Course Syllabus
Syllabus:
00_Col_A4678_Syllabus_Schedule_Bell_23.pdf
Housing After Scarcity
Policy, Energy, Settlement
Michael Bell, Professor of Architecture
Bell-Seong, Silicon Photovoltaic Cell Cost per Watt and Solar Energy Consumption
Caption: A declining logarithmic curve depicts Silicon PV cell pricing (dollar/watt). Lower prices are possible but they will arrive at slower pace. A rising exponential curve in solar energy consumption could accelerate but what relation will that curve have to PV panel pricing? When does housing cease to be a real-estate asset and instead become a downstream product of an energy asset.
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The seminar will trace histories of scarcity and how scarcity is constructed and sustained over nearly a century of United States housing policy. From 19th century poor houses to federal/state/city public housing; to mortgage backed private housing and mobility. We will uses themes of scarcity and its manifestation in housing to investigate if renewable energy portends a future where scarcity is made untenable by the very consistency of solar and other forms of renewable energy.
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Renewable energy, if removed from the self-propagating realms of scarcity that sustainability often portends, is an indicator of something that is not scarce. It is, in effect, barely measurable in its excess – non-denumerable. Renewable energy at the scale of solar energy is architecturally scale-less and persistent – a ceaseless flood tied to the billions of years forecast for the Sun’s expected existence. The urban matrices of sustainability, as building code, as zoning, and in particular as tectonics, can make renewable energy newly scarce by coding it back into architectural forms reliant on ancient materials, but also in contemporary buildings and practices and as a new way to remonetize 20th-century real estate. Real estate practices only exist to orchestrate development as scarcity of land and architectural space, and as scarcity of energy; they motivate labor and construction into realms of efficiency, re-metering the non-denumerable aspects of the Sun’s energy into architectural volume and mass – into real estate and its established forms of wealth and ownership regimes. Are denying the literal excess before us if we do not find a way to make energy itself architectural and demonstrate its excess?
This seminar will seek to reimagine settlement in the context of renewable energy; more specifically in a realm where we see energy as not scarce but abundant. The term non-denumerable comes from mathematics and can be understood to mean uncountable within natural numbers. Here, it means a form of energy whose excess and duration over billions of years becomes endlessly sub-dividable but also practically endless.
The seminar will work with contemporary and technical texts but also with Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share, vol. 1, Consumption. Bataille expressed his quasi-embarrassment in his opening text by calling it “a book of political economy.” Neither an economist nor a specialist in the Earth’s physics, he nonetheless had a fully formed discourse on an economy of energy – on how humans power the world and distribute and share assets. In his theory of political economy, he described as false the scarcity and lack of energy on Earth as apportioned by financial markets under the broader auspices of capitalism. Bataille linked economic thought to the world’s energy sources, surmising that on a daily basis the surface of the Earth received more energy than was needed to sustain life.
See Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1991).
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United States Housing Policy - Housing, Poverty, Scarcity
Does a near century of federal housing policy and its attempts to instigate, provide and incentivize housing for the poor and for lower income households map onto or into the new future of infrastructure, energy and mobility technologies?
Or do we need fully new means to imagine what affordable and poverty housing means and how we imagine who designs it, how policy supports it, and who it might serve?
Our seminar will spend half the semester tracing the past century’s evolution in housing and public housing policy and design means. The second half the semester will be spent focused on new technologies in energy, mobility and in how these factors could alter the future of public housing.
This seminar will explore the decreased direct role direct federal expenditures play in lower-income and public housing development in the United States since the advent in the 1980’s of low-income housing tax credits (LIHTC) and other tax-based incentives for housing development.
The seminar lectures will address how changes in funding mechanisms have affected not only the development and design of lower-income and public housing but also how they these changes in means have been perceived and what impact they had on the engagement of planning and architecture practices with issues of poverty and low-income or affordable housing.
With a focus on parallel evolutions in architectural design and theory since the 1980’s that has often seemed to neglect housing as a zone of experimentation, the seminar will explore how planning and architectural educations could do more to produce a counter to the status quo in all forms of housing production. The goal is re-imagine architecture and planning capabilities within a discussion of the financial practices as well the political philosophies of these shifts—more accurately within the seeming loss of an ability to critically discuss equity issues that many of the tax incentive practices often seem to dissimulate into market development models. Affordable housing as a product of tax credits, multi-tiered funding sources, and an architectural guise of “fitting in” with the quasi-vernacular of broader status quo developer housing models (and its constituency) has increasingly made it difficult to discuss the deeper meaning of both the political underpinnings of these policy shifts but also the potential of architectural and planning practices to affect the outcome—to enter the debate.
The seminar will be based on weekly lectures and discussion. Students will be asked to do extensive reading and be prepared to discuss the content. Each member of the seminar will produce a research paper based on presenting a future of the seminar content.
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Contemporary issues we will address in our weekly lectures and workshops:
- How can Mobility, Infrastructure, and Energy Innovations Re-Create Housing Markets?
- How does a rapidly changing energy infrastructure alter what we imagine for the future of cities and urban development?
