Afterall | Spring 2010

Adaptive Reuse: New Strategies in Response to the Housing Crisis

I remember when I bought my first home, and how that made me feel … It’s an overused phrase, but it’s part of the American Dream. It’s a wonderful feeling … I don’t have any study out there I could point to, but I wonder if the homeownership rate was higher in the Middle East if you’d have so much fighting and bickering. I’d love to see a study that shows what the percentage of suicide bombers who own their homes is. Because it’s something you can point to and say ‘that’s where I live, and I own it’.
Robert Couch, former general counsel of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2008

Perhaps the only instance of homeownership being posed as a solution to the Middle-East crisis, this staggeringly presumptuous comment was recorded by Damon Rich for his two-channel video Mortgage Stakeholders (2008). Couch was one of several people Rich interviewed for the video, in which academics, mortgage brokers and housing advocates explain the current economic downturn, each coming from a particular angle – some, like scholar David Harvey, theorising from a Marxist point of view, with others subscribing to the benefits of the free market. Rich filmed each interview separately, but juxtaposes the speakers on screen, so that while one person is talking another is shown patiently waiting for his or her turn to speak. The effect is one of even-handedness: if there is blame being cast, it is spread too widely to have a specific target.

Mortgage Stakeholders was part of ‘Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center’, Rich’s exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art in the summer of 2009. With a toy train racing around a track, a video of Jim Hensonesque puppets and a large-scale model of a human head that visitors could climb into and peer out of, the installation had a funhouse atmosphere. But underneath the carnival-like, playful trappings was a grim and bitingly thorough account of the history of home finance from the Great Depression to the foreclosure crisis, describing how the real-estate industry ballooned out of control and then abruptly collapsed, in part dragging the financial markets and the rest of the economy down with it. The model railroad told the story of the US Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s, after rising interest rates and deregulation pushed them from being small, community-centred banks to multinational financial hubs, while the puppets told real-life stories of predatory lending. The three-metre-high head made of plywood that loomed over the show represented Frederick Babcock, the chief underwriter for Franklin Roosevelt’s Federal Housing Administration, who in 1935 created a real-estate appraisal system that, reflecting the racial attitudes of its time, ended up codifying biases against minorities and residents of city neighbourhoods by helping determine where banks should or should not lend. Starting with the ingrained prejudices of the FHA, and wending its way forward to the stock market’s disastrous dependence on subprime mortgages, Rich’s project used the lens of real estate and finance capital to take a look at race and class in the US.

If one of the direct causes – and consequences – of the current financial crisis is a rash of foreclosures across the US, how these vacancies are affecting the growth of cities and towns remains to be seen. For example, what will become of the unfinished buildings now dotting New York’s landscape, abandoned construction sites whose structural metal posts rise like monuments to failed capital? Or the empty storefronts turning up throughout Manhattan, with ‘Vacancy’ and ‘For Lease’ signs in windows that once boasted elaborate displays of luxury goods? Joseph Grima, director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, has noted the specifically architectural nature of this downturn. ‘It’s quite fascinating how this is possibly the first crisis of our times that has a distinctive architectural aesthetic – empty, detached suburban mansions connected by deserted streets, or slum-like frame houses in varying states of dilapidation,’ he wrote in the online journal Where We Are Now. In the 1930s, the Great Depression found its emblem in the winding breadlines; in the 1970s, it was a line of cars waiting at the gas pump. Today’s crisis is symbolised by an empty house.

Over the past several months, I have been following the work of three American artists – Mary Ellen Carroll, Julia Christensen and Damon Rich – who are making work positioned somewhere between art, architecture and advocacy. While their practices are only tangentially related, they all share an interest in the forces driving property values and in broadening the definition of the public, in the sense of creating an arena that is democratic, transparent in its operations and encouraging of open debate. Both Christensen and Rich employ a research-based methodology pioneered in the 1970s by Hans Haacke and Marth Rosler, while Carroll’s work is perhaps more closely related to land-art projects by artists such as Mary Miss. Though each artist is based in (or is making work based in) a different US city – Cleveland, Houston and New York – considered together, the projects offer a unique perspective on the dramatic economic shifts unfolding right now across the United States. Crucially, each artist’s work examines the American dream of homeownership, opening up the possibility for something less fantastic and distorted to be put in its place.

