ARCH_500-600 Options Studio: ‘Privatized! Reasserting Architecture for the People’

Whereas the public sector in U.S. cities has been under attack since the 1970s neoliberal shift to a privatized political economy, compromising access to democratic design processes and spaces.

Public Architecture has been impacted, among other things, and when architecture is impacted, so is access to the quality of the city. There are of course, exceptions, but three key features of this situation include:

1. 1. Lower standards of service delivery and aesthetics. Governments generally have little funding to support basic institutional provisions like schools, police, water, post offices, libraries, airports, or regulatory agencies (unless they are participants in the “real estate state,” recruiting capital at all costs to keep property taxes up). Cost cuts and competition result in building closures or cheaply constructed systems with low ceilings, durable but mundane fixtures, and purely functional layouts and material details. Most prevent spontaneous gathering.
   2. The grand post offices, libraries, and government office buildings of the last century—that celebrated public life and equal access to quality—are largely a thing of the past. Fully public investment in institutional space is compromised today. Decisions are not really made publicly, nor are designs assertive enough to overcome or subvert these constraints.
   3. Many public institutions and provisions, along with their once well-designed, well-located buildings, are closed—then sold to private developers—or are at risk of being privatized or sub-contracted. Note how many old public-school buildings have become profitable redevelopments in St. Louis, Missouri. Or how the General Post Office in Washington, D.C. is now a Trump hotel. Other competitive “nonprofit” or corporate alternatives like charter schools, private security, private utilities, and alternate delivery services like UPS threaten to siphon public funds or business. And, unless they inhabit the original buildings, these alternatives are usually built as cost-efficiently mundane as they are out of reach of fair labor practices, voter accountability, and access.

Considering these challenges, students explored new forms of design confidence for public empowerment in a diminished public sector environment, while also imagining buildings for a robust public future.

They started by unpacking several questions. First, what is meant by public? Beyond quality and aesthetics, how should public forms anticipate and enable certain interactions, and what are the necessary design approaches for reaching this goal? The architecture of a sampling of public institutions that have been privatized or are at risk of privatization were studied, encouraging students to consider which are the most open or the most compromised and closed—both physically and politically? Based on this, students designed new models for public institutions that assert the democratic rights of access to the city. They also imagined new models that do not yet exist but could. What is the architecture of a gun control/registry authority? What about a social security office/health clinic? A police station/park? A decentralized, publicly owned utility station?

What are—or could be—new forms of urban public institutional life “of the people, by the people, for the people?”