High-End Architecture for the Poor: Solidarity or Slumming?

Simon Romero / NYTimes:

MEDELLÍN, Colombia, July 11 — Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, sporting three days’ growth of beard and unruly hair nearly down to his shoulders, Sergio Fajardo looks every bit the nonconformist mathematician who spent years attaining a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.

But that was a past life for Mr. Fajardo, this city’s mayor and the son of one of its most famous architects. Now he presses forward with an unconventional political philosophy that has turned swaths of Medellín into dust-choked construction sites.

“Our most beautiful buildings,” said Mr. Fajardo, 51, “must be in our poorest areas.”

With that simple idea, Mr. Fajardo hired renowned architects to design an assemblage of luxurious libraries and other public buildings in this city’s most desperate slums. [full article]

So on the one hand: what a cool idea! And how refreshing to hear about a leader working to bridge the gap between rich and poor by giving the latter some actual good, helpful services, and by honoring them with "the best" rather than "the adequate". The article does touch on a couple of critiques for such a scheme—wouldn't it be better to spend the money on improving basic services?, and um, do the folks in the neighborhood actually appreciate the "beauty" that their mayor's worked to bring to them? Sometimes high-concept architecture gets, um, tried out on the poor because it's easy for visionary city planners to push it through on them. I remember the first time I went to New York City, riding the train past all these massive housing project towers, and realizing it looked exactly like the early 20th century futurism I'd been reading about—Corbusier and his World's Fair knockoffs, "the home as a machine for living" etc. Back then the visionaries had said, "in the future we'll all live in these great planned housing complexes". So they built them first for the poor, to prove the concept. But in the end the rich never signed up for their own housing projects—so the only people who lived in the futuristic world were those who didn't have much choice.

Back to Medillin—for a while I've been puzzling over why, when it comes to my Colombian news, I prefer the front page of the Medillin El Colombiano over the better-designed, more-nationally-focused, Bogotá-based El Tiempo. (I've linked the websites, but visit Newseum to see the latest front pages: El Colombiano; El Tiempo) I think maybe it's to do with the mix of big-city news and charming provinciality—the annual flower fair, or textile week. Plus lots of coverage of cycling and inline skating. But also, the article made me realize, quite a bit about public art (both high-concept sculpture and more populist Christmas lights on the aerial tramway). So perhaps the mayor's to thank for that. I hope his work appeals to the locals—from every background—even more than it does to me.