Sabotage by Commitment to Solution
Walter Gropius, Diagram of the Bauhaus Curriculum (adapted, right), 1922
©2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
It takes little effort to identify the underlying cause of the affordable housing crisis, being that it is right there as the most commonly used nomenclature to describe it. The commitment to this issue, while nearly unanimous, has yielded hard-to-measure positive results. Recent research put out by National Low Income Housing Coalition shows that rent for a two-bedroom apartment in every state would require a wage above $14.00/hr., putting it well above the federally-mandated minimum.i The fact that unaffordability in the housing market continues to grow suggests potentially flawed approaches that undermine the collective commitment to find effective solutions. These approaches—however well-meaning—are undone by the existing conditions within the housing markets and the relationship of competing goods. One of the most difficult to redress is that any attempt to provide decent affordable shelter will be at odds with the creation of wealth for more typical homeowners.ii Another issue is the growing concentration of populations into urban centers, which will grow from 55% to 68% by 2050, and the inflationary pressures this has on commodities like land and access to amenities, based simply on supply and demand.iii Current trends have seen the repopulations of urban centers by groups who have seen the economic benefits of homeownership, drawing a stark contrast with existing urban populations, who see homeownership as less of a reality with each passing day.
The Worker’s House, built in 1918 by Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud, was one of the first proposed solutions for the growing housing issues.iv It was to be the International Style’s answer to increasing shortages in quality, affordable housing for Europe’s growing working class. Like many proposals that came before and after, the Worker’s House did not in fact solve housing issues; however, it did highlight an issue that since then has been ever-present and persistent in its impact. Over 100 years later, there are multiple government agencies, architecture firms, and academic researchers pursuing and proposing new and radical approaches to solving this issue, ranging from drastic changes in policy to new advances in technology, all with the end-goal of reducing the soaring cost of housing. The latest and most promising proposals involve the implementation of technologies that will automate the construction process, and (in theory) reduce price by removing the cost associated with human workers—thereby reducing the price of a home by ten to fifty percent.v This fifty-percent reduction represents approximately 8 million people, or five percent of the U.S. workforce potentially displaced.vi Overall, the number of people immediately affected may not be an overwhelming percentage; however the percentage effect happens to overlap with the groups affected by unaffordable housing. Even while there may be close to a unanimous agreement and commitment to solving this issue, the question of whether the end justifies the means persists.
Ideally, the end result of all these proposals would be the creation an equitable housing market through thoughtful design solutions that provide quality affordable housing access for all rungs on the socio-economic ladder. The issue of affordability often leads to an approach that attacks this symptom head-on falling short of recognizing the deeper fundamental issues. In most cases this approach denies any attempt at understanding possible causation and may compound the problem by reducing the affected groups’ earning ability, and thereby negating any reductions in home prices. If the general approach were to be redirected to address underlying causation, these proposals would yield affordability as a byproduct of a design process in place of the current approach that yields a house as byproduct of affordability.
Due to the urgency of this issue, the rate at which proposed solutions are generated has increased, accompanied by an eagerness to address its commensurate socio-economic dimension. The wealth generated by home ownership, and the wealth opportunity squandered in the absence of home ownership raises the question: What correlation exists between the two, beyond their market-driven commodification?
According to the United States Census Bureau, the average price of a single-family home in 1973 was approximately $17,000, not adjusted for inflation.vii While the current average price for a home in 2019 stands at 360,000.viii These prices are not an accurate representation of the cost difference, and need to be not only adjusted for inflation, but also adjusted for the growth in square footage of the average American home. Currently the average home sits at 2,700 square feet while the average home in 1973 was approximately 1,700 square feet.ix Once you factor that increase in square footage into the average cost of a home in 1973 you arrive at an average price right at $26,984.00 or approximately $153,000 dollars once adjusted for inflation.x In comparison the average cost of a home in America currently stands at $360,000, reflecting a previous cost that is 58% lower than what it is now, representing close to a 150% increase in cost. By itself, these numbers clearly highlight a real problem that has galvanized efforts to solve it. If looking solely at these statistics, the problem presents itself as merely one of an overly inflated cost that can be addressed though efficiencies in construction. However, Inflated housing prices only reveal more insights once they are compared with the recommended adjustment to the minimum wage, which currently stands at $7.25/hr., to that of $18.43/hr. according to an Economic Policy Institute study.xi This recommended wage adjustment takes into account the lost wages due to stagnation that has not kept pace with inflation over the years, along with the increase in production capability that has not been factored into worker’s wages. What really stands out from this number is that it also represents an approximate 150% increase, similar to that of the increase in housing price. This calls into question the current dominance of solutions that address or approach the affordable housing issue as one solved solely through cost reduction.
