Ketty Mora
Figure 1:Home inspections by visitors at University Homes, 1937 (University Homes Records, 2013.00412, Atlanta Housing Archives, Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta).
On April 4, 1937, hundreds of visitors toured the apartments and facilities of University Homes in Atlanta, one of the first two fully federally funded public housing projects in the United States [Figure 1].[1]
University Homes, and its white counterpart across the city, Techwood Homes, had already received ample attention from the time their construction was approved by the US federal government in 1933. This attention did not diminish with their completion, but instead continued and increased through a carefully crafted publicity strategy by the federal government, the Atlanta Housing Authority, public relation firms, and the media that was intended to shape how these projects and their residents were viewed by the public: as national symbols of successful public housing and modern design.
The scrutiny these housing projects and their residents would endure was felt early on. The housing manager of Techwood Homes, K. S. McAllister, welcomed new tenants by making them aware that “everyone is watching our progress.”[2] Similarly, new tenants at University Homes received a letter from the project manager, Alonzo Moron, that warned them of “the high standards which we must maintain at University Homes.” [3]
A political agenda hyper-mediatized the events surrounding the approval and construction of the Atlanta housing projects, making them responsible to prove within the U.S. context the effectiveness of modernist and public housing concepts and forms that had circulated internationally since the end of the 19th century. The heightened visibility foisted on the residents of these projects needs to be analyzed within the context of a culture of display that facilitated the development of new ways of looking at housing, and more specifically housing for low-income groups.
In 1932, one year prior to the approval of the University and Techwood Homes, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York inaugurated the museum’s department of architecture with the exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, curated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Phillip Johnson. The exhibition, which was primarily concerned with international solutions to housing, is credited with introducing the American public to the principles of the new modern architectural aesthetic defined by Johnson and Hitchcock as the “International Style.” The curators used the work of the leading figures of European modernist architecture to describe the style, including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe.
The Modern Architecture: International Exhibition included a section that featured several models of European and American public housing developments alongside large photographs that juxtaposed “good” and “bad” dwelling examples. This section of the exhibition received overwhelming attention, underscoring the extraordinary importance of the program of housing in the period. Multi-unit housing and the detached house were conflated in the mind of curator Philip Johnson, however. In an internal memo, Johnson indicated that “[t]he most interesting exhibit [for the public] is still that of the private house.”[4]
MoMA held multiple exhibitions that focused on housing throughout the 1930s, which was the result of a collaboration between the museum and several housing divisions in the United States. In 1934, the Housing Exhibition of the City of New York displayed plans for the large-scale housing project Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn, which would replace sixteen blocks of tenement houses and fulfill the promise to replace “bad housing” with sanitized, decent, and functional housing that would, in turn, produce better citizens. Contrary to the previous Modern Architecture exhibition, in the Housing Exhibition of the City of New York the concept of housing was clearly defined as multi-unit housing for low-income groups. As in the 1932 exhibition, large photographs juxtaposed “good” and “bad” housing examples, but in contrast to Modern Architecture, the show included two life-sized, 1:1 models of apartment interiors: one of an “old tenement house” and the second of a “housing project modern apartment.” The picture of the dark and disorderly tenement house was contrasted with the clean and luminous modern apartment. This visual contrast created a distinct picture of the insufficient living experience of the poor through an image of lower-class residential life before modernization.
The MoMA show traveled the country and was installed not only in museum galleries where it could be viewed by a group of connoisseurs, but also in department stores like the Sears in Chicago where it attracted a more diverse audience and attendance that was, according to Johnson, higher than it was at the MoMA.[5]
Figure 2: The front of the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition building (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crystal_Palace_from_the_northeast_from_Dickinson%27s_Comprehensive_Pictures_of_the_Great_Exhibition_of_1851._1854.jpg).
