Reinhold Martin, Jacob Moore, Susanne Schindler (eds.): The Art of Inequality: Architecture, Housing, and Real Estate. A Provisional Report (2015)

This book builds on the research of the House Housing exhibitions, putting the historical relationship of architecture and real estate in the context of the contemporary debate about dramatically rising rates of inequality.

“In 2013, in the United States, the median-income white household’s net worth was thirteen times that of the median-income black household. In 2014, the world’s eighty-five richest individuals held as much wealth as the world’s poorest 3.5 billion. In 2015, 88,000 households applied for the chance to live in fifty-five below market-rate apartments, accessible through a “poor door” on New York City’s Upper West Side.

What is inequality? Typically, inequality is defined by a combination of economic measures referring to income and wealth. Entire populations, in the language of statistics, are measured and managed according to their place on the inequality spectrum: patronage for the 1%, morality for the ambiguous “middle class,” and austerity for the rest. This economic inequality is, however, inseparable from social disparities of other kinds—particularly in the provision of housing. More than just a building type or a market sector, housing is a primary architectural act—where architecture is understood as that which makes real estate real. It begins when a line is drawn that separates inside from outside, and ultimately, one house from another. The relation that results under the rule of real estate development is—by its very structure—unequal.

This is the art of inequality. Its geographies are local and global. Its histories are distant and present. Its design is ongoing. Its future is anything but certain.” (from the back cover)

With contributions by Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Erik Carver, Cezar Nicolescu, Pollyanna Rhee, and Sonya Ursell.

Publisher Buell Center, Columbia University, New York, September 2015
Open access
ISBN 9781941332221
238 pages
HT Dubravka Sekulić

Exhibitions
Publisher

PDF, PDF (25 MB)

Helmut Gruber: Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (1991)

“From 1919 to 1934, the Socialist government in Vienna sought to create a comprehensive working-class culture, striving to provide a foretaste of the socialist utopia in the present. In Red Vienna, Gruber critically examines the impact of this experiment in all areas of life, from massive public housing projects and health and education programs to socialist parades, festivals, and sporting events designed to create a ‘new’ working class.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 1991
ISBN 0195069145, 9780195069143
x+270 pages

Reviews: Mark Emanuel Blum (Central European History, 1992), George V. Strong (History of European Ideas, 1993), William D. Bowman (Journal of Social History, 1993), Alfred Diamant (American Historical Review, 1993), J. Robert Wegs (Austrian History Yearbook, 1993), Karen J. Vogel (American Political Science Review, 1993), Albert Lindemann (International Labor and Working-Class History, 1993).

Wikipedia
WorldCat

PDF (12 MB, updated on 2021-4-22, via Libcom.org)
PDF (6 MB, added on 2021-4-22, via ZLibrary)

See also Eve Blau’s The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934, MIT Press, 2000 (PDF, 18 MB)

Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter: Collage City (1978–) [EN, DE, ES]

“A theoretical treatise that sets out various analyses of urban form in a number of existing cities known to be aesthetically successful, examining their actually existing urban structure as found, revealing it to be the end product of a ceaseless process of fragmentation, the collision / superimposition / contamination of many diverse ideas imposed on it by successive generations, each with its own idea.”

A major thesis on urban interaction which first introduced the concept of “bricolage” to urban theory.

Publisher MIT Press, 1978
ISBN 0262180863, 9780262180863
186 pages

Commentary: ANY 7-8, dedicated to Rowe’s work (ed. Robert Somol, 1994), K. Michael Hays (Architecture Theory Since 1968, 1998), Joan Ockman (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1998), Anthony Vidler (Architectural Review, 2011).
Review: Ed Cutler (2010).

Publisher
WorldCat

Collage City (English, 1978, 99 MB, via)
Collage City (German, trans. Bernhard Hoesli, 1984, 37 MB)
Ciudad collage (Spanish, trans. Esteve Riambau Sauri, 1998, 23 MB, via)
Introduction to French edition (1993)