Case Study: The Buell Hypothesis / Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream
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Cover of Foreclosed: Rehousing The American Dream, by Barry Bergdoll and Reinhold Martin; MoMA, 2012 (Courtesy Glen Cummings)
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“Mos Architects: Thoughts on a Walking City,” from Foreclosed: Rehousing The American Dream (Mos Architects)
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The Buell Hypothesis by Reinhold Martin, Anna Kenoff and Leah Meisterlin; Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Columbia University GSAPP, 2011 (Photo: Jordan Carver)
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Spread from Foreclosed: Rehousing The American Dream (Courtesy Glen Cummings)
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Project opener from Foreclosed: Rehousing The American Dream (Courtesy Glen Cummings)
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Project introduction (research) from Foreclosed: Rehousing The American Dream (Courtesy Glen Cummings)
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Project introduction (research) from Foreclosed: Rehousing The American Dream (Courtesy Glen Cummings)
Ed. note: This case study is a selection from the 2012 “Justified” competition, in which an esteemed jury identified submissions that demonstrate the value of design in a clear, compelling and accessible way. It serves as an example of how to explain design thinking to clients, students, peers and the public in general, based on specific metrics.
This project consists of two publications: The Buell Hypothesis, a research document which served as the brief for the workshop process of the MoMA exhibition “Foreclosed,” and Foreclosed: Rehousing The American Dream, the resulting exhibition’s catalogue.
The Buell Hypothesis
The Buell Hypothesis calls into question the cultural assumptions
underlying the “American Dream” in the context of the foreclosure crisis
and the demise of the American suburb. The book uses a screenplay
format to weave together three types of content: a Socratic dialogue that
unearths the underlying premises of the current housing crisis, a visual
history of public housing in America as told through the media and a
statistical analysis of several American suburbs ripe for radical
transformation.
Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream
In order to encourage discussion, Foreclosed: Rehousing The American
Dream lays its process bare, presenting research, workshop process,
the five resulting proposals, as well public discussion and criticism
of those proposals. The proposals are the work of five teams of
architects, urban planners, landscape architects, economists,
ecologists and engineers led by the principals of the architecture
firms MOS, Visible Weather, Studio Gang Architects, WORKac and Zago
Architecture.
Budget
$75,000 plus printing
Research
There were three collections we found helpful in contextualizing and then developing the design for both The Buell Hypothesis and Foreclosed: Rehousing The American Dream. The first collection was a visual history of public housing in America, as told through the media—compiled by The Buell Center—that comprises the second chapter of The Buell Hypothesis. Reviewing, discussing and organizing this collection helped us understand the public tone that the publication needed to have. The second was a collection of MoMA architecture catalogues that The Buell Center graciously made available to us, which helped us understand “Foreclosed" as an extension of MoMA’s original Modernist project. The third was a collection of MoMA’s recent publications—in particular, the Department of Architecture and Design’s recent publications—which helped us understand the approach and priorities of the team with whom we worked.
Challenges
The Buell Hypothesis
The main challenge was to find a way to present the book’s extremely
varied content in a cohesive way without seeming to resolve the
contradictions or conflicts within it.
Foreclosed: Rehousing The American Dream
The main challenge was to find a way to give equal weight to the
architectural proposals and to the research and criticism that fueled
the process.
Strategy
The Buell Hypothesis
We took the conventions of a printed 8.5-x-11-inch screenplay as
our point of departure, and developed each section of the book as an
extension of that format. While the content of each section is distinct,
the screenplay format connects them into a single narrative. For
example, chapter two, a collection of media images, is a dream sequence
in the screenplay. Chapter three is a jump cut to an academic symposium
where housing experts are presenting their findings as slideshows. The
presenter’s slides become storyboards. The client team and design team
worked together to develop this unusual narrative approach in order
provoke discussion.
Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream
We used different production values to distinguish The Buell Center’s
research from MoMA’s exhibition content in order to make the discursive
structure of the content more evident. Another design strategy we
employed was to use large, medium-weight text settings throughout the
book so that the textual sections would be as visually substantial as
the image sections.
Effectiveness
From the client (The Buell Center):
The Buell Hypothesis
The Buell Hypothesis had to accomplish a two-fold mission, delivering
both scientific research and a cultural critique in a way that would be
radical enough to challenge the most entrenched underpinnings of the
American Dream, while still maintaining scholarly objectivity with
respect to the facts and figures presented as on-the-ground evidence of a
crisis. The screenplay format and highly inventive graphic devices
provide entry to a very complex set of ideas while stimulating the
reader’s imagination to conjure personal references to the cultural,
historical, physical, social and economic phenomena described. The
design strikes a balance between the urgency and seriousness of an
official and timely “report” and a beauty that was essential in its
role as a design brief.
Foreclosed: Rehousing The American Dream
A chief interest of The Buell Center in partnering with MoMA on the
“Foreclosed” exhibition was to catalyze a new and urgently-needed public
conversation about current political and social issues as they relate to
the built environment. The catalogue successfully frames the design
projects as one piece of a much larger design process that involved
research, activism, cross-disciplinary collaboration and public and
scholarly debate. The catalogue propels this conversation forward to a new
audience, making the ideas accessible while still broadening
assumptions about what architects and designers might speculate on, and
how they might go about it.
Additional information
Read more about the “Foreclosed” exhibition and The Buell Hypothesis.