Housing and Urban Decline

Responding to msg by carr0023@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Brian T Carroll)
on


Brian,

Late comer to this:

Bittersweet mindlock follows word "housing" like my colleague's
seizure at "socialism" and "free market".

Here's what I try to dodge strangulation by this
socio-politico-economico chastity-term which too often
patronizingly under-specifies for the benighted masses by
unimaginative pleading socio-politico-economico-constraints.

First the Sweet:

Look for and design architectural features in locales that the
fine- and high-minded public servant just can't seem to see:

Textural mappings against the contextual

Intra-urban spaces and paths and utilities that defy urban
infrastructure

Light and shadow confabulations that mutate over time and
building and zoning lines

Multifarious scales and measurements not constitutionally
protectable or mathematically projectable -- like unprecedented
imaginary rules and loci of inter-twisted ellipsoids

Illicit ownerships and liabilities

Sightlines and blindlines disrespectful of property lines

Uneasements across boundaries

Toxicities awating naturally engendered solvents of TLC


Now the Bitter rant:

BRs, LRs, DRs, Ks, Baths, rear yards, FARs, should be
completely indistiguishable and inseparable from loggias,
palaces, health spas, 18-hole links, germ-warfare armament
incinerators, Arlington National Cemetaries, Holocaust Museums
-- travelling by, say, RV, untethered across isobars -- in
order to abandon the safe, blameless, seductive algorithms of
big-mush-award-winning-housing.

Museum-artificial-quality, HUD & AIA-participatory-this and
-that, universally-condoned-ahead-of-time, make a flood of good
will Motherhood ApplePie Housing Neighborhoods that overwashes
the architect's responsibility to be combatively imaginative,
and worse, in the process, camouflages the predations of every
bright-brain trained to make money off captive markets -- just
like Food, Health and Law-government-military.

Check who thrives by writing housing legislation, regulation
and enforcement at all levels, how many careers and industries
prey on the field, what epical exculpatory stories encrust it,
and why "housing standards" just never quite get met generation
after generation, and you too may never want to hear the word
again.

This cheap, shoddy architecture, whatever the cause, should be
intolerable to an architect.

Magic bullets are chimerical. For me it's been more useful for
many years to avoid "housing" to do unbridled architectural
work for free, to escape over-designed deprivation.

But my mind is slightly open on this.


John
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