Spatial Revolution wins Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians

My first book—Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union—won the Society of Architectural Historians’ Spiro Kostof Book Award “given to interdisciplinary studies of urban history that make the greatest contribution to our understanding of the growth and development of cities.” As an architect who discovered she was really at heart an urban designer, this award means a lot. According to Kostof’s NYT obituary, “he was noted for rejecting the traditional art historian's method of explaining architecture as a series of important buildings in a sequence of historical styles in favor of an approach that looked at architecture as a social and political act.” Yes, Professor Kostof. Definitely yes.

The committee’s citation is wonderful, and spot on:

“Spatial Revolution focuses on industrial-settlement case study projects in Baku (AZ), Magnitogorsk (RU) and Kharkiv (UA) to reveal how socialist ideology informed built works at both architectural and urban scales in peripheral but significant sites across a broad geographical scope. Christina E. Crawford examines the rapid development that ensued in the context of Stalin’s ambitious Five-Year Plan, which aimed to achieve productivity and equality by transforming rural landscapes into industrial landscapes and rural peasants into socialist workers. The author counters the “failure narrative” for Soviet projects, which emphasizes unrealized theoretical propositions, by advancing a “praxis narrative,” painstakingly documenting how on-the-ground experimentation and evolution drove design and construction as much as if not more than directives from above. Crawford argues that these projects were not produced in isolation but rather were informed by avant-garde efforts elsewhere, citing English garden cities, Weimar housing projects, and American industrial planning schemes. She also brings to light the innovation and distinctiveness of these built environments, persuasively refuting Henri Lefebvre’s argument that state socialism did not produce and architectural innovation or space of its own.”

Thanks to the committee members, SAH, Cornell University Press. Among the political acts is this: Spatial Revolution is Open Access, thanks to the Mellon Foundation and Emory University. Please, read it for free: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/62026

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Model Housing

My book-in-the-making, Model Housing: Atlanta and the Foundation of American Public Housing Architecture, has been awarded a 2025 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to the tune of $60,000!

Atlanta was the site of both the first New Deal neighborhood clearance project in the United States, in 1934, and of America's first two public housing projects fully funded and directly built by the US federal government: University Homes (1937, for Black families) and Techwood Homes (1936, for white families). The book—which I’m three chapters into writing—is an architectural history of these paired Black and white New Deal housing sites. It argues that the low-slung brick apartment complexes set in footpath-crossed open spaces were the original models for American public housing that served as clearinghouses for innovative European social housing ideas and forms and yet also codified racial segregation and funding inequity in federal housing. Model Housing favors University Homes to unfold a story of Black advocacy and uplift despite the barriers of de jure and de facto segregation in Atlanta, while Techwood Homes, just over a mile away, serves in each chapter as its white counterpoint. The book writes the now-demolished University and Techwood Homes projects back into existence to identify the design elements that made them extraordinary in their time and to revive these architectural precedents in the service of addressing the 21st century American housing crisis.

Thank you, NEH, and the reviewers who pushed my application forward!

Map of Atlanta’s first public housing projects. University Homes (U) and Techwood Homes (T) indicated in light pink. Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta. Rebuilding Atlanta. First Annual Report. Atlanta, GA: Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta, 1939.

Visit to Ukraine to Teach and Lecture

In November 2023, I visited Lviv, Ukraine, to meet the students at the Kharkiv School of Architecture who I had been teaching all semester remotely as a visiting tutor. In March 2022, just three weeks after the full-scale Russian war of aggression began, the administration evacuated the Kharkiv School to Lviv, Ukraine, and that is where they remain.

In addition to daily meetings with the students, I gave two pubic lectures: one at the Center for Urban History, the second at the Kharkiv School of Architecture’s public lecture series. To donate to the school and support its mission to train young Ukrainians for the postwar reconstruction of the country to come, click here.

