Architectural Hybrids Shaped by the Times: Moments of Public Housing in the US

Horn, Vaughn

Architectural Hybrids Shaped by the Times: Moments of Public Housing in the US

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This dissertation questioned the tendency toward varied architectural forms in US housing projects, given that the function of the public housing program evolved over time. This work contributed to existing studies on public housing by driving at the heterogeneity in the architecture hit by the forces at play—ideological, political, racial, and economic—echoing certain norms prevalent in the nation’s urban centers. In other words, beneath the story of variation in US housing project designs, the architecture reflected and expressed ‘cultural moments,’ defined here as the temporary alignment of beliefs about society, politics, the economy, and architecture that prevailed at periods of time. The investigative lens used in this study—the concept of cultural moments—extended conceptual frameworks on historical progressions to the architecture of public housing—notably, geographer Peter Taylor’s (1999) ‘prime modernities’, and, alternatively, ‘modernity’ in the work of historian Miriam Levin et al (2010). The methodology employed was case study-based, a qualitative research design which combined historical, cultural, and architectural analyses. The dissertation’s core methods relied on archival research, architectural precedent study, the generation of interpretive drawings, census data, and four in-depth interviews. To answer the research question, the study investigated three housing projects illustrative of their milieux—subdivided into three chapters. These projects were Langston Terrace in Washington, DC, Schuylkill Falls in Philadelphia, and Centennial Place in Atlanta. The three projects were chosen because they reflected housing project design’s evolution, representing critical periods of intensification in the history of public housing—the 1930s, 1950s and 1990s. The methodology interrogated the key reasons why, in each period, abrupt shifts in American’s attitudes toward low-income housing provision followed a pattern of breaking with the past. Our findings showed that political forces lie beneath the variation in US housing project designs in nearly every aspect of their creation. The findings also revealed that integral to each cultural moment were change agents and their motivations—political, social, and economic—shaping the architecture. Third and most important, our findings underscored that hybrids in style and form, embodying their cultural moments, were indispensable to America’s housing officials in achieving social good when little consensus existed. Architectural hybrids defined in this dissertation—the combination of any historical style in a single project—resulted from the necessary convergence of competing claims about location, projects’ financing, construction, and tenantry, spread across a wide range of stakeholders' opinions. Taken together, our findings show that housing project design, by nature, was an iterative process shaped by the times.