Architectural divides in New Haven and New Orleans
Hurricane Katrina wrought its latest bit of damage to New Orleans a few weeks ago. Back in 2007, Brad Pitt created Make It Right, a foundation to build a neighborhood in the wake of its destruction. The foundation paid celebrated architects like Frank Gehry, David Adjaye and Thom Mayne and many others, to design the new homes where the old had been washed away. Some of the homes that were built over 10 years ago have dramatically failed to the point of demolition, the latest this month. Others are abandoned and lawsuits are in play for others.
But Make It Right has a distant, but direct, precedent in Connecticut. The Building Project was created in 1967 by Yale University’s Architecture School dean Charles Moore and professor Kent Bloomer. The program takes First Year Architecture grad students, sets up a design competition in its ranks, then those students build it. Initially the program built housing projects in Appalachia, pavilions in Connecticut towns and settled into providing single family homes in neighborhoods that needed them. Yale has worked for various groups — Habitat for Humanity, Home, Inc., Neighborhood Housing and now Columbus House. The program is now called The Jim Vlock First Year Building Project, in memorial of a Yale graduate.
The commonality between Connecticut and Louisiana is both stylistic and missional. Make It Right and the Vlock Building Project are the essence of trying to do good in the world through architects and high design. But Make It Right ended up building houses that threaten some of their occupants, rather than protecting them. The group had plans to build 150 homes, amidst over 4,500 other new homes that were built in New Orleans by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. While Make It Right tried to create high- art architecture, the other 4,500 homes were designed to evoke memories of a time before the generic post- World War II housing it often replaced. Make It Right’s homes constituted an art exhibit in a sea of banality. In its outcome, the Vlock Building Project in New Haven tries to make high- art design as well, beyond providing housing and education.
Expressed art in architecture, in the form of edgy aesthetics, can engender negative reaction in some people, and it led to a break between Yale and Habitat. As Bill Casey, who is head of the New Haven Habitat for Humanity chapter describes the then Yale Building Project; “The designs did not always align with Habitat’s concept of ‘ simple decent housing.’ This led to Habitat and the School of Architecture amicably terminating the partnership. It is our affiliate’s belief that low- income homes do not have to look like low income housing and should also fit into the streetscape of the neighborhoods in which we build. Our more traditional, easily maintained, energy efficient and stormresistant homes have been welcomed by both our partner owner occupants and by the communities in which they reside.”
The result of this split was the development of a standard Habitat New Haven home, designed by a committee, that my office fits into each and every naked lot Habitat for Humanity can get. More than 100 homes have been built since Habitat and Yale parted ways.
It would be easy to dismiss experimental Modernist architecture as having too much visual baggage for places where traditional workers’ housing dominates the streetscape. But homes should aspire to transcend our expectations and give those who live in them joy beyond protection. Anecdotally 97% of the new homes built in
America every year are not touched by an architect and are replications of a soft, comforting design, lightly traditional or benignly contemporary.
In New Haven, the Vlock Building Project creates great places, well- built, for those receiving their homes. So does Habitat for Humanity. But the two products, identical in purpose, are worlds apart, aesthetically. In that way, Make It Right and the Vlock Building Project try to answer questions that their alternatives, like most of the other new homes built in New Orleans or Habitat for Humanity’s new homes, simply ignore. In that way this duality of architect expression versus neighborhood context seen in these noble efforts mirrors American housing .
Today, residential architecture is caught in an apartheid between art and product when each home should be both. But art in the real estate market in the form of experiment and innovation does not sell as well as the comfort of the familiar. Innovative design, manifested by experimenting in shape, detail and material, can fail. When these buildings fail, as they did at Make It Right, it detracts our hopes and validates our fears. When our fears are validated, our humanity is diminished.