Policy and Design for Housing: Lessons of the Urban Development Corporation
A major retrospective exhibition & website exploring histories, models, and ideologies to learn from in today’s housing crisis
“Policy and Design for Housing: Lessons of the Urban Development Corporation 1968-1975” was exhibited at the AIA Center for Architecture New York in 2005, at the MIT Wolk Gallery in 2006, and Roger Williams University in 2007.
As curator, designer, and photographer for the exhibition, Buscada worked with the exhibition’s steering committee of architects, planners, and environmental psychologists to explore the UDC’s unique mandate and accomplishments in building 33,000 units of humanist affordable housing for New York State.
The exhibition and its website have become the only archive on the UDC.
Read more: Policy and Design for Housing website
Going beyond a retrospective of UDC architecture, the exhibition put archival materials and vintage architectural photographs into visual conversation with new research and a series of Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani’s new photo essays with UDC building residents to understand the lessons from the UDC.
Our curation of the show considered how these buildings have fared after thirty years, and what the experience of living in some of these buildings has entailed. The exhibition culminated the current national and New York housing crisis and what lessons we can draw from the process and legacy of the UDC to address current-day housing issues.
The exhibition online
Part 1: Case Studies
The UDC’s 33,000 units of housing ranged from high-rise to low-rise, in sites ranging from rural communities to the middle of New York City. The questions the UDC sought to answer were numerous. We explore these through case studies of six rural and urban UDC developments, highlighting the intents and challenges of these projects through original plans and photographs.
Part 2: Then & now
The UDC researched with housing residents to develop a “Low-Rise High-Density” prototype, of which Marcus Garvey Park Village was the first manifestation. Roosevelt Island was also unique, creating a new-town in-town on the former Welfare Island. Here we juxtapose these two projects’ original plans and photographs with new research and new photo essays that address resident experience thirty years later. This section of the exhibition also features a film of present-day interviews with UDC architects.
Part 3: The current status
In part 3, UDC is brought into the current context; the current national and local housing crises are highlighted, and we critically ask what lessons we can draw from the experiences of the UDC. This last section also presents several current housing development models that aim to address some of the issues that were of concern to the UDC. These examples, of both housing crisis and housing design, are drawn from the New York City context.
Policy and Design for Housing on view at the AIA Center for Architecture
Policy and Design for Housing installed at the MIT Wolk gallery