EW is located on the top level of an old Firehouse in Capitol Hill. In 1971, the building was sold by the city for a dollar to a combination of 3 non-profits EW, The Country Doctor and The Capitol Hill Housing Improvement Program. All three organizations have since expanded and continue to serve the community. They all started at a grass roots activist level, with The Country Doctor clinic having its roots in Seattle’s Black Panther Party.
The acquisition of the building was a result of UW architecture students squatting in the vacant building. Several of these students went on to successful careers here in Seattle, Ed Weinstein and Steven Holl to name a few. EW eventually made capitol improvements and petitioned the city to acquire the property on behalf of the non-profits. The “free” office space allowed EW to continue their mission without having to worry about overhead.
With Nixon taking office in 1969, people’s hopes for a change within the structures of power morphed into a mandate for individual and collective action. This manifested itself in action-oriented activism or for some resignation and apathy. The mission of Environmental Works remains essentially unchanged from the time of its founding: to serve the underserved communities by providing design and planning for projects such as homeless shelters, subsidized housing, childcare, educational facilities, and treatment centers as well as other entities that often receive project funding in whole or in part from the public sector. Projects range from $50,000 - $12,000,000 and benefit from a sensitive comprehensive and “green” approach that can only be provided by a firm with almost 40 years experience with these project types.
Environmental Works is a member of a network of community design centers under the rubric of the Association for Community Design (ACD) established in 1977. The ACD acts as an umbrella organization for non-profit design centers, which began popping up in the sixties and early seventies as offshoots of general activism and concern with environmentalism and social justice. These design centers understood the importance of allowing community stakeholders to have a say in the projects that propose to serve them. This core value of inclusion is still an integral part of EW’s design strategy, where meetings with community members are incorporated into the design process and involve everything from site planning to unit layout. This, along with a rootedness within a region, gives CDCs an ability to deal effectively and appropriately with complex local issues that can only be understood through experience and a connection to local policy makers.
A highly local, long term approach contrasts to both the small-scale decentralized information based model followed by organizations such as Architecture for Humanity and the large scale centralized model of HUD’s Hope VI program. Related groups that employ the same philosophy of rootedness and inclusion are the Planners Network (1975), Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) (1981) and Mayors’ Institute on City Design (1986). The two later groups were at least in part a response to Reagan’s slashing of public housing funds in the early eighties.
Shortly after WWII, large “slum clearance” and urban renewal projects began in earnest across the country. This, along with massive suburbanization and divestment in city business centers, left a legacy that the design and planning disciplines continue to struggle with today. New York City’s Bridges and Tunnels authority under the iron hand of Robert Moses acted as a model for this type of development. These were huge urban scale projects that involved wholesale razing and redevelopment, introduction of new infrastructure and included major retrofitting for the automobile. This “visionary” approach was a combination of “enlightened colonialism” and Corbusian “radiant city” planning. By definition, this approach involved the educated and powerful imposing huge changes on masses of people who had no voice in the process. While this type of redevelopment was often well meant and enjoyed the efficiency of scale and centralization of a single controlling authority, it failed in most cases to produce effective housing and communities, often destroying highly complex and well-developed urban networks.
While much of the aforementioned planning theory is no longer valid the, “visionary” approach is far from dead. The Congress for New Urbanism was formed to promote a sterilized small scale urbanism that in its form attempts to replicate ideas championed by Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, but imposes these ideas in a top down large scale form that simulates the tactics that created the dying public housing ghettoes that the CNU is now attempting to rehabilitate. Among other things the CNU has come under criticism for displacing low-income communities in an attempt to create mixed-use neighborhoods. One common method is to imbed housing that can attract middle class buyers into primarily poor neighborhoods thus reinventing them as diverse residential enclaves with a mix of income groups. This strategy has sometimes simply acted as a catalyst for gentrification and displacement. They have also been criticized for not replacing low-income units one to one, often lowering overall density in an attempt to redesign an area to fit within New Urbanism’s ideals. It’s not surprising that the “visionary” new urbanism dovetails well with HUD’s top down large-scale strategies of renewal. By its nature, “all at once” large-scale projects are unable to have the fine grain and complexity of natural growth that define the urban context, i.e. they have no past.
Since it’s inception in 1992 HUD has funneled over 6 billion dollars into the HOPE VI program, which is based on New Urbanism principles. The program continues to attract both praise and criticism. One of the notorious cases has been Cabrini-Green in Chicago where demolition had outpaced construction displacing many poor residents. In an area known as the William Green Homes, where there were once over 1000 apartments, now a mere 176 families live (as well as unspecified amount of squatters). The 15-story towers await demolition while the tenants are left in suspense about their future.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/us/18cabrini.html?ex=1331870400&en=d9f2df7722b6b482&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Another criticism leveled by prominent designers in the non-profit sector has been that the restrictive zoning of new urbanism imposes further hardships on low-income communities. The zoning disallows small home-based industry, which threatens the sanitized image of the domestic. The fear is that the untidiness of these home based enterprises will deter buyers looking for the middle class domestic ideal. In 2000 Mike Pyatok wrote:
“New Urbanists, colluding with HUD and HOPE VI in a quest to domesticate low-income neighborhoods, are not only perpetuating the tradition of displacing the poor but also imposing ever more restrictive architectural and planning straightjackets on those who are privileged to remain, preventing them from engaging in forms of economic self-improvement.”
With all its problems the Hope VI program has been described by Henry Cisneros, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development as the last hope of public housing. Despite or perhaps more accurately because of this Hope VI was targeted by the second Bush administration for abolition, with funding eventually being reduced by congress.
Spurred on by the urgency of climate change, activism seems to be enjoying resurgence within the dialogue of the design community both professional and academic. Activist architects employ design by functioning outside the traditional client/architect relationship as they question policy and hopefully influence it. In this way environmentalism and social justice offer a starting point for finding meaning within the architectural discipline that is integral to the human experience. This search for meaning can be seen as similar to the modernist’s response to the new mechanized society, in that it reacts to global forces of change. Unlike the dialectical and largely academic roots of PoMo or other short-lived trends, activist architecture is broad-based and outward looking. Architecture becomes an applied tool for achieving the goals of social and environmental imperatives with overlapping sub-categories that include preservation, urbanism, and access to resources, Thus the activist architect puts to rest the persistent feeling of having little significant influence on the built environment through an idealism of engagement no matter how incremental, rather than the all at once “visionary” method.
The mission-based approach to architecture continues to be seen as an “alternative path.” When Seattle 2005 Medalist David Hewitt FAIA nominated Jan Gleason, who was at the time the Executive Director for EW to be elevated to the College of Fellows in 2006, he described her contribution as "to make the profession of ever-increasing service to society, in an alternative career." Perhaps if architects attempt to make themselves of “ever-increasing” service to the community the profession will also find itself less relegated to the role of service providers for the generation of wealth and more in line with creating value for the society at large.
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