Housing the general populace is an important goal for successful communities and societies. History has shown numerous examples of architects, governments, non-government organizations and numerous other organizations attempting to provide housing for a general populace that does not have housing do to economic turmoil,  natural disaster, or war. Architects become part of this equations.

Architect have often proposed ideas and schemes to help house the public but often the architects fail because they have fallen into a trap of forgetting the human aspect of their solution. The architect approaches the issue in a far to literal sense and thus end up ignoring the more global aspect of their proposal.

What this means is that housing proposal are designed with specific needs. These criteria are of a certain square footage, a minimum number of amenities and the ability to cheaply house the masses that lack homes. What is forgotten is the people who occupy the spaces. Cost and speed of construction is prioritized over not simply aesthetic but over the way the space will impact and affect the occupants.

A perfect example of this is with the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis. It was a large urban housing project designed by Minoru Yamasaki and initial was met with success but quickly became a run down haven for crime and violence which led to its eventual abandonment and demolition. In this case the design did not take into consideration who the people being housed were. The fact that young children and many single mothers would be living here was forgotten. The fact that the living breathing occupant were imperfect humans was forgotten. This design flaw would lead to the project’s demise. Yamasaki would go on to say “I never thought that people could be so destructive.”

This statement shows how the architect’s failure of design was how they thought about the people. The people were forgotten and thus the project could never succeed. Housing was failing because the architect was thinking about the structure of the house and not the occupants.

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Hollenbeck, Charles. The Examiner. <http://www.examiner.com/article/what-it-looks-like-when-good-intentions-fail-pruitt-igoe>