Comments on: Death of modernism: the human story

By: Christine

Christine — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 01:34:45 +0000

Incredibly the drive to suburbanisation in St Louis seems to have been based on the loan policies of The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC). Massey and Denton in ‘American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass’ say (p51);

“Beginning in the 1930s, the federal government launched a series of programs designed to increase employment in the construction industry and make home ownership widely available to the American public….Passed in the depression year of 1933, it provided funds for refinancing urban mortgages in danger of default and granted low interest loans to former owners who had lost their homes through foreclosure to enable them to regain their properties. The HOLC was the first government sponsored program to introduce, on a mass scale, the use of long term self-amortizing mortgages with uniform payments.”

With the loans was also introduced a practice of ‘redlining’ which rated loans according to the risks associated with four categories of neighbourhoods. The effect of this rating system was that the lowest two categories of neighbourhoods virtually never received loans.

The two neighbourhoods which did receive loans were new neighbourhoods of “American business and professional men” and established areas which were still considered desirable places to live.

By: Tom Turner

Tom Turner — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:08:06 +0000

In most countries the flight from rural areas to cities continues, because machines do the farmwork and salaries are higher in cities. But in the US, and in Europe to a lesser extent, people wanted to moved from the cramped conditions of inner cities to a car-based “better life” in suburbs – which Joel Garreau called Edge Cities. This pattern has begun to change in Europe with younger and older people finding that life is better in the cities than in the suburbs.

By: Christine

Christine — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:19:22 +0000

More to the story…

What are the causes of population decline in cities? Perhaps the distribution of employment opportunities and the ability to achieve home ownership were factors in St Louis’ depopulation?

In commissioning the design for Pruitt Igoe the civic authorities in St Louis where hoping to stem the population decline of the city which had begun in the 1930s. Regardless of the success or failure of the Pruitt Igroe housing project, this underlying objective proved to be a failure. As Alexander von Hoffman records in his paper ‘Why they Built the Pruitt-Igoe Project’ “from 1950 to 1970, the city’s population fell by 234,000 people, and its share of the St. Louis metropolitan area’s population plummeted from 51 percent to 26 percent.”

By: Tom Turner

Tom Turner — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:59:51 +0000

Re Grindelhochhaeuser, it is just what I think should be done for the Heygate Estate in London (see comment 3 on http://www.gardenvisit.com/blog/2009/09/23/context-skyrise-highrise-and-surprise/ ) – unless it is very badly built (which is what I should have said instead poorly designed, above). Prosperous single people flourish in this kind of building – it is like being back at college. But if you have a lot of people under stress then I do not think they benefit by living near each other. I also think John F C Turner was right that if people are short of money it is better to give them money than to give them housing, especially if it is of a kind they would not choose for themselves. Another point is that if the ‘green space’ around the blocks is not going to serve any useful purpose then….

PS: the juxtaposition of photos at the head of this blog post is brilliant

By: Gordon Evans

Gordon Evans — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:57:40 +0000

A further thought on Hamburg: The biggest building project there directly after the war – set in progress by the British Army – was a truly Corbussian estate composed of 12 apartment blocks, the “Grindelhochhaeuser”, a scaled down version of Pruitt-Igoe. The “Rivers of Trees” got planted too. At some point in the 70’s the apartments began to decay but instead of demolishing, the housing association owner invested 75 million Euro and the estate is again an extremely popular place to live, for singles and for families. Should anyone want to visit a living, vibrant example – 3,000 people live there – of the Corbussian dream, this is the place to go. Are there any others? Look at http://www.grindelfilm.de/fotogalerie.html for photos, and 53°34’28.14″N/9°58’50.09″E in Google Earth. There is still a functioning paternoster in one of the buildings. The estate was listed in 1979.

By: Christine

Christine — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 04:54:10 +0000

Tom the ingredients of your sentence are interesting:

Essentially the problem is about designing appropriately for ‘fragmented families’.

These are procurement issues – about the building’s users

1) large concentrations (what concentration is optimal?)
2) living on welfare (with little choice of abode? limited outcome?)

These are planning and design issues – about the siting and design of the building

4) isolated (from transport and other infrastructure?)
5) poorly designed (for the needs of the user?)

This term is neutral is assume?

6) apartment blocks

By: Tom Turner

Tom Turner — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:54:22 +0000

About ten years ago I walked through a public space between social housing apartment blocks in, I think, Dusseldorf. The cars indicated that the people were not rich but everything was well cared for and respected. One of the British students looked in amazement at the lack of vandalism and remarked ‘You know: they are just better people than us’.
Things have got better in London since they transferred the ownership from municipal authorities to housing associations but there are still serious problems when they put large concentrations of fragmented families living on welfare into isolated and poorly designed apartment blocks. This is not surprising – and it has little to do with architecture, landscape architecture or urban design.

By: Gordon Evans

Gordon Evans — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:00:13 +0000

Germany has been building apartment blocks for decades and very many of them are charming and romantic places to live. My daughter lives in a newish one in Hamburg and she has a small, cheap, well-heated apartment close to the city centre that students in London could only inhabit in their fantasies. She looks out – like very many German apartment dwellers – into the branches of a beautiful Horse Chestnut that keeps her in touch with the seasons. Sophie has no useful space at ground level at all – save for the many Hamburg parks – but she really doesn’t need or want it. There is no concierge, there is a travelling janitor, the inhabitants of the apartments are a broad age and nationality range of low income people and I have never had to be worried at all about her safety, or about her quality of life. I don’t know what the chemistry is for getting apartments blocks right, but Germany certainly seems to have more of it than many other countries.

By: Tom Turner

Tom Turner — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 05:35:58 +0000

London has spent the last decade building apartment blocks instead of housing with gardens. I regret it, because they have not learned to make useful space at ground level, but there do not seem to be any social problems associated with them – because they are occupied by relatively affluent people who probably spend long hours at the office and much of their spare time away from home.

By: Christine

Christine — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 05:08:36 +0000

This You Tube video on Benny farm seems quite nostalgic? [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9MW3pBoKIw ]

Perhaps Benny Farm was a redundant building (ie. the original use – housing for veterans was no longer needed) rather than a failed building.

Benny Farm was built in 1946-47 and redeveloped in 2005-07.
Pruitt-Igoe was built in 1954-55 and demolished in 1972 [the 16th March at 3pm]

The housing stock Pruitt-Igoe replaced were not particularly desirable.
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt-Igoe ] In the city of St Louis “…a 1947 official survey found out that 33 thousand homes had communal toilets.[7]”

Pruitt-Igoe is significant as one of the first modernist buildings to be demolished less than 20 years after its construction.

Benny Farm has been conceived of as affordable housing as part of a broader sustainability project. It will be interesting to review the success of the remodelled Benny Farm 20 years from now.

Tom may be right about the management philosophy of Pruitt-Igoe (once its original middleclass demographic had shifted) as being key to its ultimate failure. Perhaps the change of intended use also demanded remodelling of the original development as built also?