‘Real estate is a commodity with some unusual features,’ Roslyn Deutsch wrote in response to Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), Hans Haacke’s critique of notorious landlord Harry Shapolsky, who bought buildings in poor Manhattan neighbourhoods and then jacked up the rents. The Shapolsky piece resulted in the cancelling of Haacke’s solo show at the Guggenheim Museum, which had been scheduled to open in April 1971 – Haacke had singled out Shapolsky because he was on the museum’s board. Buildings and land may seem immutable, Deutsch continued, but they ‘embody relationships of exploitation and domination open to change’. Investigating relationships of exploitation and domination is the driving force behind institutional critique, and, when crossed with the real-estate boom, has meant that affordable housing and urban renewal have been increasingly visible subjects of art over the past few years. But there is a difference between the way artists are looking at private property today versus twenty and thirty years ago, when Gordon Matta-Clark made sculpture out of his interventions into abandoned buildings, and Haacke documented the shady and speculative dealings of slumlords. Today the attitude among artists manifests itself in pieces that are less strident – there are fewer examples of subversive acts such as Matta-Clark’s Window Blowout, in which he shot out the windows of Peter Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York in 1976, and replaced each pane with photographs of shattered windows from the Bronx housing projects. Instead, the current crop of artists is changing the nature of relationships that were once defined by ‘exploitation and domination’ through a willingness to utilise the resources at hand. Taking on the roles of researchers and community activists while capitalising on their position as artists – mainly by staging exhibitions to promote ideas or accessing funds via collectors or foundations that support the arts – they choose to use negotiation and diplomacy rather than displays of force or gestures of critique.

This shift coincides with the waning of institutional critique as a strategy used by artists, perhaps because of a disillusionment with its capacity to resist co-option and to actually change the power relations it critiqued. This type of activist practice has its precursors, artists acting as conduits and thereby linking communities, the art world and government bodies. Bonnie Sherk created a farm underneath a highway interchange in San Francisco in 1974 that lasted six years. Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been an artist in residence with the New York City Sanitation Department since 1976. (In her 1969 manifesto on maintenance art, she wrote: ‘After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?’) In her seminal 1989 exhibition ‘If You Lived Here’, held in a space run by the Dia Art Foundation, Martha Rosler staged four group exhibitions and a series of lectures and town hall meetings by artists and activists engaged in helping New York City’s homeless population. This essay is therefore not proclaiming the arrival of a new movement or aesthetic sensibility, but rather is an attempt to understand how this type of artistic practice might respond to the contemporary housing crisis – using these three examples as case studies – and to look at how artists are negotiating the overlap between their work and that of community organisers, activists and city planners.

In the summer of 1999, New York-based artist Mary Ellen Carroll went to Houston to buy a house. She was determined to find one in Sharpstown, a stable, middle-class neighbourhood on the southwest side of the city. Guided by Betty Townes, a realtor who had been selling properties in Sharpstown for thirty years, Carroll drove through numerous shady, quiet streets filled with the kind of modest, single-family homes she was looking for. Sharpstown was masterplanned by a developer in the mid-1950s, and it still has the pleasantly leafy, commodious feel of a post-World War II suburban environment. As they cruised down Sharpview Drive, Carroll spotted a singular looking house adjacent to Bayland Park. Its yard was overgrown with weeds and tall grass, in dramatic contrast to the neatly mowed and manicured lawns on the rest of the block.

Carroll was immediately smitten. ‘That’s it,’ she said to Townes. ‘That’s the house.’ Towne informed the artist that she was out of luck. The house hadn’t been inhabited for twelve years (which was obvious from its rundown condition), and several people had tried and failed to locate its owner. If Carroll wanted that house, she would have to contact the county herself to find out who owned it. After she sent a certified letter stating her interest in the property, she finally met its owner, Dr Ramesh Kapoor, in 2002. Thus commenced a protracted, painful negotiation lasting six years, during which time she assembled a group of individuals to form a corporation to buy the property. By late 2008, 6513 Sharpview Drive was hers (or more accurately, the corporation’s).

This seemingly run-of-the-mill story about desire and real estate was actually the initial phase of a public art project: Carroll’s reason for wanting to purchase the house was to lift it from its foundation and rotate it 180 degrees, reorienting it so that the ‘back’ of the house would face the street, while the ‘front’ would overlook the park. When she realises Prototype 180 – on 8 October 2010 – she will make the architecture ‘perform’, and in the process unsettle assumptions about how a building should appear. The rotation will serve as a catalyst for other alterations to the house, turning it into a laboratory to test new innovations in construction and sustainability.

