Foreclosed Rehousing The American Dream

Overzicht van het werk van de Amerikaanse architectuurfotograaf (1900-1976).

In 2030, the world's population will be a staggering eight billion people. Of these, two-thirds will live in cities, and most will be poor. With limited resources, this uneven growth will be one of the greatest challenges faced by societies across the globe. Over the next years, city authorities, urban planners and designers, economists, and many others will have to join forces to avoid major social and economical catastrophes, working together to ensure these expanding megacities will remain habitable. To engage this international debate The Museum of Modern Art presents Uneven Growth, Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, its third iteration in the 'Issues in Contemporary Architecture' series. Following the same model as the critically acclaimed Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront and Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, Uneven Growth brings together an international group of scholars, practitioners, and experts of architecture and urbanism in a series of workshops, an exhibition, and a publication to focus on how emergent forms of tactical urbanism can address the increasing inequality of urban development around the globe. Featuring proposals for six global metropolises - New York, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Hong Kong and Lagos - each developed by a team pairing local practitioners with international researchers, Uneven Growth documents the brainstorming sessions and workshops. Interviews with each team and essays by leading scholars on the issue make the publication a rich resource for students and professionals alike, and a catalyst for worldwide change.

What do the technical practices, procedures, and systems that have shaped institutions of higher learning in the United States, from the Ivy League and women’s colleges to historically black colleges and land-grant universities, teach us about the production and distribution of knowledge? Addressing media theory, architectural history, and the history of academia, Knowledge Worlds reconceives the university as a media complex comprising a network of infrastructures and operations through which knowledge is made, conveyed, and withheld. Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university—the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans—reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries. From colleges chartered as rights-bearing corporations to research universities conceived as knowledge factories, educating some has always depended upon excluding others. Knowledge Worlds shows how the division of intellectual labor was redrawn as new students entered, expertise circulated, science repurposed old myths, and humanists cultivated new forms of social and intellectual capital. Combining histories of architecture, technology, knowledge, and institutions into a critical media history, Martin traces the uneven movement in the academy from liberal to neoliberal reason.

How American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism: a creative challenge in 10 case studies Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in Americais an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that have, for generations, embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States. The architects, designers, artists and writers who were invited to contribute to this book--and to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art for which it serves as a "field guide"--reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in 10 American cities (Atlanta; Brooklyn, New York; Kinloch, Missouri; Los Angeles; Miami; Nashville; New Orleans; Oakland; Pittsburgh; and Syracuse) and celebrate the ways individuals and communities across the country have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, care and refusal. A broad range of essays by the curators and prominent scholars from diverse fields, as well as a portfolio of new photographs by the artist David Hartt, complement this volume's richly illustrated presentations of the architectural projects at the heart of MoMA's groundbreaking exhibition.

In a few short years, the American Dream has dried up like a raisin in the sun. Massive foreclosures of the mid-to-late 2000s have left the status of the American Dream of homeownership in serious question. In this paper, I argue that in order to formulate new federal housing and homeownership policy goals, the underlying vision of property rights that informs such policy needs to be examined and re-oriented to one that recognizes the nature of property (specifically with regards to residences) as an interconnected and contextualized regime. In the decades following World War II, the federal government supported homeownership and egalitarian access to such ownership through legal regimes and rhetoric. The form this promotion took - the push for detached single-family houses - maps a model of property rights that values ownership, separation, autonomy, and a particular legitimate version of the "home." Despite this promotion, just before and during the Foreclosure Crisis of the mid-2000s, the federal government all but abandoned this rhetoric and paradigm by moving towards a different model of property rights that treated the house as a commodity, evaluated like an investment and bound by the four corners of its mortgage contract. From this model, it could comfortably limit people's rights to their homes, especially for the 'irresponsible borrowers' amongst them. The use of both of these models has shifted the operation of property as a regime in the United States to the disadvantage of racial minorities in particular.After setting out this narrative, I argue that analyses of property rights, and therefore also housing policy, should be broadened to encompass two contextual dimensions. Drawing from the experience of City of Baltimore in the Mortgage Crisis, I argue that property and housing policy should recognize (1) the interconnectedness of property as an institution and (2) the importance of the circumstances in which the investment and contract surrounding a house were made.

Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a renowned architecture critic, followed by a close reading and discussion of the writer's strategies. Lange offers her own analysis using contemporary examples as well as a checklist of questions at the end of each chapter to help guide the writer. This important addition to the Architecture Briefs series is based on the author's design writing courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Lange also writes a popular online column for Design Observer and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Writing About Architecture includes analysis of critical writings by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Architects covered include Marcel Breuer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Frederick Law Olmsted, SOM, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Bioluminescent algae, symbiotic aquariums, self-healing concrete, clavicle wind instruments and structures made from living trees - biology applied outside the lab has never been so intriguing, or so beautiful. Bio Design examines the thrilling advances in the field, showcasing some seventy projects (concepts, prototypes and completed designs) that cover a range of fields - from architecture and industrial design to fashion and medicine. The revised and expanded edition features twelve new projects (replacing ten existing projects): Hy-Fi (by David Benjamin); One Central Park, Sydney (Jean Nouvel); Guard from Above (Sjoerd Hoogendoorn); Cell-laden Hydrogels for Biocatalysis (Alshakim Nelson); Zoa (Modern Meadow); Amino Labs (Julie Legault); Algae and Mycelium Projects (Eric Klarenbeek); Interwoven and Harvest (Diane Scherer); Concrete Honey (John Becker); Bistro In Vitro (Koert van Mensvoort); Circumventive Organs (Agi Haines); Quantworm Mine (Liv Bargman and Nina Cutler). It also includes a new 'how-to' section at the end (Tips for Collaboration/FAQs/Further Resources), as well as a fully revised introduction.

The redefinition of the single-family house, the urban landscape, and the American Dream. Sitting squarely at the center of the American Dream, the detached single-family home has long been the basic building block of most US cities. In Remaking the American Dream, Vinit Mukhija considers how this is changing, in both the American psyche and the urban landscape. In defiance of long-held norms and standards, single-family housing is slowly but significantly transforming through incremental additions of second and third units. Drawing on empirical evidence of informal and formal changes, Remaking the American Dream documents homeowners’ quiet unpermitted modifications, conversions, and workarounds, as well as gradual institutional alterations to once-rigid local land-use regulations. Mukhija’s primary case study is Los Angeles and the role played by the State of California—findings he contrasts with the experience of other cities including Santa Cruz, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and Vancouver. In each instance, he shows how, and asks why, homeowners are adapting their homes and governments are changing the rules that regulate single-family housing to allow for accessory dwelling units (ADUs) or second units. Key to Mukhija’s research is the question of why the idea of single-family living is changing and what this means for the future of US cities. The answer, this book suggests, heralds nothing less than a redefinition of American urbanism—and the American Dream.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sept. 24, 2012-Feb. 24, 2013.