September 26, 2007
Peter Gluck's Socially Conscious Design
(Wow, natural light!! What a perfect environment to learn in!!)
Fellas, Gluck's got some amazing work that you can find here (scroll down-right for the pictures, click one and an enlarged photo album pops up). This brother's edgy and outspoken. Great article.
From Metropolis Magazine:
Peter Gluck has a problem with the AIA [American Institute of Architects]. He has a problem with architectural education too. Really he has a problem with the whole profession of architecture as it is currently practiced. Economic exploitation of youth. Big ideas in service of the highest bidder. Callow young CAD monkeys trained in archispeak. Designers who don’t know how to build. Engineers rescuing forms untethered from reality. He doesn’t seem like an angry person: he’s a sort of laid-back father figure with a gentle demeanor who appears to relish his work. But don’t get him started on the irresponsibility of architects and the way the profession is practiced. Or do get him started: you might learn something.“I don’t belong to the AIA,” Gluck says during a BMW station-wagon tour of his recent New York projects, among them a campus for Bronx Prep, a charter school for 800 students in the South Bronx, and a center for the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service, a nonprofit that works with poor families and immigrants in East Harlem. “I think they’re the problem, not the solution. It’s a group of people who get together to promote themselves; they’re not interested in really looking at the profession and trying to see where its problems are.”
Read the rest of the article here.
welcome back!
That is exactly why I feel that the terms 'architect' and 'self interested egomaniac' are interchangeable.
"welcome back"--haha!
Posted by: Anthony at September 26, 2007 11:18 AMA lot of his comments can also be made about most all graduate education; for someone's Ph.D. thesis, you take the cream of their intellectual vigor for $15k/year or less.
I like the interiors, but gosh, could he make the exteriors of his building a little more stark and cold? Yikes!
Posted by: Robert Perry at September 26, 2007 12:21 PM...interesting. One thing I just mathed out, though:
His "middle-income housing for the public employees and service workers who otherwise couldn’t afford to live there" was *built* for 3.7 mill. 14 units, 3.7 mill. Adding an 8% profit on to the unit cost, and not even including soft costs (arch, engineer, LA) OR land costs (because it was a brownfield, I'm sure the client got it cheap), you're at 285,500. At a typical (but by no means 'normal', nowadays) rate, that would mean an income of appx. $71,500. Now, I imagine that a married couple could make that work on 'public employee and service worker' salaries...but it seems a *tad* bit high.
Now...I'm an LA, not an architect, so an arch may say that that's a good price for a 14 unit development. I'm sure that for ASPEN, it's a great $/sf project...but just because it's at 40% of average median income, doesn't mean that it's "affordable" for service workers (and, see a recent post by me on my page wondering what the hell 'affordable' means).
Posted by: shawn at September 26, 2007 01:08 PMand, interestingly...aspen "in a lottery drawing", sold the houses for 190k and 290k (2 and 3 br).
hmm...where'd the rest of the money come from?
Of course, this isn't Gluck's fault, just...when all you've got is a (libertarian) hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. And all i've had in my hand for ?a year? is that libertarian hammer, and it's been questioning all KINDS of things that my profession blindly runs and stumbles into.
'affordable housing,' 'leeds,' 'sustainability,' 'smart growth'....etc.
Posted by: shawn at September 26, 2007 01:19 PMFor what it's worth, it's sadly typical, in my experience, that "affordable" housing actually costs more than a lot of other housing. I vividly remember reading about $400k condos in Oakland, CA, and remember living across the street from "affordable housing" that, at $250k, was more expensive than the three bedroom ranch home I owned at the time. Where I am now, the same price range--about $50k above the average for the Twin Cities metro--again qualifies as "affordable" housing.