Mass Support, curated by Curatorial Research Collective and designed by Office ca, was on view at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture from March 21 to May 7.
What does resident control of housing mean? In the New York housing politics scene I’m situated in, we usually grapple with this question in terms of rent or price setting, lease terms, access to repairs, and other aspects of residential life having to do with cost, quality, and stability in a building— in short, democratic management or collective ownership. An exhibition at City College’s Spitzer School of Architecture prompts visitors to consider this question from an entirely different vantage.
Mass Support assesses the legacy of the Dutch architectural think tank Stichting Architecten Research (SAR), which operated from 1964 to 1990, with a special focus on its most prominent voice, the architect John Habraken. For SAR and Habraken, resident control over housing meant the ability of a household—of any size or layout—to have a say in the shape of their home and the option to change it over time. In seeking to address issues of democracy and participation in the design of residential architecture, the group developed a counterintuitive approach combining resident empowerment with mass production.
The exhibition offers a primer on SAR’s methodology. Rather than a timeline, it is a demonstration of the group’s ideas and a case for its ongoing relevancy. Yellow tape along the floor divides the gallery into rectangles and squares, and plywood partitions onto which are tacked images and texts demonstrate SAR’s way of producing space through both rigid grids and flexible interior walls. Projects such as Frans van der Werf’s Molenvliet (1977) outside of Rotterdam, which closely followed SAR’s prescriptions, reveal a concerted effort to avoid anonymity in mass housing through simple measures. An architectural model for Molenvliet whose components visitors are invited to play with underscores the simplicity and hence legibility of what SAR was trying to do.
The collective reconceived of residential architecture as a system of “supports and infills,” the former consisting of mostly structural or fixed building elements and the latter being the highly flexible configurations possible for interior spaces. Drawing on a metaphor that might be unpopular among contemporary urbanists, Habraken compared supports and infills to highways and cars, which are not designed by the same people or through the same process. Individuals have a good deal of choice in which car they buy and where they drive it, but they do so on pathways that were already planned at the regional scale.
Perhaps more to Habraken’s point, unlike most apartments, cars are industrially produced. For SAR, flexibility in housing would not be achieved through small-scale craftsmanship, but rather through mechanical manufacturing and modular construction. Standard building parts such as walls, plumbing, and electrical panels would be produced in factories and would be compatible with one another, allowing for numerous configurations within the set space of supports. Residents would be encouraged to see their units as changeable, in accordance with their needs. A household might grow or shrink, patterns of use might intensify or subside, people might move in and hate the previous tenant’s set-up—nearly any scenario could be altered or rectified simply by rearranging the walls (plumbing and electrical systems included).
In projects that implemented the SAR process, up to a third of the concept and design phase was dedicated to resident participation. Future dwellers not only sketched out their desired home layout but were invited to engage with scale models (some as big as 1:1) to try out multiple iterations of personal and communal spaces. This deep commitment to participation struck a chord with me as I recalled hours spent attending various city-sponsored planning events for neighborhood residents, during which participants were given choices that were extremely limited and sometimes cruel. (In this latest round of participatory budgeting, for example, I was asked to choose between a working bathroom at my local playground or air-conditioning in a school.) Whereas the city’s current modes of participatory planning can leave us feeling cold, the techniques centered by this exhibition seem genuinely concerned with realizing the desires of residents.
The members of SAR were responding to specific historical-geographic circumstances. Between the end of World War II and 1962, the Netherlands built one million homes for its population. In the following decade, it built a million more. The housing was largely confined to a few standard typologies, without much thought to the complexities of household composition in the Netherlands and the country’s growing diversity following Indonesia and Surinam’s successful fights for decolonization. Habraken sought to build “living urban tissues” that could change as people changed and as the country changed around them.
Despite this specificity in place and time, Mass Support makes a compelling case for SAR’s ongoing relevance around the world. Gallery space is afforded to ten recent projects: two fairly high-end apartment buildings in the Netherlands; two German cooperatives; a social housing co-op built on publicly owned land in Barcelona; Build It Back Modular, Gans & Company’s project for resident-designed housing options in New York City after Superstorm Sandy; Plugin House, a remarkable project of modular homes for hutongs in Beijing and Shenzhen; two visions of suburban infill planning in the US and Canada; and, strangely, a compendium of YIMBY memes made by Neighbors for More Neighbors in Minneapolis to advocate for land use changes.
I found the Spanish and Chinese examples especially inspiring, both in their architectural and their social dimensions. The inclusion of Build It Back Modular was useful in helping New Yorkers like me immediately realize some of the local applications of SAR’s methodology. The YIMBY memes were a splash of cold water, however; after spending an hour basking in the possibilities for a more democratic housing system, I was abruptly reminded just how reductive our binary housing discourse is today. One of the memes includes the text “Restrictive zoning is the definition of gentrification,” which would be news to Ruth Glass or Neil Smith!
Beyond the vapidity of -IMBYisms, the exhibition sparked two questions that kept me thinking for days after my visit. The first is one of labor. Prefabrication and off-site production were a huge part of the SAR project. As soon as you say these things in the US context, though, they raise questions around unionization and pay standards. Developers here have frequently used prefabrication as an explicit union avoidance strategy. For mass prefabrication to be acceptable to me and many others, that part of the industry would have to be unionized. In the best-case scenario, this could push construction unions to finally make the shift from AFL-style craft unions (which tend to be more exclusionary and hierarchical) to CIO-style industrial unions (which tend to be more expansive and, at their best, solidaristic).
The second is the question that opened this review: How far can resident control of housing go? There is rising interest in social housing models in New York today, and questions of resident democracy are paramount to the framing of what makes housing social in the first place. Oksana Mironova and the late Tom Waters argued in their oft-cited brief “How Social Is That Housing?” that social housing carries three key features: decommodification, social equality, and resident control. Could the design of housing itself be incorporated into our vision for resident control? Could future social housing allow residents not only to have a say in what their housing costs and how it is maintained, but what shape it takes in the first place? As I walked out of Mass Support, such a project seemed at least possible, if not yet within our grasp.