Recordings of my lectures in Lviv can be found on YouTube:

Georgia Humanities Public Seminar “Atlanta’s New Deal Public Housing” concludes at Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry

This free 4-part public history seminar, funded by Georgia Humanities, hosted by the Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and moderated by me, dropped into New Deal Atlanta to understand the economic, political, racial, and spatial context that made the city the birthplace of American public housing. This Georgia Seminar met from 6:00-7:30pm on consecutive Tuesdays: April 11, 18, 25, and May 2, 2023. Over these four evening meetings, we investigated how these projects learned from European housing experiments and in turn became architectural models for other US cities during the New Deal. The student mix was extraordinary and represented numerous generations, fields of expertise, and interests. Worth doing again!

Poster for the Spring 2023 Georgia Humanities Public Seminar on Atlanta’s New Deal Public Housing at Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Design by Christina E. Crawford.

Final class meeting of the Spring 2023 Georgia Humanities Public Seminar on Atlanta’s New Deal Public Housing at Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Photo: Colette Barlow.

Article in Atlanta's SaportaReport celebrates housing research

A new feature article on the forthcoming GHS historical markers for University Homes and Techwood Homes is in the SaportaReport (an Atlanta-based news outlet). Thanks to a recommendation by Georgia Historical Society (GHS) colleagues, John Ruch interviewed me for a feature on her historical research, which provided an opportunity to discuss Atlanta as the foundational site of the first federally funded pubic housing in the US, and also the site of the first full-scale demolition of public housing. The interview about the Atlanta Housing Interplay project covered ways in which the past impacts the present. “The story of public housing in the U.S. is really about maintenance and funding,” I noted, describing the bigger picture that emerged from Atlanta’s first efforts, and the perceived failure of public housing in Atlanta. “It [the failure] doesn’t have anything to do with the people who live there. It has to do with the disinvestment — financial disinvestment and political disinvestment — in public housing as a social project.” Let’s hope that Atlanta’s new mayor, Andre Dickens—an affordable housing advocate—can help to turn the city’s efforts around in 2022.

SPOTLIGHT interview with H-Ukraine

Thanks to @JohnVsetecka for the ”Spotlight” interview at H-Ukraine. I met John virtually a few years back, when he reached out for help tracking down a factory newspaper from 1930s Kharkiv. Helpfulness almost always comes back around. So, thanks for the opportunity, John/H-Ukraine! A snippet:

H-Ukraine: I remember first coming across your work when doing some research on the Kharkiv Tractor Plant (KhTZ), and you graciously replied to an email of mine asking for more information about the factory newspaper Tempo. It was so wonderful to meet someone else who was as passionate about tractors and the sotsgorod as me! When did you become interested in Soviet history, and what made you decide to study Soviet architecture and planning?

CC: I’ve been interested in these ideas and visiting sites built during the early Soviet period for a long time. I was an exchange student in Krasnodar with a Russian family in the final year of the USSR—a totally life-changing experience. I learned the language and culture from my Russian family, trial by fire, and am still close with them. Of course, 1990-91 was a tumultuous year. Quite a few of my exchange cohort, who experienced the Soviet Union collapsing in real-time, ended up studying Soviet history in college. And as for my focus on Soviet architecture and planning: well, I know from experience that English-language literature on Soviet architecture and planning is truly sparse. At the Harvard GSD (the top-ranked architecture school internationally, taken as just one notable example), the only projects from the socialist world taught (if any are at all) are so-called paper projects: visionary avant-garde designs, never built. Why don’t we know more about the material spaces that contained the lives of Soviet citizens for so much of the 20th century? Because of my background in practice, I am particularly interested in those built projects. Environments constructed in Soviet times reveal viable alternatives to the architecture and cities built under capitalism. 

