My New York Times Op-ed: “Designing a Fix for Housing”

This summer, I had the honor and privilege of working with the architects, artists, and urban planners Jeanne Gang, Roberta Feldman, Theaster Gates, Kate Orff, and Rafi Segal along with dozens of others (most notably Jeana Ripple and Katrina Stoll) on an exhibition for New York’s Museum of Modern Art titled Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, which re-imagines the future of American public housing and suburbia. Friday’s New York Times contains an op-ed written by me and Jeanne encapulating our team’s findings and prescriptions for suburbs like Cicero, Illinois (the site of our project), which have become the destination of choice for immigrants — opening the door to whole new set of problems which have been ignored in the post-bubble housing debate.

The exhibit itself opens on February 15th in the museum’s Architecture and Design galleries. If you’d like to learn more about our project and the exhibit, MoMA is hosting a public symposium on Friday, Feb. 17 featuring each of the five teams’ leaders in conversation about their projects. Jeanne is scheduled to speak about ours at 2:30 PM; tickets and more information are available here. The op-ed itself begins this way:

RECENT efforts to fix the housing market — including Thursday’s $26 billion settlement with five of the nation’s biggest banks — have focused purely on the financial aspects of the slump. A permanent solution, however, must go further than money to address issues that have been at the core of the crisis but have been wholly ignored: design and urban planning.

Too often during the bubble, banks and builders shunned thoughtful architecture and urban design in favor of cookie-cutter houses that could be easily repackaged as derivatives to be flipped, while architects snubbed housing to pursue more prestigious projects.

But better design is precisely what suburban America needs, particularly when it comes to rethinking the basic residential categories that define it, but can no longer accommodate the realities of domestic life. Designers and policy makers need to see the single-family house as a design dilemma whose elements — architecture, finance and residents’ desires — are inextricably linked.

The rest of the article is available at The New York Times.