Public Housing Single by Michael Rosen

Reinventing Public Housing Proposals to Recontextualize the NYCHA Housing Estate Frederick Biehle Pratt Institute UG Architecture Pratt FA 2014

Reinventing Public Housing

Frederick Biehle

Site Analysis 07 Site Metamorphosis 15 Proposals 19 Metastisized Block 21 Michael Rosen/Yuli Huang

Microblock 27 Hillary Flannery/Kaifang Zhang

Incremental Landscape 33 Yuri Kim/Sang Il Ma

Knickerblock 37 Peter Kim/Han Kim

Public Greenway 45 Emma Colley/Alyza Enriquez

Hyperblock 49 Javier Marcano/Veronika Suarez

Colliding Typologies Hudson DeRicco/Nicholas Blount

Precedents 65 Credits 73 01

Reinventing Public Housing The Need to Make Urban Housing Urban Frederick Biehle

In his 2008 publication Public Housing that Worked, Nicholas Bloom provided an in depth critique of high-rise public housing in the United States, something largely regarded as a failure (a perception I would heartily endorse). His powerful thesis overturned much of the conventional wisdom and triggered a fierce debate among those interested in current housing policy. His thesis was that while most of America’s high-rise public housing was, in fact, a disaster, New York City’s was not. New York City was different. It was the New York City Housing Authority that had created, overseen, and maintained a product of twenty six hundred buildings and a system that could, and continues to, satisfy the housing needs for over 400,000 tenants. In short, it worked.

1. That “slum” clearance was always a net positive. Most NYCHA projects were not built on vacant land, and were thus only possible by the demolition of multiple block neighborhoods, often occupied by tenement blocks or worse. Eliminating these neighborhoods became a critical catalyst as more than just housing advocates were interested in “slum clearance”. Because the system that was in place by 1940 to replace the neighborhoods was consistently based on the superblock housing estate model, clearance not only removed the tenement block, which perhaps could be seen as a net positive from a health and safety perspective, but it also removed the street, the public realm in which the collective activity of the neighborhood took place. While a replacement for the tenement housing would be offered, an appropriate public space to replace the street would not.

To stake this claim, however, Bloom had to redefine the frame through which affordable housing is evaluated. His new position needed to elevate bureaucratic workability over any issues related to the physical reality of its architecture. He readily acknowledged this. To get to his conclusion he had to defend several specific architectural assumptions institutionalized by NYCHA:

NYCHA Apartment Block Configuration

Tenement Block House

Perimeter Block Garden Apartment

Superblock Housing Estate

Gropius Spacing Diagrams

2. That the formula for the superblock housing estate that would a) aggressively and intentionally turn away from the fabric of the city that surrounds it, and b) zone its use to be exclusively residential and thereby eliminate any sense of urban continuity with its mixed use context was an acceptable, rational, even positive idea.

4. That not shaping the residual space opened up by the smaller lot coverages due to taller buildings was also acceptable if some trees were planted, thus elevating abstract aesthetics over social concern. In short, Bloom tells us that we should accept the NYCHA’s public housing ‘project’ for what it is- 2600 buildings on 154 sites and over 400,000 tenants all living with “well maintained brick buildings, mature plane trees and green lawns, active community and recreation programs and first class play equipment …(all of which) have made NYC public high-rise housing a smashing success.”1 As positive as these observations may be, they still disregard the fact that the projects are a psychologically partitioned (both physically by its stigmatized second ghetto appearance and spatially by its withdrawal from any larger idea for the public realm) series of island wastelands, anti-cities within the city.

NYCHA Low Income Housing Estates

Metropolis

3. That the decision to construct a kind of housing that was intended to look poor by virtue of its meager budgeting, absent of any sense of architectural detail or identity was also acceptable.

