ALLEN PARKWAY VILLAGE: SUSPENDED INTERIORS

Allen Parkway Village was designed and constructed in the 1940’s as a subsidized housing project, occupying a vast site immediately west of I-45 between West Dallas and Allen Parkway in downtown Houston. In the 1980's and 1990's it was gradually vacated and many of its individual buildings were razed as part of a controversial project to revitalize the area. Remaining were just more than a dozen buildings which had been gutted of all fixtures, infrastructure and non-essential partitions. As part of a large redevelopment initiative in the Fourth Ward, the remaining buildings in Allen Parkway Village were in stasis as infrastructure was being placed through the site to support renovation work and new construction.

A new and unintended presence was given to the buildings on the site as they temporarily ascended into a flux with nature and climate. For a brief time, another architecture existed there, unenvisioned by architects and protected by a tall fence and security guards so as to remain unseen by any others. Here photography was employed as the medium to bare the conceptual weight of these spaces which existed only in this lapse in time and purpose. The suspended interiors, like a tableau of architectural absence, proposed a new facet to an already complicated story of a social and bureaucratic melee.