The other night during Ariel's bachelor party Jeff Barber realized he was across the street, at that kindergarten-punk 'Rogue' place, and he blurted out, "That's Foxtree! I love that place! Some of the best years of my life were at Foxtree!"

I like Jeff.

You know millions of people live in apartments and they're just invisible. The buildings AND the people in 'em. Apartments have social and spatial patterns that suggest how the tenants are supposed to live, how they're supposed to relate to each other, when and where and how they see each other, how they spend their evenings, and their outward exposure to the surrounding neighborhood. Apartment buildings determine quality of life but nobody talks about how this works. It's only when public housing got so bleak and dysfunctional, at Pruitt Igoe, that the only answer is to blow the damn thing up, only then does the architectural community scratch its collective head and wonder what happened. That was public housing. That was the absolute worst of public housing. This is just an apartment building.

Do you hear that bird? It's going crazy out there.

Foxtree is a multi-building apartment complex built about 1975 and it wouldn't be possible to build this way again.

(more to come)