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3 | WORK FALL 09 ISOLATED BUILDINGS The study of the built environment has taken on special significance in the current economic downturn. Driven by the collapse of the global real estate market, much of the nation has been visibly affected by the recession. Entire skyscrapers wait for businesses to fill them while formerly booming cities could house whole towns in their vacant condominiums. Photographer and sociologist David Schalliol engages the discourse about the recession through his Isolated Building Studies. -> Text -> Images Contents 01. WORK REVIEW 02. PUBLICS WORKS 03. ISOLATED BUILDINGS 04. WAYFINDING 05. LAYOFF MOVEON 06. MONDRAGON 07. WORKPLACE 08. A CITY AT WORK 09. EMPTY 10. FARMER'S WORK DOWNLOAD ISSUE 3 ORDER A COPY OF ISSUE 3 |
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ISOLATED BUILDINGS DAVID SCHALLIOL This vacancy has stoked a concern about what we build and for whom we build it, but the discourse about the downturn rarely touches on more than recent history. Obvious facts are ignored: empty buildings and stalled construction projects are not merely symptomatic of the current national climate; tremendous variation in economic health exists between neighborhoods; work life is affected by its historical conditions. Local nuance is subsumed by national generalities. In order to systematically examine the current economic and social health of neighborhoods, we can turn to the built environment for a unique window into the character of a place. The urban landscape photographs on the following pages are drawn from the Isolated Building Studies, a photographic series exploring urban neighborhood change and social stratification. While the Studies document residential, commercial and community structures, the photographs excerpted here highlight small commercial buildings to contextualize places of work. Generally, isolated buildings are useful for addressing the above issues because they are immediately recognized as unusual. As urban buildings, their form illustrates their connection with adjacent structures: vertical, boxy, confined by palpably limited parcels. When their neighboring buildings are missing, a tension emerges because their urban form clashes with the seemingly suburban, even rural, setting. Thoughtfully engaging the landscape requires further investigation to resolve the tension. It is from this fundamental friction that the Isolated Building Studies launches. In Chicago, the answers to questions about isolation often involve economic downturns, race riots, white flight and intentional divestment, but once answers to the initial question about isolation are suggested, even more fundamental understandings can be addressed. Commercial structures are featured in the Studies to signal the concurrent connection and detachment commercial institutions have with residents in rapidly transforming neighborhoods. Whether occupied or vacant, the presence of commercial buildings seems simple. After all, if a building’s commercial establishment is open, it is a center for work and consumption. If a building is closed, it is not. In some basic sense, the building’s fate is tied to how well each business is adapted to the needs (or, perhaps, desires) of a community and its economic context. But, as such, they are more than places of work; they become representatives of the state of work in a community. They suggest that work is desired and offer cues about who is privileged to access it. Additionally, because so many commercial buildings located in residential neighborhoods were built on limited budgets during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they occupy a distinct meso-level of construction. On one hand, they typically required more capital to construct than simple residential structures but considerably less than major office buildings. On the other hand, small commercial buildings are often mixed-use buildings with storefronts below and residential units above. In these cases, they are simultaneously the loci of home and work life – sometimes for the same people. As such, while buildings were often designed to fit inside a community of other buildings, the individuals or small groups who built these small commercial structures were able to express their idiosyncrasies in ways impossible for those on the committees that built larger structures. While we typically make our lives inside buildings designed for others’ use, these buildings are personalized monuments to a new urban life. Not only do we stroll under the names of stores, families, and children enshrined above our doors; we live within their new understandings of work and play. But reading the built environment isn’t simply seeing how one structure began. It is also reading the history written in buildings and their environments through the alterations made by subsequent owners, tenants and others. These alterations were made for a variety of purposes: to conform to the fashions of the day, the particularities of a tenant, or, perhaps most relevant today, financial limitations. As building owners and tenants made places their own, bars were squeezed into produce markets and offices were carved out of bedrooms; awnings were installed, handwritten signs emerged and infrastructure lingered despite its obsolescence. Neighboring buildings similarly changed or were demolished. Through reading this landscape, we see that whether isolated buildings are volunteers or survivors, they reflect a similar position in our history: one in which individual structures are privileged over the continuity of a neighborhood. Yet, like us, they are individuals inextricably linked to their surroundings. As their cities and neighborhoods rise and fall, so do their fortunes. This historical moment is important for understanding the economic downturn, but we must consider more than the present. As we experience isolated buildings we engage the past and future by which these commercial buildings are bookended. We labor within the limitations and aspirations of those who created our neighborhoods – perhaps as much as we do within our own. |
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