Insights gained from the wage statics present affordable housing as a parallax. On one hand, merely suppressing housing prices could offer relief; however, the current proposals achieve this almost solely through some form large scale implementation of technology, yielding monetary gain and efficiency through automation of the construction process. This would then possibly generate a feedback loop as wages would ultimately see the same if not less growth offering only short-term relief while creating a paradox as jobs are eliminated for the very social economic groups that struggle to afford housing.
There are always risks associated with any implementation of such disruptive technologies such as the drop in public transit ridership associated with the rise of ride share services.xii In this case the possibility for a decrease in public transit funding may come partially due to decreased ridership, which effects the groups most reliant on it. Attacking the issue as one of inflated prices, will do so primarily through the use of automated processes and will yield efficiency at the cost of the groups most vulnerable.
Generally speaking, the residential construction industry has remained relatively untouched by disruptive implementations of technologies unlike many other manufacturing industries. Processes like the assembly line and automation have remained a distant idea which has preserved the connection between thinking and doing. By severing the mental aspects of creation from the physical ones yielding efficiency through subtraction and partitioning the two, thinking and doing, as completely divergent task reinforcing the idea of blue-collar vs. white collar.xiii This would as a consequence discard positive cognitive aspects and collective understanding of the spatial environment encountered through daily interactions by compartmentalizing the act of creation. It is without this relation that the act of making becomes foreign from the idea or genesis, which will potentially lead to the alienation of the occupant from the space they call home. Within automation of the construction process comes the potential alienation of not only the artistic design from the material production, but also an alienation of the individual from the home itself as the process becomes segregated from the occupant. This alienation permeates through all facets, including the economics driving the affordable housing issue as a whole, eventually leading to homes people cannot afford and do not understand.
If the assembly line separates thinking from doing then automation all but completely removes doing, leaving only thinking. Only through this separation of thinking from doing is the elimination of doing, which is now being proposed through the implementation of automated construction, made not only possible but a logical step. This process has been one fueled by self-fulfillment and an ideology that believes creative intellectual processes are inherited personal property of value and creative intellectual processes that are deemed unconscious have no value.xiv A case can be made that the separation of thinking from doing has at the very least not benefited the groups effected by housing inequality. The efficiencies yielded from these new forms of production have come at the cost of positive cognitive understanding and ownership of the built world while also diminishing earning capacities. The irony is that this very ideology is at the root of the prevailing issue of housing affordability, and yet each solution offered based on it builds from it has a foundational rational.
Implementation of technology into the construction and manufacturing field have always been present and more recently marked the beginning of movements within architecture. Some movements like the Deutscher Werkbund, and the subsequent founding of the Bauhaus School, directly addressed the implementation of new industrial technologies with a renewed commitment to the design process through the unity of artistic design and material production.xv The school was founded 100 years ago in 1919 on ideals that are still relevant in today’s current rapid push to scale up and implement new technologies as quickly as possible. Doing so haphazardly shifts the role of these technologies from the initial use as design tools to design solutions.
Throughout history advances in technique along with the implementation of machines have increased productivity and ability to either increase yield or quality and in some cases both. However impactful these advances have been they have generally kept intact the haptic nature within the construction process. The invention of the electric drill and subsequently the cordless drill did not fundamentally change the basic mechanical properties of the screw, nor did they eliminate the human element from the process. What has been preserved to this point has been the haptic nature of construction that it is so fundamental to the conscious and unconscious understanding of the built environment.
One does not have to come from a long line of masons to understand that a brick wall achieves strength through its interlocking pattern or how a key stone is fundamental to a stone arch. Construction simply is the summation of the collective knowledge and techniques building upon what came before with each passing generation by the way of the hand. This collective knowledge, whether it be conscious or subconscious is part of the universal experiential language expressed through tectonics, form, and touch. This idea of accrued or residual knowledge is similar to Carl Jung’s theory on the collective unconscious and is embedded within traditional constructions materials and the act of building itself. Jung’s writings on the collective unconscious proposes that the unconscious is comprised of inherited preexistent forms and archetypes, which then can become conscious secondarily.xvi Spatial experience similarly is a product of the stimulated subconscious triggering a conscious reaction. It is this embedded unconscious that prompts experiential moments and relies on the embedded understanding of forms, tectonics, and materials of the built environment.
