The Legacy Project

The Legacy Project: New Housing New York
Lance Jay Brown, Mark Ginsberg, Tara Siegel
Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, April 2017



Hardcover in clamshell box | 11 x 8 inches | 256 pages | 425 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-9881512567 | $50.00

Publisher's Description:

PlaNYC, the Mayor’s long-term visioning statement for the city’s future, projects that New York will add one million more residents by the year 2030. This publication documents the evolution of a new stage in the development, design, and construction of one of the most important services of the city of New York: affordable housing.

The New Housing New York Legacy Project brings together progressive approaches to affordable housing in the elds of design, architecture, planning, and public policy. The collaborative nature of the New Housing New York Legacy Project reflects the need for communication and exchange across the public and private sectors.

The publication discusses the lessons of two international competitions and complementary revisions to procurement and implementation processes. As America’s urban population grows, its cities will be called upon to draw inspiration from one another’s successes. This document is an important step in promoting such dialogue.

dDAB Commentary:

Via Verde is one of the few affordable housing projects, in New York City at least, that can be considered famous. By the time it opened its doors in 2012, the 222-unit apartment complex in the Bronx was known as much for the process that led to its creation as for its distinctive snaking, terraced form. It didn't hurt that Michael Kimmelman, the newly appointed New York Times architecture critic, in 2011 penned his first column about Via Verde, praising the building ("it makes as good an argument as any new building in the city for the cultural and civic value of architecture") but also signaling the departure his criticism would take compared to predecessors Nicolai Ouroussoff and Herbert Muschamp.

The book documenting Via Verde begins in 2004, with a design competition that envisioned affordable housing on three sites in three boroughs, none of them the Bronx. Those not familiar with the process leading to Via Verde might wonder what is going on. But quickly they learn that it is the "to build" component of the New Housing New York Legacy Project: it is the built offshoot of the three winning projects that were destined to remain on paper. The steering committee for the NHNY Legacy Project, as documented in the book, applied the lessons learned in the competition to criteria for a built component, which asked architects to partner with a housing developer and make innovative yet practical proposals. The five finalists are presented in the book, including the winning Phipps | Rose | Dattner | Grimshaw project.

The first half of the book is devoted to the above, the process of the Legacy Project's competitions. The balance of the book is then dedicated to documentation of the design and realization of Via Verde. There are photos – lots of photos – showing the metal-clad exterior with its functional sunshades (not shallow ones prevalent at the time), the open space at the center of the project, the urban farms on the buildings many terraces, and the interiors of the compact yet light-filled units, some of them duplexes, a rarity in affordable housing. There are also drawings and documentation of the design process and construction.

Packaged in a handsome oblong lay-flat hardcover inside a clamshell box, the book is a special object for a special project. But this approach to the $50 publication is also aligned with the main criticisms that were levied at Via Verde: the expense of the project ($235/sf) meant it could not serve as a precedent while the site-specific nature of its design meant it could not be replicated elsewhere. But the argument that good architecture with a reasonable budget should exist only where profits are to be had is just wrong. Public housing in the mid-20th century needn't have looked the way it did, with bland cookie cutter buildings scattered about superblocks; and affordable housing – so needed as it is this century – need not be given ridiculously low budgets or, as is too often the case, be stuffed into the base of luxury housing projects as incentives for developers to build higher. I agree with Kimmelman, who summed up Via Verde in his piece (included in the book), "the project points architecture, and the architectural conversation, in the right direction."

Inside the book:

Author Bio:

Lance Jay Brown is an architect, author, and an ACSA Distinguished Professor at the City College of New York/CUNY. Mark Ginsberg is partner at Curtis + Ginsberg Architects. Tara Siegel is Rose Fellow at Pratt Center for Community Development.

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