During a warm May weekend last year, I visited Carroll’s house in Houston. Built in a straightforward contemporary style in keeping with the modern architecture popular at the time, the house is surrounded by a generous, if slightly scruffy, lawn. Just behind it, separated by a chain-link fence, lies the vast expanse of a park, where kids play soccer and baseball on fields illuminated at night by giant klieg lights. As we wandered the premises, Carroll patiently described her myriad plans for the house, explaining that she was going to take it off the energy grid by installing solar panels, a geothermal heating and cooling system, and a hydroponic wall (that may run through the house) to serve as a cooling device. Such plans for energy sustainability are not just fashionable; in Houston, where air conditioning during the brutally hot summers usually results in exorbitant utility bills, innovative alternatives are essential.

Carroll’s previous art projects include Federal (2003), a twenty-four-hour video composed of two stationary shots of the northern and southern façades of the federal building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. The video is a response to Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964), making similar demands on viewers in terms of duration, but also putting the viewer in the position of monitoring an imposing government institution – the FBI’s LA offices are in this building. The making of this work included almost a year’s worth of correspondence with officials in order to get permission to film the building, a comment on, among other things, surveillance and tightened-up security in the wake of 9/11, as well as being a literal interpretation of a ‘representation of power’. Carroll has also travelled to Argentina with virtually nothing aside from the clothes on her back and the passport in her pocket for a 2007 performance, and has transported a car from New York to Munich in order to crash it on the steps of a museum (Late, 2005). This is all to say that she is accustomed to collaborating with corporate or government individuals, and jumping through numerous bureaucratic hoops to realise her projects – a process that is as much a part of the work as the final gesture or document. In fact, last summer she arranged a mayoral forum on the subject of land use in Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum (the mayoral candidates gathered around a prototype conference table that will ultimately be installed in the house). In light of this willingness to patiently manoeuvre through established power channels, it is not hard to imagine her convincing the neighbourhood association that installing a windmill in Bayland Park would provide a solution to soaring utility bills.

In any city other than Houston, lifting a house from its foundation and rotating it 180 degrees would be nearly unthinkable. But Houston – which was founded by two real-estate developers in the 1830s – famously lacks zoning laws, meaning that developers have unusual leniency to build whatever they want, wherever they want (although neighbourhood associations do enforce their own, often strict, standards). This is at least one reason why the oil-rich city is among the fastest growing in the US, with a population that increased by 19.4 per cent between 2000 and 2007. It is also what allowed artist Rick Lowe to purchase 22 abandoned shotgun houses in Houston’s mostly black Third Ward neighbourhood in 1993, using them to start Project Row Houses, a combination exhibition space, artists residency and temporary housing for young, single mothers.

Halfway through the tour we arrived at the threshold of the house, which is located along the side rather than facing the street, and we noticed a used condom lying on the stoop. The condom, in this context of a house as artwork, seemed wholly intentional, a flagrant token of trespass, both assertive and slightly mocking, as if announcing: this is our space. Carroll laughingly pointed to it as a metaphor for the house’s openness to both the park and the street. ‘The house is a conduit,’ she says, ‘from private to public.’

Siting Prototype 180 in a quiet, residential neighbourhood creates an opportunity for pioneering new ideas in urban planning on a local level, rather than in a removed setting, such as a university. For example, Carroll is currently working on enabling free wireless internet access for the entire neighbourhood. This may seem like a relatively minor accomplishment, but mobilising individuals to agree to share free wi-fi is no easy feat. Carroll has been influenced in part by urban policy scholars Gerald E. Frug and David J. Barron, who have argued for the decentralisation of legislative power in the US, saying that state governments should relinquish some of their decision-making control to cities: ‘Working out a problem in a localised setting can reveal solutions that a more abstract consideration cannot identify.’ Prototype 180 illustrates how neighbourhoods might coalesce more strongly and efficiently, collectively figuring out ways to save money and improve their environment, and could become an important model to communities everywhere about how to envision homes as being part of a larger environment rather than discrete entities.