The format of an exhibited model house for low-income groups can be traced back to The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851 held in the Crystal Palace in London, a massive structure made of glass and iron that was considered an architectural feat. Adjacent to the Crystal Palace, a full-scale model of a two-storied, red-brick apartment building for four families titled Prince Albert’s Model Lodging House was erected [Figures 2, 3]. Built by the Society for Improving the Conditions of the Labouring Classes (SICLC), the building brought attention to the existing housing crisis while presenting an improved alternative to housing the poor. This project, organized on the model of the house tour, marked the first instance of a 1:1 model built within an exhibition context. Constructed next to the monumental Crystal Palace, the Lodging House brought attention to existing structural and social inequalities within England while also, and most importantly, allowing viewers to experience firsthand what an improved low-income dwelling might feel like and to imagine the lives of the poor as they walked through the spaces the elevated poor would inhabit.[6]
Figure 3: Early illustration of Prince Albert’s Model Cottage (Image courtesy of Barbara Leckie and Wikiwand: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Prince_Albert%27s_Model_Cottage)
Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the home interior model became a standard tool for exhibiting and transmitting ideas about housing and lifestyle. Many of the most significant house models were produced not for a conventional client or building site but for exhibitions and fairs, which facilitated the intellectual and physical intermingling of private and public spaces in the twentieth century.[7]
In 1927, the German Werkbund (Association of Craftsmen) staged an exhibition of inhabitable spaces as a series of structures that constituted the Weissenhofsiedlung (Weissenhoff Housing Settlement), positioned on a hill overlooking the city of Stuttgart. In addition to the permanent houses designed by renowned modernist architects such as Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, the exhibition included a section of inhabitable interiors called Die Wohnung (The Dwelling) conceived by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and modernist designer Lily Reich. Exhibiting fully furnished units, The Dwelling was echoed in many similar European exhibitions. Several were sponsored by sister associations of the Werkbund and followed the same model of engaging visitors in fully furnished and staged living interiors.
Following the success of the project at Stuttgart, which is said to have welcomed over 50,000 visitors, van der Rohe and Reich went on to expand their housing exhibition practice starting with the Die Wohnung unserer Zeit (The Dwelling of Our Time) in Berlin as part of the 1931 German Building Exhibition. This project consisted of twenty-three 1:1 models within an exhibition hall, each representing a housing type that included a “spatial program for the family of an intellectual worker,” a “house for a sportsperson,” and a “house for a childless family,” among others. Most notably, these spaces featured actors who played inhabitants in normal activities: smoking a pipe, sitting in a chair, walking about, activating the space and turning it into a real inhabited interior.[8] The display of the domestic interior had become a powerful tool for the transmission of ideas about modern living, but also blurred the limits between private and public in space while increasing the hypervisibility of the lives of inhabitants and encouraging new ways of looking for viewers.
In Stockholm, within the housing section at the Standard 1934 exhibition, a gallery was devoted to the “collective house” model, a type that focused on the needs of a growing number of single women and mothers who worked and/or studied. The display of this centralized modernist model, which included a nursery, a central kitchen, a restaurant, a laundry, and other shared facilities, sought to promote the Collective John Ericssonsgatan housing project, under construction at the time of the exhibition, and educate viewers about it. Once completed in 1935, the development hosted its own exhibition, At Home in the Collective House, that included the same model displayed the year prior at the Standard 1934 show. To make the exhibition experience as realistic as possible, the curators included photos and descriptions of each inhabitant within each apartment unit. In the catalog, short stories described the lives, social status, and personalities of the residents and featured their pictures. A 1936 review of the exhibition in the English journal Architect & Building News admitted that “it was the proposed tenants themselves who made it so interesting, practical, and a delightful show.”[9]
The practice of exhibiting architecture by means of the staged models was one of the most radical experiments of the century. The shows were the ground for architects and designers, otherwise limited by an excruciating post-war economy, to test concepts and communicate new ideas with a wider range of stakeholders, including curators, institutions, and governmental authorities in each country. Notions about modern living were primarily shared through interior domestic spaces that became highly publicized by the media. What Roland Barthes later called “the publicity of the private,” had its origins in exhibitions that propelled the home, and more specifically those of low-income residents, to the public stage.[10]
Referring to the relationship between the private lived space and the media in her essay “The Exhibitionist House,” the architecture critic Beatriz Colomina writes, “the way the house occupies the media is directly related to the way the media occupies the house.”[11] Following Colomina, the presentation of Techwood and University Homes in Atlanta replicated the curatorial strategies employed in international housing exhibitions: the property’s pre-opening public showcasing of mock-up interiors, and the subsequent exposure of actual residents, who first imagined themselves in domestic roles through promotional materials and then ultimately came to play these roles themselves. A more complex discussion however, would be the development of interdependent attitudes between observer and observed that translated in real-time into the actual world these exhibitions sought to create. In the exhibitions, as in the world where the exhibited housing ideas were developed, the private space held the utmost importance, but only through the occupant. The enclosed space became both the transmitter and receiver of information through its activation by inhabitant and viewer.
Figure 4: Actors enacting daily routines at the We’re Building a Better Life exhibition, Berlin, 1952 (U.S.National Archives, Still Pictures Division, RG286 MP GEN 1841).