Theo Van Doesburg, Composition Weiss Black

William Lescaze, Williamsburg Houses

Obviously “a decent home and suitable living environment”2 is important to housing, but it is remarkable how antagonistic, even cavalier, housing advocates and planning authorities were to the city’s underlying fabric. The structure of the street and sidewalk was what provided the framework for an urban life, yet between 1932 and 1957 very few architects or urban planners seemed remotely cognizant of this. The crisis of decentralization, relieving urban density and overcrowding, was an at-all-costs agenda for them. One exception was the Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth, who in 1938 tried to give a more precise definition of urbanism by noting that it “included size, density and heterogeneity” but also that urbanism as a way of life meant something different, experiencing a set of human interactions that were impersonal, rather than intimate.3 This is something Jane Jacobs magically described in her Life and Death of American Cities, as “the daily ballet” of the sidewalk. She was referring to the episodic anonymous interactions which make up an “informal public life, a necessary mediator between ones more personally determined formal and private lives. The informal public life, then, is urbanism as experienced, the unplanned theater of the street and sidewalk.4 04

being designed by people who actually don’t like cities. They do not merely dislike the noise and the dirt and the congestion, they dislike the city’s variety and concentration, its tension, its hustle, and bustle. What made the city so good, was all the things the planners wanted to eliminate.”6 While we might know that statement to be true today, it still remains unclear just what we can do about it. In his concluding sentence Conn lays down the challenge- “the problem of the 21st century will be how we re-urbanize, that is, how we fix the mistakes of our anti-urban 20th century.”7 It will be no small undertaking. Movement Along Long Blocks

Movement Along Short Blocks

Steven Johnson, in his 2001 publication Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software cites Jacobs specifically for her description of the dance of urban life. For him, she is the boy in the Hans Christian Anderson tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, calling out the planners naked ignorance in not comprehending, even at the most intuitive level, what really made cities work. It was density, diversity, mixed use, and continuity she insisted. Johnson says the city is, essentially, an emergent system, operating bottom up as a constantly mutating multitude of independent interactions. He concludes by saying “better sidewalks make better cities, which in turn improve the lives of the city dwellers…city life depends on the odd interaction between strangers that can change ones individual behavior … encountering diversity does nothing for the global system of the city unless that encounter has a chance of altering behavior”.5 In his remarkable book Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the 20th Century, Steven Conn traces a consistent and repetitive attack on the city throughout the 20th century. By declaring the architects, city and regional planners, policy makers, politicians, federal housing administrators, decentralists, social engineers, garden city advocates, folklore enthusiasts, and academic intellectuals to be ANTI-URBAN he opens up a space to actually celebrate the qualitative values of living in the city, to articulate a vision of positive urbanism. William Whyte, an editor at Fortune magazine said in 1958, “most of the rebuilding underway was 05

Murders in NYC

Enclosure Diagram

Forty three years after the construction of the last NYCHA sponsored public housing project, New York City has finally run out of open space to build. Three recent events have coincided to alter the larger perception of NYCHA’s public housing estates and offer what may be a truly honest opportunity for change 1. We have seen a progressive and steady decline in the crime ratebeginning even before the Rudolf Giulianni administration and continuing with Michael Bloomberg. The city has experienced 24 consecutive years of decreasing crime and thus a reciprocal reinvigoration of the life of the city street to go along with it. This is particularly critical in more recent years where the urban context around

public housing estates have normalized. (In what is an interesting potential feedback loop, the revitalizing of city streets may be a significant contributor to the continued statistical drop in crime that has continued under Bill de Blasio, even with the taking down of the controversial stop and frisk program.)

challenges. We started with the question— Must we really accept the super block public housing estate for what it is? Or is there a way to transform and reinterpret, essentially contextualize it, and by doing so eliminate its stigma, its isolation, and its anti-urban grip on the city?

2. The remarkable building boom that started in the mid 1990s, fueled in particular by rezoning under the Bloomberg administration, has finally run up against public housing. It is now perfectly acceptable to build highrise luxury housing (the Toren, for example, on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn) or midrise market rate housing directly adjacent to public housing estates without damage to property values, something not even imagined ten years ago. 3. The RFP issued in Mayor Bloomberg’s final year calling for developers to utilize open space in a series of public housing estates to create new for-market (80-20) luxury tower projects. The carrot with this proposal was that income from the new housing would help pay maintenance and upkeep costs for the housing estates, which is another problem coming to term. Most public housing was constructed with a 50 year lifespan. By 2018 every project will have expired and be in need of serious restoration. While the RFP has been taken down by Mayor de Blasio, in part due to public outcry, the idea has not been entirely taken off the table. Finding a way for private development to fund the financial needs of low income housing is simply too attractive. 4. After 12 years of a city administration that was pro private development there is a new mayor who has made it a part of his mandate to reengage the idea of public housing. With his Five Borough, Ten Year Plan, Housing New York, he intends to a) foster diverse livable neighborhoods b) preserve the existing housing stock and c) build new affordable housing that will ultimately build and preserve 200,000 units. This fall, Pratt Institute UG Architecture offered an urban design studio intended as one step toward meeting Steven Conn and Bill de Blasio’s