Stay for the Ukraine travel tips from the architectural historian (well, me) at the end: https://networks.h-net.org/node/4555727/discussions/7904172/h-ukraine-spotlight-interview-christina-crawford

"Atlanta Citizenship and Housing, Success and Setback" published on PLATFORM

In “Atlanta Citizenship and Housing, Success and Setback” on PLATFORM, I examine retaliation against racial progress in 20th-century Georgia through the lens of housing in Atlanta, revealing a cyclical pattern of setbacks. University Homes was the first public housing project for Black families in the city, built in the 1930s at the urging of Black activists. However, it lacked essential community spaces which were added only later, after sustained action on the part of the community. But these successes were short-lived, for residents’ upward mobility—a chief goal of the US public housing program—was limited in the postwar decades by redlining. Today, I find echo of this revanchist cycle in state politics. Following the November 2020 election and January 2021 run-off, when the state voted for the Democratic Party candidates for president and Senate for the first time in decades, Republican state legislators introduced new restrictions designed to disenfranchise Democratic leaning voters, like African Americans. Still, I find that Black voices are not so easily silenced.

While you’re at it, check out the Atlanta Housing Interplay project website at www.atlhousing.org

Construction of University Homes, c. 1936. The Spelman College campus is at the bottom righthand corner of the photo; Atlanta University is at the top left. Charles F. Palmer papers, Box 167, Folder 10. Courtesy of the Emory University Stuart A. Ros…

Construction of University Homes, c. 1936. The Spelman College campus is at the bottom righthand corner of the photo; Atlanta University is at the top left. Charles F. Palmer papers, Box 167, Folder 10. Courtesy of the Emory University Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.

Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award 2021

I am very honored to be the 2021 Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award winner for the Humanities in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences. I share this award with all of my stellar Emory students who made the classroom a challenging and fun space for learning about the built environment. The deets:

“Award recipients hold a record of excellence in teaching, having made major contributions in their academic discipline to curriculum development, pedagogy, and educational innovation. They have earned the respect of colleagues both at Emory and in the larger academic community.

In addition to a stellar academic record and the accomplishments above, and in keeping with Williams' wishes, the award honors faculty who:

  • Foster participation, inquiry, and creative expression in the classroom

  • Exemplify the highest quality of teaching scholarship

  • Serve as a mentor to students

  • Currently teach undergraduate students

  • Retain a continual record of outstanding accomplishment and ongoing commitment to teaching

  • Make significant contributions that impact and advance the university through teaching”

I can’t wait to be back in the actual, 3D classroom in Fall 2021!

The Architect + The City class, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, 2017.

The Architect + The City class, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, 2017.

Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award winner for the Humanities in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, 2021.

Emory Williams Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award winner for the Humanities in the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, 2021.

Discussant for “Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture” Book Talk with Jean-Louis Cohen

I was delighted to be a discussant for a virtual event organized by the Russian Nobility Association for Jean-Louis Cohen’s new book Building a new New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture (CCA / Yale UP, 2020) along with Yuri Avvakumov and Pippo Ciorra. Want to know the difference between Amerikanizm and Amerikanizatsii? You can watch and listen to the whole event here.

Iakov G. Chernikhov. “Giant skyscraper city,” plate in 101 Architectural Fantasies. Leningrad: Mezhdurarodnaia kniga, 1933. Plate 10. CCA, W12242.

Iakov G. Chernikhov. “Giant skyscraper city,” plate in 101 Architectural Fantasies. Leningrad: Mezhdurarodnaia kniga, 1933. Plate 10. CCA, W12242.

Two New Book Reviews

Newly published reviews I’ve written for fantastic recent books on architectural histories of Eastern Europe (and beyond—) are now available online. See the links at the end of this post.

I write of Martin Kohlrausch’s interdisciplinary book Brokers of Modernity that Kohlrausch seeks to rectify this geographical asymmetry in architectural scholarship by placing the new, or significantly reshaped, post-1918 nation-states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary at the heart of his narrative. Kohlrausch has a larger goal, however: to investigate modernist architecture’s group formation.