Figure 5: Actors enacting daily routines at the We’re Building a Better Life exhibition, Berlin, 1952 (U.S.National Archives, Still Pictures Division, RG286 MP GEN 1841).
An exhibition that took place in Berlin in 1952 suggests further parallels with the Techwood and University Homes in Atlanta. The Wir bauen ein besseres Leben (We’re Building a Better Life) show consisted of a 1:1 model of a family home with modular partitions, fully furnished with the help of the MoMA in New York, roofless and with glass walls. Actors played the resident family going through their daily routine while being observed by a large crowd of voyeurs through the glass walls and from the scaffolding set up at the height of the hypothetical roof [Figures 4-7].
Figure 6: Actors enacting daily routines at the We’re Building a Better Life exhibition, Berlin, 1952 (U.S.National Archives, Still Pictures Division, RG286 MP GEN 1841).
Figure 7: Actors enacting daily routines at the We’re Building a Better Life exhibition, Berlin, 1952 (U.S.National Archives, Still Pictures Division, RG286 MP GEN 1841).
From the moment the Techwood and University Homes projects were approved, the city and the nation understood that the initial residents would be observed. This new event in the lives of all Atlantans, and specifically the lives of the new residents of the projects, is to be understood in a field of interaction with the many temporary housing exhibits that satisfied a new curiosity to observe the private spaces of others, including those of low-income groups.
Figure 8: Housing Authority image featuring members of the management at Techwood Homes posing as residents for promotional pictures, c.1936 (Techwood-Clark Howell Homes and Centennial Place records,
TECH_2013_img_02518, Atlanta Housing Archives, Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta).
Figure 9: Housing Authority image featuring members of the management at Techwood Homes posing as residents for promotional pictures, c.1936 (Techwood-Clark Howell Homes and Centennial Place records,
TECH_2013_img_02518, Atlanta Housing Archives, Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta).
Figure 10: Housing Authority image featuring members of the management at Techwood Homes posing as residents for promotional pictures, c.1936 (Techwood-Clark Howell Homes and Centennial Place records,
TECH_2013_img_02518, Atlanta Housing Archives, Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta).
Similar to housing exhibition curators, members of the Techwood Homes management team, in anticipation of its opening, posed as tenants. In images shared with the media, management staff were photographed inside the apartments as they manipulated kitchen and laundry appliances, and outside as they pretended to enjoy the recreational open spaces [Figures 8-12]. In 1937, photos of actual residents performing varied activities in their apartments appeared on the cover of the Atlanta Journal Magazine [Figure 13].[12]
Figure 11: Housing Authority image featuring members of the management at Techwood Homes posing as residents for promotional pictures, c.1936 (Techwood-Clark Howell Homes and Centennial Place records,
TECH_2013_img_02518, Atlanta Housing Archives, Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta).
Figure 12: Housing Authority image featuring members of the management at Techwood Homes posing as residents for promotional pictures, c.1936 (Techwood-Clark Howell Homes and Centennial Place records,
TECH_2013_img_02518, Atlanta Housing Archives, Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta).
Figure 13: Images of new residents who had moved in to Techwood Homes, Atlanta Journal Magazine, March 14, 1937. In Katie Marages Schank "Producing the Projects: Atlanta and the Cultural Creation of Public Housing, 1933-2011," (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2016), 140. Charles F. Palmer Papers, OBV3, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library, Emory University.
Few pictures still exist of University Homes, but stories in the tenant newsletter, The Tab, reveal that the residents were surveilled nonetheless [Figures 14, 15]. The newsletter recorded births, hospitalizations, vacations, birthdays, and anniversary parties with incredible detail, sometimes including the color scheme employed in private celebrations, as well as the names of the guests who attended. Love affairs and heartbreaks were also apparently of interest to readers of The Tab. The October 1937 edition records that “Mrs. Leroy Carter was all smiles last weekend. The reason? Would you need to ask? Mr. Carter paid her a surprise visit. They are all excited over the approaching “Blessed Event.”[13] The November edition mentions that “Mr. Clarence Tidwell, Dwelling No. 485, is still showing his pretty teeth. We wonder if it is love in that smile? Time will tell.”[14] The May 1939 edition shares that “Mary Walton’s future looks uncertain to her (or so she told me). The cream-colored Oldsmobile that has been stopping in front of her door moved up a few doors on the same side on Thursday night. What kind of ‘jam’ do you like, Mary?” [15] Reading the tenant stories from The Tab, one can almost picture the daily lives of the residents. Additionally, management visits were a continuous presence at the housing projects. The Tab recorded a series of visits through the years, and unit inspections were a common occurrence. A resident of the surrounding neighborhood recalled that “…you could tell when that [an inspection] was about to happen because the people were out washing windows… going the whole nine yards.”[16]
Figure 14: Excerpt from The Tab: The Voice of University Homes, volume 1, no. 1, October 1937 (University Homes Records, 2015.0058.3.1.1, Atlanta Housing Archives, Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta).
