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 Christina E. Crawford, 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.

News coverage about the new Techwood and University Homes historical markers

Christina Crawford interviewed about the GHS historical marker dedications in an AtlantaNewsFirst (WANF) segment

The October 11, 2022 dedications for the two new historical markers at Techwood Homes and University Homes, sponsored by the Georgia Historical Society, Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library, and the Atlanta Housing Authority, generated significant press coverage in Atlanta, Georgia, and even at the national level on the US Housing and Urban Development (HUD) website. Christina Crawford was delighted to be featured in a short “feel good” segment with reporter Sawyer Buccy on WANF! To quote Crawford in the press release from Georgia Historical Society:

“As an architectural historian, I’m delighted to have spearheaded the formal commemoration of these two foundational sites in the history of public housing in the United States,” said Dr. Christina Crawford, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architecture in the Art History Department at Emory University. “Marking University Homes and Techwood together, and equally, is one step in an ongoing effort to celebrate the history of generations of Atlantans who built their lives there and to reconcile the projects’ segregationist past.”

Please click the links below for media coverage:

Invitation to the October 11 dedication ceremonies for the new Techwood Homes and University Homes historical markers

Please register via eventbrite here for the dedication of two new Georgia Historical Markers, spearheaded by Emory University Art History professor Dr. Christina E. Crawford and hosted by Atlanta Housing, the Georgia Historical Society, and Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library. The dedications will be held on:

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

1:00 p.m. Techwood Homes dedication:

488 Centennial Olympic Park Dr NW

2:30 p.m. University Homes dedication:

660 Atlanta Student Movement Blvd, Atlanta, GA 30314

Join us in commemorating these two communities—the first federally funded public housing projects in the United States—that were home to generations of Atlantans for over 50 years. Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, among others, will speak at the dedications.

Dedication ceremony for University Homes, May 1, 1937, held in the Horseshoe Court on Larkin Street (University Homes Records, UNIV_2019_img_00008b, Atlanta Housing Archives).

Official Opening of Techwood Homes, Sept. 1, 1936, showing speaker’s stand located on top terrace of Building 1, Group 109 (Charles F. Palmer Papers, box 167, folder 9, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University).

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 Christina 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,” Christina 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.

Georgia Historical Society approves markers for both Techwood and University Homes

On August 6, 2021 the Georgia Historical Society approved applications for Georgia Historical Markers to be placed on the former sites of Techwood Homes (1936) and University Homes (1937). The markers will serve to remember the many Atlanta families that called these sites their homes, and preserve the memory of Atlanta’s role in the history of public housing along with its entanglement in the city’s history of segregation. Both markers will therefore share a common text along with details elaborating on the discrete circumstances of their separate constructions. A grand unveiling is being planned for April 18, 2022, with support from the marker sponsors, Emory University Libraries, and the Atlanta Housing Authority. The successful marker applications can be accessed at the links below:

[For more on the Georgia Historical Society’s historical marker program, see https://georgiahistory.com/education-outreach/historical-markers/.]

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

In “Atlanta Citizenship and Housing, Success and Setback” on PLATFORM, Christina E. Crawford examines 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, Crawford finds 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, Crawford finds that Black voices are not so easily silenced.

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.

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.

ATL Housing Interplay wins Graham Foundation award for 2021-22

Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts has awarded Christina’s 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 pf 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.

Crawford + ATL Housing recieve Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art grant for 2020-21

Christina Crawford has been selected as one of 10 new recipients of Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowships in the History of Art for 2020-21 to work on Atlanta Housing Interplay. During the academic year of leave from Emory University, Crawford will conduct archival research in Atlanta and throughout the US (as COVID-19 permits) on Techwood and University Homes, 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 year of work 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.

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Dr. Alessandro Porotto from EPFL to join Atlanta Housing Interplay team, Spring 2020

Dr. Alessandro Porotto, expert on European Interwar housing based at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and author of L'intelligence des formes : Le projet de logements collectifs à Vienne et à Francfort, will conduct research at Emory with Professor Christina Crawford in the Spring 2020 semester. Porotto won a Swiss National Science Foundation grant for the collaborative project “Collective Housing Atlanta - Vienna: Mapping Interwar Connections.”

Between 1919 and 1934, the widely celebrated architecture and planning effort in so-called Red Vienna provided 63,000 new affordable dwellings for the city’s working class. This initiative was fully conducted and funded by the Viennese socialist municipality. The new housing projects, situated within the urban fabric of the Vienna’s speculative outskirts, contributed to the re-organization and development of the city. Through this period, Red Vienna became one of the most impactful examples of social housing in Europe. Atlanta’s Charles Palmer visited Vienna and toured these projects in his 1934 Grand Tour of European housing; significant Viennese materials sit in Palmer’s papers at Emory University's Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library. The main hypothesis of the proposed research project is that the connections established between Atlanta and Vienna realized collective housing accomplishments that were innovative during the Interwar period and are still relevant references for contemporary and future housing design from a collective perspective.

For Dr. Porotto’s research and publications, please visit his Researchgate profile. Some of his beautiful analytical drawings of Frankfurt and Vienna interwar housing can be seen below.