The flyer bore the famous photograph of Pruitt-Igoe being dynamited in 1972. The public housing complex in Saint Louis, an icon of the Modernist movement in socially conscious architecture, had been abandoned as unlivable. Beneath the photo was the legend “Want another chance?” Thus enticed, architects and social-service professionals trudged to the Merchandise Mart in February for a day-long symposium on the topic “New Opportunities for Architecture in Social Change,” sponsored by the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
Logue has seen agencies in offices whose walls had holes knocked through them by clumsy contractors, or had no heat, or had records damaged or destroyed by busted water pipes. “It’s a very serious situation,” she said. “It is common for agencies to spend more than 25 percent of their annual budgets on maintenance. In other cases, agencies have to endure the instability of moving every few years because their buildings are falling down around them.”
The symposium broke for a box lunch, during which business cards were passed as often as the salt and pepper. No doubt this frank exploitation of misery as a business opportunity struck some as crass. Worn reports that he was privately chastised–“slammed hard,” in his words–by local members of the group Architects/Designers and Planners for Social Responsibility for inviting more bureaucrats than activists to sit on the symposium panel. Worn says he respects such objections but persists in his opinion that “it wouldn’t hurt to go after this work as a business opportunity.”
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These are alien realms to many architects, and for good reason. In typical human-services work the constraints on designers are tighter and the budgets smaller, yet the design program is more complex than in all but the most specialized commercial projects. A skyscraper requires bigger design, but a battered women’s shelter or home for abandoned kids in many ways requires more design. William Martone, director of Evanston’s Children’s Home and Aid Society, told the symposium about how he asked Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to draft plans for a new residence to replace the agency’s present building, which opened as an orphanage in 1907. Some 50 emotionally disturbed kids age 5 to 14, most of them DCFS wards of the state, would live there, he told them. The architects would have to cram medical, administrative, and kitchen facilities into a 60,000-square-foot building that should offer the children warmth, privacy, security, safety, and a variety of play spaces and the supervisors unobstructed sight lines (“these are kids who have to be watched all the time”). There must be an adjacent “outdoor education complex,” and the whole thing has to be squeezed onto a one-acre lot.
That part architects know about.
If unhappy people often take a toll on the housing, the reverse can also be true. Logue explains that most dedicated social-service professionals put up with squalor out of an excess of selflessness. But people in pain, people in transition, people who are alone often are acutely (if not consciously) sensitive to their physical surroundings. Says Logue: “The environment does affect morale. Talk to substance-abuse counselors and they’ll tell you that a woman will not come to a crummy place. She needs to think it’s a step up in her life or she won’t get involved.”
Tom Layman of the North Avenue Day Nursery notes that building or remodeling sometimes forces staff to examine for the first time those ill-lit corners of their programs that the physical environment illuminates. The nursery moved into a newer existing building a year and a half ago, and Layman recalls that the building’s configuration forced them to make do with two smallish rooms, each big enough for 8 kids and one teacher, rather than the 16 kids and two teachers that are standard in the day-care industry. Unexpectedly, they have proved to be the nursery’s best rooms, because the smaller group size made for a more focused, intimate classroom experience. Says Layman, “Everybody in day care knows that group size is the main factor in program quality, but even the profession is not sure what the optimum group size is.”
