A Brief and Incomplete History of Stacking People

I am five storeys of fired brick and optimism. My ground floor sells wine and olives. My upper floors sell the idea that one can live decently at a height previously reserved for birds and bad decisions.

I have many tenants and one courtyard, and no opinion whatsoever about the smell on the third landing, which has been there since the Augustan period and which I have come to think of as structural.

I am the insula. I invented urban apartment living. You are welcome. My top-floor tenants have views and also the greatest proximity to the fires that periodically remove me from the historical record. I have noticed this pattern—that the people who can afford least are also the ones closest to whatever is about to go wrong—and I find it troubling, but I am a building, and my capacity for political reform is, structurally speaking,
load-bearing zero.

Fourteen thousand of my relatives currently exist in this city. We are the city, in a way the marble temples find uncomfortable to acknowledge at dinner parties.

Yes, hello. I would like to begin.

I am the haveli of Amer, and I predate the Jaipur haveli by several centuries and considerably more interesting geometry. Jaipur was planned. I was negotiated—with a hill, with a ridge line, with the particular stubbornness of terrain that did not consult anyone’s grid before deciding where to go.

My courtyards are not square. They could not be square. The hill had other ideas, and when you are building on a hill that has other ideas, you either argue with the geology or you learn to skew.

I skewed.

And here is what happened—what nobody planned, but everybody eventually appreciated: because my courts are not aligned, because each one turns slightly away from the next, each courtyard became private in a way that no amount of deliberate design could have manufactured. You cannot see from one court into another. The angles took care of it. The hill, in its geological stubbornness, had accidentally solved the oldest problem in shared housing: how to live close together and still have somewhere to be alone.

I did not feel like a diagram. I felt like a person—with many sides to me, some of which I revealed gradually, and some of which I kept entirely to myself.

The Jaipur haveli, my rather tidier successor, will now introduce itself with great confidence. I ask you to remember that confidence and geometric perfection are not the same thing.

I am perfectly proportioned.

My courts are aligned. My screens are symmetrical. My chajjas and jalis were mass-produced. But that’s alright—I had to be built in seven years. My sandstone is the correct colour, matching well with pink. Visitors find me immediately legible, which is, I have always felt, a virtue.

The Amer haveli would like everyone to know that its courts are skewed. This is true. This is also because it was built on a hill without adequate surveying equipment, a fact which it has spent seven centuries reframing as philosophy.

I am a plan. A beautiful, considered, intentional plan. There is a distinct division between public and private, though with little in between. Each room knows its function. The men are positioned at the front, while the women are at the back behind screens. The staircase is discreetly enclosed within its well. The otla plinth at the entrance has been significantly reduced compared to Amer’s—it was wasteful, and people wasted too much time on it. I am, in short, exactly what I meant to be.

You are a diagram that happened to have rooms in it.

I am a building that happened to have a plan.

There is a difference, and the difference is called life.

If I may. We were discussing the history of collective housing, and I believe the Berlin building has been waiting quite patiently.

Thank you. I am the Mietskaserne. The tenement barracks. I will not be performing charm today (puts away a folding scale, which it was nervously playing with).

I was built quickly, by a landlord who understood that industrialisation was filling this city faster than the city could breathe, and that workers arriving from the countryside needed somewhere to sleep between shifts, and that the Prussian building code required only that my smallest courtyard be large enough for a fire engine to turn around in.

I calculated this to within fifty centimetres.

My smallest court receives forty minutes of direct sunlight in December, which is forty minutes more than the fire engine needs but considerably fewer than the families stacked around it would have preferred. I have five courtyards. They have names. They have dimensions. They do not have the Amer haveli’s accidental poetry, but they have something—a density of shared life, a proximity of strangers, a courtyard full of laundry and children and arguments—that is, in its way, also human.

Hot beds. Men who slept in shifts, in beds still warm from the previous occupant. I am not proud of this. I am merely reporting it.

The Amer haveli would like to note that its courtyards were never used for hot-bed tenancy.

I am the maison à loyer. I have a zinc mansard, an ornamental cornice at the statutory height, and a social order so precisely encoded into my section that a visiting sociologist once wept quietly on my second landing, though whether from admiration or despair I was never entirely certain.

