A home is a not an optimization excercise

This morning, we met down at the site for consideration- a quarter mile stretch of Delmar between Union and Kingshighway. We all met in the lobby of 3rd degree glass studios- a facility that began as a glass blowing studio and turned into a gallery/exhibition space with custom glass and melt glass for industry for sale. Cool place.

We broke up into four groups, loosely interested in documenting both sides of the street in the following categories of People, Movement, Signs, Utilities, Edges, Vegitation, and Gaps. I was part of the sign group and we further split into people who were looking at the north and south sides of the street. I started photographing street signage, business signage, and advertising, but gradually became more aware of a broader view of semiotics vs text on the wall. I started photographing places where signs SHOULD BE or WERE. Or conspicuous lacks of other types of signage. Food brands on trash on the ground. Clothing brands of discarded shoes in the alley behind the street. Juxtapositions and small security signs. We had about an hour to document.

It's a complex site- a few seemingly abandoned buildings, about 50% of the lots on the site were overgrown fields. Very few people walking around, mostly concentrated around the barber shop, the car wash, and the very happening blood donation center. No vandalism, or what little vandalism there was had been painted over, which either suggested a high level of community involvement in the neighborhood(or a few people who care) or that the area is so deserted to not warrant the attention of taggers.

Delmar is a demarkation zone, a boundary separating the private streets and neighborhoods to the south of Delmar, from the rest of the neighborhood, mostly Black, on the north side of Delmar. There is a continuous fence that runs along the border, unbroken, for the entire length of the site. The streets that pass through to connect to Delmar are blocked by massive concrete planters and locked gates and even the pedestrian gates are key code locked. Do we even want to attempt to bridge the two neighborhoods with this project? We are being asked to take a stand.

Good KFC lunch with Dew (Japanese), Saori (Japanese), and Kenny (Chinese), where we compared the differences of KFC from our respective countries.

After lunch, we met back at school for another lecture, this time by Julie Eizenberg (of Koning Eizenberg Architects ). The visiting lecturers keep getting better for this workshop, and I really like the way that the outside lecturer comes in, gives a lecture, and then folds into the workshop, becomes one of the directors of it, and throws themselves into discussion with the students. It's one thing to sit through a lecture and leave and another to work directly with someone. So that is really cool.

After the lecture, we went back upstairs to studio and worked on taking one observation from our group's study and extrapolating a design principle from this observation. We were also required to show one "secret" that we photographed that we think no one else saw. So that was fun. After a fast two hours, we pinned up and had a thorough discussion of our methodology, our ideas, and what questions were raised after these two days of study and observation.

Housing, especially public housing is very tricky. One could say that the failure of Modernism to "solve" the issue of public housing was the fact that they approached it as an optimization problem- most efficient units and site use. I went through a phase where I considered architecture largely as an optimization problem- but there are bigger issues at play of meaning and society and culture and individual experience that also come into it. This is a challenging site in a challenging city, and one of my new rules is to not think about "good" or "bad" streets or parts of the city, but to feel out what exactly gives them those labels and why. St.Louis is a dilapidated, decimated city. Decimated in that quite literally 10% of the city was destroyed as part of "urban renewal." More than half the population had left the city since the 1950s. There's so much open land in the urban core and the neighborhood because its a deserted urban landscape, and housing needs to be more than just a roof and walls to be successful in these places. Community building is required.

It's very challenging, it makes me feel like I'm back in BsAs studio, but now I realize that we dont have the option of saying "oh well, its an unsolvable problem with pure architecture." We have to build something and do what we can. It tiring to think about it.