Twin Parks was once an icon of affordable housing. What went wrong?

For the second time in a week, a deadly fire broke out in a low-income apartment building in an American city.

A fire broke out last Wednesday morning in the double-row loft unit owned by the Philadelphia Housing Authority in the city’s Fairmont neighborhood. Twelve people were killed, nine of them children.

On Sunday morning, a defective space heater started a fire on the third floor of a 19-story rental building in Section 8 in the Bronx. As of Monday afternoon, at least 17 people have died, and another 15 are in critical condition in local hospitals.

At first glance, each of these tragedies appears to indicate the culture of neglect that characterizes low-income housing in the United States. In Philadelphia, the three-story building was home to 26 people – representing Serious overcrowding It infects many urban US zip codes where affordable housing is nearly impossible to find. They may also have malfunctioning smoke alarms.

In New York, the question is how smoke from a third-floor apartment fire managed to fill the entire building in a matter of minutes. Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said the apartment where the fire broke out had a door that did not close by itself, allowing smoke to quickly fill the building’s hallways and staircases, infecting people on every floor. (The owners group said the building had self-closing doors, which are required by city fire law.)

History is also associated with the Philadelphia Row House and the Bronx Tower. Today, we are more likely to associate a row house with high-quality housing and a brick tower with malicious housing projects. But when Twin Parks North West, Site 4, was built in the Bronx in 1973, it was meant to be a highly-designed antidote to two kinds of dilapidated “slum” styles: not just dilapidated dwellings and sloping homes, but The turbulent modernist towers that replaced them. Seeing Twin Parks Northwest turn into a site of tragedy and symbol of wear and tear is a bitter irony of a building once seen as the vanguard of public design.

At the time, the Bronx’s East Tremont neighborhood was suffering from the consequences of highway construction, divestment, whitewashing, and substandard housing stock. In a Canadian documentary on the Twin Parks project, a pastor said the neighborhood is losing 1,000 housing units a year to fire and abandonment. “In the back there is the kind of house we wanted to demolish,” Paul Mattson, the old minister at Tremont Methodist Church, told the filmmakers, pointing to a typical house. “It’s a wooden frame, it might last two years, and it might burn tomorrow.”

Seeing Twin Parks Northwest turn into a site of tragedy and a symbol of wear and tear is a bitter irony of a building once seen as the vanguard of the public the design.

The Twin Parks project—an archipelago of 1,900 income-restricted units on sites scattered throughout the neighborhood, named after the nearby Bronx and Crotona Parks—was a collaboration between Mayor John Lindsay’s Public Design Committee and a group of neighboring religious groups. It was funded and built by the New York Urban Development Corporation, headed by Crusader planner Ed Log. Its architects included Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Richard Meier, The Architects Collaborative and Giovanni Pasanella, an extraordinarily talented group for an affordable housing project.

Twin Parks has been a closely watched experience in getting accommodation within the city the correct. Apartments, facades and public spaces are built according to surveys of residents’ preferences. The buildings included three daycare centers, three schools, two-story family apartments, programs such as a tenant orientation course and endless touches of thoughtful design. In Twin Parks North West, Site 4, the tower at 181st Street, for example, a ground-floor laundry room is connected to an enclosed courtyard, playground, and herb garden called “Mother’s Hour”. For two weeks in 1972, Logue, Meier, and several other UDC officials moved into one of the buildings themselves.

In addition to the documentary, this bizarre neighborhood planning exercise included a three-part feature in the Architectural Forum, which noted how buildings were expressly designed to avoid public housing disasters like the notorious Pruitt-Igoe buildings in St. Twin Parks complete. “The theme of the anti-project architecture permeated the entire planning process, which was shared by both the community and architectural planners,” the magazine wrote. All plans emphasized the need for new buildings to fit into the existing physical fabric [and] Addressing shortcomings of the past such as the appalling lack of comfortable, usable open space.” Twin Parks North West, Site 4, has been given a full page, complete with photos, drawings and floor plans.

Whether all of the open space is truly welcoming to crime-scared residents has been a topic of debate ever since. The Canadian documentary shows children playing double Dutch and dancing to a merengue band in the yard. But at least one critic, Kenneth Frampton, concluded that the most successful buildings were those designed by Prentice & Chan, Olhausen, in part because they adopted a more restrictive and fortifying concept of public space. (Architect Oscar Neumann popularized the idea in his book defensible space the previous year, based in part on a study of public housing projects in New York. *) Next, Cornell University sociologist Franklin Baker surveyed the entire population of the findings and found that the best responses for an urban project came from Twin Parks Northwest, Site 4 – by Prentice & Chan, Olhausen – in part because they had a single, sheltered entry foyer. (Two ways to exit are via a scissor drawer, though.)

For the 2013 story on Urban Omnibus, Juliette Spirtus and Susan Schindler brought several Prentice & Chan alumni to Twin Parks North West for a bittersweet survey of their work in the 40’s.^y birthday. As you might expect, many of the finer touches have been damaged or torn down, including the “Mother’s Clock” patio. The supervisor considered the “defensible” spaces that still existed as “dead zones”. On the other hand, the group met a resident of three decades with the front of the tower tattooed on his forearm. He told them, “I love this building.”

At the time, Spirtus and Schindler used the reunion tour to reflect on the paradox of “successful” architecture. “By what criteria, and in terms of what time frame to judge the ‘success’ of architecture in housing?” They wrote. “How can we advocate better design if we cannot relate it to non-design issues such as management, maintenance and use, in the short and long term?” The practice of evaluating buildings right after they open – or worse, before that! It ignores the special way in which time and use reveal the true nature of space. But it works both ways: Sometimes condemnation is placed unfairly on design concepts that are being jeopardized by poor maintenance and divestment.

In short, Twin Parks North West has for many years been a symbol of success—a symbol of New York’s commitment to rebuilding the Bronx at its lowest point, and a commitment to affordable project-based housing as Washington abandoned thoughtful design in public work. And to get people out of the town’s fire trap, overcrowded homes. In time, we’ll learn more about what allowed a malfunctioning machine to turn into the city’s deadliest fire in three decades. Right now, we can think of Twin Parks North West as a symbol of something else: the vulnerability of the building, though celebrated by its architects and occupants, to a door that didn’t close properly when it mattered most.