Adam Martin

Reading Summaries

“Home Planning and Gender in Mandatory Palestine” by Sigal Davidi

Lotte Cohn, a woman architect practicing in Tel Aviv in the ’20s-’40s, thought that the modern home could be both functional and comfortable. She fought for improvements in home planning on behalf of the “new woman.”

Palestine during at this time was a good place to design houses and a good place to be an architect if you were a woman. The influx of Jewish immigrants from Europe led to high demand for housing, and the influx of German trained Jewish architects led to vigorous professional discussion.

At the heart of this debate was the idea of the “modern household.” There was widespread frustration among women directed at the men who designed kitchens. Cohn argued that the kitchen should be big enough to accommodate cooking, a play corner, and a table. This would save women the work of bustling back and forth from the kitchen and also keep them connected to their families.

She was heard but not listened to. Men still controlled the discourse, and the persistent influence of the “Frankfurt kitchen” stymied progress. Others, like Alexander Klein, proposed technical methods of analyzing kitchens, most of which did not consider the actual work of a kitchen.

Though not heeded in her own day, Cohn’s ideas caught on in the 1950s when kitchens started to get larger.

“An Alternative to Functionalist Universalism: Ecochard, Candilis, and ATBAT-Afrique” by Monique Eleb

In French-controlled Morocco, a group of upstart architects kicked off a revolution in thinking about housing. This revolution would change the discourse in Europe and lead to new branches of the Modernist Movement.

The idea was to think of housing as “habitat,” and as such, to assess the geographical and sociological conditions for any given project. To do so, Michel Ecochard assembled an interdisciplinary team to study the needs of the Muslim, Jewish, and European populations of Casablanca.

Ecochard’s horizontal grid solution led to the vertical grid concept developed by Candilis and ATBAT-Afrique. These “adapted housing” solutions were an attempt to evoke Moroccan vernacular architecture. The works received some acclaim in Europe and started to change CIAM from within by proposing an alternative method of understanding housing.

Their success should not be overstated, however. For starters, this was still Europeans dictating the living conditions of colonized subjects. Also, the buildings themselves were unsuccessful in many respects (as in the case of the isolated courtyards). Further, the projects were never intended to be a permanent solution; they were supposed to steer people toward modernity. Finally, the inhabitants had mixed feelings, with some wanting to actually have a more paradigmatic “modern” building.

“The Right to the City: From Capital Surplus to Accumulation by Dispossession” by David Harvey

Robert Park said, “In making the city, man has remade himself.” As such, the right to the city is also the right to change the city. That right is allocated on increasingly unequal terms.

Cities are the result of excess capital. In order to continue to accumulate capital, the capitalist has to reinvest that capital in something. This is important not only in the accumulation of wealth but also in the prevention of unrest.

For example, Paris in 1848 and New York in the 1970s saw the problem of unallocated capital and labor. In both cases, the solution was to dispossess the city’s poorest inhabitants of their newly valuable land holdings and build monumental cityscapes in their place.

Another crucial point is the idea that markets can act as stabilizing forces both nationally and globally. A national example is the United States housing market which, until its collapse in 2008-9, served to reallocate capital through the commodification of risk. Globally, the Chinese economy has done similarly, providing a capital sink for many global resource economies that would otherwise be underutilized.

So who has the right to the city? It’s often an unholy alliance of neoliberal governments and powerful corporations. Large private organizations like universities (Yale in New Haven) and hospitals (Johns Hopkins in Baltimore) frequently remake their cities as well. Too frequently left out are the poorest among us who are offered a pittance in exchange for the land they inhabit; that is, if they’re lucky enough to be offered anything at all.

Critical Response

All three of these readings are particularly salient in our present society, where skyrocketing inequality has made housing increasingly uncertain for large groups of people.

At the heart of the matter is the question, “Who decides?” Who decides what housing should look like? Who decides where housing is placed? Who decides that it’s worth investing in housing in the first place?

The first two readings highlight similar cases of architects actively looking for better solutions: for the design of functional residential spaces in one, and for the design of suitable mass housing in the other. I think that in these two cases, we see a lack of inclusion rather than a lack of will. Various groups of white men sat down with one another and tried very hard to come up with good solutions. The problem is that try as they might, they were still almost exclusively white men with a correspondingly limited understanding of the world.

The third reading highlights what happens when we don’t prioritize housing at all. In the cases presented here, people are individuals who have natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Instead, they are units of labor to be effectively deployed so as to avoid unrest.

I think we will all agree that these are not ideal circumstances, so I hope our discussion centers on what we can do about them.

Application and Interpretation

Plaza de Armas Building, Santiago, Chile (1954)

Designed by five American-trained architects, the Plaza de Armas Building was one of Santiago’s many attempts to deal with rapid urbanization. This is a case of urban infill as a viable solution; the building was sited on an open plot of land adjacent to the Plaza de Armas public square. The first four horizontally arranged floors were commercial, the remaining eight vertically arranged floors were residential.

This building reminds me of our second reading this week. It is a response to rapid urbanization, was built in a city that is well known for its 20th century shantytowns, and insisted upon a reinvented, vertical typology. Importantly, this building was not specifically designed as low-cost housing. However, it was intended to drive Santiago and its residents toward modernity. The vertical massing of the residential section is intended to bring light and air into the individual apartments. It breaks from its context and justifies this break using functional arguments.

A bit more superficially, this building has also changed in unintended ways over the years. The wood blinds that were spec’d to “give order to the facade” (ArchDaily) have not held up particularly well and many residents rely on disparate shading solutions of their own. I’m reminded of the mismatched pattern of bricks splayed across the Beehive building in Casablanca, a testament to people’s will to shape their cities themselves.

Main Takeaways

• Fair and equitable housing requires both the will to build it and a commitment to inclusion throughout the process.
• Imperfect solutions can nonetheless move the ball down the field, as in the case of Ecochard’s move toward interdisciplinary architecture.
• Modern architecture doesn’t just happen in Europe. This week, we saw examples of revolutionary thinking in Palestine and Morocco.
• Architecture is political. Every instance of architecture is an expression of its political context (that’s a pretty strong claim, and I’m definitely open to being proven wrong).