Radical Realism

Curated by Barry Bergdoll and Juliana Barton, Reset: Towards a New Commons gently but firmly pushes architecture’s limits. It’s a show about inclusive approaches to designing collective space in American neighborhoods—an expansive theme that brings together ideas about universal design, communal living, exclusionary zoning, and resident engagement. More than that, the exhibition is a showcase for a new mood of radical realism that has been sweeping the American architectural academy of late.

Reset fills the entire Center for Architecture with four commissioned projects by teams of interdisciplinary designers, a wall of case studies, and a miniature library. But it is the two projects in the main ground-floor gallery that steal the show. Block Party, led by Irene Cheng, David Gissen, and Brett Snyder, reimagines a single-family residential block of Berkeley, California, by adding shared infrastructures designed with disabled residents first in mind. The neighboring Aging Against the Machine, led by Neeraj Bhatia, Ignacio G. Galán, and Karen Kubey, takes on a parallel set of issues facing older residents in nearby West Oakland. Across exquisite models of a shared porch, an intergenerational commune, and a retrofitted house, they argue that diverse residents aging in place would benefit from collective living—and from architectures that support it.

The two design teams have benefited, respectively, from interviews with disability rights activists and roundtables with local housing nonprofits, and the projects are in small and large ways specific to their Bay Area cities. Yet they are also generic, applicable to similarly low-rise domestic landscapes across the U.S. Indeed, the show as a whole makes for a convincing entry in a long-running tradition of interventions in the everyday (read: suburban) American neighborhood, without resorting to cliches about “the suburbs.” It’s downstairs that this becomes explicit, in the third installation, Decolonizing Suburbia, by Architensions and Parc Office with Sharon Egretta Sutton and Andrew Bruno. Focusing on an inner-ring suburb within Cincinnati’s municipal boundaries, the team aptly explains that “in the U.S., the city and the suburbs are often indistinguishable.”

If Reset is an update on the suburban retrofit genre, then the show is a striking departure from Bergdoll’s last curatorial statement on the American city-suburb, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, a collaboration with Reinhold Martin and the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation’s Buell Center, presented at MoMA in 2012. Foreclosed argued that addressing the crisis of American housing required retooling the American dream itself. “Change the dream and you change the city,” went Martin’s pithy formula. WORKac imagined sustainable infrastructures and Studio Gang studied immigrant arrival cities; both proposed mid- to high-rise megastructures that alternated urbane densities with pockets of green space—dreams that had more in common with modernist utopias or Chinese garden cities than with existing patterns of American (sub)urbanization. MOS’s intervention memorably filled streets with multistory dwellings, in an ironic yet candidly direct attack on car-centric planning. “Changing the dream” meant inverting, if not violating, the American suburb’s organizing protocols. And while design teams collaborated closely with economists, legal experts, and ecologists to vet the realism of their proposals, this was a utopian realism, concerned with a project’s internal coherence, not the feasibility of its realization.

The Reset projects are cautious by comparison. Decolonizing Suburbia replaces single-family houses with small multifamily buildings, lot by lot. Block Party leaves most houses undisturbed while inserting shared infrastructures. Yet even a proposal as simple as Block Party’s elevator to a bridge, shared between two neighboring second floors, eloquently enfolds an indictment of the single-family house’s ableism into a pragmatic and unexpected fix. Splitting the cost of accessibility retrofits across multiple households is a no-brainer, and the thought experiment drives home a broader thesis of the exhibition: that “commoning”—bottom-up collaborations to inaugurate collective use of formerly private spaces—will be instrumental, not incidental, to achieving inclusive environments.

Does that change how architects need to operate? The fourth commissioned project, Re:Play, is an outlier and useful foil to the rest of the show. A series of collages and design proposals authored by young NYCHA residents, facilitated by an interdisciplinary team from the Pratt Institute, it leaves an unsettling question at the exhibition’s close: when must designing “inclusion” mean devolving authorship? The other teams don’t go this far, but still, they are refreshingly attentive to the painstaking work even modest changes will demand.

A cartoon callout on the Block Party wall asks the crucial (and not at all pithy) question: “Can obscure, technical rules like zoning laws be redesigned to advance disability justice, critique the contemporary system of private property, and encourage acts of spatial commoning?” Other panels connect urban design ideas to novel administrative arrangements like “accessibility land swaps,” where homeowners would be required to contribute land for common use in exchange for the privilege of adding inaccessible square footage to their homes.

Aging Against the Machine also gets down to nuts and bolts, with material samples and technical standards presented alongside the team’s more synthetic proposals. Cork flooring tiles, rubber doorknobs, and grab bars might make as much a difference for aging residents as new housing types; the installation insists that these minor retrofits are indispensable aspects of an inclusive architecture.

There’s no heroic image to be had here. As a “dream,” the Reset projects look barely different from low-rise American neighborhoods today. But it’s not for a lack of optimism or failure of nerve. If anything, Reset’s cautious interventions suggest a reinvigorated faith in the possibility of change—a faith less apparent in Foreclosed’s speculative utopias. With landmark zoning reform efforts underway in small progressive cities across the country, and the recent passage of California’s SB 9 statewide subdivision legalization, today’s would-be re-designers of the American city operate with the difficult knowledge that change is happening. Can architects help to craft a more inclusive dream? Reset gives a resounding yes, but with an important caveat: radically expanding who is able to live in “suburban” neighborhoods, and how they do, may not look “radical” by last decade’s standards.