The simple revolution of a single-family home is also a complex gesture relating to notions of public and private, whose more theoretical consequences are here slightly blurred by the emphasis on community enhancement. In fact, in observing the practices of all three artists, I often noticed the constant need to define the difference between their work and that of community activists, architects or designers, and it is notable that this distinction still sparks debate. The April/May 2009 issue of Bookforum featured a roundtable discussion on cultural practices that utilise and attempt to redefine geography. During the discussion, Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land (2007) – an analysis of Israeli settlement architecture – expresses his reservations about positioning artists as agents of change, as though they could do more in a short period of time than people who spend years studying how to modify a particular socio-political situation. Weizman writes: ‘I am still rather careful about not undoing expert knowledge as a gesture of democratisation and liberation…. I also think that placing rights versus power could sometimes end up as an appeal for the moderation of power’s excess and replace more fundamental questioning. So a right to the city must be articulated as a programme, rather than a critique, and this means it should not work only from the bottom up.’

All the artists I spoke to for this story are highly aware of the delicate nature of their position, and echo Weizman’s sentiment that short-term efforts should not be confused with or obscure the ongoing work of urban planners and policy makers. Damon Rich, who is not only an artist but also a city planner for Newark, New Jersey, is sensitive to interpretations of his work in either field as having an interventionist agenda. ‘It’s a romantic way to think about it,’ he tells me, ‘but ultimately terms such as “interventionist” or “sabotage” have violent, masculinist overtones.’

Since writing her 2008 book Big-Box Reuse, which looked at different adaptations of large-scale buildings built by chain stores in the US, Julia Christensen has been asked by more than one municipality about revamping vacant big-box stores. Inspired by the razing of a former Wal-Mart store in her hometown of Bardstown, Kentucky in order to make room for a new courthouse, Christensen travelled across the US, meticulously documenting the transformation of vacated Wal-Mart buildings. The book consists of ten case studies of adaptive reuse, examining how buildings have been appropriated as churches, libraries and schools. In some cases, such as the SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota, the renovation is startlingly transformative, while other adaptations are less dramatic. In an interview with Walker Art Center curator Andrew Blauvelt, Christensen has acknowledged that her role as an artist gave her some freedom in terms of her approach to documenting the sites: ‘I’m not sure why, but I think people are more willing to share their story with an artist in a way they would not with an academic, or corporate entity, or a governmental agency, for instance. Throughout the big-box research, I have recognized a freedom that the subjects feel in knowing they are part of an art project. In a way, taking part in an art project contextualizes what they have done as a creative act, which empowers them to think critically about reuse, and so they tell me all about it.’

For Christensen, one of the most important aspects of her work is its ability to disperse information. When Blauvelt asked whether she sees herself as neutrally documenting or acting as an agent for change, she replied: ‘In regard to this project, I do not see the difference, honestly. I think that I can document this phenomenon as it is emerging on the ground, and that in itself will indeed spark change. No matter how “neutral” the presentation remains, the subject matter is anything but neutral! It does not need me to render it political, because that is inherent.’ Christensen’s reflexive position is necessary – she doesn’t view her project as having redemptive qualities that could somehow transform the life of an unidentified ‘other’. Instead, her stance recalls Heisenberg’s principle of observation, which states that one cannot observe without changing the event being observed. Although it may be possible to point to a progression from the documentary practice of Haacke or Allan Sekula to Christensen’s work, what is more striking is how the responses to socially conscious documentary work remain constant, as evidenced by Blauvelt’s question. There has been and will continue to be confusion over a lack of clearly defined roles (as well as the need to define the artist’s purpose in society), and a craving for evidence of positive social impact from these works – in other words, concrete results.

On 28 April 2009, the day I visited Christensen, Cleveland’s newspaper The Plain Dealer sported a dramatic headline – ‘Casualties: Pontiac, Many Jobs, Dealers’ – below which six short squibs detailed the carnage resulting from General Motors’s restructuring – ‘Workers: 21,000 will lose jobs as many plants close’ and ‘Suppliers: Several likely to go out of business’. The last prediction was particularly apt, since our first stop was HGR Surplus, which, as Christensen puts it, is a graveyard for the rust belt. A resale market for used factory equipment, the twelve-acre ‘store’ is something of a shock. As far as the eye can see are rows and rows of metal equipment and parts. The purpose of most of the machines eluded us, and as we walked through the industrial cast-offs Christensen mentioned how she, in her research for a subsequent art project, looked at these mechanical contrivances different to the way other scavengers do, who roam the aisles in search of a good deal on a metal press or forklift. What isn’t bought in the store ends up on a scrap heap or is junked.