Clayton Strange’s beautifully designed Monotown explores the urban phenomenon of the monotown (monogorod in Russian), a self-contained urban node built ex novo for a solitary industrial enterprise on a remote site, most often by a socialist state with a robust centralized planning apparatus. Strange’s book provides important new case studies in Russia, China, and India that will prove impactful for historians and present-day designers alike.

ATL Housing Interplay wins Graham Foundation award for 2021-22

Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts has awarded my new project, Atlanta Housing Interplay, a Research and Development grant to begin June 2021. Graham funding supports projects for their originality and potential for impact. A funded project must make a meaningful contribution to discourse and/or to the field of architecture; expand knowledge; be a catalyst for future inquiry; raise awareness of an understudied issue; and promote diversity in subject matter, participants, and audience. It’s a huge honor to be among the incredible funded projects this year. To view some more archival images from the project, please visit the Graham Foundation’s website for the ATL Housing project here.

CAA / Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant for Spatial Revolution

Spatial Revolution is among the nine grantees of the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund for Spring 2020! The Meiss grants—given since 1975—support “book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.” The grant will go to my publisher, Cornell University Press, to support the large number of high quality images in the book, like the remarkable image of Baku’s urban modernization below, from the National Archives of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

Replanning the City of Baku photo series, documenting the removal of houses along Iur’evskaia Street on July 5, 1928. The width of the street is measured by more than a dozen figures who stand in a single line across the clearing. Orthogonal buildings line the cleared path of movement through the Nargornyi Region. Photo: L. Bregadze. Azərbaycan Respublikası Dövlət Kino-Foto Sənədləri Arxivi (Azerbaijan State Film and Photo Documents Archive), Inv. 5-378.

Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art 2020

I am thrilled to announce that I’ve been selected as one of 10 new recipients of Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowships in the History of Art for the 2020-21 academic year. I’ll use the fellowship year to work on my second project, Atlanta Housing Interplay: Expanding the Interwar Housing Map. It is research that seeks to expand the interwar architectural map through a detailed investigation of Techwood and University Homes, America’s first federally-funded (segregated) public housing projects, to establish Atlanta’s role as a clearinghouse for European social housing ideas, and to investigate how architectural ideas and forms travel and transform—in this case, across the Atlantic, across Atlanta, and across the United States. The research, writing, 3-D modeling, and cartography that emerge from this project will result in a monograph and allied digital public history project that tests the capacities of new hybrid publishing formats. Thanks to the Getty and ACLS for the amazing gift of time and flexibility to get this project truly off the ground.

Crawford_Atlanta Housing Interplay_map.jpg

The Planners' House

In both my undergraduate and graduate courses, I give discussion-leading responsibilities over to the students, and I encourage their creativity in developing ice-breaker activities for their classmates. Today’s leaders in The Architect and the City (my 20th-century urban design history course) had the class break into groups of 4-5 to build a house, in which our six theorist/architect/planner protagonists (Engels, Sitte, Stübben, Howard, Unwin, and Wagner) would be “materials/components/rooms.” It was a VERY WEIRD charge (I had tried to convince the discussion-leaders to make the task more traditional—they wisely ignored me), and wildly successful. The resulting diagrams are funny, astute, and the exercise caused the student groups to think analytically about what each protagonist had to offer to the problem of the Industrial City. I asked their permission to post them, so here they are.

PRESIDENT-ELECT, Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA), 2020-21

I am delighted to announce that I have been elected the President-Elect of the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA)! I was the winner of SHERA’s inaugural Emerging Scholar Prize in 2017, and am very happy to be giving back. The three-year term on the SHERA Board includes one year as President-Elect (2020), one year as President (2021), and one year as Outgoing President (2022). I look forward to representing architectural historians of the region, in particular (our sub-sub-sub field, as it is). Check out the society’s beautiful website (screenshot below), and see all that we do, and join!