James Harrison Steedman Fellowship in Architecture
Washington University in St. Louis, AIA StL
Abstract
While not everyone agrees with Charles Jencks that the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe was the death of modernism, most agree that it marked the end of the American experiment in public housing. But rarely do we hear about the tenant organizations formed by Pruitt-Igoe residents and their efforts to recover the complex prior to the demolition. This erasure exemplifies how, to many, social housing as an architecture of care is a contradiction in terms.
My research will begin with the tenant organizers at Pruitt-Igoe and extend across three international housing projects—Ciudad Kennedy in Bogotá, the Baan Mankong initiative in Thailand, and the INA-Casa program in Italy—to highlight architectural projects which each redefined the act of building and living together. These projects have divergent forms, but each illustrates how an architecture of care may arise from a program of social housing.
To situate these projects, my research will be guided by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's constructive view of reparations, focusing on how each case study breaks existing patterns of accumulation by redistributing flows of resources and capabilities. At the architectural scale, this research follows the methodology (and takes its name) of Maria Giudici’s "Counter Planning from the Kitchen" wherein close typological analysis shows how human relationships are encoded in domestic spaces.