Relations between the UDC and its architects were not always easy. When the UDC told John Johansen that his buildings on Roosevelt Island were designed with too many entrances, complicating security and increasing operating expenses, Johansen threatened to walk off the job.158 Sert and his partner Huson Jackson complained that the UDC’s fees, dictated by HUD guidelines, were frustratingly low.159 When James Stewart Polshek specified alternating black and white stripes on the facade of his Twin Parks building in the Bronx, Logue wrote in anger that they would give it “the design distinction of the Bronx Hall of Detention” and demonstrated “the failure of a designer to deliver what was promised and accepted.”160 Charles Hoyt, writing in the Architectural Record in 1975, complained that Logue’s interventions “infringed upon architects’ designs.”161 Many of these conflicts were common to the frequently fraught architect-client relationship. But often the problems stemmed from unique pressures the UDC exerted on architects to keep quality high, budgets low, and the pace fast, while still demonstrating innovation in design and materials.162
In the search for ideal prototypes, the UDC “spent a lot of time … analyzing what had already been built, figuring out where it succeeded and where it was not fulfilling the goal,” Pangaro remembered. Their early efforts became “guidelines for future projects, where we had a great deal more control over what the architect was producing than in the first round.”163 Some improvements were as simple as incorporating common spaces—meeting rooms, medical services, schools, senior centers, and day care—into housing to enhance community vitality.164 But often the goal was more ambitious, such as developing a new approach to elderly housing.165 The UDC surely benefited from its controversial power to ignore the local building codes that often blocked housing innovation. Sert was able to use skip-stop elevators in the low-income Eastview on Roosevelt Island, for example, only because the UDC overrode the city’s building code. With skip-stop, the elevator stopped only on every third floor, permitting the apartments above and below to run as “floor-throughs” with windows at each end providing natural cross-ventilation. Private corridors on the elevator floor and internal staircases leading up and down to the apartments on the other two floors provided residents with unusual amounts of privacy.166
In its effort to keep improving the quality of its housing, the UDC in 1972 introduced an unusual process for gaining feedback: requiring UDC staff as well as architects to live in the buildings with their families for one or two weeks as projects neared completion. Insights gained from “live-ins” complemented surveys of residents as well as an in-depth study of tenant satisfaction in eight projects that the UDC commissioned in 1973 from the Cornell sociologist Franklin D. Becker. “Design aids” gathered through all these evaluation tools were then compiled into a set of “livability criteria,” arranged in a loose-leaf notebook handed to each architect at the outset of a new project.167 The UDC also used the evidence behind these design aids to bolster its requests to the FHA and HUD to revise standards when existing ones, such as for room sizes and amenities, proved overly stringent.168
Logue believed strongly that those planning housing for others should experience it for themselves. Design changes inspired by the architects’ live-ins included adding more telephone booths to building lobbies, providing better screening between residences and streets, improving noise insulation between apartments, and making bedrooms larger. Liebman remembered asking his secretary to order the kind of bedroom set that she would choose for her own home—“not the modern stuff.” Lo and behold, the headboards didn’t fit. Ed and Margaret set an example by living in three projects—in the Bronx, Coney Island, and Yonkers. After one of these stays, Margaret argued for a larger second bedroom and a pass-through between the kitchen and living room.169 Live-ins and other evaluation mechanisms did not cure all the problems with UDC projects. Complaints remained, but the UDC tried to balance the often-competing demands of architects, tenants, budget watchers, and the Feds.
The UDC’s prototypes frequently used new technology to make housing construction easier, quicker, and cheaper. Applying the methods of mass production to creating “industrial housing” had long been a dream of prominent modernists including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Jean Prouvé, R. Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames, Moshe Safdie, and Paul Rudolph. But supply and demand for the concept had been weak in the United States, except for occasional bursts like the short-lived Lustron homes experiment immediately after World War II.170 Logue nonetheless remained intrigued, particularly in efforts to shift prefab production from single-family houses to multi-family dwellings. In Boston, he had worked with Carl Koch, a pioneer anointed by Progressive Architecture as “the Grandfather of Prefab,” to utilize precast wall panels and long-span, prestressed floor planks in Roxbury’s Academy Homes.171
In New York State, technological innovation became fundamental to the UDC’s agenda. The UDC even launched its own state-level Operation Breakthrough, thereby cashing in on the HUD secretary George Romney’s pet project launched in May 1969. A former American Motors Corporation executive, Romney, too, was eager to apply state-of-the-art mass production methods to a recalcitrant housing industry.172 A columnist for Harper’s expressed cautious optimism a year into the UDC’s existence that Logue had “started to lay the groundwork for a revolution in the building industry, notoriously the most backward of industries,… still us[ing] handicraft methods essentially unchanged since the time of the Pharaohs, and … still organized (if one can use that word) in thousands of small, inefficient firms.”173
