When the Lambert Houses were completed in 1973 as part of the Bronx Park South Urban Renewal Area, the complex was quickly recognized as a significant architectural and social contribution. Built by nonprofit affordable housing developer Phipps Houses (which still owns and operates Lambert today) and designed by Davis, Brody and Associates (now Davis Brody Bond), the cluster of low-rise, six-story buildings was celebrated for its architectural design and sensitivity to its West Farms neighborhood. On-site provision of social services further cemented the progressive credentials of the development.
So when UO columnist Susanne Schindler1 learned that Phipps is planning to demolish and redevelop the Houses, citing structural issues and significant security concerns, she wanted to understand what went wrong at this much-lauded site. As she traces the architectural, social, and economic factors that took Lambert from acclaim to pending demolition and redevelopment, Schindler confronts the intersection of historical preservation and housing provision. In so doing, she questions why New York City’s diverse and innovative history of affordable housing design is so often unrecognized as important to our cultural heritage and argues for preservation — both architectural and financial — of our affordable housing stock.
- 1. Susanne Schindler is an architect and writer focused on the intersection of policy and design in housing. She is a co-author of Growing Urban Habitats: Seeking a New Housing Development Model (2009), and a founding co-editor of the peer-reviewed Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge. Susanne teaches design at Parsons The New School for Design and Columbia University, and is an adjunct associate research scholar at Columbia’s Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.
This is not a plea to save the Lambert Houses. What would give me the right to demand such a thing? I know little about their financial situation, their structural integrity, or what it’s like to live inside. Nonetheless, I will ask a series of questions prompted by my initial reaction (of dismay, I admit) when I heard that this cluster of exceptionally designed low-income housing is soon to be “redeveloped,” that is, will soon be gone.
... We’re left with three questions that reach beyond Lambert: Are we capable of imagining a future for the built realities of the visionary low- and moderate-income housing of the 1960s and 1970s, other than to deregulate and privatize? What would it take not only in terms of financial, but in terms of design and management creativity, to let the original promises of the rooftop community rooms, the ground-floor childcare spaces, or the outdoor sitting areas come alive again? If a non-profit of the scale and clout of Phipps, with its unusually long and varied history of realizing new housing design integrated with supportive services, can’t or doesn’t want to do it, which stakeholders do need to become active?
We will soon learn more about the redevelopment proposal for Lambert Houses. Let it be a prompt to debate these questions, even if the redevelopment of Lambert seems a foregone conclusion.