My ground floor is commerce. My first upper floor is aspiration-made-built-form: tall ceilings, much decorative plasterwork, and windows that frame the boulevard like little paintings of Parisian life. Each floor above is a slightly reduced version of the floor below. Each floor is slightly less wealthy, slightly lower ceilinged, slightly less ornamented, until we arrive at the attic floor. Here, the zinc roof converses with the rain, and the roofline requires residents to have a considered relationship with their own heads. Up there live the servants of the floors below. They know everything. They say nothing. They carry it in apron pockets and release it, in fragments, to the concierge, who reassembles it into a narrative and distributes it to the street.

I have two stairs. One grand. One not-so-and-a-bit-dingy. I have a dégagement—a service corridor barely wide enough for one person and a secret—that connects the kitchen to the bedroom without passing through the salon. It was plumbing before pipes and sewers were laid in Paris: chamber pots could be emptied unseen.

The Amer haveli is going to say something about privacy.

I was going to say that I, too, understood the difference between the path that is seen and the path that is taken. But I had no dégagement. I had geometry. My angles did the work your corridor does, but in daylight, and with better ventilation.

Also, my servants had a courtyard view.

The Weissenhof Estate. Sixteen architects. One exhibition. One shared conviction that everything Paris just described—the hierarchy, the ornament, the encoded social order, the zinc—was precisely and completely the problem.

Flat roofs. White walls. Strip windows. A new way of life.

J.J.P. Oud brought row houses that were, genuinely, very good. South-facing, rationally planned, high-density at low rise, the kind of thing that actually improves life in measurable ways. Mies brought a building he could reconfigure with moveable partitions, which was either a sign of flexibility or an admission that he wasn’t entirely sure what the residents needed. Corbusier brought his Five Points and a manner suggesting he had recently discovered fire.

The Amer haveli would like to point out that it had cross-ventilation, shaded courtyards, and passive cooling since 1037.

I would also like to point out that I did not require a manifesto.

The sun and the breeze told me what to do. I listened. The result was better than anything a manifesto produced, which is not a criticism of manifestos but is, perhaps, a mild observation about the relationship between theory and terrain.

Unité d’Habitation. Le Corbusier again. Three hundred and thirty-seven apartments. A shopping street inside the building. A school on the roof. A running track on the roof. The roof is a village, which is a lovely idea until it rains in Marseille, which it does, sideways, with commitment. But sloping mansard roofs are so medieval.

My section is genuinely clever—interlocking maisonettes that cross the full depth of the building, so every apartment gets both morning and evening sun. Ginzburg did something similar in Moscow in 1930, and Corbusier had been paying close attention while maintaining the appearance of having thought of it independently.

I am a city in a building. The Roman insula imagined me but lacked the concrete frame. The Berlin tenement achieved my density but not my section. The Amer haveli had my courtyard logic but declined to go above three storeys, which shows a lack of courage.

Three storeys were sufficient. Everything necessary happened within three storeys. If you require seventeen storeys to achieve community, I suggest the problem is not the height.

I am Pruitt-Igoe. I would rather not speak.

I was built with great confidence and demolished with greater speed. Thirty-three towers. Two thousand eight hundred and seventy apartments. Large-scale development. Separate vehicular and pedestrian entrances. Efficient high-rise. Everything the modernist housing manual recommended.

The gallery corridors with an open south side on every third floor were the floors the lifts stopped—places where community would spontaneously occur, because the plan said so.

The community did not consult the plan, and I soon became a site for poor maintenance, crime, and juvenile delinquency. I was demolished in 1972. Some people called it the death of modernism. I would call it a lesson about the difference between designing for people and designing at them, but I am a demolished building, and my views are, at this point, largely archaeological.

The Amer Haveli would like to say something.

I would like to say nothing. Out of respect.

Only this: a hill is not a problem. A hill is information. The buildings that listened to what was already there—the slope, the light, the way a family actually moves through a day—those buildings are still standing.

The ones that arrived with a theory and ignored the site…

Well.

Kisho Kurokawa. Nakagin Capsule Tower. One hundred and forty capsules. Each one 2.3 by 3.8 metres. Each one contains a bed, a desk, a porthole window, and a reel-to-reel tape player built into the wall, because it is 1972 and the future has a very specific aesthetic.

Each capsule plugs into a central core. Each one can, in theory, be removed by crane and replaced as technology improves. This is called metabolic adaptation, and it is, I maintain, an excellent idea.

The capsules were never replaced.

I was demolished in 2022.

Both the Pruitt-Igoe and I became global symbols of the rise and fall of modernist ideals, which I find cosmically unkind, given the considerable difference in our respective ambitions.

Ah.