The UDC established the Housing Technology Office in its headquarters in New York City with a mission to expand the use of industrialized methods. The UDC also developed a factory to produce precast concrete components such as hollow-core floor slabs, load-bearing and non-load-bearing wall panels, and stairs, landings, and balconies. Other technological experiments, in addition to the AVAC refuse system on Roosevelt Island, included various kinds of modular construction; high-bond mortar to allow pre-assembly of brick walls; plumbing improvements such as single-stack plumbing systems to avoid vent piping, low-flow fixtures that reduced water consumption, and premade “plumbing walls” complete with all fittings and pipes; spray-on painting; solar-power systems; and even the application to housing of electrical wiring panels developed by NASA.174 In publicizing their Roosevelt Island work, Johansen and his partner Ashok Bhavnani boasted about using, for the first time in the United States, a three-inch extruded cement-asbestos panel erected from within the building that, they claimed, required one-tenth of the labor force to erect than conventional brick and block, needed no scaffolding, and came very cheap.175
But despite Logue and his staff’s enthusiasm for technical innovation, there were many obstacles to achieving it, including finding manufacturers that could stay in business with a limited volume of orders and the resistance of contractors and building trades unions to changes that might undermine their long-established practices.176 It also proved time-consuming and expensive to develop these new approaches, which was disappointing, given that a major motive for them was to combat the spiraling costs of construction. Logue even became exasperated with his friend Paul Rudolph when Rudolph’s effort to use prefabricated twelve-by-sixty-foot modular units in his Buffalo waterfront housing led to long delays: “My report on your first design for Phase III Buffalo Waterfront is that it will win a P.A. [Progressive Architecture] award and that is about it. After the length of time you have been working on this job, it seems to me that we ought to be able to get down to the real world without a waste of time, money, and your own unique talents.”177 These frustrations aside, Logue would remain committed to the holy grail of industrializing housing construction into his next job in the South Bronx during the 1980s.
Probably the most important prototype that the UDC undertook was aimed at developing an alternative to the much-maligned high-rise public housing. In 1973, the UDC’s own inside designers Liebman and Pangaro joined Michael Kir
kland, Kenneth Frampton, Peter Eisenman, Arthur Baker, Lee Taliaferro, and Peter Wolf of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), a recently founded nonprofit organization of theoretically inclined young New York architects, to invent a new kind of low-income housing: “low-rise, high-density.” Together they designed Marcus Garvey Park Village, a 626-unit project of four-story, four-unit buildings spread across six devastated city blocks in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn, part of a larger Model Cities area. Resembling traditional rowhouses in scale but more modern aesthetically, they achieved the same density of fifty-five units per acre as a high-rise tower, but without the drawbacks. The units, intended particularly for families, featured mostly two- and three-bedroom (with fewer one-, four-, or five-bedroom) duplex apartments, some facing the street and others a public mews, with each household having its own private stoop, entrance, and outdoor space.
The designers were influenced by the architect and planner Oscar Newman’s recently published book Defensible Space (1972), which attributed the high crime rate in housing projects to residents’ feeling that they had little control over, or personal responsibility for, the space. In response, Marcus Garvey’s designers strove for greater clarity in distinguishing private, semi-private, semi-public, and public spaces to make tenants feel more secure as families and more invested as community members. The high density on this 2.5-acre site was achieved by eliminating the large setbacks from the street common in public housing towers, instead respecting the urban grid and increasing the number of bedrooms per unit. A second version of the prototype was planned for the more suburban location of Fox Hills, Staten Island, but was never built. Nor were the seven other low-rise, high-density projects on the UDC’s docket when it collapsed.
It was important to Logue not simply to build prototypes like Marcus Garvey, but also to draw public and professional attention to them. One of the reasons he chose the IAUS as a partner was that he knew its architects had close connections with Arthur Drexler, director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Just as Logue hoped, on the day of the ground breaking for Marcus Garvey—June 11, 1973—an exhibition showcasing the project opened at MoMA, titled “Another Chance for Housing: Low-Rise Alternatives,” with an accompanying catalog. From MoMA it traveled to the U.S. embassy in London.178 Opinions varied on Marcus Garvey Park Village. Upon its completion, eager tenants flocked to move in, delighted at the unique design features, despite the elimination of some due to budget; chain-link fences had replaced walls between gardens, and the promised day care was never built. Over time, some tenant enthusiasm dimmed in response to management’s neglect of community spaces, poor maintenance, and security problems like drug dealing, which sadly thrived in the off-street areas originally intended for protected gathering and play. But an observer who decades later visited the village noted that residents still were “pretty amazed … at the quality of the housing they were living in,” particularly that as relatively poor people “they lived in a duplex,” usually a privilege reserved for the middle class.179
With this celebrated low-rise, high-density experiment behind him, Logue moved on to an even greater challenge: seeking high-rise alternatives to the public housing towers that so often failed their residents. Still committed to the prototype strategy, Logue took the unusual step in 1974 of launching a major architectural competition for the design of a mixed-income, high-rise project that would complete the north end of Roosevelt Island. He knew that a competition would garner a great deal of attention. It had certainly worked for Boston City Hall a decade earlier. Logue turned out to be right. The competition attracted more than 700 entrants, of whom 250 made final submissions.
