“This can be changed. We will change it.”
During a campaign speech to a buzzing Madison Square Garden crowd on the eve of the 1936 election, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke to the broken and the battered populace—“farmers whose acres yielded only bitterness, businessmen whose books were portents of disaster, home owners who were faced with eviction, frugal citizens whose savings were insecure”—and implored them for more time to make headway against unemployment and to rebuild the country.
Roosevelt and his administration, soon to be granted another four years in the White House, had just begun to unleash the full force of his New Deal social programs on the nation. A series of wartime like mobilizations against poverty and the Great Depression, these initiatives helped put millions of Americans back to work beginning in 1933, but millions more still needed assistance. Starting in 1935, the federal government would turn to a series of massive public works programs, including the Works Progress Administration and Public Works Administration, to reforest land, employ artists, build housing and hospitals, and “meet the needs of community life: schools, playgrounds, parks, sanitation, highways,” President Roosevelt said in the same address.
They would form the vast physical imprint of the New Deal, arguably the most transformative infrastructure program in the nation’s history—the website Living New Deal Atlas catalogues roughly 16,000 sites created as part of the program that are still standing today—and a byword for ambitious development plans. A 1937 piece from The Nation said that the sweeping networks of roads, schools, health centers, gyms, and hospitals called for by the deal “will be memorable for generations.”
“Any 21st century public works project should be inspired by the New Deal ideal that the average everyday American should benefit the most,” says Scott Myers-Lipton, a sociology professor at San Jose State University and New Deal expert.
Roosevelt’s bold proclamations and confidence felt revelatory to a nation pinned down by scarcity and strife. They feel especially relevant during a year when the United States feels convulsed by a pandemic, economic uncertainty, environmental degradation and wildfires, and widespread protests over systemic inequity. When overdue maintenance and strained budgets have led so much of our existing infrastructure to corrode and crack (the nation received a D-plus on its last infrastructure report card), considering the impact of the nation’s most famous public works program offers a thrilling prospect: uniting around a new national vision that asks architects and engineers to design not just buildings, but a new social fabric.
Proposals for such a modern infrastructure bill, most famously the Green New Deal, call the architectural profession to not just accept a civic challenge, but to ask what kind of infrastructure should be prioritized today. The nation doesn’t need more Hoover Dams or massive, headline-grabbing megaprojects as much as it needs a corps of architects to help fix what’s broken, whether that be housing or massive investments in restoring our natural land and ecosystems.
“There’s this idea that infrastructure is only what you can see, that it’s concrete,” says Kate Orff, a landscape architect and founding principal of the firm SCAPE.
A new public works initiative also challenges architects to better engage communities, so a chorus of diverse voices guides a new wave of rebuilding and restoration. One of the New Deal’s lasting legacies is entrenched racism and economic disparity—housing programs of the era such as the creation of the Federal Housing Administration and redlining lead to today’s striking racial wealth gap, where 30% more white families than Black families own homes, and white familial wealth is 10 times that of Black families. Without addressing those issues, and being careful not to repeat such mistakes, any future plan could similarly ripple across the racial divide. To fully realize the possibilities of engaging with multifaceted communities across the nation, the profession also needs to reckon with its own relative homogeneity, and better reflect the country’s diversity. “Architects are conduits of power between the state and the people,” says Bryan Lee Jr., AIA, founder of New Orleans-based architecture and design justice practice Colloqate Design. “It’s less about what we can ask of communities, but more about finally listening to what communities have been stating for years and years.”
The Common Sense Behind a Creative Job Corps
The New Deal bankrolled thousands of new buildings and showcased a new generation of civic architecture. More importantly, it kept many architectural practitioners in business during a prolonged downturn. According to Kermit Baker, Hon. AIA, senior economist at The American Institute of Architects, while the architectural billing index, a measure of industry activity, experienced a record plunge this March—even steeper than those during 2008’s Great Recession—architectural employment hasn’t taken a similar drop. Firms have told Baker that they have trimmed staff by an average of 5%; data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a 6% decline in the roughly 200,000 national payroll positions at architectural firms.
“The situation is a bit perplexing,” Baker says. “We’re still trying to wrap our heads around it, but the decline hasn’t been as bad as we expected, and the bulk of the layoffs may be behind us.”
While the job picture could be worse, Baker said another important lesson of the last recession was that once architects leave the field, or fail to find jobs after school, they tend to stay away permanently. A program proactively putting architects to work—especially young graduates whose careers can suffer from a failure-to-launch during a downturn—could potentially pay big dividends. This moment creates unique opportunities: With so much need for retrofitting, sustainable development, and adaptive reuse, young architects hired as part of an AmeriCorps-style program would learn marketable skills.
Wenjia Tang
What’s Old Is New: Focusing Resources on Renovation
Before raising an army of architects and workers, any new program needs to consider marching orders. Those may simply be updating the New Deal-era infrastructure of roads, schools, bridges, and airports (a recent report this summer by the American Society of Civil Engineers found $9 billion in shovel-ready projects that could be started immediately, and that’s still just a fraction of what’s needed to bring the nation up to a state of good repair). But tackling today’s pressing challenges may require a different kind of rehabilitation.
