PLATFORM : Creative Housing

Leaders have to believe that the environment that someone lives in is important to their well-being. If that becomes a value in society, then there are incredible strategies for handling housing, low-cost housing, industrial housing and dealing with communities and landscape. We know how to build inexpensively and make beautiful environments inexpensively. I don’t think that’s the issue. We just have to want to.

Who is going to pay for it? The developer that builds environments, builds for profit and the people we’re talking about (building for) haven’t got those kinds of bucks. When I say you can build inexpensively, inexpensively still doesn’t get down to the level of the people who live in South Los Angeles. That has to be subsidized.

Right now, we’re working in Frankfurt, Germany, doing social housing. The housing is tied into greenbelts. And the politicians and the city fathers are all involved and they’re all interested in good architecture and they’ve invited 20 or 30 of the world’s most prestigious architects to come and do housing projects.

When you go and look at what they’re building, you say, “what’s the problem?” All of us would love to live in these things. They’re not crowded and they have play yards and all the amenities. I think it’s intrinsic to the society that they want to do something and they place a value on it and they’re doing it. And they’re doing it well.

If architects are invited to respond to the issue, they will. Usually, we’re not.