Value?

Recent Federal Reserve estimates suggest that since the peak of the market, the total loss in market value of United States household real estate is approximately $4 trillion dollars. This vanished value has forced, in some places, upwards of a third of American homeowners into some degree of negative equity, and to the brink of foreclosure, or eviction.

For the home buyer, developer, planner, or architect, both the rapid inflation of speculative bubbles and their catastrophic implosion force the question: what is value?

What about value is durable or persistent, and to what extent? What is transient? What anchors it? Where does value live? Internally, fully bound to specific places, configurations, and materials? Or externally, in the collective mind of a perceiving market, and the market participants who bet capital on it? And for us specifically: What is/what could be/ what should be Architecture's role in the creation and sustenance of value?

Competition

In 1931, near the beginning of another catastrophic value loss in the American economy, George B. Ford, an architect, publishes a treatise on real estate. He hopes to use better zoning to "protect the building owner against himself, to safeguard him from economic mistakes" by seeking an optimum balance between the human needs for light, air, and space, and the economic needs of development

But he also introduces to Architecture a new market term: competition. When he finds that a 10' increment in height, or a different orientation to the sun can account for a measurable and significant increase in rental income, then all buildings are not only in competition with all other buildings within their market, they are also in direct competition with other parts of themselves. Ford's finely granulated, drastic, and sudden recalibrations of value dilate and squeeze the repetitive, comparatively undifferentiated cells, dwellings, and blocks that Architecture has traditionally provided to the City.

Reasonable Worst Case

As part of New York's New Housing Marketplace plan for the provision of affordable housing, the City has coordinated an effort to up-zone over 37.5 acres of waterfront property in Long Island City, Queens.

The City does not generate its own specific architectural solutions. Rather, it attempts, like George Ford, to balance economic imperatives with human ones, density with quality of life. The new Special Hunter's Point South zoning district would permit up to 7.47 million square feet of new buildings. As part of its review, the City must test the maximum build-out permitted. This is referred to as the "Reasonable Worst Case Development Scenario", and, as pictured in the City's documents, bears a strong resemblance to the tower-on-a-base typology used in previous developments in other parts of the city, such as Riverside South and Queens West.

We can take the regulations apart and ask: what does the city want? And: Is this really the best solution?

Affordable, for whom?

Who will live here? What are their needs? How will the 'non-affordable' 40% of the units, presumably market rate, be integrated into the overall plan? What percentage of the residents will rent, what percentage will own?

And how will the Architecture on the site respond to the risk they take in moving to Hunter's Point South, to their choice to live here instead of another neighborhood, to their investment in the value of this project?

Our question will be: Is it possible to filter the material and spatial means of Architecture through the competitive scales of Real Estate, in order to construct Value over time?