forec losed; rehousing the american dream - barry bergdoll

Fore-closed Barry Bergdoll reinhold Martin The Museum of Modern Art, New York In association with The Temple HoyneBuell center for the study of American Architecture,columbia University,

Fore-closed

Barry Bergdoll

reinhold Martin

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

In association with The Temple HoyneBuell center for

the study of American Architecture,columbia University,

New York

Published in conjunction with the

exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, organized at The

Museum of Modern Art, New York, byBarry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson

curator of Architecture and design,

MoMA, with reinhold Martin, director,Temple Hoyne Buell center for the study

of American Architecture, columbiaUniversity It runs from February 15 toJuly 30, 2012

The exhibition is made possible by Therockefeller Foundation This is the

second exhibition in the series Issues in

contemporary Architecture, supported

by Andre singer

The accompanying workshops are madepossible by MoMA’s Wallis AnnenbergFund for Innovation in contemporary Artthrough the Annenberg Foundation

Additional support for the publication isprovided by The richard H driehausFoundation

Produced by the department of

Publications, The Museum of ModernArt,

New York

edited by david Frankel

designed by MTWTF (glen cummings,

Juan Astasio, Aliza dzik, Andrew

shurtz),

New York

Production by Matthew Pimm

Printed and bound by Asia one Printinglimited, Hong Kong

This book is typeset in

Akzidenz-grotesk

The paper is 120gsm White A woodfree

Published by The Museum of ModernArt,

11 W 53 street, New York, New York10019

© 2012 The Museum of Modern Art,New York

“The Buell Hypothesis,” pp 19–52, andthe descriptions of the sites on pp 55–57,

73–75, 91–93, 109–11, and 127–29are all © 2012 The Trustees of columbiaUniversity in the city of New York

copyright credits for certain illustrationsare cited on p 181 All rights reservedlibrary of congress control Number:2012931748

IsBN: 978-0-87070-827-5

distributed in the United states and

canada by d.A.P./distributed Art

Publishers, Inc., New York.

distributed outside the United states and

canada by Thames & Hudson ltd,

london

secretary shaun donovan’s speech

and the proceedings of the June 18workshops were transcribed from audiorecordings into type by castingWords,

at http://castingwords.com

cover, back cover, and flaps: details

of the five Foreclosed projects by Mos

Architects, Visible Weather, studiogang Architects, WorKac, and ZagoArchitecture

Printed and bound in Hong Kong

7

Foreword

glenn d lowry

9

The Buell Hypothesis

reinhold Martin, leah Meisterlin, andAnna Kenoff

Projects

The oranges, New Jersey

Mos ArcHITecTs: THoUgHTs oN AWAlKINg

cITY

73

Temple Terrace, Florida

VIsIBle WeATHer: sIMUlTANeoUscITY

91

cicero, Illinois

sTUdIo gANg ArcHITecTs: THe

182 Trustees of The Museum of ModernArt

since its founding given issues of

housing and urbanism

pride of place alongside aesthetic andformal ques-

tions With the complex and timely

project Foreclosed:

Rehousing the American Dream, we

renew that legacy

It is too often forgotten that preciselyeighty years ago,

the Museum’s epoch-making Modern Architecture:

International Exhibition of 1932 not

only promoted the

aesthetic principles of what curatorsHenry-russell

Hitchcock and Philip Johnson saw as anemerging

“International style,” but also—with the

collaboration of

the writer lewis Mumford—advocatedhousing reform in

the slums of New York and other

American cities as the

effects of the worldwide economicdepression began

to make themselves profoundly felt Inrecent years

that advocacy role has again been ahallmark of our

department of Architecture and design,particularly in

the series “Issues in contemporaryArchitecture,” which

challenges architects to confront

problems they don’t

necessarily face in the direct

commissions and design

competitions that are the usual vehiclesfor new design

invited a broad range of designers towork together to

imagine ways to make cities more

resilient to the

ris-ing sea levels brought on by climatechange With that

project, Barry Bergdoll, the Museum’sPhilip Johnson

chief curator of Architecture and design,also cre-

ated a unique collaboration between theMuseum and

its sister institution MoMA Ps1, which

provided studio

space for workshops open to publicvisits and debates

while design was under way That

process was followed

by an exhibition of the results at MoMA

plines that separately and implicitlyshape our daily built

environment, have come together to thinkcollaboratively

and explicitly about new models forfuture develop-

ment of suburbs In an economic climatemore and more

often compared to that of the Museum’searly years in

the 1930s, the curators have presentedthe workshop’s

design teams with the challenge of

seeing a silver

lin-ing in the economic downturn—of

looking for places to build ever fartherfrom the urban

core, are fabrics that have the potential

Foreclosed aims at nothing less than the

programs, through the website with blogand com-

mentary, to the exhibition at the Museum

8

The mission of the Buell center is toadvance the interdisciplinary study ofAmerican architecture, urbanism,

