio. The inner city, once the main stay of the working middle class families, is inhabited by the poor. These single family dwelling are not maintained. I feel it was do to social welfare programs that spanned, as I count over seven generation. In return for their vote, Lyndon Johnson and his great society gave many benefits to the poor. Over time, housing, food, and medical care were given and with each election, greater benefits given too. This in turn caused the inner poor to live for the welfare, food stamps, and medicaid. It was more profitable to have children and collect addition benefits than plan a family. The family talked about welfare payments, not school or jobs. Welfare payment increased for fatherless families. The poor ran to these short term gains, causing much long term pain in their health, family and quality of life. I blame the democrats, and still after all this failure, I wonder why these same people vote for them each year. The democrats traded these social benefits for votes. The current single residence in most of inner city Toledo is normally rented or abandon. Ownership causes one to maintain properties, while rentals do not. The pinnacle of these programs and promises for the democrats was the election of a black man, who promised hope and change but, as of today, only can deliver despair and the same. The poor must understand that these social benefits kept them in place as a voting block. They were intended, least I think so, to make the poor vote democrat. Remember, short term pain will give long term gain. Study and plan hard and reap the reward. Short term gain will give long pain, take the social benefits today, and become Detroit.
Because our state government is running out of social funding, new realities will be coming to them soon. Home heating, rental payments, food stamps and medical care are or will be cut. I await the day when new social philosophies for the poor will be adopted. I wish I knew what those philosophies are and how the poor will respond? Governor of Ohio, John Kasich and other republican governors have started the hard change. Hang on America, it going to get interesting.
No mo Uro #26:
I was just talking to my brother the other day about my observation that blacks make the “best” government bureaucrats, in the most negative sense of the word. In the Pentagon I recall encountering black secretaries who refused to answer the phone. One was always too busy doing something else and another actually was insulted that she would have to answer the phone when the officers in the organization would not.
My brother said he had noted the same thing, and a builder friend of his had described how the permitting process in one county used to take maybe an hour. Now that the people he has to deal with are all black it takes all day and still is not completed.
One of our neighbors was a civilian employee of the US Army. The blacks in the organization kept urging her to quit so that they could get one of “their” people into the job.
In certain management jobs in DC I saw that once you had appointed, say, a black woman to a senior position that position had to be filled by a black woman from then on.
In bureaucracies that deal with various forms of welfare, special education, and similar social programs the organizations typically are overwhelmingly black. And it usually seems right and proper to many in power.
I agree that the dark underside of the Big Government movement is that it provides jobs for minorities who could not do nearly as well as they can as government bureaucrats. As to whether this situation really represents a large percentage of the black middle class, I don’t know. But when cries of “racism” are hurled over the issue of government spending they have an underlying cause that has nothing to do with the actual services provided to the public.
SKBF, For the Montreal World’s Fair Moshe Safdie designed Habitat 67, an irregular shaped apartment block which was I believe used as part of the Olympic Village in ’76. It was a very striking design and made all the architectural magazines. After the Olympics, somebody had the bright idea to make it low income housing. Almost immediately, the place turned into a dangerous mess.
After the place had become horrible nuisance, another bureaucrat had a truly enlightened idea; turn the place into high end condos. After all it still was a striking design. And Voila! the place was a success. Which all goes to show that the kind of people you put into the projects matters.
I always thought that directing the downtrodden all to the same place in the projects was psychologically a very bad idea. But now with the incredible levels of criminality and disfunction among underclass, it is a wretchedly bad brain dead idea.
SteveAz, I think your scorn is better directed towards our nation’s urban planners whose preference for dehumanized huge apartment blocks is very big right now. The planning community since the twenties has pushed and often achieved many sterile, neat and tidy huge apartment block communities which have little of the messy interaction that was so praised in Jane Jacob’s critique. Of course there is a large segment of the architectural community that still likes these oversized fascist designs as well.
steve@40 — There is something endemic to an architect’s psyche that predisposes him to try to corral, confine and conduct human beings.
Isn’t this the nature of architecture? If we wish not to live under the stars, to avoid rain enhanced sleep, to avoid windy breakfasts, must not we confine, corral and conduct ourselves off the open fields and into shelters?
Your point is better taken if directed at those, some of whom may be architects, that assert their superiority over their peers.
SgtPete, I agree, having watched the ‘war on poverty’ destroy poor families and encourage fatherless children here in Texas. The big cities here all resemble what you describe, as people of all ethnicities left the inner city with the welfare moms and their uncivilized children. The second tier suburbs, started in the ’70s, full of non-maintained apartments, have now been engulfed by that destructive culture. Now the middle-class of all ethnicities has moved even further from the cities. Socialism has failed here, as it has always failed everywhere it has been tried. Sections of Ft. Worth, for example, which were thriving working class neighborhoods where people actually didn’t lock their doors in the 1960′s now look like a warzone, as the businesses left 30 years ago; some streets are declared off-limits to white people because the thugs that control the neighborhoods hate white people. With the media and leftist politicians beating the drum of hatred among the black communities for decades, it is now impossible for non-blacks to help blacks; white teachers are among the victims of this hatred.
And the bureaucrats have such wonderful new prescriptions for sustainable communities etc.
http://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/partnership/
Life in a housing project is really the crystallization of all Leftist dreaming. All the damage they have done pools up in such places. As the projects started to take off in the 60s, so did all of the following.
* Explosion of crime rates due to Liberal changes to policing and punishment.
* Elimination of the death penalty (of course later reversed)
* Liberal romanticizing of criminals (remember when graffiti vandals were praised as being “urban artists”?)
* Feminist denigration of men and the male role in the family
* Attacks on the nuclear family as bourgeoisie and repressive (ahh, the fantasies of rich Leftist women have sown disaster among the poor)
* Denigration of the value of hard work by the Left (remember the endless Leftist attacks on the “dehumanizing” labor of the factory worker — how we’d love those factories back now!)
* The welfare state and all its Pandora’s Box of rewards
* Romanticizing and legitimizing “black rage” and a general culture of resentment
* Hideous, sterile modern architecture, much of it driven by Soviet agit-prop and Gramscian upheaval in academia and the arts
Ahh heck, I could go on. But you get the picture. All the Leftist hobby-horses rode into town and settled in the projects.
Hey, the design features of the Pruitt-Igoe project sound nice to me, or at least mostly harmless. I can hardly imagine how the width of a staircase can cause residents to become feral beasts.
Look at life in sub/urban Los Angeles, small to medium-scale apartments and condos, the designs of new construction tend to be sub-optimal, all the developers want to do is maximize space utilization, mostly small rooms, narrow halls and stairs, minimal outdoor patios. Huge closets, does that really help social values? And the residents, even in middle and upper class areas? Drop a candy wrapper in the hall, or even on someone’s door mat, and it will sit there for a month, the resident carefully stepping over it rather than pick it up in a common area, even in their own private traffic areas.
People, huh.
Anyway, I’m not blaming any architects.
You want bad design, look at your f’ing cell phone.
Isn’t it the general case that the motivations of those directing welfare funds are the primary determiners of the outcomes?
Contrast the demeanor of those who must approach their neighbors directly for assistance with those who approach faceless bureaucrats whose own livelihood is highly dependent upon the existence of the supplicant?
The former is likely to be much more conscious of the sensibilities of others if the plea is to be successful. The latter will adopt a much more confrontational attitude when seeking that which is perceived to be owed.
The dynamic has dramatic affects upon both sides of the equation. If it is a requirement that assistance be personally requested and granted, the responsibilities of both parties will become obvious.
Of course, those who will not subject themselves to this scheme cannot expect to benefit from it either. The very real prospect of starvation, ill health and lack of shelter focuses the mind powerfully.
The cost savings realized through the elimination of the middlemen is another benefit yet to be explored.
Good points MSO and Unsk. I’d argue that the social engineer and the architect are two knots cinched in the same cord. That is, there is a spectrum of effects, ranging from benign to inhumane and malign, that both types of engineers seek to generate in human populations.
Yes. A functional four-walled home with a simple shed-roof provides necessary shelter while eschewing pizzaz, glamour and style. This structure’s designer has produced a modest, benign frame within which humans can achieve a base comfort. But contrast that with the rectilinear, promenade-lined gardens at Versaille, or with modern, corridored prisons, or with labyrinthine riot-proof complexes like the University of Washington’s administrative building on the Seattle campus, and you’ll comprehend both the spectrum of a layout’s effects on people and the concepts of crowd control inherent to the field of architecture.
An aside which circumlocuitously makes my point: architects design campuses. Period. The second that their pencils mar a blank field of paper, the designers are in effect campusing an imagined population on what was before a virtual 360 degree range of freedom. Blocking egresses, confining traffic, framing “views” – all of these techniques hope to campus human behaviors within predetermined, engineered walls to achieve the architect’s goals.
BTW: I don’t write this to denigrate the field of architecture. That would be self-immolation on my part; I’m a landscape designer by trade. In fact, most self-aware designers would admit that their chosen vocation trades in human traffic to one degree or the other.
No. I write this more to affirm Unsk’s observation – and Wretchard’s insinuation, that there is little distinction between the impulses of big-government, progressive social engineers entrenched in our urban backwaters and architects in general. And to suggest that, in a perfect, more-honest world, both social architects and those who only design buildings would be less shy about admitting this overlap.
Walt: You clearly are one of the good ones. As for wit, you demonstrate it daily at the Club. Some make the journey, many do not.
In the building permit process, the big hurdle is always getting through planning. Planning is subjective and planning regulations are frequently subject to a wide range of interpretation.
After planning, getting through the building department plan check is easy. Maybe not fast, but at least there is a written document, (for us, the 2010 California Building Code), which everyone can read and mostly, understand.
This is based on the 2009 International Building Code, which is written by design professionals, industry representatives and building officials, working together in committees that each deal with a limited portion of the code. Planning codes, by contrast, are generally written by local planning staffs,often by the most junior members.
There is a big difference in telling people where they will live and in telling them that if they make the rafters too whippy, the roof will sag.
With regard to the criminal element taking over housing projects, we have a working model of success from Iraq. People are only secure in their communities when there is an authority contingent living among them. As in Iraq, if the police leave the area when the sun goes down, the gangs replace them as the defacto law. Any government housing should include a percentage of police officers living in the community and they should operate as a team.
Are there any “successful” public housing projects? I think that the residents MUST have skin in the game. Money, labor or a combination of both.Except for the severely handicapped or very old there needs to be mandatory resident participation.
The physical structure is less important the the sense or ownership that money or labor instill.
sa@40: Heck, even Frank Lloyd Wright knew his buildings forced behaviors onto their residents.
Architecture as an organizing principle.
Dubai Architecture
The World Islands off shore Dubai are sinking.
I’m sure there is a common theme that weaves through the three links. The stylistic aesthetic of the Dubai skyscrape is aggressively creative and uber-modern.
One (of several) reasons the Denver Intl Airport remains so deeply disappointing. Yikes.
