The Architecture of Urban Housing in the United States during the Early 1930s

Abstract

The housing programs undertaken by the federal government in 1932-1934 through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration set the pattern for the architecture of housing projects in many cities of the nation for the rest of the decade. In these works the older traditions of American philanthropic housing, apartment house layout, and Beaux-Arts planning collided with new ideas of housing developed by European modernists in the 1920s and introduced into this country just as the federal housing programs began. This process is examined in the three cities most open to Continental modernism in housing: Philadelphia, in the Carl Mackley Houses; Cleveland, especially in Lakeview Terrace; and New York City, in early works of its Housing Authority such as Harlem River Houses and Williamsburg Houses. These examples are then set against the different backgrounds of American and German housing in the preceding decades. The role of Henry Wright in promoting the new architecture on the federal level is clarified. In the light of this evidence, derived largely from unpublished archives and interviews, an explanation is attempted of the early successes and eventual failures of America's public housing design and, more broadly, of aspects of our assimilation of modernist architecture.