Steward — Adare Brown

About

At the intersection of labor, climate, and tenant organizing, I work toward a future where housing is a public utility. I have been organizing for a Just Transition with the Architecture Lobby’s Green New Deal Working Group since 2020. I am also a member of the Alternative Building Collective, which organizes practitioners in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry towards climate action and alternative development models.

In my professional work, I perform construction administration and project management with non-profit organizations with roots in the city's community housing movement of the 1970s-1980s. Prior to this, I worked for Outside Development, an architectural research practice where I provided mapping and research assistance, to advocate for a urban form-of-life capable of breaking our dependence on fossil fuels.

Housing at the Gowanus Canal

2020
Independent Work
Yale School of Architecture
Critic: Miriam Peterson

This proposal for the Gowanus Canal finds potential in integrating multi-family housing and infrastructure development to advance climate mitigation on city-owned land. Where many proposals for preventing flooding along canals contract and ‘armor’ the waterway, this proposal expands and connects the canal into adjacent streets, regaining the absorptive and filtering capacities of the historic marsh on the site. The figure of the original canal is inscribed by durable live-work apartments above.

Here, the residents and the wetland are reciprocal stewards of one other. Contemporary residential development along the Gowanus presents the canal as a picturesque amenity, even though the canal is Superfund site plagued by chronic combined sewage outflow. This proposal allows the canal to testify to the city’s historical and ongoing metabolic processes. Contrasting the dominant mode of development, this housing project foregrounds the inextricable link between urban dwellers and urbanized land to foreground their mutual dependency.