Agree about the urban planners being the real culprits. Property Management is an ancillary issue. Short story is that nobody does it anymore – neither owners nor renters of public or private infrastructure. No maintenance budgets (I am assuming) but I also suspect a socio-cultural subtext relating to management breakdowns and outright failures at the lower organizational levels. It’s not just the labor pool.
It’s the people that are the problem, so I agree with those who’ve made similar statements in this thread.
What it is about the people is their conditioning and upbringing, so it’s not “genetic;” not that anyone in this thread has implied that.
I have observed public housing, Section 8 “solutions,” and certain behaviors of 3rd worl immigrants, so I’ve been exposed to those pathologies and negative quirks.
YBR,
Excellent link, that first one.
Heh!
Back to urban projects and social engineers: what an architect designs for you to live in ought to tell you a lot about what he thinks of you. And St. Louis’ “poor” ought to feel insulted by Pruitt-Igoe’s designer.
He thought they’d enjoy living in his monstrosity. And Nancy Pelosi thought Americans would like living in Obamacare’s mandatory, padded rooms with pink window shades, too.
Once we figure out what’s in the bill, that is. Which tells us how much she thinks of her
subjectsfellow citizens.A modest anecdote about the clueless thinking of modern liberalism:
Washington DC has a plastic bag tax they’ve tasked merchants to collect. It came about because the Anacostia River has a trash problem. The tax was somehow meant to 1) discourage the use of plastic bags, and 2) raise funds to help clean up the Anacostia.
Here’s the underlying elephant-in-the-room issue: DC’s bigger and better-known river, the Potomac, doesn’t have this problem. The Anacostia River flows through DC’s poorer NE areas, and also has a lower water volume than the Potomac. The most important point is the nature of and attitude of much of the population along the Anacostia; that is a main cause of the trash problem. FWIW: Anacostia residents are not all poor, and their are some very pleasant, well-maintained nighborhoods; still, something is very rotten in NE DC for it to have a trahed-up river.
An interesting take on the role of property management in public housing from the comments to the St. Louis Pruitt-Igoe link:
What all of these buildings lacked a strong resident manager for each unit who could keep tight control of who belonged there and who did not. Those who did not belong there without a reason for entering would not be allowed to hang out there and cause problems. As well, any resident causing trouble there, such as vandalism or trade of illicit substances should have been evicted immediately. And any grafitti or other damage should have been removed or repaired immediately to show something was done about upkeep of the buildings and the concern of the residents who lived in them, and not sending the message to others that they live in a ‘dump’. A zero-tolerance policy with strong leadership would have given the residents an incentive to maintain their homes, including the common areas. New York City has shown this is possible with their Subway system. It is no longer the scary sight it once was with grafitti strewn cars, and passengers feel safer now, and are embarrased having to ride it. Had Pruitt-Igoe been properly maintained from the start, the architect would not be getting the bad rap he does not deserve.
Erc, Many if not most of the code changes in the Uniform Building Code and particularly the California Building code over the last twenty years are simply nanny state overkill. It’s difficult with the exception of some seismic codes to justify the need for these new codes. All these new codes often render existing building conditions nonconforming in ways that create legal nightmares. The ICBO, International Conference of Building Officials, are in overdrive creating new regs just to create ever difficult new regs. Each new complex regulation needs a new bunch of seminars to attend and new issues of expensive code books just to comply with it. In short, the regulatory scheme has become a racket to make money for the code writers and their sponsors, and of course pushes the Cloward Priven endgame just one step closer.
@61
YBR, “strong resident manager” sounds like the “Big Man” method of governance so widely admired on the Left and widely practiced in places foreign and domestic. The Big Man will take care of us (as long as we look like him) while we get to practice our cultural pathologies unmolested. In return, we will ignore the Big Man’s corruption, excesses, abuse of power and repression of liberty and the inevitable catastrophic failure of whatever entity is being operated.
Great movie. Two enthusiastic thumbs up. Now playing in a 3rd world hell hole near you (not to mention Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans).
Years ago I had an acquaintance with an elevator repairman who worked in the Cabrinni Green projects.
When he first told me what he did for a living I was incredulous. My first reaction was holy crap you’re a white guy and you work where? The projects were notoriously fatal to fools-read that white fools- who wandered into that district.
“No, No,” he said, “you don’t get it. Its a system. I fix the elevators, then go talk to the gang members and give them a cut of my pay. They go back and destroy the elevators and I get called back to repair them, and give the gang members their cut, and so it goes. Everybody there knows who I am. I got no problems.”
Obviously it was a nice little Symbiotic relationship the only folks who got screwed were the tax payers of Chicago.
Public planned ‘communities’ don’t work – everyone agrees on that. It’s the people – general agreement on that.
What about private planned communities? Gold River, on Vancouver Island was founded in 1962 at the head of an inlet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It was what Americans would call ‘primeval wilderness’ and what Canadians call ’the bush’. No roads, no existing settlements but the greenfield site for a big sawmill and pulpmill. The mills were built and the town, schools, hockey rink, road in from outside etc. created to house the workforce. Gold River was a prosperous planned community for 30 years until the mills became uneconomic and closed in the mid to late nineties. Nowadays Gold River is a retirement community.
Gold River never had the problems that public housing projects have because it was built for people to get wealth, not built to distribute wealth. It had all the problems of company towns, and bush-rat towns but they are different from the hopeless social decay of modern public housing projects.
I think that the very first public housing projects were built to allow people to get wealth, not for the distribution of wealth so, for a time, they worked. If the goal of planned housing is to distribute wealth then it will be a disaster. If the goal is to allow people to get wealth – see the original planned tract housing in California – then it’s a different story.
It’s the people – if they are working to get wealth and improve themselves they will, regardless of the housing. If they are just a bunch of riffraff, bumming off everyone else and have no self respect, they will stay that way, regardless of the housing. Sorry architects – you’re irrelevant.
Van@63:
I see it as more of a security issue, identical to the one in Iraq. Living with terror is not a viable organizing principle.
One of the reasons neighborhood watches have been effective. Isolate the bullies.
WesternCanadian,
Despite the fact that some wealthy, gated suburban developments are the most oppressive constructs I have ever visited, Progressive rabble rousers like Obama’s reverend Wright tend to prefer these managed communities to the less managed, freer rural ones.
It’s almost as if the urban poor, or the Reverend Wright, are Stockholm Syndrome-addled, caged birds, too scared to leave the cage thru its opened door. And this inability to flee might explain these populations’ own tendencies to craft evermore Progressive cages for their fellow citizens to live in.
In our urban campuses peer pressure, fashion, and “keeping up with the Jones’” are powerful campusing techniques. To stay in these campuses requires the inductee to put up with these assaults. And, as urban liberals’ political agenda’s regularly confirm, the saying is true: misery loves company.
Even if it has to use the government’s force-agency to compel that company to live with it.
YBR, I think we are agreeing in principle. I read the premise of Wretch’s essay to be that “public housing” in whatever form it takes and whoever “runs” it, is a perpetually failed idea, It is not so much a waste of money as it is a waste of people, the very people its advocates claim to want to help. And the advocates don’t care about the money, its not theirs anyhow.
Barney Frank’s pre-subprime speech arguing that “houses are not tulips” are the apotheosis of the thesis that housing is a good-in-itself; a value independent of the market. The counter-argument is made by Dionne Warwick in “A House is not a Home”.
Maybe housing isn’t about housing at all. Back in the Tondo Days, we had people negotiating with the Marcos administration who wanted to demolish the Foreshore and relocate everyone to Sapang Palay, Bulacan, where there wasn’t a hope in hell of employment.
The people who lived in Tondo were there because they found a niche in the ecosystem as ragpickers, small tradesmen, day-laborers in nearby factories, or in service industries like home laundry and domestic service. That whole ecosystem would be bulldozed over and its human contents sent off to a rural area.
It was a recipe for disaster, but you couldn’t convince the planners, who had degrees from pretty good universities, to see that. Later, they relented and decided to reclaim some more land from the Bay and turn it into the Dagat-dagatan estate, which at least would be nearby.
The proposal of the community groups was very simple: in place upgrades. All they wanted was a little street widening, a few more water points, and some rationalization of infrastructure. But this had little appeal to the planners.
The reason for this was simple. The planners had a PR goal in mind. They wanted to create a Model Community they could show visiting dignitaries. They wanted a Potemkin Village to convince outside observers that they too, were enlightened. It was like that incident in Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere where the Spanish colonial friarocracy kept a never-to-be used laboratory to show visitors from Europe that modern equipment existed, but was never used because the indios were too dumb to use it.
But if housing is not about homes, then what? PR has already been mentioned. Other objects come to mind. Housing could be about votes. It is almost always about money and the subprime crisis is in some way the perfect confluence of PR, money and votes. It was the perfect vehicle to achieve all these non-homing goals. Here was an “affordable housing” project, which was good PR, for which people were to be eternally grateful through votes. And it made a pile of money too — for a while — and for some.
And then, like some terrible, virtual Pruitt-Igoe the whole subprime thing imploded and its ruin is still upon us. The fragments are still raining down. So maybe Barney Frank is right: housing has lasting value, at least for his own political faction. See he’s still in office. Yet Dionne Warwick may have been right too. “A House is not a Home”. In fact, homes have been broken up to fit people into housing. You have whole communities of single-parent, unemployed, poor people where once you might have had communities of relatively familial, employed poor people. Homes for housing is a poor trade.
But at least the machine has the votes. And of course, for the connected, there is also the money. “The poor we will always have with us.” So the only question is how to make a buck off of them.
YBR
“As well, any resident causing trouble there, such as vandalism or trade of illicit substances should have been evicted immediately.”
Which begs the question, where do you evict them to? Ignoring the poor grammar, the reason they are there to begin with is they can not house themselves. I’d like to see any court order that eviction.
69. wretchard: But if housing is not about homes, then what?
Perhaps in part, warehousing the “undesireables.” Sort of like internment of the public nuisances. That does not mean just the criminals, but those wretched poor (no slight intended). ( Palace functionary: “Sire, the peasants are revolting!” King: “You’re telling me! They stink on ice.”)
It’s almost as if they are saying, yeah, we have a large population of poor and lawless people but at least we have them contained in one place. Of course they never build a factory within walking distance of a project. Why is that?
Is it that social engineers are as presumptious as and in league with architect gods in designing to affect human behavior, or that they do it badly? Either way, housing’s still going to be built, either by crats or speculators, but, these days, mostly for modest to upper middle-class incomes. Conversely, rundown neighborhoods are still going to be razed, by the same suspects, through takings and/or private investment that banishes the disenfranchised- a form of domestic terrorism, imo.
Since projects are out of fashion for good reason, housing for lower income populations usually defaults to apartment complexes, which have the advantage of there being no ownership responsibilities and sometimes proximity to town, but they become easily ghettoized and tenants live as transients, moving from place to place to beat rents and bouncing children from school to school. Some poorer working and welfare classes find houses in the shabbier suburbs, away from town, where risky mortage defaults and fallen property values are leading to reverse gentrification, as the younger more affluent go urban. But suburban renters need cars to get to school, stores and work (planners are wrong about prohibitive rail lines + buses supplanting private transportation needs); they need a lawnmower: and, they have to reset their inner city ethos to survive a different space and attitude that is all street but not “street.”
