The Architectural League presents

Urban Life: Housing in the Contemporary City

Housing the City: Strategies for Multiple Dwelling in New York, 1830-2003
October 17, 2003 - December 10, 2003
The Urban Center, 457 Madison Avenue @ 51st Street, New York City

On October 16, the Architectural League opens an exhibition of twenty recently completed urban housing projects from cities around the world. The exhibition focuses on three critical questions facing architects and urban designers:

How can dwelling form contribute to the future of cities?
How can housing help create a balanced and sustainable land-use pattern?
How can housing design make medium and high-density urban living affordable, comfortable, and appealing?

Drawing from cities including Paris, Vienna, Osaka, and London, the exhibition brings together housing projects that offer creative answers to these questions and suggest innovative or provocative points of comparison with housing design efforts in the United States. Architects with work in the exhibition include Frederic Borel, Neave Brown, Coop Himmel(b)lau, Bill Dunster, Koning/Eizenberg, Michael Pyatok, Stanley Saitowitz and many others.

The exhibition is organized around six 'perspectives on housing,' which serve as criteria for evaluating the projects as urban strategies. Three perspectives focus on different levels of scale: body, building and city. Three more consider approaches to implementation: environment, technology, and issues of finance and development.

A complementary exhibition on the evolution of multifamily housing in New York-Housing the City: Strategies for Multifamily Living in New York, 1830-2003-- provides a local context for viewing the projects in Urban Life. The New York exhibition presents selected subsidized and market rate projects, arranged chronologically and with unit plans drawn at the same scale, to show the evolution of multifamily housing form in New York City.

An online component, to be available October 16 at www.archleague.org/urbanlife, features comparative analysis of the projects in the Urban Life exhibition; a range of supplementary materials and readings on the topic of urban housing; and a moderated forum for discussion and the presentation of new work and ideas in housing design.