Our visit to the Museum of the City of New York was very interesting and informative in terms of the future housing in New York City. The museum had a very good representation of the past, present, and future of the city. I found it interesting to see the population density around the boroughs depending on the lifestyle of the occupants, such as married or single. Although most of the statistics for the neighborhoods in the city were predictable, there were some that were surprising. For example, I did not know that there were as many singles living in Queens as shown at the museum.
For the present, I feel like the museum did a good job showing the regulations and condition that people live in. Many of the regulations that were described during the tour seemed very strange and unheard of, such as the one about the square footage requirement for apartments to follow. I know that many of these regulations were passed because of the transformation that took place in the 20th century led by journalist Jacob Riis. By showing the poor living conditions that many New Yorkers lived in, he and others exposed the necessity for having certain living condition requirements for safe and healthy measures.
The part of the museum that I found most interesting was of the future for New York City living spaces. The fact that people can be living in more aesthetically pleasing spaces while still maintaining the same costs and efficiency seems like a great idea. Rather than having all the apartments in a line look the same, having differences in them makes them unique and allows for more creativity on the part of the occupant. The models of the buildings helped in visualizing the buildings and the apartments inside.
I also found it very interesting to hear about the plan that Bloomberg is trying to push for the building near Baruch to be built. The fact that the apartments will be build elsewhere and brought to the site of the building seems like a very smart idea to me since it would increase efficiency and save time and energy. The competition that this idea was brought about from was certainly helping since it gave the idea to separate the apartments while making them affordable. This affordable housing will definitely make the building’s apartment availability very competitive and hard to find. During the tour of the museum, I recognized that many of the ideas that people had for future New York City living units were similar to those I’ve seen in pictures of Japan. Since the Japanese make many things compact and try to save space by building things around other things, we can certainly learn and implement some of their design ideas. I was surprised by the fact that a third of New York City’s occupants are single. However the more surprising thing for me was that there were many other major cities that had a higher percentage of singles. I think this is because I live in a family-oriented neighborhood so I tend to see more families, while there are many more people living alone in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The part of the exhibit that I liked best was the sample room that they had showing the future of New York CIty living. The ingenuity that the designers used to design that space was remarkable. The chair that turns into a ladder, bed that comes down from the wall, ottomans that go inside one another to save space, working station that folds down and becomes functional, refrigerator behind the television, expandable eating table, and even the foldable chairs. These are all some of the brilliant things that I found were very useful and saved a lot of space. In the future, as the population in New York City grows, I feel that we will need to become more compact and learn to live in closer living spaces. This sample apartment showed that a small space can be just as functional as a regular sized space. By hiding things in other things, we save space by making things multifunctional so that they can come in use for more than one purpose. For example, the chair can also fold over and become a ladder.