Atlanta is achieving modest success through demolition, housing vouchers, and “human transformation.” It’s social engineering by the crats and manipulative design, yes, but in this case it seems to be working enough to make a difference. A non-project roof is not enough for some.
Most architects will continue the conceit of promoting projects for the proles and indigent because habitat does make a difference; it’s just that planned cities, mini-cities and projects intended as concrete examplars of human engineering can be sterile to dysfunctional, since their creators lack perfect prescience as to cause and effect and the serendipity. More fundamentally, they lack positive transformation loops over time whereby people are incentivized or able to affect and redesign/ redesignate that which is intended to affect them and does. For good intention to work it often needs to be subverted to suit on-the-ground needs and preferences, and to add honest to god color.
There are designers who have come up with successful mixed-use, mixed-income developments in conjunction with planners. Most architects and their investor clients, though, will only be able to butter their bread designing mass housing for the monied folk and calling them condos and co-ops: the middle classes corraled, instead of the po’ folk.
64. Stuart
“No, No,” he said, “you don’t get it. Its a system. I fix the elevators, then go talk to the gang members and give them a cut of my pay. They go back and destroy the elevators and I get called back to repair them, and give the gang members their cut, and so it goes.
Mmmmm . . . So THAT’s what’s been happening to the DC Metro system escalators!
–i always liked the Bow Wows school. The avatards were Gropius and his compatriot Van der Roh. The Bow Wows believed in the principle of the school, Les S. Moore. Design, construction, maintenance, cleaning, access, egrets, all were made simple and easy –which was a lucky break, since the Bow Wows were notorious Minimalists.
I have a hard time believing they’re that stupid, but since the people who come up with these types of things repeatedly are liberals, you never can tell.
Most likely many of them realize their solutions suck, but could care less. It’s about posturing, graft, and vote-getting, not results.
Liberalism, Leftism of all sorts, is an alliance between the stuipd and the corrupt. Maybe stupid isn’t the right word, these aren’t garden-variety dumb people, they’re just too self-centered to accept being told no, or too lazy to pay attention to consequences. Instead of stupid, call ‘em the selfish and the lazy. So Liberalism is an alliance between the Selfish, the Lazy, and the Corrupt. The Selfish and Lazy provide the foot soldiers, and the Corrupt exploit them for gain.
there is little distinction between the impulses of big-government, progressive social engineers entrenched in our urban backwaters and architects in general
I suspect that’s more an indictment of our current gatekeepers than of the occupation itself. There’s nothing inherently corrupting in the act of designing a structure, it all depends on the attitude brought to it. If the architect is interested in designing enjoyable places that people live or work in, that’s a helpful, worthwhile attitude. But the Le Corpuscles are more intestered in imposing their artistic will. To them, people are merely components of their masterpiece, no more deserving of consultation than the pigments a painter daubs on his canvas. The purpose of a Pruitt-Igoe or Cabrini Green isn’t to serve the people living in or even around it, but to stroke the egos of the creators. I suspect the average Bonsai gardener is more considerate of the tree he stunts and disfigures than the Planners are of the people they warden.
Every profession has it’s would-be auteurs who cannot abibe by another’s idea or input. Software Engineering isn’t immune, but there are no gatekeepers. If you – a la Steve Jobs – have good ideas, you actually get to “impose” them on people because they like them. If, like Larry Ellison, your ideas suck, you either bend to someone elses will or go broke. Credentialed occupations are subject to capture. Oddly enough, Hollywood seems to prove that the credentialling doesn’t have to be government sponsered, it can be Union imposed.
steveaz@67
Agreed. Which is why I bought a house in an unplanned ungated neighbourhood where every house is unique, they date from the 1930′s to the 2000′s and we’re one block from the ocean.
…housing’s still going to be built, either by crats or speculators…
Why not built by the people who plan to live in the homes? It used to be that way, but today there are so many regulations and hurdles, and so many palms that need greasing, it’s only the well-connected and large-scale outfits that can afford to do it. I tried to build a home once. In addition to a General Contractor full-time for the duration, I was going to have to keep an Ecologist and a Lawyer/Lobbiest on retainer. Way too expensive. And people wonder why people in new neighborhods have to count driveways to find their house.
erc rodson @ 1 said:
“I have known, worked for and with, hired and fired architects. … Unrealistic expectations based on theory not observation, they are the only technical field permeated with the liberal arts sensibility.”
I’m also an engineer but my wife is an architect. I’m a sucker for fancy architecture, i.e. I like to tour Gothic churches, medieval mosques, ancient temples and mausoleums. I also enjoy a well laid out shopping center. However when it comes to actual day-to-day architecture that I actually pay for, my tastes and my wife’s tastes are diametrically opposed. If left up to me, all architecture would be square concrete boxes with copper plumbing, painted white and designed to last at least 200 years. My wife on the other hand wants everything to look like it came from a scene out of “Star Wars”. With many architects, aesthetics trumps practicality. When we did the extension to our house, I chose the easy path and just let my wife design what every she wanted (I did the plumbing and electrical). Now, the back of my house vaguely resembles a flying saucer. Funny thing though, my wife was right. The house as she designed it is very comfortable to live in and quite attractive. However it was difficult to build because the design was so weird (probably cost about $50k more because of that). I actually don’t understand how it’s possible for architects to exist. The skills architects need to have as artist, engineer and project administrator are mutually antagonistic, i.e. artists tend to be very poor engineers and vice-versa. I’m glad there are architects and doubly glad that the world is not made exclusively out of square white concrete buildings.
(money quote) W: But most governments are convinced that the soul can be altered by a change of clothes. After all, politicians do it all the time.
No more can be added after that observation.
buddy larsen #74
i always liked the Bow Wows school.
The Bow Wows have morphed into designer props for protest marches, as in the “funeral” procession mourning the death of Wisconsin:
The latest demonstration against Gov. Scott Walker’s union-killing budget bill overflowed with Mardi Gras-style energy, including extravagant costumes, a ragged brass band and lots of inventive props. . . . For all the indignation on display, the parade’s mood was overwhelmingly joyous. A rainbow coalition of families, students, teachers, professors and union types dressed up for the occasion – and some even dressed up their dogs. (My favorite sign was attached to a little black mutt: “The Budget Repair Bill Is Great – For Me to Poop On!”) One trio was decked out in masks, antlers, and shredded burlap; kids were draped in black shawls; and many others carried colorful umbrellas. Former and possibly future Madison mayor Paul Soglin shook hands with the marchers, looking as happy as a pig in mud.
At the center of the parade was a group of pallbearers in top hats, carrying black styrofoam coffins. The idea was that Walker had killed Wisconsin, thus the need for this New Orleans funeral. The brass band played “When the Saints Go Marching In” and other tunes with more energy than polish – but hey, Walker will be around for awhile, so they’ll have plenty of time to practice.
http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=32627
No further catty comments needed.
Much of the problem revolves around the breakup of communities. Slums for the most part evolved over time. Typically such places are communities where the inhabitants are bound together by a complex web of social, family, and economic bonds and common interests. Its kind of like the lyrics from the old Cheers TV series, “Where Everyone Knows Your Name.” There are unwritten obligations which bind you as well as the other members of the community, as well as unwritten punishments for breaching those standards.
But to social engineers and the likes of Hillary Clinton (“It takes a village to raise a child”) their notion of a community is far different. A community to them is a geographic area whose citizens have been regimented sufficiently that they will conveniently fit at the bottom tier of a pyramidal power structure, usually political in nature. They will be good little pieces of meat and cheerfully do what they are told to do. To them a community is something that can be assigned to you.
The two notions are inherently incompatible. Traditional communities build up over years or even generations, and they tend to favor their own local traditions and interests rather than the mandates from the tin gods on high. If you take a large number of strangers and throw them together in close proximity there are no community bonds which can act as a brake on anti-social behavior. You have created a situation where it is every man for himself and the Devil take the hindmost. That’s what happened.
And I wonder sometimes too if some of the people pushing such schemes weren’t doing it simply out of misguided kindness. The destruction of traditional communities weakens local political power and tends to shift it up the pyramid. Was this a hidden goal?
70. SpeakEasy
The real question is why should anyone care where a criminal lives? If they can’t follow the law why should they benefit from a society that they abuse?
I think a blood test the first of the month for nicotine, alcohol, and drugs would be reasonable. You fail and out you go right now! Come to the office next month for another blood test and we will see at that time. If you have money for smokes, drugs or booze you should have money for rent. I cannot believe that society owes people that do not, will not and have never contributed to are owed anything.
Of topic but interesting:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/everything-now-correlated-exclusively-fed-balance-sheet
The linked chart proves that the only thing supporting the American economy is money printing by the Fed. The money printing is probably the main reason why commodity prices have sky rocketed with the consequent social unrest in the developing world. Bernanke is now between a hammer and a hard place.
Eggplant…
WE are between a hammer and anvil. The maestro of disaster just pounds away. You have to have a PhD to be that obtuse.
blert @ 84 said:
“Eggplant… WE are between a hammer and anvil. The maestro of disaster just pounds away. You have to have a PhD to be that obtuse.”
Guilty….
Private property is the basis of Liberty. I think #19 pointed out that Margaret Thatcher encouraged rent to own.
It has nothing to do with the shape of the structure. Have you ever been to an Indian Reservation in the US? A perfect pustule of communism’s end result. Nobody really owns their property, so why should they care? That these places exist in the 21st century is an incredible testament to graft.
@74
Before Gropius, some cat said, “Forearm follows funkjunk.” Louis somebody. Armstrong?
@74
Before Gropius, some American cat said, “Forearm follows funkjunk.” Louis somebody. Armstrong?
Ironically Joseph Darst – the mayor who built the monstrosity had another St. Louis housing project named after him: Darst-Webbe. It was razed too.
I was once listening to an Australian government official give a talk. He related how at an aboriginal community he went for a walk with an elder, who over the course of years had become a personal friend.
Sitting off someplace, way out of earshot from anyone else, the aboriginal elder asked him. “You know, we’re going about this problem all wrong. Why don’t you just treat us all like whitefellas?” Neither could say this in public, but there it was.
The bedrock principle of ethnic politics is that you can’t ever treat people like “whitefellas”. You have got to treat them special: the power to take special umbrage at supposed slights, access to special programs, etc. And the net result is these reservations. Maybe Pruitt-Igoe wasn’t called a reservation, but in some sense it was.
Getting treated special is equivalent to accepting liberal rules. It’s like a housing project. It looks nice but once you accept it and go in you are subtly captured by the paradigm. And the net result of that is permanent second-class status. About the only culture that has figured this out completely are the north Asians. The Emperor Meiji and his boys realized that the key wasn’t what status the Man gave you; it was the status you got for yourself.
So the Japanese and Chinese decided to get rich, get smart, go to the moon, build nice technological things. And viola! They became “whitefellas”; or more exactly, they got to the point where it didn’t matter what the Man thought they were, because they were the Men the themselves.