Le Corbusier

Villa Radieuse

It has been quite some time since public housing (belligerently) carried the flag of the future by replacing what was then a discredited prior housing model, the tenement house, condemned as a slum and destroyed to make way for the future. But perhaps its time has come again. As the superblock public housing estate has itself been discredited as fundamentally antiurban, can we identify a way and a means to transform it, only this time without the wrecking ball. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Nicholas Bloom, Public Housing that Worked, (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, page 3 Stated goal of the original 1949 federal housing act legislation, allowing for the use of eminent domain to clear urban slums and replace them with new housing as quoted in Nicholas Bloom, Public Housing that WorkedQuoted in Nicholas Bloom, Public Housing that Worked, page 2 Steven Conn, Americans against the City: Anti-urbanism in the 20thcentury,(New York, Oxford University Press, 2014, page 306 Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of an American City, page 57 Steven Johnson, Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, 200, page 94 Steven Conn, Americans against the City: Anti-urbanism in the 20thcentury, New York, Oxford University Press, 2014, page 155 Steven Conn, Americans against the City: Anti-urbanism in the 20thcentury,(New York, Oxford University Press, 2014, page 306

Site Analysis

Ingersol-Whitman Houses, Brooklyn, NY

1930s Slum & Row Houses 23 Blocks 1200 Dwellings 80-90% Lot Coverage 2-3 Stories High

1940s Fort Greene Low Income Housing 5 Superblocks 3501 Apartments 22% Lot Coverage 6-13 Stories High 1.3 Millions Sq Ft Open Space 07

1930s Slum & Row Houses

1940s Fort Greene Low Income Housing 08

Ingersol-Whitman Site

Figure Ground Plan Orginal Context - 1941 09

Ingersol-Whitman Houses

Figure Ground Plan Superblock - 2013 10

Programmatic Distribution

Commercial Uses

Commercial Uses - Bank

Institutional Uses

Commercial Uses - Clothing

Commercial Uses - Personal Care

Institutional Uses - Cultural

Commercial Uses - Market Commercial Uses - F&B

Commercial Uses - Transportation Service

Commercial Uses - Leisure

Parking Uses

Commercial Uses - Specialty Market 11

Commercial Uses - Office Building

Commercial Uses - Special Services

Institutional Uses - Education Civic Uses - Public Services

Civic Uses - Health Services Civic Uses - Government Administration

Industrial Uses

Building Sections

Unit 1

Unit 2

Hallway

Unit 1

Unit 2

Unit 3

Vertical Circulation

Hallway

Vertical Circulation

Transformation of Urban Fabric 1855 - 2014

1855 Street Boundary 1889 Street Boundary 1908 Street Boundary 2014 Street Boundary 13

Site Topography & Section

Site Metamorphosis Restoration of the Idea of the Street The Further Subdivision of the Superblock

Existing Condition

Metastasized Block

Knickerblock

Public Greenway

Microblock

Incremental Landscape

Hyperblock

Colliding Typologies

Reshaping the Urban Fabric Refilling to Reinforce the Street

Existing Condition

Metastasized Block

Knickerblock

Public Greenway

Microblock

Incremental Landscape

Hyperblock

Colliding Typologies

Proposals

Reinvention of Public Housing

Existing Condition

Metastasized Block

Knickerblock

Public Greenway

Microblock

Incremental Landscape

Hyperblock

Colliding Typologies

Metastasized Block

Michael Rosen Yuli Huang

E ON AV CARLT

ST ERLAND CUMB

ST FORD N. OX

RTLAN N. PO

N. ELLIOTT

NAVY ST

FORT GREENE PUBLIC HOUSING MICHAEL ROSEN YULI HUANG PROF. FREDERICK BIEHLE

D AVE

METASTASIZED HOUSING

E CARLT

SAINT

ON AV

EDWA

N. PO

RDS ST

RTLAN

D AVE

PARK AVE

PRINCE ST

The apartment block as freestanding mark in an open landscape, the underlying premise for nearly all of NYCHAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s projects including this one, is allowed to grow and ultimately metastasize by extension and continuation of its existing fabric, closing in on itself to create a new organism, a vast honeycomb of what appear to be courtyard oriented spaces. The additions would propose to integrate and distribute middle income and even market rate housing into the overall complex generating an extreme density without resorting to the high rise tower. The potential claustrophobia generated by the excess of enclosed spaces is resolved by stripping out all ground floor and second floor architecture, allowing for a transparent, piloti supported horizontal realm. New entrances are in glass so as not to disrupt the continuity and semi-private and semipublic use is integrated by breaking up the larger landscape into paths, outdoor seating and bounded passive and active recreation.

