Michael Bell ¦ Design
Stateless Housing ι New York ι New York 2001-02 ι The market
tendency to subdivide property in order to build low-density,
single-family units is here coupled with an attempt to promote density
and collective housing types. . . .
Stateless
Housing was an attempt to define a new model of housing that combined
the high-density, open space paradigms of early modernism with the
single family house model common in the United States. The market
tendency to subdivide property in order to build low-density,
single-family units is here coupled with an attempt to promote density
and collective housing types. The housing units are joined but
individuated. The basic housing type employed is a triplex model—three
units combined as a module. Each prototypical housing block contains
four triplex modules and a higher-density duplex apartment building.
The land underneath is left open so that natural vegetation can
flourish.
16
Houses was supported for both its architectural content and as a model
for collaboration between institutions whose efforts are multiplied by
shared information and specialization. It also served as a model of
institutional collaboration that the Architectural League of New York
and the New York Department of Housing Preservation Development relied
on this year in forming a research and exhibition project
to explore the redevelopment of a 100-acre city owned site on the
Rockaway Peninsula in Queens. The Architectural League and the HPD
chose to fund four university- based teams to explore how market-rate
housing could be inserted into a fragmented urban fabric whose margins
are formed by three eras of public housing. The 100-acre ocean front
parcel on the Rockaway Peninsula was cleared in 1968 as one of
The
last major urban renewal projects in New York City and never
redeveloped. Today it is an ecologically and politically unstable site
that will be redeveloped as 1800 units of new market rate housing. In
this context we designed a project, titled Stateless Housing, whose
title refers to the literal states withdraw from subsidized housing in
this area as well as the organic and ecological qualities of the ocean
front site. As a result of this collaborative model the HPD is now
considering hiring architects and planners prior to developers thus
placing design as well as ecological issues on a more even playing
field with finance. The Architectural League and the HPD relied on 16
Houses as a model that renewed former roles of the university taking a
substantial lead in social and politically sensitive urban
redevelopment. 16 Houses and Stateless Housing establish bridges
between professional practice, the university and the community at a
level of engagement that does not diminish the complexity of either
realm. The work attempts to renew the effectiveness of architecture and
the university but indeed any local component of urbanism. It has been
an attempt to bring a generation of urban theory into a contemporary
and pragmatic realm. The expansion of the United States economy in the
1990’s has been the inevitable impetus for this engagement
architecture’s critical role has always bridged art and economics and
these works attempt to redefine the malleability of this conflation.
Project Team: Michael Bell, Anthony Burke, Alex Phifer, John Mueller
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