ATLANTA HOUSING INTERPLAY

PUBLIC HISTORY project, website, book project

Public History Project: Atlanta Housing Interplay: Expanding the Interwar Housing Map

Book Project: Model Housing: Atlanta and the Foundation of American Public Housing Architecture

Click to access project website

Article on Georgia Historical Society Marker ceremonies, December 2022

Getty/ACLS Fellowship in the History of Art project

Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts research and development grant project

Atlanta was the site of both the first New Deal neighborhood clearance project in the United States, in 1934, and of America’s first fully federally-funded—racially segregated—public housing: University Homes (1937-2009, for Black families) and Techwood Homes (1936-1996, for white families). Model Housing: Atlanta and the Foundation of American Public Housing Architecture is an architectural history of these paired Black and white New Deal housing sites. The book tells American public housing’s origin story through intense focus on a single city—Atlanta—while it also pulls back to uncover the transnational networks within which the Southern US city became productively entangled. It investigates how social ideals and architectural forms travel and transform, in this case across the Atlantic, across Atlanta, and across the US, and argues that while the foundational architectural program of workforce housing was internationally examined and debated, it is in specific contexts like Atlanta that architectural solutions evolved. Atlanta’s low-slung brick apartment complexes set in footpath-crossed open spaces were the original models for American public housing that both served as clearinghouses for innovative European social housing ideas and forms and yet also codified racial segregation and funding inequity in federal housing.

While Model Housing embeds the inaugural US public housing projects in Atlanta within an international housing scene, University and Techwood Homes were the results of community efforts in distinct neighborhoods. University Homes, set in motion by Atlanta’s Black intellectual and business elite, embodied a vision for an affordable and modern neighborhood to replace the adjacent “dilapidated” neighborhood of Beaver Slide. African American-only University Homes was geared toward upwardly mobile working- and middle-class families who, organizers believed, would benefit from proximity to the Atlanta University Center, a powerhouse consortium of historically Black colleges and universities. It was built as a beacon of progress and a testing ground for large-scale social change by and for Black Atlantans. Development of Techwood Homes was spearheaded by Charles Palmer and Atlanta’s white business elite. Although Palmer later claimed to shift away from purely mercenary motives, his initial involvement with Techwood Homes was to shield his own midtown Atlanta real estate assets from contamination by the so-called slum. The poor neighborhood cleared for Techwood was mixed race; the housing project that replaced it was for upwardly mobile white families solely. University and Techwood thus materialized the “separate but equal” mandate of Plessy v. Ferguson in federally funded housing.

The story of University Homes leads each chapter, unfolding a story of Black advocacy and uplift, whereas Techwood Homes, just over a mile away, serves as its white counterpoint. Ultimately, Model Housing writes the now-demolished University and Techwood Homes projects back into existence to identify the design elements that made them extraordinary in their time. Organized by architectural scale and zooming in from site plan to community building, from apartment house to the individual unit, Model Housing revives these architectural precedents in the service of addressing the 21st century American housing crisis.

The research has been funded by a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art, a Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts research and development grant, and has benefited from ongoing support from the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS). Read here a feature article in the SaportaReport about the new Georgia Historical Society markers at University Homes and Techwood Homes, applications submitted by Christina Crawford in 2021 with sponsorship from Emory’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library and the Atlanta Housing Authority.

Early work cataloged correspondence, maps, architectural plans, photographs, booklets, and ephemera for digitization and georeferencing by the Emory University Library digitization team and ECDS collaborators. Palmer’s motion picture films of his European trips, The World War Against Slums—used to convince local and federal constituencies of the need for a comprehensive U.S. public housing program are already available on this site, thanks to digitization efforts at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library and Charles F. Palmer’s descendants, who are graciously allowing us to host them.

The project has also engaged outreach and collaboration with Atlanta-area archives, particularly with research seminars Christina Crawford taught at Emory University on Atlanta New Deal public housing in 2018 and 2022. Each student in the seminar conducted archival research to mine for materials on the two housing projects. These repositories included the archives and libraries of Atlanta Housing, Atlanta University Center (Woodruff Library), Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Atlanta History Center. The students' research and findings are found in the STORIES section of this website, and were presented in the 2018 Atlanta Studies Symposium. Current work engages in deep architectural analysis of the materials, to determine how and in what ways European precedents made their way into Atlanta’s public housing architecture, and what elements emerged from University and Techwood to influence other sites in North America.

For the published pieces on the project, please see Christina E. Crawford’s articles “Black Community Building: New Deal Programmatic Advocacy at Atlanta’s University Homes” in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, “From hof to homes: interwar housing exchange between Vienna and Atlanta” in the Journal of Architecture by Christina E. Crawford and Alessandro Porotto, and “Atlanta Citizenship and Housing, Success and Setback” on PLATFORM (June 2021).