MYRTLE AVE

ARK

ALDELPH

I ST

Existing Condition

Introduction of Streets

Pilotis System and Courtyards

Addition of New Housing

1. Front Courtyard 2. Site Plan 3. Process 22

Rooftop Pavers Metal Rainscreen System on Brick Facade

Rooftop Green Space Rooftop Trellis System

Amenity Level Bridge

Affordable Housing Unit Market Rating Housing Unit

Lobby Lobby

Storefront

Rooftop Pavers

Rooftop Green Space Rooftop Trellis System

Amenity Level Bridge Market Rating Housing Unit

Lobby Lobby

Storefront

INGT WASH

RK ON PA

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

HI ST ALDELP

RTLAND N. PO

RDS ST EDWA

N AVE CARLTO

SAINT

PRINCE ST

AVE

N AVE CARLTO

CUMB

ERLAND

FORD N. OX

AVE

RTLAND N. PO

N. ELLIOTT

NAVY ST

PARK AVE

MYRTLE AVE

Housing Axonometric Courtyard Courtyard Courtyard Nolli Plan 24

9. 10. 11. 12.

Myrtle Ave Courtyard Courtyard Courtyard 26

Microblock

Hillary Flannery Kaifang Zhang

The Microblock scheme attempts to give a rational urban order to the anti-urban tower in the garden typology. Each existing tower is provided with a new base or apron two to three stories in height that is the basis of an individual block. The prior modest architectural footprint is entirely reversed, with the new forms filling each block site completely with an intentionally dense urbanism. That density is aerated, however, by the consistent inclusion of courtyards, around which a variety of programs are distributed- institutional, retail/ commercial, and community. As an urban pattern it generates an irregular agitated grid that allows for missing pieces or openings that can act as figured gardens. The streets that threads through vary in dimension and hierarchical importance. While the superblock has been divided now into a fully porous street pattern, the absence of through access makes for a primarily residential neighborhood. 27

Existing Condition

Introduction of Streets

Relation Among Residents

Duality of Front and Back

Inactive Zone

Breaking the Duality

Sphere of Influence

Sun Study

Joined Lobby

1. Street View 2. Site Plan 3. Process 28

4. Street View 5. Microblock Plan 6. Figure Ground 30

7. Perspective 8. Perspective 9. Aerial View 31

Incremental Landscape

Yuri Kim Sang Il Ma

This proposal is a form of landscape urbanism in that it preserves a park-like landscape that is open to the public that can be used for both active and passive uses, and at the same time, tucked under is slopes, is a new agenda of built form that can be programmed to serve both the neighborhood and the surrounding areas. Generated as a pixilated grid, the carpet of green peels up along Myrtle Avenue to reinforce that streets infill with commercial storefronts. The landscape then runs continuously throughout the superblock site sloping down in places to the original ground gently, forming bridges across streets and open blocks and lastly shaping internal courtyards with facing community or retail uses. This forms a second, at-grade, set of meandering paths through the complex. The existing towers “raise their skirts”, that is pull up, to allow their structure to puncture the park and offer direct park/rooftop access from within. The loss of lower level housing is made up for by additional “green” stories. Monumental stairways are also distributed as a way to emphasize the “greenway”. 33

Existing Condition

Elevated Greenspace

Reaction to Site

Final Formation

1. Perspective 2. Site Plan 3. Process 34

4. Sectional Perspective 5. Sections 6. Street View 7. Courtyard 35

Knickerblock

Peter Kim Han Kim

Influenced by the Knickerbocker Village (see pg 58), this proposal introduces a sense of perimeter blocks effectively concealing the existing architecture at street level. The street is reintroduced north-south as a meandering vehicular path,like speed bumps in the plan which divides the superblock into six sub-blocks rather than four. Each of these is then subdivided again into two or three perimeter blocks each with a central passive courtyard and a landscaped active pedestrian thoroughfare that runs east to west between them. The facade strategy recognizes the green condition of the public pedestrian as well as the courtyard. Dense planting is applied on the ground condition of the pedestrian space as opposed to planted green panels and hard ground are reflected in the courtyards. 37

Existing Condition

5 Modified Street Pattern

New Commerical Configuration

Additional Housing

New Courtyard Green Space

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Courtyard Ground Plan Process Perspective Model Model 38

7. Nolli Figure Ground Plan 8. Perspective 39

9. 10. 11. 12.