Back in the 19th century, there were two responses to Western dominance. In one choice, the Japanese decided to get what was in the Western man’s head. They learned science, technology and business. The Chinese, after Mao, did the same.
The other choice was exemplified by the tribal kings of Africa who decided to wear the whitefella’s clothes, live in his house, drive in his car. The old cartoon of the tribal leader on a palanquin wearing a dinner jacket captures it perfectly. They thought the fire was on the outside. Only the Japanese and the Chinese knew that the fire was on the inside.
Today it is evident who figured things out right. The Chinese and Japanese are the 2nd and 3rd largest economies in the world respectively and Robert Mugabe runs Zimbabwe.
I think the first step to achieving parity with the Man is simply to act like him; to stop accepting all these “special” gifts from a paternalistic state. As Admiral Ackbar once said, “it’s a trap”.
But it’s politically incorrect to even recognize that fact. I suppose that’s why the government minister and his aboriginal friend could only talk about it in whispers, like they were planning a jailbreak. Ironically, that may be the most appropriate simile.
I’m curious… has anyone done a ‘where are they now’ on recipients of ABC’s Extreme Makeover Home Edition homes?
Josh #51: “I can hardly imagine how the width of a staircase can cause residents to become feral beasts.”
Brings to mind what happened when a power outage occurred in NYC in the mid-70’s Unlike the Big Blackout of 1965 in that same area, it proved to be a night of terror, of “feral beasts” roaming the streets. The mayor vowed to demand answers from the power company, and “find out why our people were subjected to such terror.” Of course, I thought he was missing the whole point; if people turn into werewolves just because the electricity goes off the electricity ain’t your real problem.
Don Rodrigo #60:
As you probably know, getting from downtown DC over to Maryland, such as Suitland, Andrews AFB, etc. requires considerable experience and some luck. It ain’t easy. One reason is that I-95 does not go through DC but dead ends, because to have continued it on up northward to create an direct path alternative to taking the DC Beltway would have “put a white man’s road through a black man’s bedroom.” And of course, due in no small part to the resultant poor access that area has been blighted ever since.
re: not all high density housing s#@ks. Last I looked neither Singapore nor Hong Kong had any significant social safety net (beyond charity and their own savings, and (at times mandated) self-funded catastrophic insurance and defined contribution retirement – superannuation.) And they do suffer a bit of from the tragedy of the commons – I’ve been in a number of HK high-rises examining the fiber comms infrastructure and more than a few of their wiring closets were not maintained and even some were underwater (though they still worked, and were patchwork fixed when needed rather than addressing the root cause).
The family is still the unit of cohesion (and trust) in these societies. Arguably Singapore (with its near death in the late 60s) is one large extended Chinese family. This strength has also been a weakness in that there’s little beyond the family trusted – so civil society suffers for a lack of voluntary “let’s solve this problem” associations.
A more interesting question is what happened in the Chinese mainland communes, as compared to say, those in the USSR? Granted, the PRC never really took ownership of the land and property – but it was tilled by the group.
It has been interesting to see the conflicts amongst various classes and minority groups for the largess distributed under the concept of set asides. Asians are often too “white” for inclusion into certain US university graduate programs. Hispanics out number blacks so there is a conflict there. Blacks from overseas cultures often despise inner city US Blacks. In India set asides have cause conflict amongst the numerous different castes. While Japan is often seen as a monolithic culture it is not. Some families keep lists of names of other families that are considered Etta and are not to be intermarried with. Government efforts to reduce the discrimination are ongoing and I don’t know how successful. That is part of the underlying theme of the movie, “Departures” the main character becomes Etta when he becomes an undertaker.
The fate of Pruitt-Igoe shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who was actually observant. My parents moved into brand-new public housing in Boston in 1953, and moved out a year later because of deterioration caused by the typical occupants. But hope springs anew among the folk who measure their activities only by their intentions, rather than by their programs’ results.
The Chinese are almost pathologically practical. The generation of leaders after Mao must looked around them and said to themselves, “why copy the second-rate Western thought system?” They must have seen, as only the Chinese can see, how materially unsuccessful Communism was. And if they were going to copy the West, why not Adam Smith and not Karl Marx?
In contrast, the intellectuals of the West, living large until recently off their patrimony, have dabbled with Karl Marx. Now that they’ve marched through the institutions they are in the advanced stages of “putting out the fire”, because they hate it. It’s a mystery why — perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of world weariness — but they don’t want freedom, either for themselves or their wards. The day may not be far off when all academic pursuit, whatever the discipline, will really be preparation for a career in corrections.
They’ve ended man’s quest. They’ve abolished the heavens, the better to rule on earth. Once upon a time humanity thought the better of itself. Now, instead of Augustine’s “my heart shall never rest, until it rests in Thee,” we have the politically correct substitute: “my heart shall never rest until you think like me”.
The Daily Telegraph noted that modern British sensibility found nothing so funny or ridiculous as Robert Scott’s closing entry in his Antarctic diaries. Scott died on the way back from the South Pole and these words were found penned in his pocket.
How ridiculous! How foolish! How despicable! It became fashionable to sneer at such striving.
And maybe Robert Scott was an incompetent fool but there is something lost in a civilization that no longer sees anything to risk for; that looks at the stars and wishes only for its own extinction; whose vision is hope that their own cities will someday be overgrown by a returning wilderness, sans carbon, sans light, sans the laughter of something once called man.
Had to do a home visit to a recently hospitalized client in one of West Philadelphia’s last remaining high-rise projects. I went in early in the morning, and fortunately the elevators were working. I got in and out with no problems. Our investigator, a former Philly cop and Marine Vietnam vet, just shook his head and told me I was nuts….
This story is typical of the way “our betters” know what’s best for persons they know little or nothing about.It should also be noted that poor neighborhoods are destroyed for purely political reasons. I lived in East Harlem, NYC a mix of people of Irish and Italian extractions. The problem for the pols was that the area was represented in Congress by Vito Marcantonio, who had run successfully as a Democrat, but who eventually became an independent backed by the Communist party. He wasn’t a commie, but he accepted their backing since the Democrats didn’t like his maverick style. To disrupt his backers the city bosses bought out and tore down perfectly old but serviceable buildings to put up these high-rise monstrosities in the name of modernity, but in reality to tear the guts out of what had once been a close-knit neighborhood, chase out the former residents, and bring in new ones, many of whom barely knew how to flush a toilet. Needless to say they were not a success. Anecdotally we said “They tore down a neighborhood to put up a slum.” How sad but true.
It’s a mystery why — perhaps out of guilt, perhaps out of world weariness — but they don’t want freedom…
I don’t agree Wretchard. I think they are so decadent, they just can’t imagine anything other than what they already have. They assume the good things that freedom brings will always be there, like the sun rising unmoved by foolish mortals. They are so used to beating their tiny fists against the carpet they can’t imagine they might just bash a hole in the floor and fall through.
Unsk@46
Read the article PA Cat linked to @ 23. Food for thought!
#99
Its not that they don’t want freedom–its just that they don’t want freedom for anyone else but themselves. The lesser folks don’t deserve it, and might turn feral if allowed it.
re: tragedy of the pensions/commons..
Hasn’t Australia moved to largely defined contribution (v. defined benefit)? How’s that working out? If the citizen doesn’t control/own their own investments it’s an opportunity for government (union, institutional) misbehavior – any of this happening there? How’s Oz compare to Chile?
From talking to local bankers it appears that what financial stress that exists in Australia is due to the major banks being a bit vulnerable to downturns due to floods and droughts in farming – because farms/stations are rapidly consolidating into (giant) first-tier agribusiness enterprises to lower costs and increase productivity – which generates lots of demand for million-dollar farm equipment upgrades – largely financed by big loans from banks. But that’s it. Housing prices are inflated but the government controls the amount of land released for building homes so they simply limit availability to hold prices up (which has perverse side-effects, but..).
Richard observed that the U.S., Canada and Australia are the world’s breadbasket. I wonder how many of the Club members realize that the Ukraine would by itself be able to supply the world with grain and meat at U.S. consumption levels if it were managed by the world’s best agribusinesses? It’d be hard even for the Mississippi mid-country prairie to compete with the 10-20 feet of loam covering most all of this well-watered nation that’s the size of Texas. It’s a pity Marx (and the USSR) were not stillborn.
What motivates wealthy Liberals is climbing Maslow’s pyramid. That’s it.
In their world without God the only outlet for their self-actualization is to meddle — counter-productively — in the affairs of their ‘lessers’ with the apparent objective of transforming the world; yet with a true objective of transforming their own self image.
Hollywood and the media are stuffed with such pontificators. With rare, very rare, exceptions they are lazy and orthodox — Left-orthodox.
Both are professional script readers with the kind of self-importance parodied by Broadcast News.
All are devotees of ‘propaganda makes the man.’
Unwittingly they’ve morphed into a media-priesthood in every way aping the Catholic Church circa 1480 AD.
It’s asking an awful lot of architects to correct multiple social pathologies.
If you put a bunch of Section 8 recipients into an upper middle class neighborhood in a year or two it would be a crime-ridden slum. At best architecture can affect behavior on the margins.
For those who enjoy a bit of nostalgia, one of the funniest TV shows ever, “Car 54, Where Are You?” did an episode on a housing project in New York and the mentality behind them. In this case, the old lady wins out over the forces of “progress,” which come in for a right good spanking. It’s delightful, and some of the dialogue is laugh-out-loud funny.
http://youtu.be/4MP_PUhNUYk
As a side note, it’s amazing how consistently funny this show could be without ever resorting to smut, profanity, sexual innuendo or any of the dozen other things that plague modern so-called comedy. Back when wit still meant something.
Orangetree @72,
That was very thoughtful. A citrus smoothie even, high in vitamin C!
Thanks.
The St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project sounds eerily like 0bamacare. Huge amounts of money spend on a mammoth bureaucratic slum – with a few waivers for 0bama’s political cronies and those with enough political clout to escape.
b @ 103: Maslow’s pyramid
obsolete
all human needs are now met by an iPhone and a vente latte.
Oddly enough, just last evening I had a idle moment and stumbled across a program on the history of Singapore, and specifically the section on its housing experiment.
The point was made explicitly clear by the interviewees: Singapore’s public housing succeeded because they sold the units to the people, rather than renting them, even if it would take 20 years to pay off what would probably be an otherwise modest price. They saw what happened to rented buildings, thought forward, and didn’t like where they ended up.
“Now” (whenever this program was filmed) they claim that 80% of housing in Singapore is owned and not rented, and apparently Thatcher brought this model back to Britain during the 80s to address urban decay there.
I assume that the part of the program I didn’t see, if it was filmed at all, was that on the strict enforcement of laws in Singapore and general low tolerance for tomfoolery. This is a big missing part of the picture in the west’s housing attempts as well, but absent a policeman on every floor and mass-evictions for poor behavior, a good place to start is with property ownership.
Sure, much of the current financial mess was triggered by the “homes for everyone!” crew, however we’re now talking about small apartments stacked on top of each other–and therefore built cheaply, not suburban subdivision sprawl units.
