Lyceum 2020: Belt Tightening - Bungalows for a Millennial Family ARCH 7004 - Professor Terry Boling
A New Norm Lyceum 2020: Belt Tightening - Bungalows for a Millennial Family Professor Terry Boling Introduction: What you see here are the developing positions of 15 fourth-year undergraduate capstone student submissions for the 2020 Lyceum traveling fellowship competition. A few more weeks of gestation will commence after graduation as we prepare for the final submission on May 22nd. As the global disruption descended upon us at Spring Break, we had just finished a round of intense reviews attempting to solidify individual strategies for addressing the program brief. We ended the day with a great deal of uncertainty about what was next, as we just found out that the remainder of the semester would be taught remotely, and that there would be no coming back to work in the grungy studio that we all knew as our creative home. Sadly, we had just spent several weeks building a large model of the site in Chicago- painstakingly painted and patinated- that we could no longer access. All of our work up to this point was carried out under the auspices of a physical submission: Since the inception of the Lyceum more than 30 years prior, an 11 x 17 book was the sole product that was evaluated by the jury. From the beginning of the semester, we decided to address this requirement with tenacity. Texture, paper type, weight, feel, hand-craft, and details of the actual physical book were at the forefront of our discussions for more than 9 weeks. Shortly after Spring Break, we found out that the project proposals- for the very first time- would be entirely digital. Like everyone else on the planet, we were forced to negotiate with this new norm. Following Spring Break and the initial shock of the upheaval, the students regained their bearings and got back to work at home- without access to the many things that made the studio environment so rich, and that all of us likely took for granted. Congratulations to all- Carpe Diem!
Program: The competition is situated in the South side of Chicago, Illinois, and addresses the problem of affordable urban housing by interrogating an iconic symbol of residential design and economic progress- the Chicago Bungalow. Excerpt from the competition brief below: “By 1940, bungalows comprised nearly a third of all housing in Chicago. While the bungalow became the spatial symbol of middle-class advancement and success, it was mostly reserved for white families. Racially restrictive covenants included in housing contracts prohibited owners from selling to African Americans, while discriminatory lending practices made mortgages nearly impossible to obtain for families of color. Only after the 1948 Supreme Court case of Shelley vs Kraemer did restrictive racial covenants become unconstitutional. Only in the 50’s and 60’s, as existing bungalow homeowners moved outward to the suburbs, did families of color start to enter the Bungalow Belt. This white flight towards a suburban spatial ideal marked a shift in how the architectural typology of home was conceived. Since 1960, Chicago has lost nearly one million residents, eliminating the population gains of the turn of the century due to increased demographic shifts in neighborhoods, subsequent redlining, and increase in cost of living. The impacts of this loss of home ownership opportunities have cost African Americans in Chicago over $1 billion in wealth.” We documented the site during a snowy trip to Chicago, and met with architectural firms that worked with under-represented Chicago communities. Studio Gang shared their award-winning project “Garden in the Machine”, which addressed the housing and foreclosure crisis through the appropriation of an abandoned factory, creating a neighborhood of stakeholders through creative equity building. HDR presented a project for the Chicago Transit Authority that re-invigorated outdated transportation infrastructure by creating hybrid programs. All of our research suggested that housing design alone was not the problem, and that new strategies for building equity and generational wealth needed to be examined. Each student was asked to articulate a position addressing the complex issues that veiled the seemingly simple prompt of re-imagining the Chicago Bungalow.