Perspective Elevation Section Facade 42

13. Perspective 14. Perspective 15. Model 43

Public Greenway

Emma Colley Alyza Enriquez

The principal act of this proposal is to introduce a new public street, a mostly pedestrian avenue that can wind through the obstacle course of the existing towers roughly parallel to Myrtle Avenue. Unlike Myrtle Avenue it will not be dominated by traffic due to its side street termination at each end. Thus it restore a condition of urban normalcy where there is today a retail/commercial desert. It can be dedicated to active public uses; restaurants and cafes with outdoor dining on the sidewalks, an amphitheater, an open air market, and the principal institutions that are already clustered on the site- the elementary school, the catholic church, the library, and the hospital. Intersecting this street is a green or garden street that connects Fort Green Park with Commodore Barry Park at the very heart of the enterprise. The open air market also is the keystone to the streets success by acting as a feeder by bridging Myrtle Avenue with the interior street. 45

Existing Condition

Addition of Streetfront Buildings

Alteration of Streets

Addition of Green Space

Alteration of Buildings

Addition of Civic Amenities

4 1. 2. 3. 4.

Perspective Site Plan Process Elevation 46

5. Perspectives 48

Hyperblock

Javier Marcano Veronika Suarez

To reintegrate the superblock into the city this solution is to make it a collection of hyperblocks. The hyperblock scheme reshapes the existing residual open space into a newly defined and distinct set of public courtyards, an urban space type not typically found in New York City. The public courtyard is intended to carry the same vitality as the street by being structured around a mix of use that includes local institutional and retail programming. Conceptually a repetitive pattern (as in the historic plan of Savannah, Georgia) each space is ultimately shaped and configured uniquely by the transformational demands of pedestrian circulation, existing tower footprints, new and proposed institutional programs, and a larger sense of episodic interconnectedness. Some courtyards are a landscaped extension of community centers for residents only, others support a larger institutional program such as the public school, the library or a newly designed museum. Redefining the street and courtyard by adding shared uses will cultivate a public trust and a healthy community for what will no longer be able to be called the Ingersoll/Whitman houses. 49

Commericial Uses

Residential Uses

Community Uses

Parking Uses

Incubator/Pop Shop Uses

Courtyards

Institutional Uses

Destination Points

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Perspective Site Plan Savannnah Squares Courtyard Transformation Programming

6. Nolli Plan 7. Prototypical Building Axonometric 52

08. 09. 10. 11. 53

Axonometric Axonometric Axonometric Ice Skating Rink

12. 13. 14. 15. 55

Axonometric Axonometric Axonometric Library

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 57

Balcony Axonometric Axonometric Axonometric Perspective

Colliding Typologies

Hudson DeRicco Nicholas Blount

The superblock is initially returned to something closer to its original patterning by threading five new north-south streets through the site. Along these streets are introduced new low density street front housing of three varieties depending on the block width dimensions and larger context- a. the townhouse with an enclosed semi-private common rear yard, b. the townhouse with a public rear yard taken up with fenced in recreational use (basketball, handball, tennis court, childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s playground, dog runs, etc.) which provides a buffer, and c. a shallow linear courtyard house with a privatized inner garden whose leftover space is given to decorative landscape. The existing towers are modified at the ground level to reconfigure their access into the new linear housing types. They typically act to subdivide the central spaces into incremental areas. Myrtle Avenue is also filled in with a building mass dedicated primarily to commercial/retail use. Although seemingly haphazard in the juxtaposition of the two systems, the scheme generates a wide variety of new housing as well as programed open public space for active and passive use. 59

Rowhouses

Elevated Towers

Amenities

Final Formation

1. Perspective 2. Site Plan 3. Process 60

4. Ground Plan 5. Perspective 61

6. Perspective 7. Sections 64

Precedents Socially Progressive Philanthropic Models Perimeter Block Garden Apartments

