Daniel Libeskind Tries His Hand at Affordable Housing

Description

Daniel Libeskind Tries His Hand at Affordable Housing: The Atrium in Bedford-Stuyvesant is a fine proof-of-concept, but does it scale?

Architecture critic Justin Davidson reviews the affordable housing project, The Atrium in Bedford-Stuyvesant, for New York Magazine’s Curbed.

 

“With the Atrium, Libeskind has given vulnerable people a place they can gradually make their own. He has also demonstrated that the daunting list of rules, requirements, prohibitions, and economic strictures that govern affordable housing in New York don’t have to choke off inventive architecture. The firms with experience negotiating those constraints don’t generally indulge in innovation, and those that prize capital-A Architecture avoid the long and frustrating gauntlet of New York’s housing bureaucracy. Getting this project finished — assembling the team, winning the job, completing the design, gathering the funding, and finally putting up the building — took seven years.”