Bauhaus blunders: architecture and public housing - 1950s public housing estates Cabrini-Green, Chicago, Illinois, US

Public Interest, Fall, 1993 by Witold Rybczynski

A new architecture

The French architect Le Corbusier, who proposed that cities should consist of freestanding high-rise buildings in a parklike landscape, is often given the credit--or the blame--for this new urban vision. But the model for the public housing projects of the 1950s was closer to home. The urban design of Cabrini-Green closely followed the ideas of Ludwig Hilberseimer, a German planner who had lectured at the Bauhaus and emigrated to the United State--to Chicago, in fact, where he taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The man who had brought Hilblerseimer to IIT was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, another German expartriate and fellow-Bauhauser living in Chicago. His influence was evident in the utilitarian appearnace of the Cabrini-Green apartment slabs (designed by Epstein & Sons and Pace Associates), which resembled high-rise factories with exposed concrete frames filled in with glass and brick. Mies had built exactly such an apartment tower in Chicago in 1949 and, in 1955, he and Hilberseimer were engaged in designing a large commercial housing project in Detroit.

Architects and planners maintained that high-rise buildings were better because they occupied less land, and provided their occupants with sunlight and unobstructed views, but the Chicago Housing Authority was probably attracted to Modern architecture for the same reason that many commercial developers were partial to the designs of Mies van der Rohe--their cost. The truth is that standardized, stripped-down, and undecorated tall buildings can be erected quickly and inexpensively. It is also likely that the plain architecture suited the puritan view of many Americans--and certainly of the housing reformers--who felt that social housing should not be fancy. Soon, utilitarian high-rise apartment towers were accepted as thB best solution for public housing.

High-rise slums

However, it was one thing to build apartment towers for the upper-middle-class, as Mies did, and quite another to adopt them as solutions for housing the poor. The well-off have doormen, janitors, repairment, and baby-sitters; the poor have none of these things. Without restricted access, the lobbies and corridors were vandalized; without proper maintenance, elevators broke down, staircases became garbage dumps, roofs leaked, and broken windows remained ureplaced; without baby-sitters, single mothers were stranded in their apartments, and children roamed unsupervised sixteen floors below. In Cabrini-Green, there were problems with the design of the buildings: To save money, no private balconies or terraces were provided, access galleries and elevator lobbies were left open to the elements (in frigid Chicago!), and despite the lack of air-conditioning, the unshaded apartment windows of the tall buildings faced east and west.

Equally unsuccessful was the overall layout which dispensed with the familiar street and supplanted it with parkland, although what little landscaping there was quickly disappeared and was replaced by beaten dirt and asphalt parking lots. In any case, the open pedestrian spaces were problematic: windy, unappealing, and more crime-prone than conventional streets and sidewalks overlooked by individual homes. In the name of housing the poor, the well-meaning social reformers of the 1950s invented a new type of lurbanism, quite foreign to any previous American ideal of city planning. It is hardly surprising that the projects acquired a social stigma. This, as well as crime, drugs, and poor management, explains why today one-third of the partments at Cabrini-Green remain unoccupied.