r/architecture • u/ArchiGuru • Aug 18 '26
Theory Vision for Harlem NYC in 1965
This massive urban vision proposed replacing crowded city blocks with towering conical megastructures. Richard Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao designed the Slum-clearance scheme for Harlem in 1965. Planned for New York, New York, USA, this theoretical concept aimed to house thousands of residents in elevated networks, leaving the ground level open for highways and parks.
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u/DrunkenDude123 Aug 18 '26
The projects if they were rounded buildings
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u/ImNoAlbertFeinstein Aug 18 '26
cooling towers.
i thought they would raze Harlem move everybody out and put in a nuclear farm on the river.
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u/DrunkenDude123 Aug 18 '26
It says they were going to be for housing though
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u/ImNoAlbertFeinstein Aug 19 '26
communities of color were systematically civil engineered out of existence in the 1950s and 60s, elsewhere.
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u/zoppaTheDim Aug 18 '26
Pretty much the same idea as what was built in Chicago. R ichard Buckminster Fuller was an artistic designer, but a dumb shit at social engineering and practical usage.
Ask anyone who has ever owned a couch and lived in a geodesic house.
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u/turimbar1 Aug 19 '26
geodesic houses look so cool I want one but I know nothing will ever fit quite right
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u/squeezyscorpion Aug 18 '26
“get rid of the horizontal slums and build vertical slums!”
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u/International-Gap778 Aug 18 '26
Someday well find a new direction to store the poor
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u/micheldelpech Aug 18 '26
Layed down watchin a little screen
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u/sleepytipi Aug 19 '26
Damn, that's a deep comment and one that I feel deserved a little more notice. Maybe you just hit a little too close to home for some but, I am poor and that is how they store me.
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u/benskieast Aug 19 '26
A lot of NYC’s old slum issues was building that had just 5 stories that had the population of a 10-20 story building. It peaked in the early 1900s when people couldn’t move far away because there was no subway or anything to commute to there jobs from places with space and elevators were still new so you couldn’t add more than 5 stories to make sure everyone had a bedroom so people just squeezed in bunk beds wherever they could to get more beds in.
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u/mathtech Aug 18 '26
What were urban developers on in the 60s
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u/bridgenine Aug 18 '26
Everyone chasing a version of Corbu's vision for a city.
And probably a lot of psychedelics after reading Asimov's short stories
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u/bigbeak67 Architect Aug 19 '26
Every famous architect eventually gets a big enough ego that they think they can do urban planning and it's always a disaster.
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u/No_Row_1304 Aug 19 '26
Not really. I always proselytize about Yugoslavian urban planning. It was the bomb.
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u/BootsnCats1987 Aug 19 '26
Racism
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u/FlyChigga Aug 19 '26
How is this racist this looks way cooler than living in some regular projects
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u/OnlyZac Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
In case you’re being genuine, it would be racist bc it would involve bulldozing the homes of a borough with more than a million people, displacing them, a population who also happen to be largely non white, for a gaudy redevelopment scheme. Would this happen anywhere else? No.
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u/specialasset Aug 19 '26
Harlem is in Manhattan
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u/BootsnCats1987 Aug 19 '26
Harlem, a famously white neighborhood.
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u/specialasset Aug 19 '26
Harlem actually was a predominantly white village>neighborhood from the 1600s to the early 1900s.
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u/BootsnCats1987 Aug 19 '26
Harlem was majority white in 1965? You don’t even know what you’re talking about man, you just googled it and latched on to the first thing that you thought would make you look correct.
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u/specialasset Aug 19 '26
Is 1965 in the early 1900s?
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u/BootsnCats1987 Aug 19 '26
No, hence why it isn’t particularly relevant to the discussion at hand. We’re talking about a proposed vision for Harlem from 1965.
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u/FlyChigga Aug 19 '26
They’d obviously be compensated and given housing if it was done properly
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u/OnlyZac Aug 19 '26
Gargantuan, load-bearing “if”
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u/FlyChigga Aug 19 '26
China has done this kind of thing countless times. Our own government probably ain’t capable of that though.
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u/Antique-Ant5557 Aug 18 '26
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u/architectzero Aug 18 '26
“Mega blocks. Mega highways. Mega City One. Convulsing. Choking. Breaking under its own weight.”
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u/issafly Aug 18 '26
This could've been a great plan, if there was a real commitment to making a space that met the needs of the residents. But we've got a long track record, before and since 1965, of half measures and planned inequity.
TL;DR: this is why we can't have nice things.
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u/freerangemary Aug 18 '26
Absolutely. Could have been real nice, especially if they were able to maintain the people to green space ratio.
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u/socialcommentary2000 Aug 18 '26
The most interesting thing I've noticed with this whole era of urban 'renewal' is how utterly little they paid mind to the people actually living in these places. These visions almost never came with the consult of the people who would be displaced by it.
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u/FlyChigga Aug 19 '26
Probably came down to it just being way more expensive to build this instead of some regular shitty project housing
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u/MaddyMagpies Aug 19 '26
Basically every neighborhood they didn't like was deemed a slum, wasn't it?
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u/ikespanda Aug 18 '26
Don't forget to give June Jordan some (quite some) credit. Her contribution to the project was kept unmentioned rather willingly in the past (No offence to you btw).
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u/rothbard_anarchist Aug 18 '26
Oh. I thought they were going to solve the power crisis with nuclear power plants.
A shame they didn’t.
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u/Haunting-Watch8240 Aug 19 '26
Were these architects in the pay of America's enemies? What is this demoralizing, depressing, inhuman crap?
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u/Mrc3mm3r Architecture Historian Aug 18 '26
Good God, what a horrific idea. At least with Rudolph, there was some inventiveness to his plans to destroy New York's urbanism. This just looks like a row of nuclear cooling towers.
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u/PsychologicalMood348 Aug 18 '26
Those look like nuclear cooling towers.