Architecture and Law: Courtyards as starting points of resistance
Discovering Architecture
As you might have read in some of our other Medium pieces, the last few years we have been exploring the intersection of architecture and law. I decided to sign up for the architectural design discovery course at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, as I was eager to learn more about architecture and how we could use some of their tools and methodologies in our work at the Legal Design Lab. The following Medium piece chronicles my insights and final assignment that I submitted for the class.
At the start of the course, we had to pick a typology that we wanted to focus on for the next weeks. A typology in architecture categorizes and classifies buildings according to their characteristics. I picked courtyard tenements, because I was interested in the interplay between the private and public spaces of these types of buildings.
Courtyard tenements
Courtyard tenements, can often be found in Eastern European countries. They are, as the name implies, characterized by a courtyard in the center of the building surrounded by apartments on all four sides.
I have visited these type of places several times and was always curious how people who lived in the buildings interacted with each other. Obviously, everyone has their own apartment; their private space, away from others but at the same time the courtyards incentivized people to interact and form connections.
Architecture, as other design fields, is interesting because it allows you to visualize questions and thoughts that you have. One of our assignments, for example, focused on the interconnection between private and public spaces. We had to create floor plans of the building and use patterns to think through what private and public usage actually means for those who live in these buildings.
This exercise allowed me to think through what public and private spaces mean for these building and its inhabitants. How do I define private and public and what is the actually use of these spaces? Working through these questions made me realize something about law and architecture processes.
Same starting point, different question
The starting questions that we ask ourselves in a particular discipline, whether it is law or architecture can be the same, but the tools we then use to explore these questions can bring different ideas to surface. In architecture (and other design fields) the emphasis is on visualizing research questions and discussing these visualizations with an instructor and a group of peers. In law the emphasis is on writing. What’s interesting about this, is that writing and visualizing can each bring forward different questions, provocations and thoughts. Different tools allow you to think differently about research questions.
Seeing the courtyard tenement visualized in this way, made me think about courtyards as community hubs. As I was researching courtyards, I found an interesting article that mentioned how courtyards in courtyard tenements in Budapest were an important starting point for the 1956 revolution against the Soviet regime. The courtyards provided a physical space where citizens could come together and organize themselves without the watching eye of the regime. The article theorized that after the revolution, the Soviets banned courtyard tenements to prevent another uprising from taking place.
Architecture and Evictions
One of the stories that popped up in my head as I was working on these visualizations was the story about how a group of tenants during the Covid-19 pandemic banded together to form a rent strike.
During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the government enacted emergency rental protections for tenants. A property management company in Los Angeles sent out an email to all the tenants in the building, stating that despite these protections the tenants would still be required to pay rent. The property management company accidentally forgot to BCC everyone on the email thread, thus all the tenants in the building had each other’s contact details. As the tenants could now contact each other, they decided to come together, discuss their concerns (from rising rents during the pandemic to health and safety concerns in the building). They managed to organize and put their requests forward.
This story exemplifies the importance of community spaces for tenants. Tenants need places to come together, not only to organize, but also to form connections and relationships. In this story, because of the lack of physical community spaces the tenants had to organize themselves digitally, but they could only do that because the property management company made a mistake and accidentally published the contact details of all the tenants in the building.
Physical public spaces, whether it’s in apartment buildings or public squares in neighborhoods are needed to form relationships between community members. Forming relationships does not necessarily mean that, in this case, tenants will take an adversarial role against landlords. It means that community members can create relationships, exchange ideas and come together in times of crises to help each other.
And it’s exactly this point that brings me back to courtyard tenements in Budapest during the revolution of 1956. It seemed that during my final assignment all the puzzle pieces, from evictions to courtyard tenements started to come together. Below, you’ll find my written out presentation and final drawings that I made for this course.
Final assignment: courtyards as starting points for resistance
Courtyard tenements line the streets of Budapest. These historic buildings inspire a sense of grandeur in those who are lucky enough to visit the city. However, a lesser known fact is that behind the ornate framed doors a more dark past exists.
In 1956, Hungarians rebelled against the Soviet regime that had been occupying Hungary. At the start of the uprising, it seemed as if the Hungarians made progress to topple the regime through community organization. However, weeks later, the Soviets put a brutal end to the Hungarians call for freedom.
One of the reasons this revolution could take place on such a scale and in such a short amount of time is through the courtyard tenements. These buildings allow communities to gather in safe spaces, out of sight of prying eyes and without Big Brother watching over them. After the uprising of 1956, the Soviet regime banned the building of courtyards and instead opted for the well-known Soviet housing blocks that created more opportunity for surveillance.
Courtyards create spaces for communities to come together. These spaces do not have to be occupied at all times but can be used when there is a need within the community.
This need for community spaces in emergency situations is also seen in the current day. During the pandemic, to resist evictions during a health crisis, tenants banded together and assisted each other.
However, their efforts were constrained by the lack of communal spaces in their buildings. The anonymity of apartment blocks means in practice that neighbors barely know each other’s names — let alone contact details that can be used during emergency situations.
The small acts of resistance against evictions that took place during the Covid-19 pandemic were happenstance — coincidental meetings that happened due to privacy breaches. In several apartment blocks across the country, landlords sent out emails to their tenants that accidentally identified the email addresses of everyone in the building. This allowed tenants to communicate, organize and resist rent increases and evictions during the pandemic.
But the lack of communal spaces in apartment blocks hampered community organization efforts and more could have been done if there were spaces where individuals could come together.
Communal spaces are always needed. They do not need to be continuously used to prove their necessity. Instead they can exist and the community can decide what their function is and when these communal spaces should be used. Courtyards are one potential way to create more spaces to connect, communicate and organize.
During these past weeks I tried to imagine courtyard tenements in the United States as a tool for community organization, in particular for the ongoing housing and eviction crisis.
The images that you see interspersed throughout this presentation are stills from footage taken during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. These images are a reminder of a dark past, but it also gives us a glimpse in how the uprising started. Not by large gestures or events, but by people coming together in communal spaces, such as courtyards, in the buildings where they live.
Change does not take place in an abstract universe. The starting point of change needs to have a physical manifestation, whether these are courtyards or other spaces. Architecture, like other disciplines, has a role to play in creating and cultivating spaces for resistance.
Every year on October 23rd Hungary commemorates the uprising. A poem by Miklós Radnóti titled ‘I cannot know’ is often recited. This poem, written before the events in 1956 took place, is as relevant now as it was then.
Like other nations we have greatly sinned. We know our sins. Know when and how we sinned.
But innocent are poets, laborers and babies. Whose intelligence must shine, hidden away protected in dark cellars — till peace once more shines on our land. Then they with fresh and open speech will answer our stifled words.
But shield us until then with your huge wings oh watching clouds of night.
- Miklós Radnóti