and landscape As a separately endowedentity affili-

ated with columbia University’s

devoted specifically to the study of

publica-tions, and awards

In joining with The Museum of ModernArt to spon-

sor the workshop whose products arepresented in this

exhibition, the Buell center has enlargedthe scope of its

mission by undertaking first to define anurgent contem-

porary problem in the built environmentand then to par-

ticipate in the search for innovativesolutions Aside from

sharing in the management of

Foreclosed, the center’s

contribution, initiated and led by itsdirector, reinhold

Martin, is embodied in two documents

appearing as

prologue and afterword to the workpresented herein:

The Buell Hypothesis—the proposition

that provoked the

endeavor—and a critical essay

evaluating the analytic

responses and synthetic design

proposals received from

workshop participants

The subject of housing and its

relationship to

concepts of public and private in

American society is

now at the forefront of our

consciousness, yet remains

strangely resistant to fruitful discourse

Foreclosed have dared to venture that

the imagination of the architect, withessential support from other disciplines,can bring the problem

of housing into focus in a way that

stimulates the needed

discourse and opens it to possibilitiesthat would other-

wise remain undiscovered The Buellcenter is full of

admiration for the courageous leadershipshown by

MoMA’s department of Architecture anddesign in con-

ceiving and mounting this boldly

exploratory exhibition

It has been a privilege for us to

participate in thus

test-ing the Buell Hypothesis: “change thedream and you

change the city.”

Henry N cobb

chair, Advisory Board

Temple Hoyne Buell center for the study

of American

Architecture

9

Fig 1 levittown, New York, in 1958.Built by the developer William levitt inNassau county, long Island, outside NewYork city, in 1947–51.

10

however—as it might have been

planning—to one of the

recently built “communities” of

supersized developer

houses, each surrounded on its

individual lot by a

nar-row frame of manicured lawn, that in thelast decade or

so have come to circle the outer fringe ofnearly every

American city There, developers

churned out readymade

dreams on an ever larger scale,

producing rings of often

monofunctional bulge—carpets here of

demographics of today’s new suburbanpopulation and

unamenable to conversion to otherpurposes Many of

these developments—more real estateinvestments than

places—are now, at scarcely a decadeold, landscapes

of partial abandonment, disinvestment,and foreclosure,

symptoms that strikingly recall themalaise of inner-city

neighborhoods in the 1960s and early

which had already gained steam forseveral years before

the financial crisis of autumn 2008? Isthat model of

building to be left intact, to be set inoperation again on

the diminishing supply of undevelopedland if and when

the current recession fades into

consciousness as a

bad dream?

In the fifteen years leading up to thecollapse of

the housing market—the first signs thatair was escap-

ing from that speculative bubble came in

use (fig 2), and by

the rise of the smart growth movement.3Yet apart from

isolated cases across the country, both ofthese drives

were largely offset by the overheatedmarket for turnkey

developments on new exurban sites,which leapfrog-

ged the older suburban-sprawl model ofdevelopment

into virgin territory—the path of leastresistance for

Fig 2 Wellington, Palm Beach county,Florida A typical New Urbanist plan,designed in 1989 by duany Plater-

Zyberk & co., Miami

most developer models By the height ofthe housing

11

boom, the average size of the Americanhouse had in-

creased by almost 140 percent in justover a half century,

from around 983 square feet in 1950 to

vious to cries of ecological

unsustainability, but in the

wake of the foreclosure crisis it has runcompletely out

to the tenacity of the postwar Americandream—the

enduring allure of the detached housewith front lawn

and backyard patio—as well as to theprofitability of

catering to these aspirations.”5 Half ofthe American pop-

ulation today lives in suburban

communities.6 That

popu-lation, however, bears little resemblance

to the white

middle-class average-family

Fig 3 Unidentified “McMansion.”

