"The Raymond Hilliard Homes (also called Center) was a Chicago Housing Authority complex located on the near south side of Chicago, containing two 16-story round towers for elderly housing and two 18-story curved towers for low-income family housing. Supporting 756 dwelling units, the complex included lawns, playgrounds, and an open air theater. It has since been renovated by the private sector and converted to mixed-income housing, still with a significant lower income population. It is also now listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1997, recognized for exceptional design. (...)
Meant as a new solution to public housing woes, Raymond Hilliard was built to be a structure which residents would be proud to live in. Goldberg felt that much public-housing was designed in such a way to make the poor feel that they were punished for being poor and did little other than warehouse them. As stated by Goldberg in a 1965 promotional piece, "their architecture must meet them and recognize them, not simply store them." Residents were chosen from records of model citizenry in other housing projects, and for many years this was the only public housing complex which needed no constant police supervision. The unusual tower shapes maximized the space allowed by Public Housing Authority standards while creating a sense of community and openness."
Raymond Hilliard Homes
::: DOWNLOAD: Integration by Design: Bertrand Goldberg, Stanley Tigerman, and Public Housing Architecture in Postwar Chicago, Marisa Angell Brown, Brown University
Excerpt (p. 218):
This essay examines a critical moment in public housing design in which two architects—Bertrand Goldberg and Stanley Tigerman, both white, Jewish, and Chicago residents—deliberated over what would constitute appropriate designs for African American residents on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s. The Raymond Hilliard Homes (Figure 1) and Woodlawn Gardens (Figure 2), built six miles from each other—one at the northern edge of the Black Belt, the other at its southeastern boundary near Hyde Park—reveal Goldberg and Tigerman grappling with race, poverty, and spatial segregation in thoughtful and empathetic ways and coming to two very different conclusions about how an architecture of black empowerment might look.
Goldberg, drawing on the work of contemporary sociological thinkers such as Herbert J. Gans, Edward T. Hall, and Nathan Glazer, believed that different social groups have intrinsically different cultures, and that architecture must suit the users’ particular cultural mores and needs.
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photograph via chicago modern
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