Christina Crawford’d 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.
