Imagined Communities: Race, Gender and the Architecture of Public Housing in America, 1933-1974

This dissertation examines the architecture of public housing design in the United States from its inception under the Public Works Administration (PWA) in 1933 through passage of the Housing and Community Development Act in 1974, which expanded federal and local housing authorities' abilities to provide vouchers and other types of financial assistance for use in the private housing market, marking the end of the short period in which public housing was the government's primary means of providing housing assistance to the poor. It argues that during this time, conceptions of race and gender were central to public housing design, shaping many of the projects' unit and building plans, facade designs and surrounding open space design as architects and landscape architects commissioned to design public housing during this time increasingly turned to contemporary sociological accounts of American race and poverty to inform their project designs. This thesis seeks to correct the dominant narrative within architectural history that has seen public housing in the U.S. as an iteration of International Style modernism, and to widen the scope of urban and political histories of the public housing program which treat public housing projects as backdrops, with little attention to the ways in which space was deployed to achieve specific social ends.;Chapter One examines the building program of the PWA in the years 19331937, arguing that the first corpus of public housing projects to be built were conceived as women's space that were intended to elide contemporary gendered and racialized notions of urban poverty, showing that from the program's inception, public housing was conceived as an architecture of alterity. Chapter Two pinpoints the emergence of a new "imagined community" of public housing tenants in the 1950s that was defined by race and ethnicity just as federal public housing projects were forcibly desegregated by the Supreme Court; in particular, it examines three projects in California, all built for different ethnic groups that sought to represent aspects of these groups' cultural identities and includes a fresh reading of Richard Neutra's Elysian Park Heights (1952) project in Los Angeles, contextualizing it in contemporary ethnic politics. Chapter Three traces the integration of public housing in postwar New York City into public officials' capitalist urbanization strategies, and within this context examines the design of several parks, plazas and playgrounds in public housing projects in Harlem, East Harlem and the Lower East Side in the 1960s that were designed to address contemporary social problems in the racial and ethnic ghettos, with special attention to the work of the landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg. In Chapter Four, I discuss Bertrand Goldberg's Hilliard Homes (1966) within the context of Chicago's racial geography and contemporary sociological accounts of African-American poverty and modern family structures, concluding with a brief examination of Stanley Tigerman's Woodlawn Gardens (1969), which provided an alternative model of African-American architecture in the Black Belt.;Relying upon research conducted in a number of different archives, author interviews with many of the architects and landscape architects discussed and prodigious research into the primary materials associated with the public housing program, the dissertation presents a nuanced picture of public housing architecture within its social and political context, arguing for the central role of race and gender in shaping these projects and also the significance of public housing architecture within the scheme of the history of American architecture as a prime site of negotiation and struggle over racial and gender identity in the 20 century.