New York City Launch of The Art of Inequality: Architecture, Housing, and Real Estate—A Provisional Report
September 23, 2015, at 6:30pm
Goethe Institut, New York City
Housing forms the rooms, neighborhoods, and streets of our daily lives. But housing issues are increasingly reduced to real-estate problems and dissociated from the cultural practices of architecture. The result is that growing numbers of people are finding it increasingly difficult to access affordable housing on their own terms. The project Wohnungsfrage at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) investigated the fraught relationship between architecture, housing, and social reality in an exhibition of experimental housing models, an international academy, and a publication series (edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Jesko Fezer, Christian Hiller, Wilfried Kuehn, and Hila Peleg) that examined various options for self-determined, social and affordable housing in a mix of annotated historical pieces and contemporary case studies. House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate, an exhibition series by Columbia University's Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, formed part in the collaborative Wohnungsfrage project.
For this evening event, Reinhold Martin, Jacob Moore, and Susanne Schindler were in conversation about two books published in conjunction with the exhibitions:Friedrich Engels: Zur Wohnungsfrage (Commentary from Reinhold Martin and Neil Smith; Spector Books, 2015), an annotated edition of Friedrich Engel’s essays on the housing question (first published in the Leipzig newspaper Der Volksstaat, 1872) that is part of the aforementioned HKW series, as well as The Art of Inequality: Architecture, Housing, and Real Estate—A Provisional Report (Reinhold Martin, Jacob Moore, Susanne Schindler, eds.; Buell Center, 2015), which builds on the research of the House Housing exhibitions, putting the historical relationship of architecture and real estate in the context of the contemporary debate about dramatically rising rates of inequality.
For more information, see the Goethe Institut's website here.