This competition for a thousand units of housing on a 9.2-acre site opposite the Motorgate garage was planned to proceed in two stages, first winnowing the large pool down to eight finalists who would then compete for first, second, and third prizes. Logue explained in the call for proposals that despite success with the low-rise, high-density concept, the UDC wanted a new prototype, because “if we can be convinced that elevator dependent housing can serve families, as well as elderly and childless households, with maximum livability, it will give us much more flexibility in our housing program.”180 Calling on prominent figures to bring wise counsel and public attention to the competition, Logue appointed a jury chaired by Josep Lluís Sert that included fellow architects Paul Rudolph, Joseph Wasserman, and Alexander Cooper; Sharon Lee Ryder, the interior design editor at Progressive Architecture; the Cornell sociologist Franklin D. Becker, who had analyzed tenant responses to UDC projects; and the prominent New York real estate developer and philanthropist Frederick Rose.
All the bases were covered, except the most important one: the survival of the UDC. It crashed a couple of months before the competition was completed. Liebman became so concerned the prize money would be canceled that he threatened to go to The New York Times. Instead he was kept on for three additional months at the UDC to see the competition through. The planned two stages were telescoped into one, but after all that, the jury divided, splitting the prize among four young firms rather than declaring one winner.181 The day after the results were announced, Liebman left his post as chief architect of the UDC, and the competition’s contribution to high-rise subsidized housing remained more theoretical than real. A design innovation that Liebman had once believed “in his mind’s eye that every magazine on earth would say is the future of high-density housing” instead definitively marked the end of the UDC’s prototype program.182
Despite UDC successes in developing prototypes to improve the quality and quantity of housing in New York State, the strategy had its pitfalls. Some critics argued that the UDC’s commitment to developing universal prototypes downplayed the importance of context. The topographical challenges of a particular building site were impossible to ignore, of course, but promoting ideal housing types minimized the importance of each project’s unique social and aesthetic setting. In a discussion many years later, with the distance of time, Robert Campbell and Tony Pangaro acknowledged this weakness in the UDC projects that they personally had worked on as young architects. “I don’t think they were conceived as parts of something larger. They were conceived as prototypes that could stand alone and could be on one site or perhaps on another site and perhaps on another site,” admitted Campbell, who had worked with Sert on several UDC projects. Pangaro agreed, referencing his own work on Marcus Garvey: “We were a bunch of kamikaze architects, you know dropping this project into Brownsville, in the best way we could.”183
The New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger may have offered the most balanced assessment when he took stock of the UDC’s impact on housing design as the agency came under fire in 1975. He wrote that although the UDC’s architectural record was “far from unblemished, and there are some notable failures,” over seven years the corporation “built nothing that resembles the banal oppressive buildings customarily considered suitable for public housing.” With the UDC’s aspiration for architectural quality, “it managed to produce some of the finest housing New York State has seen in recent times.”184 Goldberger might have added that the UDC managed to use its unusual powers, plentiful resources, and public visibility to inspire an atmosphere of experimentation greatly needed in a field that had become stultified, too often content to build either conventional market-rate single-family homes or formulaic high-rise public housing.
THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE OF ALL
The UDC provided Logue with new tools for combating the most serious charges brought against federally funded and locally implemented urban renewal as it was practiced from the late 1940s through the 1960s. He invented a fast track to push projects to completion more quickly. He experimented with ways of avoiding clearance and displacement, utilizing previously leveled urban renewal sites and building New Towns on open land. He tried to make the UDC’s urban redevelopment program one that advanced rather than set back the nation
’s civil rights agenda through creating more diverse residential communities, establishing a semiautonomous UDC subsidiary in Harlem, and wielding the UDC’s contracts as a weapon to promote affirmative-action hiring. He worked to accelerate the nation’s slow progress in building more and better housing for all Americans by encouraging design innovations and construction efficiencies, many made possible by adopting the latest technology. And he never gave up on the search for alternatives to failing high-rise public housing. Logue achieved some of these goals more successfully than others, but he made headway on all of them, even as he struggled with participatory democracy’s calls for greater grassroots involvement in the planning process.
There was one goal of Logue’s, however, that towered above all others in the importance he attached to it and the potential he felt it held to change how American cities were developing. This was Logue’s long-standing ambition to solve urban problems at the metropolitan level. In New Haven and Boston, Logue had felt frustrated that his authority stopped at the city’s borders when, he judged, so many of its challenges—and certainly the best solutions—were metropolitan-wide. And still now, “The day seems no closer when the New York metropolitan area, covering three states, will take a unified approach to the problems of housing, jobs, transportation, recreation, pollution, and even taxation,” he lamented in 1972. Finding this effort “unquestionably the most difficult part of our work,” he went on to complain that “despite repeated studies demonstrating substantial needs for new housing for families with low and moderate incomes in all the counties making up the New York metropolitan region, there is great resistance to facing this reality.”185
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