Christensen is currently making a work, titled Surplus Rising, which tracks the migration, from point of origin to destination, of the used equipment found in the store, so we brought a tape recorder and microphone to better document our trip. Two women carrying recording equipment piqued curiosity among the store’s mostly male employees and patrons, and after learning the reason for our visit, one of the managers introduced us to a regular customer, David, who had been coming to the store since it opened seven years ago. He does repairs, and comes here to search out spare parts. David, who is in his forties, has lived in Cleveland all his life, and having witnessed the slow drain of industry from the city, his outlook on its future is bleak. HGR takes in about twelve to twenty truckloads of material a day, David told us. ‘Some days it could be nothing other than ladders and lampshades. There was one day, several years ago, and one truck came in and it had a single lane of a bowling alley. The next truck that came in, from Northrop, had an ion implanter to make subconductors, which is almost several million dollars worth of equipment.’

David then informed us that his mother used to work in this very building, back when it was an automobile plant called Fisher Body. ‘Now a quarter of the whole facility is a surplus outlet,’ he said. The amount of unused space was difficult to fathom, since the store itself seems enormous. It is hard to imagine it expanded by three quarters, and full of people. ‘Obviously they don’t build cars here anymore,’ David said. ‘Jobs have gone out of this area.’

Cleveland is widely acknowledged as having been hit especially hard by the foreclosure crisis. It is estimated that one in thirteen houses is vacant, and the city has experienced an exodus of some 100,000 people since 2002 – something not seen in the US since the forced exodus from New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Euclid Avenue, where HGR is located, was described in a Baedeker’s guide in 1893 as ‘one of the most beautiful residence-streets in America’; the four-mile thoroughfare, which once boasted some 260 elegant homes built by industrial barons, is now a stretch of commercial and institutional buildings. The change in architecture reflects the city’s transition from the thriving industrial and manufacturing hub it was in the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries to the struggling and uncertain economy it is today, a slow decline that started with the closing of American steel mills in the 1960s. And yet Cleveland retains its grandeur, or at least parts of it seemed so to me in the course of a day-long tour spent largely on the city’s main roads. The landscape often consists of rolling hills and verdant elms, and there are many signs of growth and resiliency, both historical and contemporary: the lock that opens onto Lake Erie and feeds water into the Erie Canal; the Progressive Stadium; the Hope-Memorial Bridge with its WPA sculptures of Art-Deco-style figures wearing winged helmets and cradling automobiles (locally dubbed the ‘guardian angels of traffic’). Later, on a flight back to New York, I saw the city in miniature; from an aerial view Cleveland’s travails are more obvious. Abutting the bridge is a dilapidated strip of factory buildings, a blackened, burnt-out hole surrounded by smoothly interwoven highways curving like the leaves of a four-leaf clover.

III

In light of my experiences in Houston and Cleveland, cities that respectively represent the ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ extremes of the real-estate market in recent years, Damon Rich’s project filled in some of the gaps. The emphasis of his Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center (2009) is on education. In 1999, Rich founded a non-profit design organisation called The Center for Urban Pedagogy, which uses the built environment to show how power is distributed in society, spreading this information through high-school curricula, exhibitions, tours and design partnerships with other non-profit organisations in the city. The show did not try to make its visitors into experts, but rather to equip them to ask questions. Red Lines’s favoured experts seemed to be the New York-based Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project (NEDAP), an advocacy group which provided Red Lines with foreclosure data and whose directors are also interviewed in the aforementioned video Mortgage Stakeholders about elderly women losing their homes in Jamaica, Queens. Much like Rosler’s ‘If You Lived Here…’, the exhibition functioned as a temporary meeting place, with a rack holding flyers from housing advocacy organisations that had also participated in extensive public programming developed by the QMA in the Queens neighbourhoods hardest hit by the crisis. One component of the show capitalised on the museum’s exquisite panorama of New York City, using pink triangular markers to designate city blocks on which three or more houses had filed for foreclosure. It was a startling illustration of how New York’s minority neighbourhoods are being particularly decimated by foreclosures. During a panel discussion in which the participants walked around on the panorama (mainly in New York City’s waterways), the better to comment on the city’s situation, urban historian Kenneth Jackson towered over a particularly dense patch of pink triangles in Brooklyn, and said: ‘Each one of these triangles is really marking a personal tragedy.’