Figure 15: Excerpt from The Tab: The Voice of University Homes, volume 1, no. 4, January 1938 (University Homes Records, 2015.0058.3.1.4, Atlanta Housing Archives, Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta).
Both the University Homes and Techwood Homes public housing residents shared the privilege and the burden of occupying the first federally subsidized housing projects in the United States. They were well aware that their lives were both constructed in and infiltrated by the media. Modern housing exhibitions, the types of which this story introduced, created the media landscape that sparked a necessary interest in housing and the domestic space for these projects to be understood and received. But the visibility and social pressure of being on display certainly impacted the lives of early residents as well as the reception and shaping of the concept of public housing in ways that require further study.
***
Ketty Mora is a PhD student in the Art History Department at Emory University.
Twitter: @lamoraketty
Keywords: Public housing, exhibitions, architecture, privacy, Atlanta
Notes
[1] The Tab: The Voice of University Homes Newsletter states that hat the open house on April 4, 1937 attracted hundreds of Atlantan’s. See “University Homes, A Glimpse at the Past, With Eyes Toward the Future,” 1991, UNIV_2017_doc_00145, Turner Associates for the Atlanta Housing Authority, University Homes Records, Atlanta Housing Archives, Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta.
[2] K. S. McAllister, quoted in “Katie Schank, “Producing the Projects: Atlanta and the Cultural Creation of Public Housing, 1933-2011,” PhD diss., (George Washington University, 2016), 88.
[3] University Homes Welcome Letter signed by Alonzo Moron, April 17, 1937, University Tenant Letters-Announcements, 1937-1940, UNIV_2017_doc_00335, University Homes Records, Atlanta Housing Archives, Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta.
[4] Beatriz Colomina, “The Exhibitionist House,” in At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture, ed. Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art), 141.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Jurjen Zeinstra, “Exhibited Interiors in a Debate About Style,” Dash, no. 11 (2015): 9-10, https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/dash/article/view/4957.
[7] Colomina, “The Exhibitionist House,” 130.
[8] Dick van Gameren, “Ludwig Mies van der Rohe et al.,” Dash, no. 9 (2013): 92-93, https://journals.open.tudelft.nl/dash/article/view/4879.
[9] Eva Storgaard, “Curating the Collective House,” in The Housing Project, eds. Gaia Caramellino and Stephanie Dadour (Belgium: Leuven University Press), 72-73.
[10] Roland Barthes, quoted in Paula Rabinowitz, They Must be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (New York and London: Verso, 1994), 35.
[11] Colomina, “The Exhibitionist House,” 130-141.
[12] Schank, “Producing the Projects,” 133-140.
[13] The Tab: The Voice of University Homes Newsletter 1, no. 1 (October 1937).
[14] The Tab: The Voice of University Homes Newsletter 1, no. 2 (November 1937).
[15] The Tab: The Voice of University Homes Newsletter 2, no. 2 (May 1939).
[16] “The Tab: The Voice of University Homes Newsletter,” 1937-1939, University Homes Records, 2015.0058.3.1, Atlanta Housing Archives.
CITATION
If you are citing this story, we recommend the following format using the Chicago Manual of Style:
Ketty Mora, “Home on Display,” Atlanta Housing Interplay, ed. Christina E. Crawford, accessed [the date accessed], https://www.atlhousing.org/homes-on-display.
Bibliography
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University Homes Records, 1936-2005, Atlanta Housing Archives, Housing Authority of the City of Atlanta (Atlanta, GA).
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_____. “The Art of Advocacy: The Museum as Design Laboratory.” Places Journal (September 2011). https://placesjournal.org/article/the-art-of-advocacy-the-museum-as-design-laboratory/
_____. “Out of Site in Plain View: A History of Exhibiting Architecture since 1750.” Lecture presented at the Sixty-Second A.W. Mellon Lecture in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., April 28, 2013. https://www.nga.gov/audio-video/audio/mellon-bergoll1.html.
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“The City” (1939). YouTube, uploaded by American Planning Association, October 30, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nuvcpnysjU.