Living in Protest

Sophomore Rob MacNeill looks at public housing in the United States and sees an exercise in failure. For more than 70 years, efforts to provide safe, affordable homes for the disadvantaged have produced dreary rows of barrack-like structures and unimaginative high rises. MacNeill believes that the poor deserve better.

“Public housing is not working in this country,” says the architecture major. “It’s hardly ever worked. So why don’t we focus on something different, maybe rethink the entire process?”

He finds hope in a back-to-basics approach that focuses on architecture’s most fundamental concept – the primitive hut. It is the mythological basis of all architecture, representing the first time a human shunned caves and other natural shelters in favor of building a dwelling. “I wanted to take [the concept of] the primitive hut and make it tangible,” he says, “so we could look at it instead of just thinking about it.”

For MacNeill, the hut’s nearest modern equivalent is the tent city. Created as a way to protest the lack of affordable housing, he says, tent cities also solve the problem of homelessness on a small scale by creating shelter for the downtrodden. Most are temporary encampments on empty lots. They often are located next to major thoroughfares and feature eye-catching signs.

A College Alumni Society Undergraduate Research Grant and funding from the Benjamin Franklin Scholars program allowed MacNeill to study tent cities last summer in Jersey City and Brooklyn. He traveled with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, a protest group that set up “Bushvilles” in the weeks before the Republican National Convention to show disapproval of the administration’s policies.

“The purpose of tent cities is to visualize the plight of the poor, who have to live in a primitive way because they don’t have housing,” MacNeill says. “The structures are built by scavenging materials from the neighborhood, including the mattresses and couches, the tarps if we could find them and the wood. So it’s really like living off the city and its trash – using it to create a new structure.”

For weeks, he and other protesters lived as squatters, occupying private land near the main arteries into Manhattan, before being chased by police. Property owners would routinely send bulldozers to clear the makeshift dwellings. Then the camp would set up elsewhere and the authorities would arrive again. Through it all, the protesters spread the word about homelessness to drivers and nearby residents.

Although a longtime homeless advocate, MacNeill approached the project with the eyes of an architect-in-training. “The whole idea of finding tent cities as primitive huts in our modern cities has never been done before,” he says. “I wanted to be able to construct a measured drawing of each dwelling and quantify its relationship to the environment around it, so people can understand and learn from them.”

MacNeill hopes his experience will provide the foundation for an exploration of public housing alternatives. Some tent cities that were designed for protest have evolved into permanent communities, such as Dignity Village in Portland, Ore., and Dome City in Los Angeles. He also points to architects outside the United States who advocate more primitive ways of building that still are very hospitable.

“Hassan Fathy in Egypt is building with mud brick instead of concrete, and mud brick is cheap; it’s basically free,” MacNeill says. “Public housing is not beautiful. But the structures they are building very cheaply in Egypt are beautiful to look at, very modern and probably wonderful to live in. Why can’t we approach public housing here in the same way – without assumptions?”

- Joseph McLaughlin