36 YEARS OF HOUSING

Created By: Adam Vosburgh, Adeline Chum, and Jonathan Chester

For: Jia Zhang’s Fall 2020 DataViz for the Humanities course at the Columbia GSAPP

This project is about the Columbia GSAPP's Housing Studio, which began in 1974 as a result of student activism and the coordinated interests of new faculty. The studio has continued in different iterations over the 40+ years since, and has changed with the dominant ideas in architecture as well as with the social political and economic pressures on the city. 36 YEARS OF HOUSING is centered around two components: Data comprised of individual student projects, and Tags which are an attempt to draw some lessons from the past 40 or so years of production out of them.

36 YEARS OF HOUSING was made by three Master of Architecture students during their completion of the Housing Studio, but would not have been possible without the work done in 2014 by the GSAPP Exhibitions Team, in a retrospective of the GSAPP Housing Studio titled “GSAPP Housing Studios, 1974-2014.”

The 2014 GSAPP Exhibition Team comprised of: Director of Exhibitions: Mark Wasiuta, Exhibition Coordinator: Adam Bandler, CCCP Exhibitions Assistant: Florencia Alvarez Pacheco, CCCP Research Squad: Alissa Anderson, Liyana Hasnan, Maite Borjabad, Pedro Cenal Murga, Rayna Razmilic Triantafilo, Rosana Elkhatib, Tania Tovar Torres, Virginia Black, M. Arch Exhibitions Assistants: Brittany Roy, Megan Murdock, Sareeta Patel, M.Arch Exhibitions Crew: Andrew Hite, Dasylva Bolton, Dong Joo Kim, Emily Mohr, Grete Grubelich, Huynh Ngoc Ho, Ilijana Soldan, Jorge Cornet, Julie Pedtke, Rebecca Book, Yitao Wang, Yujing Mandy Han, Exhibition Design: Adam Bandler, Florencia Alvarez, Mark Wasiuta, Graphic Design: MTWTF

A NOTE ON DATA

The archive that 36 YEARS OF HOUSING is based off of is incomplete and biased. For the years up to and including 2014, we relied on the projects curated by the Exhibition Team, who themselves were relying on projects curated in each release of Precis or Abstract, two yearly publications of GSAPP work. As a result there is only one project per studio per year, resulting in 4 - 8 projects depending on the year, and of these only one image is shown, while the text is sometimes from the studio critic's brief, and sometimes from the student's project. The projects seen here cannot be taken as a representative sample of the GSAPP Housing Studio's production, but rather as representative of what the faculty and administration want to be seen as representative of the studio's production.

For 2015 and on, the archive is more complete, but still imperfect. Hosted on the Columbia GSAPP's website is anywhere from 50%-75% of each studio's work and much more holistic in terms of images, but very lacking in text. We individually formatted each of those projects to include as much information we could find about them, including the description of the project itself in the case that it was available.

A NOTE ON TAGS

Because the text included with each project was impartial and not always from a consistent source, we had to rely on the only document we had for every year to attempt to compare the Housing Studio apples-to-apples, the Coordinator's Studio Brief.

While every individual studio is often a world unto its own, priorities, pedagogy, and sites are usually set to some degree by the coordinator. In reading all of these to tease out shared themes in commonalities, we placed an emphasis on tags that would not be mutually exclusive, but rather have a high degree of overlap with others. For example: For Pedagogy, we identified three themes that often appeared in Studio Briefs, Typology, Precedent Study, and Site Analysis. The inclusion of each of these does not mean that a studio of that year only did this, or that those not tagged with "Site Analysis" didn't analyze the site, but rather that they were concepts that were emphasized in the coordinator's brief. A brief that tagged Typology might also be tagged for Precedent Analysis, and in fact higher amounts of overlap between tags may be a by product of the briefs getting longer and more encyclopedic, as can be seen in the Brief Length tag.

One group of tags in particular took a lot of attention: Take On "Housing Problem." The two sub-tags for this, Grappling with Generic and Proposing New Modes are reductive and highly qualitative, but they are an attempt to address a real difference seen in the briefs over the years. In particular, studios tagged as Proposing New Modes often positioned the role of the students as producing "new prototypes for housing" (2007) and 're-writing the rules of "affordable" housing' (2009,) possibly in response to the utter failure of many systems of Housing in Subprime Mortgage Crisis. Studios tagged as Grappling with Generic saw the role of students more as working within a frame of the existing, and often overlapped with studios tagged with Typology: "Housing by its very nature is a generic building type. Some may argue that working within a particular typology produces boring buildings. However, it is precisely through understanding of a type, and its multiple typologies that allows one to understand what has motivated the peculiarities of a particular building." (2014)

In summary, the tags are an attempt at making sense of the 40 years that we've been making Housing projects at the GSAPP, we hope they're a useful guide to this massive amount of work amassed over the years.

-Adam, Adeline and Jonathan