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THE LOST URBAN GYPSY Proposed shelter system New York City, 1984
"As Night comes to the City we find our way home. To our books, clothes, and bed, to family, friends or privacy. Imagine your home, and its pivotal role in your well-being. Now consider it gone. As Night comes to the City, many have no home to find. They are the homeless, whether de-institutionalized former patients, displaced workers from failing industries, victims of arson or of natural disasters. Some may simply be drop-outs, but most are in desperate need of simple shelter until they can start anew in homes of their own. On this Night, the permanent shelters are nearly full. Some will be turned away, while others will stay away, afraid of violence and theft. But tonight the City is prepared. From their storage yards in the Bronx rail yards come small caravans of portable two-person shelters. Some are placed in parks, in vacant lots, in urban plazas. They are clustered in small villages around permanent pavilions which have been designed for easy conversion to clinics or bath houses. Here they are hooked up to central utilities. Others are set individually on wide sidewalks, where they rely on their own storage tanks and batteries. In each cart, the homeless find privacy, hygiene and dignity, while they await their permanent homes. And as the carts are returned to storage, the City has a responsive, flexible tool in readiness for the next lonely Night." (text from the drawing by Christopher K. Egan, 1984)
"The genesis for this design was the architectural question: assuming a person who must live on the sidewalk, how can we provide a shelter that begins to offer the dignity each member of a society deserves? The solution is to combine symbols of Home (in New York the front stoop and formal street façade) with the rigorous functional and material minimalism required of a tiny, portable, all-weather shelter." (text from Harvard Architecture Review, Christopher K. Egan, 1987)
Commentary from 2003: In the early 1980s homelessness became a major crisis in American cities, and many architects sought ways to address the issue. However, the problem was not essentially architectural, instead it was societal; that is to say, homelessness was not caused by a building type, it was caused by lack of political will and infrastructure. When both Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture issued calls for ideas, I decided to address the architectural needs of a person who, for whatever reason, was forced to live on the sidewalk. Two architectural decisions determined the design. One was based on the observation that the spatial relation between a passerby and someone sitting on the sidewalk, literally at their feet, is inherently demeaning. For a solution I turned to the traditional New York "stoop" or front steps, which are universally used as places to sit and talk to passersby, with a more even eye-level. The second was to apply the same principles of composition and proportion that are used for the homes of the wealthy to those for the homeless. After all, human dignity should be respected no matter the economic status.
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