gag
pretty pictures with pop-culture condemnations that read like someone opening a history book for the first time
hey lets let the intern write the captions and see if anyone notices.

They may be from hell but I would love to visit some of those places. They are quite photogenic in their horridity. Hong Kong is amazing BTW - I love the density of housing in that city.

Housing Project = Hell

Period.

i dont find all of these projects 'from hell'. How about some bullshit american suburbs like valencia, CA? Those are not hellish for the residents, but for the environment, for overextended infrastructure and for the mental health of the residents.
Housing projects, as they are referred to in the US are 'hell'. In most other places of the world it is a reality because of high density. A lot of those have very strong sense of community, safety and communal well-being in general.
I think the whole compilation is made by an intern who grew up in a suburb.

new urbanist pablum.

yawn. next...

ya like mcmansion mountains..

those housing projects are beautiful.

also i think suburbs like valencia CA might be hell for their residents too because of the dependence on the car and that sinking inferiority you must feel for not being in LA

oh, come on! beautiful!
I grew up in one and it wasn't always pretty.
Might I add, they kill any sense of community wen everybody owns everything and nobody owns anything. When you throw in a bit of communism you get rats and cockroaches. sorry.
I love some density but you can't say those projects are good.

i wonder how many people living in favelas wouldn't mind moving on to some of those buildings...different definition of "hell", i guess...

Allt-erlaa is a truly amazing project and is actually very popular - reason enough for me to ignore anything written on that website.

plan voisine may be fukt because it would have demolished part of inner city paris, but corb had it right.

social housing towers on the periphery just don't work, a la cities all over the u.k. and paris 'burbs.

Corb had little of anything right planning wise. It might be right from an architectural-- or even economical-- point of view but his plans are absolute rubbish.

That would explain why they were never actualized.

usu., the reason plans aren't actualized has little to do w/ being rubbish. in fact, a lot of projects built in the last 50 years are downright pathetic.

If these places are hell it's because the security and maintenance budgets have been slashed.

I'm considering making a website that's called "25 ignorant ass hit-and-run list-based linkbait websites (as featured on kottke.org)"

just for the record, the plan voisin was NOT housing towers... they were all office towers... in fact corbu banned housing from the towers in both the "ville contemporaine" and the "plan voisin"... the housing was in mid-rise buildings...

i wish that the corb-bashers would at least get the facts straight...

Pruitt-Igoe is probably the only one that truly belongs on that list. There are PLENTY of more "hellish" housing projects, like the ones near my school in Newark. Thankfully they finally closed Baxter Terrace...

Baxter Terrace/NJ.com

the whole city of las vegas = one large suburban hell housing project

“The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”


pruitt-igoe was successful for 5 years then became repository for hard-cases and the maintenance was slashed. the buildings were not the problem as much as you might believe.

architecture is seldom so effective at making either heaven or hell. people do it so much better.

i live in a corbu-inspired place on the edges of tokyo. it is brilliant. the longer i live here the more impressed i become with the planners who put this place together. so it can work.

a lot of asian suburbs totally resemble these idealistic urbanities...