Of course, the same crew that “bleeds” for the poor slums is also allergic to property rights and believes just the opposite: that if we were just to own nothing, and do what we’re told by the Government, which owns everything, then they (er… we) will be much happier!
–JC
#96 Wretchard:
Your post matches exactly the experience of Os Guinness as he relates it in this video clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3-qimjJC3E
Das…
Apparently…
You don’t get it.
Moscow, the KGB/ SVR, CENTRAL has been actively perverting our norms for DECADES.
You are absolutely NOT looking at a general shift in cultural norms.
You are looking straight down the barrel of chronic professional manipulation.
The opfor has for the longest time — put their thumb on the scale of Western voting. Get it?
Until you come to grips with foreign, hostile meddling in our democracy — you are lost.
The manipulations of the Iowa 2008 caucuses by the Zero should be illuminating.
Armies are hugely expensive. Moscow has discovered that spies, agents and moles are immensely cheaper and more effective.
Chapman should be a wake up call for the media. They BLEW it.
Naturally.
To admit that Russia INFLUENCES American politics is haraam.
Better to duck and blather.
—
Open your mind.
Hostility to America runs world wide. Most of humanity is despotically ‘led.’
The Duck of Death is the norm.
#96 Wretchard
How ridiculous! How foolish! How despicable! It became fashionable to sneer at such striving.
And, as General George S. Patton said, “Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.”
As for the rest of the thread: we’d better win in Wisconsin. The Leftists realize this could be the tipping point.
Theodore Dalrymple on Le Corbusier: A terminal inhumanity—what one might almost call “ahumanity”—characterizes Le Corbusier’s thought and writing, notwithstanding his declarations of fraternity with mankind. . . .
This ahumanity explains Le Corbusier’s often-expressed hatred of streets and love of roads. Roads were impressive thoroughfares for rushing along at the highest possible speed (he had an obsession with fast cars and airplanes), which therefore had a defined purpose and gave rise to no disorderly human interactions. The street, by contrast, was unpredictable, incalculable, and deeply social. . . .
Le Corbusier does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism. . . It is a sign of the abiding strength of the totalitarian temptation, as the French philosopher Jean-François Revel called it, that Le Corbusier is still revered in architectural schools and elsewhere, rather than universally reviled.
There is a predictable lack of humility among these social planners who think that they can over-ride human nature. Some of them have ideas different from Le Corbusiers’ ideas, but most of them seem to be determined to change everything. They are never “content to add their mite to their civilization.”
in the light of the topic, you can find that this behaviour isn’t new, but as old as the world is
an exemple, a biography of Musolini and his change of mind, from page 50 to 60, on how the different belligerent states tried to influence Italy to enter into the conflict, or to stay out in WW1.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33727583/1935-Sawdust-Caesar-The-Untold-Story-of-Mussolini-and-Fascism
It is funny to see the parallel of his “appeasing discourses” with what we hear today from our lefties, and their intrinsic will for “fashism”
Rejection of God is also rejection of the existence of fundamental truth or absolute values in the universe. What is the replacement – the only alternative is relative truth and values of the arrogant mind of man.
There is nothing so abhorrent to the arrogant mind than being proven wrong, having nature or human events demonstrate the inadequacy of human thought, the impotence of human solutions.
It is in desperation that still another solution to the failures is offered, with renewed hope, but eventually with disillusion. And it is quintessential arrogance to blame the next failure on others. ‘It would have worked if only we had more resources or had tried harder.’
103. blert said…
“What motivates wealthy Liberals is climbing Maslow’s pyramid. That’s it.
In their world without God the only outlet for their self-actualization is to meddle — counter-productively — in the affairs of their ‘lessers’ with the apparent objective of transforming the world; yet with a true objective of transforming their own self image.
Hollywood and the media are stuffed with such pontificators. With rare, very rare, exceptions they are lazy and orthodox — Left-orthodox.
All are devotees of ‘propaganda makes the man.’
—
The disposable woman
“…while his self-abuses are endlessly discussed, his abuse of women is barely broached.
Our inertia is not for lack of evidence. In 1990, he accidentally shot his fiancée at the time, the actress Kelly Preston, in the arm. (The engagement ended soon after.) In 1994 he was sued by a college student who alleged that he struck her in the head after she declined to have sex with him. (The case was settled out of court.) Two years later, a sex film actress, Brittany Ashland, said she had been thrown to the floor of Mr. Sheen’s Los Angeles house during a fight. (He pleaded no contest and paid a fine.)
In 2006, his wife at the time, the actress Denise Richards, filed a restraining order against him, saying Mr. Sheen had shoved and threatened to kill her. In December 2009, Mr. Sheen’s third wife, Brooke Mueller, a real-estate executive, called 911 after Mr. Sheen held a knife to her throat. (He pleaded guilty and was placed on probation.) Last October, another actress in sex films, Capri Anderson, locked herself in a Plaza Hotel bathroom after Mr. Sheen went on a rampage. (Ms. Anderson filed a criminal complaint but no arrest was made.) And on Tuesday, Ms. Mueller requested a temporary restraining order against her former husband, alleging that he had threatened to cut her head off, “put it in a box and send it to your mom.” (The order was granted, and the couple’s twin sons were quickly removed from his home.) “Lies,” Mr. Sheen told People magazine.
The privilege afforded wealthy white men like Charlie Sheen may not be a particularly new point, but it’s an important one nonetheless. Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears are endlessly derided for their extracurricular meltdowns and lack of professionalism on set; the R&B star Chris Brown was made a veritable pariah after beating up his equally, if not more, famous girlfriend, the singer Rihanna. Their careers have all suffered, and understandably so.
This hasn’t been the case with Mr. Sheen, whose behavior has been repeatedly and affectionately dismissed as the antics of a “bad boy” (see: any news article in the past 20 years), a “rock star” (see: Piers Morgan, again) and a “rebel” (see: Andrea Canning’s “20/20” interview on Tuesday). He has in essence, achieved a sort of folk-hero status; on Wednesday, his just-created Twitter account hit a million followers, setting a Guinness World Record.
But there’s something else at work here:
the seeming imperfection of Mr. Sheen’s numerous accusers.
The women are of a type,
which is to say,
highly unsympathetic…”
Karen T
Theodore Dalrymple analyses Le Corbusier through his “empiric” mind. He forgets to put him in context. Le Corbusier isn’t born from a spontaneous generetion, his experience must be written with his foremasters, within “Bauhaus” and the Austrian school of Architecture, that all emananed from the spirit of the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th’s that put confidence in Science and Modernity. He is more a theorician than a prolific architect, and more than that, a artist, BTW, his drawings are interestings, some kind of purity in the lines.
He didn’t thought Architecture as a practical Art, but as Art itself, and sufficent to itself. Isn’t it funny that that his conception are finally fitting our nowadays word than rather the 1930 aeras? in that sense that people today rather live confined into their home and or appartment, and that the only outside contacts with the world is through their computer.
But the few constructions to be inhabited that he achieved are self sufficient, they have all one population need, even the superfluous, stores, swimmingpool… without one need to walk outside.
He’s been copied, and rather undercopied.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d%27Habitation
Theodore Dalrymple forgot also to quote Oscar Niemeyer, one of Le corbusier disciples, that build Brazilia, that made the “pot de yaourt” in Le Havre center… at the beginning, people thought it was weird, and now, if one would want to erase it, he’ll find a majority of opponents.
“our nowadays word” –> our nowadays world, sorry
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/torontos-backward-on-public-housing-get-em-out-not-in/article1927444/
Marie Claude:
He didn’t thought Architecture as a practical Art, but as Art itself, and sufficent to itself.
But what of the daubs of paint, Marie, who must live on Corbusier’s canvas?
81. Tcobb
Much of the problem revolves around the breakup of communities. . . .
But to social engineers and the likes of Hillary Clinton (“It takes a village to raise a child”) their notion of a community is far different. A community to them is a geographic area whose citizens have been regimented sufficiently that they will conveniently fit at the bottom tier of a pyramidal power structure, usually political in nature. They will be good little pieces of meat and cheerfully do what they are told to do. To them a community is something that can be assigned to you.
One thing that pops into my head reading this is that these social engineers think of their schemes as being permanent solutions to people’s problems. They never imagine, for example, that someone less benevolent than themselves might replace them at the TOP of the pyramidal power structure. Or that the power structure itself might change people’s values. I also think of what MSO said at #52:
Contrast the demeanor of those who must approach their neighbors directly for assistance with those who approach faceless bureaucrats whose own livelihood is highly dependent upon the existence of the supplicant. . .
The dynamic has dramatic affects upon both sides of the equation. If it is a requirement that assistance be personally requested and granted, the responsibilities of both parties will become obvious. . .
I don’t believe it is always true that “If you take a large number of strangers and throw them together in close proximity there are no community bonds . . . you have created a situation where it is every man for himself and the Devil take the hindmost.”
There are times in history when pioneering communities or people recovering from a terrible disaster have created community bonds in short order. But this usually happened through direct personal interactions — not through interactions mediated by faceless bureaucrats. Some people naturally assume or are assigned leadership roles in such conditions, but they are typically reacting to conditions on the ground in real time. “Faceless bureaucrats” start out as real people. They are made faceless by bureaucracy.
And as Dennis Prager says, “The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen”. Social engineering schemes created and administered on a national level have a far greater potential for creating an eventual disaster than those created and administered locally.
Dave’s Dothetaxpayers’ Project, aka TCHC*.
“David Mitchell, a boy from the projects who would chair the embattled public housing board, would walk out of a private meeting with his colleagues, a farewell statement already typed up.”
>>> “Furthermore, he said the board is against privatizing the TCHC, the second largest social housing provider in North America, a move the Mayor said he would consider.”
…-
“TCHC citizen board members tender resignation”
“Before the morning meeting, his mind was made up.
David Mitchell, a boy from the projects who would chair the embattled public housing board, would walk out of a private meeting with his colleagues, a farewell statement already typed up.
By mid-morning Thursday, all seven members of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation board had tendered their resignations, after rebuffing Mayor Rob Ford’s public calls this week for them to step aside in light of an audit that found staff expensed spa treatments and chocolates, while ignoring rules around awarding contracts.
Two tenant representatives are refusing to do the same, and CEO Keiko Nakamura, whom the Mayor also wants out, remains in her job.
“I’m glad that they’ve resigned and we can move forward and restore the public’s confidence in community housing,” Mayor Ford told reporters Thursday. He plans to bring forward a motion at next week’s council meeting asking that the whole board be disbanded. The board will be in the hands of the city manager, Mr. Ford said, until new representatives are appointed by city council, which he expected to take about one month.
The surprise departure of the board members came during a special meeting to discuss what Auditor-General Jeffrey Griffiths described as a “blatant” disregard for rules and tax dollars.
“Unfortunately, the present political reality has made it untenable to effectively govern,” Chair David Mitchell said in his final statement. He said the Mayor had “spurned” the shareholders agreement that governs the TCHC “by announcing unilaterally through the media, that he has lost his confidence in us as a board and does not wish for us to proceed with due process… We cannot work effectively when the Mayor is unreachable for constructive dialogue.” Furthermore, he said the board is against privatizing the TCHC, the second largest social housing provider in North America, a move the Mayor said he would consider.
