Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream is an exploration of new architectural possibilities for cities and suburbs in the aftermath of the recent foreclosure crisis. During summer 2011, five interdisciplinary teams of architects, urban planners, ecologists, engineers, and landscape designers worked in public workshops at MoMA PS1 to envision new housing and transportation infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country’s suburbs. Responding to The Buell Hypothesis, a research report prepared by the Buell Center at Columbia University, teams—lead by MOS, Visible Weather, Studio Gang, WORKac, and Zago Architecture—focused on a specific location within one of five “megaregions” across the country to come up with inventive solutions for the future of American suburbs. This installation presents the proposals developed during the architects-in-residence program, including a wide array of models, renderings, animations, and analytical materials.

La propuestas que aparece a continuación es una de las 5 propuestas que se han planteado en diferentes estados de EEUU.

web: Foreclosed 

 

THE GARDEN IN THE MACHINE

Located along freight rail lines predicted to increase in capacity, Cicero is an aging, inner-ring suburb of Chicago. In recent decades it has been a point of arrival for immigrants, overwhelmingly Mexican and Central American, and it is experiencing a high rate of foreclosure, both in its fabric of tightly spaced brick bungalows, many of which are now multifamily dwellings, and on industrial sites. In this proposal, Cicero's linked problems of industrial decline, rising unemployment (coupled with high poverty rates), and environmental contamination are transformed into opportunities for rejuvenation. 

The team, led by Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects, focused on a former factory. Situated adjacent to housing, it inspired the designers to imagine how the existing fabric and new interventions might be connected. Inverting the title of Leo Marx's classic book The Machine in the Garden (1964)—which discusses the historical conflict between the USA's pastoral ideal and its industrial ambitions—and the typical suburban ideal of urban life nestled in nature, the team proposes that lost industry is an American legacy within which the "garden" must be cultivated anew. 

The team created a new housing type that allows for the mixing of families, generations, and spaces for living and working in ways generally not sanctioned by current zoning laws. Team members asked, "What if the bungalow could be taken apart and sorted into separate pieces—bedroom, kitchen, lawns—and reassembled as needed?" Their response is the Recombinant House, which remains affordable because people may buy only the parts they need and add or subtract spaces as families grow, shrink, or change. Communal spaces allow for shared recreation, and the work spaces accommodate informal entrepreneurial businesses. By redeploying elements of the abandoned factory, notably its steel trusses, the architects achieve flexibility, introducing open spaces and gardens on multiple levels. Homes, work spaces, and public amenities coexist with a variety of green spaces, which align with the rail lines to form wildlife corridors.       

The proposal is based on the limited equity cooperative (LEC) model of home ownership. It decouples the ownership of homes from that of the land beneath them; residents own their spaces, and thus have an incentive to care for them, but land and shared amenities are jointly owned by all, in a private trust.