Listen up…This is who we are.

Tomorrow afternoon, Luke, May, and I have a meeting with Dean Balfour to unveil our plan to build the GaTech COA’s reputation up over the next few years in the academic and professional community. Luke and have been discussing a fresh lecture series for next year, and we recently brought the grey matter(s) online publication into the mix. Here is what we will be proposing:

1. A lecture series run almost entirely by students.

• Students make contact and continue correspondance with the Lecture guest.
• Students will devise a theme [consistent ideal] to link the semester’s lectures together.
• Student will be responsible for entertaining guest when they are in Atlanta.
• A relevant poster to accompany the lecture series that can be distributed to architecture schools across the nation and attract interest in the school for graduate school [new GSA]

2. A school publication with 80-100 pages of student work, faculty papers, and grey matter(s) content.

• This publication should also exist as the representative student gallery for prospective students to view.
• This should accurately gauge the pulse of the school. Dead or Alive.

These are the two most important deficiencies we, as the student leadership underground, see as the most important to start working on, and believe they will bring the most results. We are also bringing with us our vision for the new GSA of which we feel responsible for establishing its identity in its infancy. The image of the school on a hill for all to see and all to flock, set in the middle of Atlanta, builds a notion of the new GSA being at the forefront of the profession in the coming years. Along with this, we will plastering the images all over the college as a propaganda campaign to encourage a culture and feeling in the students that Georgia Tech can be a top ranked architecture school.

Construction to Destruction in 20 years

There was another housing complex destroyed in Atlanta this weekend; the Martin Luther King Jr. Housing block. The news anchor said it was being torn down in the city’s effort to “improve” the neighborhood. They also said the residents had been relocated using a voucher system to help subsidize their next living arrangement. Again, what is it about these low-income, subsidized housing communities that almost inevitably leads them to destruction within 20-30 years of their construction. Are these projects planned to be inhabited for 20 years and then torn down, its inhabitants  relocated, “city beautification” projects commissioned in their place, and then more low-income housing communities built somewhere else to continue the cycle? It seems like an elaborate, but brilliant, plan to ensure the existence of city projects for developers and architects on a regular basis. If this is true, wtf.

Truckin’

So today I was driving [in the truck] past Bankhead Courts on my way to school, and I was amazed at how large that complex is and how abandoned it is. For those who aren’t from the ATL, Bankhead is a run-down area west of Atlanta that has a bad reputation for crime, and Bankhead Courts is/was a low income low-rise housing “community” that has recently been gutted and prepared for demolition. I would estimate that there were 16 units per building and 30 buildings, making room for 480 units. At an average of 4 people/unit, there were nearly 2,000 people living in this complex, and they have now all been displaced.

It is being torn down because it had such a high concentration of crime and an overall bad reputation across the city. Why did it have these problems? Why do a majority of low-income housing projects have such a bad reputation in general? Is there something in the water that instigates negative behavior? Is it inevitable? Is it possible to have a low-income housing project with a positive reputation, a healthy community, and low crime rate? What role can the architecture/design of a place play in creating a community? Can it? I don’t know, but I plan to find out over the next few months. If enough evidence turns up, I might just make a thesis out of it.

Dueces