Segregation by Design: Race, Architecture, and the Enclosure of the Atlanta Apartment

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which architecture, landscape design, and site planning helped maintain racial segregation in housing in Atlanta, Georgia, between the 1960s and 1990s. Under Jim Crow, apartment complexes in Atlanta hewed to national design norms. By the late 1960s, however, racial tension, rioting, and passage of the Fair Housing Act led to proliferation of the architecture of enclosure: design that helped code communities as white through pastoral symbolism and heavy, obscuring landscaping. The concept, which appeared to a lesser degree in other U.S. housing markets, was introduced to Atlanta at Riverbend (1966-1972), a swinging-singles complex developed in part by Dallas’s Trammell Crow with a site plan by California’s Lawrence Halprin & Associates. The practice was generalized in the 1970s and 1980s by Post Properties, which became one of the region’s largest builders.