Katy Chey - Multi-Unit Housing in Urban Cities: From 1800 to Present Day

From 1800 to Present Day

Katy Chey

by Hans Ibelings

A pit bull on the Upper West Side noses open a refrigerator door. A Pomeranian obsessively rearranges her bedding. A rabbit in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, waits for his nightly bowl of oats. A bulldog in the East Village makes passionate love to a pillow.

This is how an article begins in The New York Times, published in the summer of 2016. It describes how pets live their domestic lives, unaware of being monitored by cameras, while their human companions are away. Most of the time there is not a lot going on. It turns out that pets sleep a lot when there is nobody around.

What pets do when they are home alone doesnt differ much from what humans do when they dwell: eating, cleaning, idling, having sex, sleeping. And just as with the secret life of pets, most of the time the human act of dwelling passes unnoticed. Even to dwellers themselves, who happen to dwell almost unselfconsciously. Precisely because it is so common to dwell, it is extremely hard to say what it is and how dwellers do it.

Most of the time, the act of dwelling exists in the domain of the infra-ordinary, as French writer Georges Perec has called it in a short essay written in 1973. The infra-ordinary is here, right in front of us, but we are unable to see it, unless, as Perec stated we start,

to question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?

The same question applies to the dwelling itself. We can easily see the extraordinary, aspirational forms of habitation for a happy few, when they are published in lifestyle and architectural magazines for instance, but rarely can we discern the multitude of quotidian forms of living. How, where, when, and why we dwell often remains opaque. We just do it.

With more than half of the worlds population living in urban environments, dwelling is deeply entangled with the city, a phenomenon which is often as hard to fathom as dwelling, and dwellings. The complexity of the city was succinctly defined by Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy during a conference in Persepolis back in 1974, when he said that a city is not the stone and bricks of which its buildings are made. Its a million of acts that go into its making and the millions of acts that go on within it at every moment. Many of those million of acts are related to housing, which, according to unsubstantiated by intuitively probable estimates, makes up around three quarters of cities.

As Fathys statement elucidates, it is difficult to comprehend dwelling, dwellings, or the city in their entirety. Katy Cheys foray into the universe of urban housing is an ambitious attempt to deepen our understanding of what living in the cities means, and how in different times and places, the question of the big number of housing has been addressed and articulated in different building typologies, and how they have shaped the city.

Cheys capita selecta cover two centuries and a huge, and culturally diverse, territory which includes cities in Western Europe, North America, and Eastern Asia. The ten case studies in her book offer, in their breadth and depth, a wealth of knowledge and many great insights, yet they have an intriguing side effect, at least for this reader: the humbling realisation how many of the acts that go into the making of cities, even the ones I am familiar with, remain infra-ordinarily invisible. Not to mention the thousands of other cities I am not familiar with, and all their millions of acts that that go in their making and all the lives that take place in them. In that sense this book is as illuminating for what it contains, and for what it doesnt.

Hans Ibelings

Hans Ibelings is an architecture critic and historian. He is the editor and publisher of The Architecture Observer and author of numerous books on architecture and housing.