“Now is the perfect time to rebuild communities and public housing,” Meyers-Lipton says. “I think we need to come back to the issues of redlining and segregation. The reality is, parks and streets aren’t as nice on one side of [a given American] city. How do we reimagine and repair that gap? We need to create public spaces that can be commercial, be part of nature, and help knit neighborhoods together; think of the Riverwalk in San Antonio.”
For Colin Brice, AIA, a partner at New York-based Mapos, the approach should be focused on the basics. An architectural New Deal needs to develop affordable housing tied to economic development, providing workers with a chance to earn a living and not spend it all on rent (the National Low-Income Housing Coalition found that due to a systemic deficiency, the nation is short 7 million units for extremely low-income renters). He believes a new commitment to regionalism and vernacular design—taking the value of place and affordability elevated by programs like Auburn University’s Rural Studio and then attacking the national shortage of accessible housing—can help solve the problem.
Lee says that simply committing to the kind of federal reinvestment in housing—especially rental units and even community land trusts—needed to bring the ideas of such a design program to life would represent a fundamental shift. He points to the substantial cuts in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget—between 1980 and 1989, it was slashed roughly 80%—as symbolic of indifference to addressing the problem. (Progressive lawmakers such as Rep. Ilhan Omar have proposed massive new investments in the nation’s aging public housing stock).
“We’ve built thousands of military bases across the country—these little cities—and then wonder what would happen if we invested the money and finances in building our communities at that scale,” he says.
Much like the nation has a widespread gap in affordable housing, it also has a dearth of sustainable housing, says Jacob Corvidae, a buildings expert at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Basalt, Colo. He advocates four major needs for the national housing stock: the need for it to be electrified so the nation can move closer to abandoning fossil fuel; the need for it to be more efficient in terms of building envelope and energy usage, to cut down on emissions; the need for it to be more responsive, so buildings can use less power and potentially feed energy from solar panels back into the grid; and finally, the need for new construction to happen with lower carbon materials.
“Buildings and architecture have long suffered from the sense that, unless it’s new construction, it simply is not sexy,” he says. “But there’s so much happening with our understanding of buildings. Architects can step in here and take a huge role in promoting wide-scale renovation.”
A sustained renovation push can also change the industry itself. Right now, Corvidae says, ground-up new construction, not surprisingly, makes up the bulk of architectural billings; nationally, only roughly 1% or 2% of buildings get renovated and upgraded each year. But to really make a dent in emissions, the U.S. would need to start renovating 5% of all buildings each year. It’s a significant shift, but once that path is taken, it encourages architecture firms to focus more on renovation and makes that portion of the industry more financially viable. Add a significant push for more adaptive reuse, and suddenly, more jobs and careers revolve around more sustainable models of building and design.
The Most Fundamental Infrastructure
Nothing requires more collective action than the environment, and here, too, a sustained public works plan could be a boon to those practicing sustainable design. Before resiliency and climate change were part of the architectural lexicon, a constellation of New Deal programs in the ‘30s showcased the potential for national conservation push. The WPA hired artists to design signage and posters for parks, and workers for the Civilian Conservation Corp planted 3 billion trees and created 800 parks between 1933 and 1942. Expanding an existing program framework, such as community development block grants—which cities and states already use to build greenspaces and rebuild from disasters—to serve an ecologically minded purpose could open up modern possibilities for ecosystem recovery.
SCAPE’s Orff suggests a contemporary version of these plans focused on restoration, especially coastal waterways that will be ever more vital in an era of increased storms and rising waters. Projects her firm has spearheaded, such as the Living Breakwaters Project in New York City, which combined flood resiliency and habitat restoration, and Our Future Coast in Louisiana, a research project that envisioned ecological and economic restoration along the receding Gulf Coast, exemplify a type of design that seeks to support and reanimate living systems and landscapes.
“We need to practice in the mode of ecological activists,” Orff says. “Natural systems are fragmenting and breaking down, and we need to knit those things back together. It calls for a very different form of practice.”
As we repair the natural landscapes scorned and scorched by industry and pollution, it’s necessary to pair that action with infrastructure projects that move us toward zero emissions and cleaner, more renewable power. That includes installing smart grids, building up wind and solar power, and upgrading our roadways to support more mass and multimodal transit and vehicle chargers.
A New Deal for Everyone
Lee, Orff, and others also argue that the kinds of changes made possible by large-scale federal infrastructure also require a commitment to engagement and advocacy. Architects have long seen projects held up by NIMBY backlash, as well as by building and zoning codes that some consider counterproductive. When pursuing radical ideas, designers and architects are forced to be reactive, Lee says. To truly push radical change, there’s a need to focus on repairing past injustices, and to remove barriers to progress going forward. Part of that requires dialogues with lawmakers and city leaders to help update rules and regulations.
“Architecture has often placed itself in a position where it’s too small to deal with politics and too focused on the purity of the craft to deal with the surrounding environment,” Lee says. “We need to reaffirm architecture’s political nature and lean into that on the city, state, and federal level.”