diverse as cities In 2010, poverty insuburbs reached its

highest level since the U.s census

Bureau first began to

record income statistics, in 1967;7 andnumerous demo-

graphic studies have shown that suburbsare aging,

as baby boomers stay put there andyounger people

choose to become urban homesteadersrather than

suburban soccer moms.8 The percentage

of households

without children is growing nearly as

fast in suburbs as

in cities, and where newly arrived

immigrants once made

their first stop in urban tenements theynow often go

directly to suburbs—or what might oncehave been called

suburbs, I should say; for if one thing isabundantly clear

it is that there is scarcely such a thing as

a “typical

sub-urb” (fig 4) anywhere but in the

American imaginary And

that imaginary is in a state of shock andanxiety brought

on by the collapse of the model of

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream sets

out to address this complex nationalemergency, at

once a cause and a symptom of themortgage-default

crisis, on which our project seizes as arare chance for

fresh thinking While architects, urbanand landscape

Fig 4 The house of the cleaver family

in the television sitcom Leave It

designers, and infrastructure engineerscan do little

to Beaver, 1957–63 The cleavers lived

here during four of the show’s six

seasons

directly about the problem of foreclosedmortgages

12

and households “under water” (thatbeing a crisis of the

financial architecture of America), theycan address the

risks of a downward spiral of

disinvestment in suburbs

In this sense discussions that have beenforeclosed

for decades can now again be had, achange potently

underscored by The Buell Hypothesis, a

Meisterlin, Anna Kenoff,

and a group of doctoral students in urbanplanning at

columbia University, The Buell

Hypothesis also invites a

reconsideration of the residential

correspond to our society’s diverseneeds and are not

adaptable to change, or to the role thatzoning, restrictive

covenants, and

convenience store, for

instance—but also in the creation of alandscape remark-

ably inflexible to the plate tectonics ofglobal capital in an

era of abstract financial instruments

Beyond such questions, The Buell Hypothesis

(fig 5)—which the Buell center published and MoMA

self-made available as a research report tothe architect-led

teams that designed projects for

a whole series of previously unexaminedassumptions.

Hoyne Buell center for the study of

other incentives—is now seen as

anything but a universal

panacea Besides the issue of

affordability (rendered

more and more problematic with thescaling back of

federal programs such as Hope VI,

which often improved

the quality of public housing but alsooften reduced the

supply of affordable homes within givenareas), it is

apparent that in a severely diminishedjob market, home

ownership brings with it a lack of

mobility and flexibility

even while the plans for high-speed railcorridors that

President Barack obama announced in

2009, as part

13 reopening Foreclosure

of the national stimulus package, havesuffered huge

setbacks, there is a new receptiveness todiscussions of

altering the “natural” regime of the car,now that soaring

gasoline prices are straining many

In the America that will emerge from thegreat

recession of the early twenty-first

century, the unrolling

of a welcome mat to developers acrossthe landscape is

in all likelihood endangered,

unsustainable ecologically,

demographically, economically,

socially, and probably

even politically No Noah’s ark can beconstructed to

preserve existing species of urban and

the moment demands enormous

hybridization and the

development of basically new species ofdesigned envi-

ronments, in which uses, demographics,and ownership

models have been rethought,

reinvigorated, and given

new resilience, essentially crafting newindividual and

collective ways of living In all

likelihood, new modes of

ownership will emerge, not merely newfinancial “prod-

ucts” to be bought and sold in globalmarkets but experi-

ments with different individual andcollective ownership

assumptions

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream fol-

lows a model set at MoMA in 2010 by

the Rising Currents

project, in which the Museum pairedfive interdisciplin-

ary teams—each assembled by one ormore emerging

designers, of great talent and vision, asteam leaders—

with five different sites in New YorkHarbor to create

ideas for alternative futures in response

New conversations were begun not onlywith city offi-

cials but also with city residents andwith architects and

architecture students Although Rising Currents faced

a problem that is ultimately global, itsfocus was local;

Foreclosed, on the other hand, addresses

an issue at a

national scale

Fig 6 Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront Installation As

in Rising Currents, the five Foreclosed

teams view of the exhibition at The

Museum of Modern Art, New York,March 24–october 11, 2010

began, not with a specific brief, but with

New York city and adjacent New

Jersey, all visible from

the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, thestaten Island Ferry,

14

or from many of the planes that land atNewark, JFK,

and laguardia airports Instead they weresuburban

municipalities, often unknown to almosteveryone but

those who live or work there or nearby(although anyone

who buys mail-order goods from

staples, for instance,

has probably received packages fromrialto) These

sites were “unearthed” through

states, as proposed by the America2050initiative of the regional the economy ofeurope in the late twentieth century andPlan Association.

is now doing the same in china, wasthought possible at

least on a limited basis in the Unitedstates (fig 7; much

of course would depend on the

placement of stations

and nodal points on those lines) Mostimportant, all

have experienced high rates of

foreclosure, and continue

to shelter many properties at risk offoreclosure; and in

addition to their properties now held by