Daily Blague

¶ Among the many things that the prof and I talked about during yesterday's lesson was the folly of housing poor people in high-rise apartments. Apartment towers require a degree of social responsibility that many poor people quite understandably lack. Common areas must be treated with respect, with elevators and corridors in particular kept in working order. The indistinct sense of property that a person without property is likely to have means that many residents are going to treat whole buildings as their own, or at least no more not their own than the flats that have been allocated to them. Bad architecture ends up reinforcing the very characteristics that conservatives deplore - but then conservatives believe that bad architecture doesn't hurt people, only people hurt people. Anyway, I thought I'd do a little Googling about the alternatives. Not that anybody's building towers any more. The first thing that I came across responded perfectly to my query. Here's the excerpt from the University of Chicago Press's catalogue:

Architecture for the Poor describes Hassan Fathy's plan for building the village of New Gourna, near Luxor, Egypt, without the use of more modern and expensive materials such as steel and concrete. Using mud bricks, the native technique that Fathy learned in Nubia, and such traditional Egyptian architectural designs as enclosed courtyards and vaulted roofing, Fathy worked with the villagers to tailor his designs to their needs. He taught them how to work with the bricks, supervised the erection of the buildings, and encouraged the revival of such ancient crafts as claustra (lattice designs in the mudwork) to adorn the buildings.

Here are some housing projects proposed for the mentally ill in the Seattle area.

That's much nicer. In Scotland, architect John Gilbert has developed sustainable housing for "deprived areas": it will be interesting to see if this turns out to be overambitious. Finally, be sure to look at these photographs of the Charlotte Street area in the Bronx. The earliest homes were simply suburban; the newer projects are more appropriate to urban density.

What can you do? This is what I asked Barbara Ehrenreich after she spoke about the problem in 2003, and her answer was to make a contribution (at a minimum) to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. So I did, and you can, too.

¶ For another kind of misery-at-a-distance, have a chuckle at Strindberg and Helium. M le Neveu could have done the voice work; his imitation of utter despondency is just as funny. There's nothing quite like faux wallowing for silliness. (Thanks to Majikthise.)