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

Public Interest, Fall, 1993 by Witold Rybczynski

The winning project was the work two assistant professors of urban design at North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota. Jim Nelson and Don Faulkner's proposal brims with Midwestern good sense. Rebuild the old street-grid, the designers suggest, and fill in the open spaces with traditional row-houses oriented to the streets. Save as many of the existing apartment blocks as possible and mix in commercial buildings (public housing traditionally has no commercial or industrial functions), and introduce small parks and squares as well as civic buildings like police and fire stations, churches, and daycare centers. Create avenues linking two large neighborhood squares. Replace the two large schools with several smaller elementary schools.

Back to the future

The carefully crafted project of the winning team is representative of a current approach to urban design that has been termed neotraditional, but whose adherents prefer to call it the New Urbanism. The New Urbanism represents a turning away from the principles that have characterized Amrican urban design since the 1950s, a rediscovery of the virtues of traditional, gridded streets scaled to the pedestrian, and a return to cities that integrate a diversity of urban uses--commercial and industrial as well as residential--rather than being zoned according to single functions. So far, the accomplishments of architects and planners like Peter Calthorpe, Daniel Solomon, and Andres Duany and Elezabeth Plater-Zyberk, have been predominantly suburban in location and aimed at an upper-middle-class clientele, but the commercial successes of the New Urbanism are evidence of its broad appeal to consumers and developers alike. It seems entirely appropriate that such a mainstream, pragmatic approach should be appealing feature of the New Urbanism is architectural design whose flavor is regional rather than international. In Nelson and Faulkner's proposal, moreover, the traditional design approach means that public and private housng are indistinguishable. "One must avoid the danger of building for the poor under regulations or in a style very different from that to which the middle class is accustomed," wrote Nathan Glazer in the pages of The Public Interest in 1967. Just so. Despite the argument of one of the Carbini-Green competition entrants that "Architecture is not the solution, architecture is not the problem," it's obvious that large islands of high-rise apartment blocks that contribute to social isolation are a problem.

But more than architectural alterations are required to make the projects part of the city again. The most radical change that Nelson and Faulkner suggest is that the Chicago Housing Authority sell off a good part of the land that it owns to private developers who would build residental, commercial, and retail functions. According to the designers, of the 8,000 dwellings in the final scheme, which also takes in land next to Cabrini-Green, adjacent to the Chicago River, almost two-thirds will be privately owned. IN such surroundings, the public housing finally would have a chance to be socially and economically--as well as architecturally--integrated into the surrounding city.