- The matrix of housing and mobility has affected architecture, urban development, housing markets, real estate mechanisms in a relatively consistent way for most of the past 75 years. What can we say about the future mechanisms -- do we know what will drive settlement?
Research and lectures will offer contemporary and historical context to how housing as been developed and how a new energy infrastructure might change its future.
-- What is public housing and why re-examine it today?
-- What were the key formative principles in public housing?
-- Should we start with the current conditions or return to the origins? Where are the origins? (De-mystify)
-- Deconstructing the Perceived Notions of Public Housing as Failed
-- Architecture and the Flow of Money; flow of space—The Post Bretton Woods global city.
-- Losing Support: Public Housing and Transformed
-- Topology: What is the shape of poverty today?
-- The Construction of the Local / Disaggregation of Aid and Subsidy
-- A false memory thwarts a closer look at history.
-- The Foreclosure Crisis and the State of Housing after the Crash
-- How does land vs. structure values interrelate in affordable housing and housing. What did mobility contribute to this dichotomy during the past century?
-- After LIHTC: While the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit may seem an arcane branch of housing policy they also represent a scenario where federal roles in social advocacy (social ethics) and housing production often operate with their hand’s tied; while great expenditures are in fact allocated they are injected into a status quo of housing development, and capital practices. In short, they are not seen as innovation engines but a means to ameliorate a market rather than alter its momentum. They seek to expand who the market serves but not to alter the market or the assets it distributes. Can we redesign this process? Indeed, do we see a future where Cabinet-level agencies, DOE, DOT or HUD are not only outmoded but where their deep economic resources need to be redesigned? The next decade portends as much as $85 billion in LIHTC allocations; what team could make the case for new means to drive innovation with even a small portion of these funds? And who could benefit from the innovation these funds might bring?
Bell - Seong, United States Household Debt to GDP, 1947-2019
Caption: Household debt as a percentage of United States GDP since the end of World War II falls in three eras. It expanded after World War II as homeownership grew. After the Bretton Woods Agreement was dismantled in 1971 the uses of debt at the private level accelerated. Mortgages traded as derivatives and securities enabled and sustained a deeper leveraging of housing markets before it collapsed under the exploding prices between 2000 – 07 era.
Data source: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), Households and Nonprofit Organizations; Debt Securities and Loans; Liability, Level [CMDEBT], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CMDEBT, June 25, 2020 and U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gross Domestic Product [GDP], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP, June 25, 2020.
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Michael Bell is founding Chair of the Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering and Materials, a multi-year research program hosted at GSAPP in coordination with Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design (ILEK) at the University of Stuttgart. Bell served as Director, Master of Architecture, Core Design Studios, (2000-14) and the Coordinator of the GSAPP Housing Design Studios (2000-11). This seminar will fuse work from housing and development, design and design theory, and engineering and new crossovers between architecture and materials/engineering.
Architectural structure if more broadly seen as architectural physics routinely analyzes the deployment of energy into materials. When things fail is a fundamental concern of architectural design. In our seminar we will broadly apply this logic; where is architectural thought coincident with thought in the overall stability of policy, of settlement, of household wealth. What does architecture provide in terms of structure to settlement? Above: FEA analysis of Giuseppe Terragni's Palazzo Littorio (Rome) and Villa Bianchi (Milan).
A sample of research we will explore in this seminar:
The Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering, and Materials:
http://visibleweather.com/images/ET_program_FV.pdf (Links to an external site.)
http://visibleweather.com/images/Solid_States_Bell.pdf (Links to an external site.)
http://visibleweather.com/images/Postductility_Bell_Program.pdf (Links to an external site.)
http://visibleweather.com/images/Plastics_program_FV.pdf (Links to an external site.)
Bell is the author of the forthcoming book "Encrypting the Sun: Housing After Banking" with Eunjeong Seong. An essay of the same title is published in Log 47: Overcoming Carbon Form
(https://www.anycorp.com/store/log47 (Links to an external site.) and other recent writings on housing, energy and design are included the Technology, Architecture and Design as well as Architectural Design.
Bell’s architectural design has been commissioned/exhibited by The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Venice Biennale; the Architectural League of New York; the University Art Museum, Berkeley and has been shown in museums and galleries in Europe, Mexico, and China. Architectural design by Bell is included in the Permanent Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His Gefter Press / Binocular House is included in American Masterwork Houses of the 20th and 21st Century by Kenneth Frampton. Bell has received four Progressive Architecture Awards.
Books by Michael Bell include Engineered Transparency: The Technical, Visual, and Spatial Effects of Glass; Solid States: Concrete in Transition; Post-Ductility: Metals in Architecture and Engineering; Permanent Change: Plastics in Architecture and Engineering; 16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House; Michael Bell: Space Replaces Us: Essays and Projects on the City; and Slow Space. Bell is the editor of a monograph on the architecture of Stanley Saitowitz.
http://www.houstonpress.com/2000-11-09/news/not-your-standard-issue/full/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. (Links to an external site.) (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. (Links to an external site.)
Course Summary:
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