Thread by @torrHL

“Bronx building fire:

Twin Parks was once an icon of affordable housing.

What went wrong?” slate.com/business/2022/…

“the question is how the smoke from a third-floor apartment fire managed to fill the entire building within minutes.

Fire Commissioner said the apartment where the fire started had a door that didn’t close on its own, allowing smoke to quickly fill the building’s corridors…”

“The ownership group said the building did have self-closing doors, which are required by the city fire code.

The Philadelphia row house and the Bronx tower are linked by history as well.”

“Today, we might be more likely to associate the row house with high-quality lodging and the brick tower with maligned housing projects.”

“But when Twin Parks North West, Site 4, was built in Bronx in 1973, it was supposed to be a high-design antidote to two kinds of decrepit “slum” typologies:

not just crumbling tenements and row houses, but also the troubled modernist tower blocks that replaced them.”

“To see Twin Parks North West transformed into a site of tragedy and a symbol of disrepair is a bitter irony for a building once held up as the cutting edge of public design.”

“At the time, the Bronx’s East Tremont neighborhood was suffering from the consequences of highway construction, disinvestment, white flight, and a dwindling, substandard housing stock.

One pastor said the neighborhood was losing 1k housing units a year to fire and abandonment.”

“Back there is the kind of house we wanted to tear down,” Paul Matson, the longtime minister of Tremont Methodist Church, told the filmmakers, gesturing to a typical row house.

“It’s wood frame, it may last two years, it may burn down tomorrow.”

nfb.ca/film/new_york_…

“It was funded and built by NY Urban Development Corp, headed by the crusading planner Ed Logue.

Its architects included Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Richard Meier, The Architects Collaborative, and Giovanni Pasanella, an unusually talented group for an affordable housing project

“Twin Parks was a closely watched experiment in getting inner-city housing right.

Apartments, facades, and public spaces were built according to surveys of resident preferences.”

“The buildings included three day care centers and three schools, family-size two-story apartments, programs like a tenant orientation course, and countless touches of thoughtful design.”

“At the Twin Parks North West, Site 4, tower on 181st Street, for example, a ground-floor laundry room connected to an enclosed patio, playground, and herb garden labeled the “mother’s watch.”

“the buildings had been explicitly designed to avoid public housing debacles like the notorious Pruitt-Igoe buildings in St. Louis, which would meet the wrecking ball before Twin Parks was complete.”

“Whether all the open space was truly welcome for crime-wary residents has been a topic of debate ever since.

The Canadian documentary shows kids playing double Dutch and dancing to a merengue band in the courtyard.”

“But at least one critic, Kenneth Frampton, concluded that the most successful buildings were those designed by Prentice & Chan, Olhausen, in part because they had embraced a more restricted, fortified concept of public space.”

“Afterward, the Cornell sociologist Franklin Becker surveyed all the residents about the results and found that the best responses for an urban project came from Twin Parks North West, Site 4—by Prentice & Chan, Olhausen—in part because they had a single, guarded entrance lobby.”

“For a 2013 story in @UrbanOmnibus, Schindler brought several alumni back to Twin Parks North West for a bittersweet survey of their work on its 40th birthday.

As you might expect, many of the finer touches had been worn down or demolished, including the “mother’s watch” patio.”

“The superintendent considered the vaunted “defensible” spaces that still existed to be “dead zones.”

On the other hand, the group met a resident of three decades with the tower’s facade tattooed on his forearm.

“I love this building,” he told them.

“By which criteria, and in terms of which timeframe do you judge the ‘success’ of architecture in housing?” they wrote.

“How can we advocate for better design if we can’t relate it to non-design issues such as management, maintenance, and use, in both the short and long term?”

“The practice of appraising buildings just after they’ve opened—or worse, just before!—is blind to the particular way that time and use reveal a place’s true nature.

But it works both ways:

Sometimes condemnation is unfairly put on design concepts compromised by poor upkeep”

Cc: @modassic @SamSeder @alizinha