So how can design solve affordable housing? The simple answer is it cannot; there is no possible quick solution to a problem built over decades to where it is presently. Any singular directed approach as an instantaneous solution will fail, not only due to its naivetés but also to the fact that the same driving forces that brought on this problem happen to be what is behind the given solution. Cost and affordability in this case are seemingly synonymous or interchangeable, however the associated price or cost speaks to the embedded value within an object and affordability merely speaks to one’s ability to afford. This ability to afford a home is directly related to the ability to generate value through work and any proposition that threatens this does little to address the overarching issue of competing goods.
On the one hand, there is the reduction of cost through continued wage suppression, and on the other, the possibly of a recommitment to the design process that focuses on the unified material production and artistic design. A return, or recommitment to process, would utilize new technologies as tools for design as opposed to holistic design solutions similar to the embrace of technology embedded in the Bauhaus pedagogy.
“The art schools of old were incapable of producing this unity—and how could they, for art may not be taught. They must return to the workshop. This world of mere drawing and painting of draughtsmen and applied artists must at long last become a world that builds. When a young person who senses within himself a love for creative endeavor begins his career, as in the past, by learning a trade, the unproductive “artist” will no longer be condemned to the imperfect practice of art because his skill is now preserved in craftsmanship, where he may achieve excellence.”xvii
Similar to the passage above from Walter Gropius’s Manifesto of the Staatliches Bauhaus a return to the process and craft, not the products, ideas, and designers that the Bauhaus school eventually produced. The fixation on the culmination or solution has led to design that has turned its back on the craftsmen in favor of reverse engineering design to fit preconceived solutions. The separation of thinking from doing has been a significant factor in the alienation of the individual from the built environment while also negatively impacting the individual’s ability to afford housing. Gropius’s manifesto is a clear call for the combined action of thinking and doing that is as relevant now has it was 100 years ago. It can be concluded that a commitment to the intrinsic value of creative process is one acquired through inquisition, will yield understanding and purpose.
Thomas Mouton, Associate AIA
Thomas Mouton is an Architectural Job Captain at WDG - Architects & Engineers located in New Orleans, Louisiana and is currently working towards licensure. He is interested in the exploration of methods for intrinsic evaluation of architectural elements gained through tactile experience.
In 2016, Mouton received his graduate degree in Architecture from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In graduate school he participated in the design and construction of the award-winning Lafayette Strong Pavilion project. The project was part of a multi-university research project initiated by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and culminated with the publication of the collective projects research “Thinking While Doing: Explorations in Educational Design/Build” including his student perspective/reflection on the academic and profession value of educational design/build.
iOut Of Reach.” National Low Income Housing Coalition. Accessed December 18, 2019. https://reports.nlihc.org/oor.
iiMichael Diamond, “Affordable Housing and the Conflict of Competing Goods: A Policy Dilemma in Affordable Housing And Public-Private Partnerships,” (Nestor M. Davidson & Robin Paul Malloy eds., Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2009).
iiiUnited Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2018 Revision (ST/ESA/SER.A/420). New York: United Nations.
ivOud, Jacobus J.P. Atlas of Interiors. Accessed December 18, 2019. http://atlasofinteriors.polimi-cooperation.org/2014/03/19/jacobus-j-p-oud-weissenhof-row-houses-stuttgart-germany-1927/.
vSouza, Eduardo. “Could 3D Printing Be the Future of Social Housing?” ArchDaily. ArchDaily, June 26, 2019. https://www.archdaily.com/919667/could-3d-printing-be-the-future-of-social-housing.
vi“Employment by Major Industry Sector.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 4, 2019. https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm.
viiUS Census Bureau Historical Census of Housing Tables Home Values. “US Census Bureau Historical Census of Housing Tables Home Values.” Historical Census of Housing Tables Home Values - Housing Topics - U.S. Census Bureau, June 1, 2000. https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/values.html.
viiiU.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, New Residential Sales, November 26, 2019
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