The Mayor responded to the outgoing chairman’s criticism by saying “I just look out for the taxpayer, and the taxpayers are pretty upset about the wasteful spending they saw take place. Fifty-thousand dollars on Christmas parties, and chocolates? It’s just a bunch of nonsense.””
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/03/03/live-coverage-tchc-emergency-board-meeting/
*Toronto Communist Housing Corporation.
Karen:
There are times in history when pioneering communities or people recovering from a terrible disaster have created community bonds in short order. But this usually happened through direct personal interactions — not through interactions mediated by faceless bureaucrats.
Excellent observation. The difference in behavior comes out of the reward strucutre, as MSO’s post at #32 mentioned. In the pioneering community of direct personal interactions, your individual reward is the result of your ability to be useful to your neighbors and fellow pioneers, who are likewise trying to be useful to everyone else to secure their own rewards. Everybody has an incentive to make each other more productive. The blacksmith can’t get more money from the farmer if the farmer doesn’t have more crops, so the blacksmith better do a good job on that plow. You make him more productive and he shares some of that extra productivity with you.
But when the rewards come from the faceless bureaucrat, your neighbors are not fellow members of the community, they’re competition for the stash.
I’m convinced that the root cause of Leftism is the failure to understand this. The people who let themselves be taken in as useful idiots don’t understand productivity. To them the Universe provides and everybody is just stashin’
JMH
contrary to what you think, Le corbusier inhabitations are well designed and with no superfluous lost space
and you couldn’t afford to buy one nowadays, while they were ment for ordinary people at the beginning, besides people who are living in them, would never sell their property, even for making money !
Marie Claude, “his experience must be written with his foremasters, within “Bauhaus” and the Austrian school of Architecture, that all emananed from the spirit of the end of 19th century and beginning of 20th’s that put confidence in Science and Modernity.” I would agree that Le Corbusier wasn’t as sinister as some made him out to be. He was a brilliant architect with work like no other. He was self taught and did not go to college. Urban planning was a small part of his work, and he was trying to solve problems of his day. His early urban planning work came as a result of a housing shortage in Paris in the twenties. And he did not have the advantage of ninety years of social engineering to look back on to see what a mess social engineering can make.
That said, I think part of the problem stems from the fact that generations of architects have been taught his theories without an unbiased critical analysis. His “house is a machine for living” idea has been reformulated in numerous ways particularly as “building as machine” where as a consequence many of us have become just cogs in great social engineered building machines. The social engineers hate freedom for the individual, and they used his theories to enslave society as much as they could.
Unsk
exactly
My Dad had an aphorism that explains this& the whole “progressive” narcissistic fantasy very well:
Marie, his buildings are ugly. He earned his recognition as the father of the Brutalist style. The people who wouldn’t trade them for money are the sorts of people who already have money and instead sacrifice themselves for status. They would live in a sterile abode for the sake of status among their peers for living in a place built by a “famous” architect. Fair enough for them, their choice.
They’re not the ones I’m thinking of when I criticize The Crow. I’m thinking of the people he wanted to condem to Cabrini-Green style monstrosities. Lucky for you Frenchpersons your own politicians (save for the Vichy who gladly hired him) mostly ignored his plans and were content to merely celebrate his death. Unfortunately for millions in other countries, their pols lapped him up. And unfortuantely for us Merkins, his fame gave large-scale real estate developers and urban planning afficianodos cover and justification for their profit-driven uglification of many of our cities.
It is interesting, his works. Consider his House of the Mad in Marseille. The Wikipedia entry says of it ” Unlike many of the inferior system-built blocks it inspired, which lack the original’s generous proportions, communal facilities and parkland setting, the Unité is popular with its residents…” Why do you suppose his first forray into ugly cast concrete mass-housing without any ornamentation were more livable than later interpretations? Perhaps the first buildings were still beholden somewhat to the old notions of decoration and ornamentation which The Crow so disliked. But once the brutally ugly and utilitarian exterior was established, is it any wonder later incarnations made the interiors unpleasant as well?
About the only good he did for architecture was provoke Christopher Alexander’s and Jane Jacob’s responses. I think Dalrymple sums him up well:
Marie Claude,
Dalrymple characterized Le Corbusier as someone with true talent, perhaps with some tendency toward Asberger’s syndrome (possibly contributing to the pure artistic thinking you describe). Dalrymple also points out that Le Corbusier’s theories allowed for fast rebuilding after war and were therefore attractive in war-torn countries.
He deplores the way Le Corbusier became useful to many political types with totalitarian tendencies. Dalrymple WAS critical of Le Corbusier’s tendency to be totally insensitive to the architecture which preceded his. This architecture represents civilization and human connections established over centuries in many cases. Political totalitarians are often similarly dismissive of history, which increases their attraction to Le Corbusier’s ideas.
His disdain for history also leads the architecture of his disciples to stand out in an ugly manner from its surroundings. And Dalrymple pointed out that by adopting a pseudonym with no first name, THE Corbusier manifested a certain sense of superiority also found in political totalitarian types.
Karen T
that’s a too easy thiking. Dalrymple, like all the Anlo-Saxons that visit (and or want to live in France) only want to see the “museistic” image of France that they have in mind.
You can’t prevent followers to imitate him, even poorly, especially for building popular inhabitations, like Umsk said housing shortages appealled such constructions, there was a big agricultural exode to the cities from the fifties
Besides Le Corbusier, at his times, was the “architectural” well known personality to whom the intelligentia wanted to refer, with constrained budgets though, while Le Corbusier himself had rich sponsors.
Now there a few explanations for his Nic,
“Le Corbusier s’était associé à un de ses cousins pour ses premiers travaux (Pierre Jeanneret). C’est peut-être dans le but de ne pas être confondu avec lui qu’il a décidé d’utiliser le nom – un peu modifié – d’une branche de sa famille maternelle, Lecorbesier.
Selon la biographie de Jean-Louis Cohen, il a pris ce nom vers 1920, lorsqu’il a débuté sa carrière parisienne.”
and
“En 1920, Le Corbusier et Amédée Ozenfant créent la revue l’Esprit Nouveau. Les articles sur l’architecture portent la signature de Le Corbusier. Il choisit un pseudonyme évoquant à la fois son ancêtre albigeois Lecorbésier, ainsi que le peintre Le Fauconnier. Il continue cependant à signer de son véritable nom les textes sur la peinture.”
I wouldn’t focus on his Nic signification
123. JMH, I think you have distilled out a very important point:
. . . when the rewards come from the faceless bureaucrat, your neighbors are not fellow members of the community, they’re competition for the stash.
And yet, it is capitalism which is portrayed as fostering rapacious dog-eat-dog competition.
As Mark Steyn observed in connection with the inability of the Greek population to adopt a responsible attitude toward bankruptcy, “Nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government.”
Though his emphasis was on competition between the present generation and future generations for “the stash”.
too easy thinking was ment, sorry
And maybe Robert Scott was an incompetent fool but there is something lost in a civilization that no longer sees anything to risk for; that looks at the stars and wishes only for its own extinction; whose vision is hope that their own cities will someday be overgrown by a returning wilderness, sans carbon, sans light, sans the laughter of something once called man.
The Abolition of Man, indeed.
BTW, wretchard, this thread is terrific. I don’t think I’ve seen so many new/rare posters on a topic in, what, years on BC.
Hello, fellow Clubbers! Great to hear from you!
Marie Claude,
I don’t mean to blame Le Corbusier for all the sins of his imitators. But as you point out, he was a popular figure among the kind of people who think they are smart enough to direct other people’s lives. Imitation by architects who wanted commissions for new projects was totally predictable.
Concerning his Nic, your history is interesting. However, I am more concerned with the psychological effect of his Nic on the “movers and shakers”. His emphasis on “the mobilization of enthusiasm, that electric power source of the human factory” must have also been attractive to social planners who thought of “the masses” as a “human factory”. Like, say, Stalin. l’Esprit Nouveau would have a nice ring even to many non-totalitarian thinkers. Something imitators would be attracted to.
Here’s a pic of what seems to be about the best one can do with interior decoration in Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation:
http://tiny.cc/t7v67
Other photos from the same apt, and others from the building, on his photostream.
The style screams “dorm room” to me.
The concrete hallways are putridly ugly. Dormitory becomes teen mental institution. Yuck.
JMH
“They would live in a sterile abode for the sake of status among their peers for living in a place built by a “famous” architect.”
I have watched a report on his apparments in Marseille and people, living in them, were also interviewed. There wasn’t such ugliness, nor any architec vagary (caprice), the design is fonctional, light is intelligently displayed all was ment to economize unuseful movements (mainly for the housewife), and people were happy with that, and sur-happy to live in a famous construction.
now about Vichy:
“Le Corbusier approached his Syndicalist friends in power at Vichy in hopes of finding there an authority to implement his ideas for reconstruction. For eighteen months Le Corbusier attempted to make his way in Vichy circles, first as part of a commission to study housing, and then as an increasingly annoying advocate of his own plan for Algiers. Le Corbusier left Vichy in 1943, after Algerian authorities had denounced him as a Bolshevik.” (the author is a JMH double?
)
Algerian authorities, Aka french far-right authorities…
After Liberation, Le Corbusier was able to take part in the reconstruction of France. Under the auspices of the Ministry of Reconstruction, Le Corbusier began plans for the port of Marseille, which culminated in the construction of his first Unite d’habitation. Le Corbusier prepared plans for the towns of St-Die and La Rochelle. Le Corbusier was selected as French delegate to the architectural commission of the United Nations. For a moment it seemed that many years of somewhat self-imposed martyrdom had borne fruit. Le Corbusier told an interviewer in New York, “For thirty years Fd been a consultant talking in a desert. Since 1945, I’ve led the architectural movement in France. I have arrived at a stage where things in my life flower, like a tree in season”
Problem for ALL artists, it’s HOW to survive, and above all, of their Art, I find no compromission to try to get markets from Vichy administration when he wasn’t himself a “collaborator”, besides, none knew how long such a regime cold last, so, people weren’t ment to starve util that Regime would disappear. Remeber, Rosevelt, didn’t acknowledge de Gaulle at the beginnings, but Vichy Regime.
Also, most of the “creators” of the era had socialist connotations, Picasso was a communist, and his works are bought by the capitalists…
bogie wheel
for the era (1945-1952), it ment progress, today it’s “has been”
I still don’t find the “thing” ugly, comparatively to other, even of nowadays, buildings for middle class people.
You can’t have original and fonctional architectures at the same time, you have to chose, original is expensive, and unique
bogie wheel
I forgot, the pic show a “studio”, a small space ment for one person or two
Mondrian might have claimed sumthin for the furniture design !