The centrepiece of Rich’s project was Frederick Babcock, a New York City bureaucrat from the 1930s whose connection to the current crisis is not immediately apparent. But Babcock’s role in American urban development was decisive and powerful. ‘There is one difference in people, namely race, which can result in a very rapid decline,’ he wrote in The Valuation of Real Estate (1937). ‘Usually such declines can be partially avoided by segregation, and this device has always been in common usage in the South where White and Negro populations have been separated.’ This statement was printed on one of a handful of light boxes along with Rich’s diplomatic commentary: ‘Unfortunately, Babcock misread the nature of neighbourhood change, seeing decline as a result of race mixing rather than as evidence of racist real-estate properties.’

In essence, as Rich’s exhibition showed, Babcock turned racism into official practice. Following his guidelines, neighbourhoods that were deemed risky for lenders – that is, where a bank might be less likely to get its money back – were delineated in red ink on maps developed in the late 1930s by the Home Owners Loan Corporation. ‘Red lining’ became a term for unfairly denying loans in certain neighbourhoods, with the result that buying or improving a home – and the surrounding neighbourhood as a result – was often out of reach for minorities or immigrant populations. Although red lining was acknowledged in the 1970s as a tacitly racist practice and eventually outlawed by the federal government in an episode also chronicled in the exhibition, by the 1990s red lining had transformed into its opposite: now, in the name of affordable housing, there was too much credit available, often in extremely predatory forms. These very same neighbourhoods that were once ignored were directly targeted by mortgage companies, who often portrayed themselves as heroically reversing a terrible trend. In a New Yorker profile on Angelo Mozilo, the former chairman and CEO of Countrywide Financial Corporation, one of the leading US home-loan providers (which was eventually sold in near-bankruptcy to Bank of America in 2008), Mozilo is quoted as saying of his customers: ‘So they’re not upper-middle-class white people – so what? They’re Hispanics, and maybe their money is not in a bank – but they are responsible.’

In Rich’s video, we hear another perspective from Don Baldyga, of the Episcopal Community Development in Newark, who says: ‘These people were sold the American Dream. You wave that in front of them, and even if there’s a downside, they don’t hear it.’ But his main contention is that, even though these people may be guilty of not paying their mortgage, each additional foreclosure hurts the rest of the neighbourhood. ‘For every abandoned house on a block, that’s like a 15 per cent decrease on the value of neighbouring homes.’

Baldyga’s comment hits home after viewing the pink triangles dotting the panorama, which showed the extent of the impact of foreclosures in New York City with clarity and immediate comprehensibility. It was one of the most striking elements of the installation. This piece, as was true of most of the show, demonstrates that Rich’s visualisation of complicated information borrows as much from graphic designers and city planners as it does from early Conceptual art. With its pointedly museological display and objective tone, ‘Red Lines’, like Christensen’s work, is not caught up with measuring its own virtuousness. The evidence of the events leading to the foreclosure crisis is laid out for viewers to absorb and digest, allowing them to freely develop their own opinions.

Though Cleveland, Houston and New York differ vastly in terms of culture and economy, they share the same problem now visible in all cities: an increasing number of vacancies and a shortage of ideas about how to deal with them. It would be an overstatement to say the artists discussed in this essay are stepping in to help close the gap. Yet Christensen, who has developed a versatile set of ideas about big-box stores that, as a book, may be widely distributed, and Rich, whose reflexive displays concisely deliver complex information to museum audiences, have both compiled data and developed theories about housing that are as useful to city planners and architects as they are compelling to casual readers and viewers. They thus have expanded the purview of their work and made it difficult to categorise their practices as ‘pure’ art, if such a thing ever existed. And while Carroll’s Prototype 180 – sculpture as discursive site – started from the basis of an aesthetically driven project, it has evolved to encompass a much broader range of issues related to urban housing. There may be a difference between the deliberate neutrality in work by these artists versus that of earlier generations, yet it seems too soon to make a case for a distinct break. Instead, these artists are worth singling out for their unveiling of new strategies to counteract the effects of an economic slowdown, and their ability to see possibility where others might agonise at the prospect of being strangled by red tape.