Linden Court Andrew Thomas, 1919 84th and 85th Streets between 37th and Roosevelt Ave Queensboro Corporation

The Chateau Andrew Thomas, 1922-3 6-09 34th Ave, 80-81st Streets 65

Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Andrew Thomas, 1924 Long Island City 54 Builldings, 2125 Families

Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union Springsteen and Goldhammer 1927 Bronx 66

Thomas Garden Apartments Andrew Thomas, 1928 John D Rockefeller Bronx

Paul Lawrence Dunbar Apartments Andrew Thomas, 1926-8 Harlem John D. Rockefeller 67

Phipps Garden Apts Clarence Stein, 1929 Sunnyside Gardens, Queens

Mesa Verde Henry Smith, 1926 Jackson Heights, Queens 68

Knickerbocker Village Apts John S. Van Wart & Frederick Ackerman, 1933 Fred F. French Company 12 stories, High-rise Concept

New York City Housing Authority Sponsored Projects

First Houses Frederick Ackerman and NYCHA technical Staff, 1936 Ave A/ 3rd Street, Manhattan 69

Hillside Houses Clarence Stein, 1935

Harlem River Houses Charles Fuller, 1937 70

Williamsburg Houses Lezcaze with Richmond Shreve (Shreve, Lamb, Harmon Architects), 1938

Red Hook Houses Domenick, Mccarthy, Hohauser, Litchfield, Moscowitz & Robin for Alfred Poor, 1939 71

Queensbridge Houses Ballard, Churchill, Brost, Turner, 1940

East River Houses Voorhees Walder Foley and Smith, 1941 72

Credits

Jennifer Lopez, Commissioner of Entertainment, NYC Mayor’s Office. Thank you for acting as the catalyst for bringing the idea of the studio to life. Erika Hinrichs, Chair UA Pratt Institute. Thank you for supporting the idea of the studio John Shapiro, Chairperson of Center for Planning and the Environment. Thank you for referring me to a series of fellow faculty and professionals involved in low income housing and plans for its future. David Burney, Professor and Director of Urban Placemaking and Management, Pratt Institute, Tamar Kiselevitz, Partner, Robert Scarano, Architect, and Jonathan Martin, Professor, Pratt Institute. Thank you for assisting me with the background material critical to an understanding of the scope for the project. John Kirchenfeld, Architect and Founder of the Institute of Public Architecture, Nicholas Bloom, Professor, NYIT and author of Public Housing that Worked, Kaja Kuhl, Professor, Columbia University, Beth O’Neil, Professor, Pratt Institute, Lawrence Zeroth, Professor, Pratt Institute, EJ Seong, Professor, Pratt Institute, 73

Debora Gans, Professor, Pratt Institute, Tom Vander Bout, Partner, NVda Architects, Frank Lang, Professor, Pratt Institute, pubic housing specialist. Thank you for participating in the reviews that helped the work to mature. Michael Pyatok, Architect and Public Housing specialist, Thomas Jefferson Medal recipient, Pratt graduate. Thank you for taking the time to critique the students’ progress at the time of your lecture at Higgins Hall. Steven Lovci and Bruce Eisenberg, Department of Design, NYCHA. Thank you for your generous participation in our reviews and bringing a more official perspective to the larger issues. Elaine Braithwaite, Policy Advisor for the Deputy Mayor of Housing and Economic Development, NYC Mayor’s Office. Thank you for taking the interest in the project and encouraging the distribution of its results. Bill Menking, Professor, Pratt Institute and Karen Kubey, Executive Director of the Institute for Public Architecture. Thank you for including the work in the Symposium on Housing to be held in April of 2015

Pratt Institute Thomas Schutte, President Bruce Gitlin, Chairman of the Board of Trustees Peter Barna, Provost Pratt Institute School of Architecture Thomas Hanrahan, Dean Kurt Everhart, Assistant to the Dean Pamela Gill, Assistant to the Dean Undergraduate Architecture Erika Hinrichs, Chair Jason Lee, Assistant Chair Teralyn Stewart, Coordinator of Student Advisement Juliet Medel, Coordinator of Student Advisement Latoya Johnson, Administrative Assistant Adam Kacperski, Administrative Assistant Editor Frederick Biehle Design and Production Michael Rosen