MC -
Yes, I know it was a studio apartment. But there are oodles of examples of studios with much more appealing base design and layout, which lends to more appealing interior decoration. Just barely scratching the surface:
http://tiny.cc/b8etv
http://tiny.cc/93e8p
The use of primary colors on the Marseilles building, in combination with the heavy(-handed) use of squares and rectangles, comes across as juvenile to me. Maybe it’s because kindergartens all across America use this look? I don’t know. I’m not a big fan of modernism to begin with but I do draw lines of distinction between that which I don’t care for, personally, but could see appealing to a lot of other people, and that which is patently ugly because it looks rigid, cheap and oppressive. Unite d’Habitation is pretty much in the latter camp IMO.
If the issue were the use of certain building materials, like concrete, rough brick and exposed pipes, then one would expect most if not all converted lofts to be as b0tt-ugly as a Brutalist apartment building. And yet they are not. Loft conversions have produced many, many examples of stunning beauty. Again, just one of many illustrations:
http://tiny.cc/ghzlb
So if space is not the issue (studios can be done quite appealingly) and building materials are not the issue (successful loft conversions), then something else is going on in the design and execution of buildings by LeCorbusier and his fellow travelers that *forces* the ugly to the surface. I think that something starts with architectural intent, well documented by others on this thread, which then becomes expressed in specific design elements.
Regardless of aesthetics, even those imposed by arrogant architects, none of this would matter if we were talking about private housing. If people want to buy, decorate and furnish a monstrosity with their own money, that’s their business. It’s the concept of subsidized housing that’s the core issue here. The fact that public housing has so frequently intersected with architectural ugliness by “famous designers” is, I tend to think, one of those curious relationships that Wretchard has a knack for unearthing, that took this thread above and beyond a debate about either issue (aesthetics or funding) alone.
Another thing I noticed from working as a contractor in downtown washington dc a decade ago was that most floors of US government had EEOC offices. The result in agencies that I worked for including HUD, Veterans Affairs, US Customs & Border Patrol…–was that minorities were way overrepresented. While whites usually occupied the top spots — all the people in the second tier in the lower ranks and on down were minority and usually black. By now huge percentages of the senior spots in the bureaucracy have shifted over to being black as well as very significant percentages of staff. While HUD was almost entirely black, places like Veterans Affairs were 40% black. These numbers were likely replicated through out the bureaucracy.
No longer, sadly. Have a look at the zoning and building codes — not to mention the “growth management laws.”
Boogie weel
the first pic you brought is “cheap” furnished, design wasn’t from Lecorbusier but “Les meubles de l’époque : Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand”
now check what is a private apartment:
http://tinyurl.com/5wxq3oq
Again, you have to put Le Corbusier’s building into its contex: pre WW2 after WW2, baroque wasn’t fashoniable, as everyone was fed up of old things, old space, old furnitures… Fortunately I kept wardrobes and cupboard that were in my family sonce great grand parents, even above, that were, fo some of them stored to become rotten in a moist room. I remember to have cleaned off one, and waxed it. Years after I got married a cousin told me, but that wardrobe was destined to my mother, I replied, too bad, if I hadn’t taken care of it, it won’t exist anymore.
That said, these old furnitures aren’t what we nowadays mean as pratical, they are heavy, cumbersome, but they impress visitors.
Now I don’t care of such “fantaisies”, it suffices to have something to range (tidy) things
“sonce great grand parents, even above, that were, fo some of them ”
since great grands, even, for some of them, definitly, I ought to drink coffee
wrong link, sorry
http://maisonradieuse.org/visiter/visiter.html
click on a square until “appartement privé”
See here for two competing architectural presentations.
Le Corbusier … did not invent the cube, nor sheet glass, he just happened along at a time when these could be combined in new ways, if it wasn’t him it would have been someone else. He makes a nice whipping boy as an advocate of efficiency over comfort or more organic forms, but there’s a lot of inevitable in what he stands for.
That’s my not particularly well-informed on this topic 0.02.
Oh, and here’s one further contribution to the discussion: Howard Roark.
Josh:
Heh. Howard Roark: another man with a pure architectural vision.
Dalrymple is thinking somewhat along the same lines about Le Corbusier as you, I think. If he had not had real talent, his place may have been filled by several less famous architects: “Le Corbusier does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism, to the spiritual, intellectual, and moral deformity of the interbellum years in Europe. Clearly, he was not alone; he was both a creator and a symptom of the zeitgeist. His plans for Stockholm, after all, were in response to an official Swedish competition for ways to rebuild the beautiful old city, so such destruction was on the menu. . . . . “
Josh…
Roark blew his stuff up before it was even trashed.
W a a a a y too far ahead of the curve.
We can’t be commending that kind of independent thought.
——
More generally…
Why is it that that all designs/ scheming for the projects is oriented towards reduced spaces, reduced comforts and above all reduced transportation links — and then the ‘experts’ wonder why attaining and maintaining employment is impossible for teen youth?
And why is it that in the middle of farm country — with its attendant low land costs — that St. Louis even considered densifying the dependent poor?
Going in you know that this population segment has huge crime issues, starting with a massive concentration of hapless females — particularly the teenagers — who function as ‘Alpha bait.’
With Big Daddy ( government ) missing from the equation the Alphas flash their Bad Boy act to establish that they are ideal mating material. That’s where all of the property destruction comes from! Mating competition, plain and simple, causes anti-societal preening — rather in the manner of a peacock — which then results in Neolithic gene sets passing on down to the next generation.
Dr. Huxtable is missing from the equation. The kind of modern genes that improve socialization are being castrated in the ghetto/ projects.
This gene competition can be seen fulsomely exposed in the National Geographic, March 2011 — Taming the Wild.
It is now realized that not only did Neolithic man tame the wolf and the flock — he tamed himself.
If steps are not taken quickly to stop crime-prince Alphas from swooping all of the babes in the projects then a terrible consequence will follow.
It only takes a handful of generations for wilding genes to explode across the ghetto community and establish ineradicable poverty. The genes that made for a wildly brave warrior are tragic vectors in our modern urban society.
That the ghetto massively promotes reverse comity at the genetic level is something is so un-PC that it is not addressed even as a research topic.
But it’s not going away.
—-
In the distant past too much warrioring trimmed the gene pool. I believe that we’ve domesticated ourselves for so long that our own genes have shifted far more than we can imagine. The baseline is lost to us.
However, another couple of generations rising from the projects is going to peel back the adaptations and reveal to one and all why progress 10,000 years ago was so halting and slow. Rather than peace and harmony — Eloi style — the natural state of Neolithic man was perpetual war. This is still seen in Papua New Guinea.
b @ 148: Why is it that that all designs/ scheming for the projects is oriented towards reduced spaces, reduced comforts …
Same design rules used on new apartments and condos in Los Angeles at anything below the multi-million dollar range.
I have long wondered, just what is going on with the incredible standards for gross ugliness and constipated dimensions of even the new “monster mansions”, spec houses built to the property lines and sold (I guess) to the nouveau riche? And mebbe to the Gaddafi real estate investment trust and that sort. In any case it would cost little or no more to at least make them attractive.
the natural state of Neolithic man was perpetual war
well, no, not war, or they would all be dead. hostility, perhaps. the lions are not at war with the antelopes, nor with the hyenas. War is when you drop all other activities and kill, or die, until there’s nobody left. anything less is not war, whatever it is. including our WOT.
The lions ARE at war with the hyenas.
When your top-of-the-line weapon is a spear there’s a real limit to how much damage you can inflict without suffering exactly the same damage.
The historical record and the archeological finds all point to perpetual warfare — normally of the skirmishing kind.
That was also the pattern in North America when the Caucasians showed up. Only a handful of the natives were NOT chronically at war with each other.
One of the earliest massacres — in the 17th Century — by the natives triggered a counter-massacre. The guys with the guns completely liquidated the naughty tribe down the road. Even with just bows and arrows, the natives were more than willing to ruthlessly murder and burn out farmers in their solitude. The counter stroke in almost all cases was total war.
George Washington, himself, put down the natives right in the middle of the Revolutionary War! It was a full blown ethnic cleansing never forgotten by the survivors. They found that being allied with the British this time around was a full blown disaster. The Colonials crushed the natives and then ultimately spanked the British.
Karen T
“Le Corbusier does not belong so much to the history of architecture as to that of totalitarianism, to the spiritual, intellectual, and moral deformity of the interbellum years in Europe
for you, only, and the few people that think the same, but he is studied in all architecture academia, and still the nowadays architects are more or less positionned for his architecture, or to contradict it, these don’t care of your political analyse of the person, and of the era, and of the aeras where he lived.
Corbu my have been a fascist lap dog, but for this in 1955, all was forgiven. The right client saved him.
b @ 150: One of the earliest massacres — in the 17th Century — by the natives triggered a counter-massacre. The guys with the guns completely liquidated the naughty tribe down the road. Even with just bows and arrows, the natives were more than willing to ruthlessly murder and burn out farmers in their solitude. The counter stroke in almost all cases was total war.
Yes. What that shows is that real war is a social/technological innovation that the ‘natives’ did not quite understand or adapt to, until rather too late.
In the natural case, the hyenas depend on the lions, though just what the hyenas do for the lions in turn, is not immediately clear to me. Keep them from getting too fat and lazy, I suppose.
Not that it’s clear whether that would have mattered.
but he is studied in all architecture academia, and still the nowadays architects are more or less positionned for his architecture, or to contradict it…
I mentioned above that I see the problems we have today with architects as more a problem of the gatekeepers than anything inherently wrong with the activity of architecture. Marie Claude reinforces my argument.
…none of this would matter if we were talking about private housing. If people want to buy, decorate and furnish a monstrosity with their own money…
Interestingly enough, Le Crow initially gained his fame building villas for wealthy Frenchmen, and his work was considered quite good and appreciated by his clients. These successes were where the person who would be living in the house approved payment. It was only when he started being paid by faceless bureacrats to design housing for faceless peons around the globe that his true nature bubbled to the surface. Grand open spaces unnreachable by the people packed into his brutalities, shadeless cement deserts in the subtropical heat, transportation systems that reduced traffic capacity and created unnecessary barriers: beyond the callous disregard for humanity, the man was incompetent as a designer. The perfect architect for Socialism.
JMH
“beyond the callous disregard for humanity, the man was incompetent as a designer.”
that shows that you don’t know his works at all,
only by what your favorite opinionists said about his political membership
I love how there is nothing — nothing! — French that Marie Claude will not find a way to defend. Well bless her. If we had 100 million Americans with her attitude toward her homeland, things would be a lot different.
I certainly don’t always agree with her, but I bet spending a some hours with Marie, a few bottles of fine French wine, a plate of cheeses and some baguettes would be quite a good time.
Forklift @ 152: Thanks for the link. I had never seen that building and I appreciate the knowledge. But to me, it’s an eyesore.
b/148 – Your outline has merit culturally, but I think actually alteration of genes is a much slower process. It’s so slow that proving Darwin’s theory remains elusive. That said, fatherless children are a very serious problem. And then I wonder. . .
Could Muslims be so feral because of polygamy?? Not enough father to go around?? And how does their architecture affect them? Those onion domes??
Oh well, I agree with others here who have seen ugliness where professional critics have found something to praise. The 20th c. has left many a scar upon the earth and the heart.
