Fast Forward into the Past: Frederick Ackerman’s Radical Banality and the Affordable Housing Future That Could Have Been

Abstract

The design of affordable housing is a pursuit inextricably linked to the project of modernism. In New York City the achievements of its housing authority would become immediately recognizable for their uncompromised realization of modern architecture’s promise for the future – reductive appearance, essential interior arrangements, and a siting defined by the elimination of the preexisting urban fabric. Without the idealistic cover of modernism, the enterprise can now be recognized as anti-urban from the start. Today, the superblock sites of low-income housing continue to stand alone as stigmatized suburban anomalies. This paper looks back at the birth of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and asks what if in 1937, following the completion of both First Houses by Frederick Ackerman and Williamsburg Houses by William Lescaze, it was the radical banality of First Houses that had been embraced as the more appropriate template for the future? Could our future city have become more equitable?