Thanks to all for a fascinating post and thread.
Read the National Geographic article: wild foxes became as tame as a lap dog in less than nine generations!
The shift can go the other way, too!
Without a fatherly intervention the ghetto babes are getting knocked up too soon and by fellows daddy wouldn’t approve — like the head of the local drug gang.
PUAs can tell it straight: the babes fall for Alpha every time. It’s NOT a conscious decision. It’s preprogrammed deep in the feminine DNA.
Co-operative behaviors required to earn a high income ( for most ) come off as Beta if not Omega to the babes. Such men are mere wallets to them — because they don’t want their seed — just the benefits.
——-
The reason that most societies evolved to arranged marriage is because their fresh flowered daughters make astoundingly poor selections.
In many ways Romeo & Juliet is a morality tale about a girl foolish enough to reject her father’s pick: Paris. In 16th Century England or Italy Romeo is plainly a disaster waiting to happen. Let’s start with his age: he’s a teenager! Yuck! Girls should be married by age twenty — but boys must become men — first.
The plot establishes that Romeo had ever been chasing every skirt in town. He’s a slick talking Beta swooper.
A true Romantic Love is a creation of Shakespeare and other poets to balance the exigencies of court life. For the peerage marriage must concord with political gambits. Neither groom or bride could ignore their station, as unvalued people do.
And by the poets, Romantic Love is a forbidden one. Thus the Arthurian quandary WRT a love triangle — and R & J.
It’s nice to know that when it’s time to cheat on the old ball and chain that you’ve got the poets on your side.
——–
Where did the residents of Pruitt-Igoe come from? One place was Mill Creek valley.
Built St. Louis – Web Log
Mill Creek Valley, A Soul of Saint Louis
Destroy the community. Destroy the family. Destroy the country?
I love how there is nothing — nothing! — French that Marie Claude will not find a way to defend. Well bless her. If we had 100 million Americans with her attitude toward her homeland, things would be a lot different.
Agreed, peterike. It would be nice if everyone could find *some*thing to be proud of re: their native land, but some countries make that task difficult to nigh impossible. OTOH there are countries with no deficit of greatness in their history. If one is going to be stubbornly nationalistic then, it seems to me, France is one of those countries worth being quite stubborn about. So I give props to MC. She comports herself like a d@mn proud Frenchwoman. Half the time I don’t agree with her, sometimes I think she picks a fight for the sake of picking a fight, but, dang, no one can accuse her of lacking patriotism.
I would distrust her if she groveled and apologized for her country in the company of foreigners. Such behavior never speaks well of anyone. Especially presidents. Weird how that lesson is lost on some people.
bogie wheel
at least, I’m not smart, like the political corrected plebe would like
It’s easier to have such converssations here than on the european stage, even the French are berating me for my non diplomatic talks
Guys, Le Corbusier and the architects of the Bauhaus, while you might think some of their designs were ugly or misguided, were never philosophically aiming to destroy communities and create ugly buildings.
Not so the “Deconstructionists” of the ’70′s and later. These heavily honored architects, like the early Frank Gehry, Michael Rotundi, Thomas Mayne, Eric Owen Moss and Zaha Hadid, designed purposely discordant, threatening, oppressive and dehumanizing buildings.
In much the same way that the Democrat party went over the philosophical anti American marxist cliff in the ’70′s, the architectural community began in the late 70′s to promote this new nihilist kind of architecture that these “elite” architects were producing. This was a clear philosophical break from the modernists of the early twentieth century. All the Cloward Priven urges seen elsewhere on our cultural landscape, were put into these designs. Following the lead of the entertainment and fashion, the University driven architectural community honored and encouraged architectural designs subliminally intent on destroying our culture. And to make matters worse, all too often, the Far Left controlled Big City governments purposely use these architects to do the important public commissions to reinforce this nihilism.
Gehry, omg. I live in Los Angeles, enuf said.
Though, whoever designed the *parking* in the new Disney Hall, finally got it right.
Yesterday I visited the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA is the best place to learn about Brutalist architecture in the context of 20th century art and politics. There are admiring displays of not just architecture as an industrial design process but also of propaganda for public hygiene. The rejection of the past and all ornamentation was stressed. Alfred Loos is quoted on how doing so was a sign of civilization. To me it shows a rejection of what makes us human.
Marie, had I the money, I would gladly pay to have every Corbusier-inspired Brutalist pile on American soil shipped to France for Le Musée Crow and have you installed as Curator.
Alas, I’ve no such fortune (do you know how expensive it is to ship concret overseas?) so we’ll have to leave the buildings in place at let nature – or the inhabitants – take their course.
I will grant you that his imimtators were lesser talents, but then so where Bismarcks’. Both men – and the lesser lights they inspired – proved disasters for Western Civilization. We Americans haven’t yet equaled the Old World in this regard, but we are trying. Oh, we are trying…
JMH
wait a few decades, and they’ll become like the cambodgian temples, snacked by Nature !
b/158 – Interesting article. Here’s the link:
http://tinyurl.com/6krpv25
Sounds like domesticated foxes could become a new pet fad.
As for the correlation to human behavior, you may be right. I misunderstood your argument. Breeding is certainly important and is not the same as evolution. Indiscriminate breeding is already fairly uncivilized behavior and may lead to further decay of the same, unless it has some unknown benefits to civilization, in the long run. Hard to see any benefits in the short run.
Three or four generations and counting. And how to change the situation? Do we begin to think like nannies or do we fire the nannies. If behavior is genetically determined, then whatever Le Corbusier and his followers design and the governing types throw up and tear down is inevitable. As are any consequences.
OTOH, if genetics are only influential, freedom lives.
Josh, I’m not talking about the mellowed celebrated Gehry who designed the Disney Hall. I’m refering to the Gehry who in the early 70′s wrapped his Brentwood house in chainlink and corrugated metal in a purposeful effort to shock. He inspired the Deconstructionists.
On architecture, it seems to me that you don’t have to go to a symphony, but you do have to go a building. So architects were wiser in job security than composers, writers, or other kinds of artists, because they have you by the balls.
I don’t know the actual accounting of feelings, but I quite suspect Le Corbusier and other quite envied Albert Speer. Consider the Nazis and whatever they stood for to merely be a means, and Speer emerges with the perfect architectural gig. Here’s a man whose canvas expanded to become an entire culture, one he shaped and inspired through his control of public spaces. A real question emerged: is architecture about buildings, or social planning?
Whatever went bad in modern art in 1918 went bad across the board. Music wasn’t for listening anymore. Architecture wasn’t for buildings. Writing wasn’t for readership. Nobody to this day can figure out what planet painting and sculpture landed on.
These are reflection of the mind of the modern intellectual, unmoored, adrift. A hazzard to himself and others, mostly.
159. Aristide
Frank’s housing bubble also caused the wholesale destruction of low end housing.
Without any master plan the ‘hood was invaded by Poles, Russians and others straight from the old world into inner city Sacramento.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=oak%20park
Use definition number two.
Today’s Oak Park is shockingly white. What little I’ve heard makes me believe that the former government dependents relocated both north and south where rents were somewhat bearable.
In all of Barney’s central planning he overlooked those who could never join in the mania. They got crushed just from the leaping rents in a world of no economic growth.
There is a bright line connecting the idea that government should focus on results as opposed to principles, in this case maximizing the number of homeowners who would then change their behavior as opposed to having an honest and efficient banking system under the rule of law, and the subsequent drive by the government to have the banks issue subprime mortgages in order to increase home ownership rates.
82. Forgotten Man
The real question is why should anyone care where a criminal lives? If they can’t follow the law why should they benefit from a society that they abuse?
Go to your local post office. Have a look at the rogues gallery. Tell me how many abused children you see. I’ll save you the time. Almost all of them.
uh Cowboy
the fashist and nazy architectures were ment to celebrate nationalism, their monument were written in a Cinecitta peplum glory, a bit like our 2nd empire Haussmann reframed Paris, while Le Corbusier in the conceipt of a population without patry, like the EU wants it today. It’s why, finally, Le Corbusier’s ideology is more actual than it was in the thirties.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Eug%C3%A8ne_Haussmann
about “nationalist” architecture:
http://olivier.nourisson.free.fr/nasio.html (in french)
Though the point of view expressed here on Le Corbusier interests me, I’m going to digg into this view, for I had only the history of Art perspective.
Curtis W. Fentress, whose work was influenced by I.M. Pei, designed Denver Intl Airport, which was enthusiastically approved by then Mayor Federico Pena as the iconic form he was looking for – “similar to the Sydney Opera House” (designed by a team of architects who are unfamiliar to me.) The Opera House is quite stunning.
I’m not sure who was responsible for the interior design and artwork. Probably left Dodge by now.
(On the plus side DIA is regularly acknowledged within the industry as one of the best managed airports – in the world. Kudos for that – no small task.)
Don Rodrigo is right. It was the tenants who ruined Pruitt-Igoe. Given a different, more decent sort of people with higher social capital, those buildings would probably still be standing and considered desirable housing.
As for the particular sort of people who destroyed Pruitt-Igoe, blert has hit the nail squarely on the head. One of the few things that cheers me about the idiot in the WH having landed there is that finally blacks are beginning to be called out on their horrible social pathologies, which are problems only they can solve. All the rest of society can do is try to protect itself from the effects of those pathologies, i.e., build more prisons. In all honesty, until the situation of blacks committing 50+% of the violent crime with less than 12% of the population changes drastically for the better, America will not even consider a) gun control, and b) ending the death penalty. Too many people will never forget Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom.
172. M. Simon:
Go to your local post office. Have a look at the rogues gallery. Tell me how many abused children you see. I’ll save you the time. Almost all of them.
I’m not sure if this is your point, but I have some jarring news for you: the “child abuse leads to crimnal behavior” notion is wildly exaggerated. Personal and anecdotal observation, coupled with an extensive study by two Johns Hopkins psychologists showed that the “abused” future criminals were often the only ones among their siblings who were frequently singled out for physical punishment. The use of physical punishment by frustrated, exasperated lower-class parents may not be enlightened, but it is a human reaction to trying to deal with an obdurate child with a mean streak. Criminal lawyers and inner-city teachers have related to me how a parent would show up in court pleading with the judge to put away their bad kid so that the good kids in their family could be saved from the bad one’s influence (and for their own safety).
94. toadold
While Japan is often seen as a monolithic culture it is not. Some families keep lists of names of other families that are considered Etta and are not to be intermarried with. Government efforts to reduce the discrimination are ongoing and I don’t know how successful. That is part of the underlying theme of the movie, “Departures” the main character becomes Etta when he becomes an undertaker.
In Edo Japan (the time of Japanese isolationism), the most despised and lowest class were the merchants, who were also the primary source of wealth building in Edo Japan! They inspired the marvelous block printing art Japan is famous for because they were also the prime sponsors and purchasers of visual art at the time.
Ironically, there is a bit of this hostility toward the American “merchant class” these days, which is expected to carry much of the rest of society on its despised back. This contempt for the core of the middle class was a primary reason for the emergence of the Tea Parties.