Architect as Developer and the Postwar U.S. Apartment, 1945-1960

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| 27

matthew gordon lasner

Architect as Developer and the Postwar U.S. Apartment, 1945–1960

American designers have long had an uneasy relationship with the mass-built environment: trained experts in a democratic sea of stock plans, do-it-yourself, and uncredentialed “lumberyard architects.”1 This article considers an overlooked chapter in this dialogue: architects who worked in mass-market homebuilding in the two de-cades after World War II. Some conceived of projects and partnered with more experienced agents such as speculative developers and local redevelopment authorities. Others navigated the worlds of finance and land acquisition to serve, at least in part, as their own developers; yet others left design to work permanently in development.

While perhaps a common practice, this blur-ring of boundaries remains obscure. Scholars have shown little interest in understanding speculative homebuilding both because of the generic quality of the architecture and because of taboos against profit motive, although recent writing on industry leaders like Levitt & Sons has begun to close this gap.2 At the same time, the decentralized and ephemeral nature of real-estate work makes design-develop harder to de-tect than more overtly authored activities. I came to the topic through research on postwar com-munity planning, where I encountered, rather serendipitously, several architect-developers and architect-developer firms. In this article I dis-cuss three of them: Vernon DeMars in Northern California, Brown & Guenther in New York City, and Erwin Gerber in the suburbs of northern New Jersey. All operated as full-time architects and, intermittently, part-time real-estate develop-

ers in the field of multifamily housing in the late 1940s and the 1950s.

My objective is to explore their methods and motivations and to locate their efforts in the larger context of twentieth-century housing production. I also seek to foreground real-estate development as a lens through which to explore the U.S. built environment. The questions we typically ask of housing derive from familiar cat-egories like type (single-family or multifamily; high-rise or low-rise), style (high or vernacular), region (East Coast or West Coast), tenure (rented or owned), class (market-rate or social), and met-ropolitan geography (urban or suburban). This compartmentalization encourages explanatory frameworks that conform to these classifica-tions and encourages us to overlook items in the landscape (to borrow a concept from geographer Peirce Lewis) that do not readily fit in.3 Paying more attention to processes of production—in-cluding financing; the multiple, often conflict-ing, effects of housing policy; and the role of pro-fessional values—affords us new opportunities to recognize diversity in how, and what, we build and to derive new meaning from our buildings and landscapes.

Multiple-family housing seems to have been an especially fertile arena for architects entering larger-scale homebuilding. The kinds of collabo-rations in which DeMars, Brown & Guenther, and Gerber engaged and the disciplinary digres-sions that they embraced are evident, to vary-ing degrees, across the mid-twentieth-century American landscape as suggested by recent work



28 | BUILDINGS & LANDSCAPES 21, no. 1 , SPRING 2014

on the shopping center, the office park, and the suburban single-family tract.4 But designers played a particularly prominent part in multi-family housing. One reason was that physical forms like apartments and clusters of row houses were generally more complex than single-family subdivisions (Figure 1). Writing in the 1970s, ar-chitect Roger Montgomery characterized this as the “enhanced design employment effect,” not-ing that “in group housing, powerful economic, constructional planning, and legal forces en-couraged integrated design,” making architects “relatively more important in the development process.”5 Of equal importance, perhaps contrary to expectation, the Federal Housing Administra-tion (FHA) and many local and state housing and redevelopment agencies encouraged architects to take a leading role in apartment production.

A third reason for the architect-developer’s interest in the apartment, I argue, was politics. Many architects, like planners and urban crit-ics, disapproved of mainstream homebuilding, which they construed, correctly, to be dominated in the postwar period by the construction of single-family houses. Multifamily projects rep-resented a desirable alternative, both because architects welcomed the challenge of complex design and because they perceived apartments and attached houses as socially progressive. De-veloping them could serve, in this light, as a way

to advance social change, if not by directly engag-ing in high-volume production than at least by demonstrating the market appeal of, and design possibilities for, higher-density living. Postwar architects like DeMars and Brown & Guenther developed real estate in hope of producing widely replicable alternatives to the status quo.

My focus on three case studies and the paucity of other examples in the literature may suggest a degree of singularity. It seems likely, however, that DeMars, Brown & Guenther, and Gerber are representative of architectural practices that were common in the United States. Scores, even hundreds, may have been engaged in similar work. (Hundreds, to be sure, worked in the adja-cent field of “production architecture,” designing mass-built “production” homes for “production,” or merchant, builders.) The figures I discuss seem to have been among the most skilled, or at least the most prolific.

More importantly, they left some trail of their operations beyond built examples, including writings, office records, and coverage in trade papers and the real-estate news. This material sheds crucial light on how these figures operated and why. Their experiences as developers sug-gest that not only was the American homebuild-ing apparatus less hostile to professional design than assumed but that architects could, and did, play a key role in shaping and reshaping main-stream building production in the postwar era.

Early ExperimentsThe borders between the profession of architec-ture and the larger field of mere “building” have always been porous. In housing, architects were long torn by competing impulses to reform and educate, on the one hand—what Dell Upton characterizes as an “effort to inject expertise into the process of everyday architectural design”—and to censure and ignore, on the other. In the mid-nineteenth century some pursued a strategy of professionalization policed through licensing and regulation, while others began producing inexpensive pattern books. In the early twenti-eth century it became fashionable to dabble in prefabrication. Yet only when faced with the tur-bulence of the great housing crisis and the Red

Figure 1. Group of apartments at Elmwood Village, both sides of Boulevard south of Broadway, Elmwood Park, New Jersey, Erwin Gerber (architect and perhaps developer), 1945–46. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2012.



MATTHEW GORDON LASNER, ARCHITECT AS DEVELOPER AND THE POSTWAR U.S. APARTMENT, 1945–1960 | 29

Scare surrounding World War I did the Ameri-can Institute of Architects (AIA) consent to the Architects’ Small House Service Bureau—nearly fifteen years after the rise of the catalog house and more than eighty after Andrew Jackson Downing published Cottage Residences.6

Meanwhile, critic Lewis Mumford expressed the views of many trained designers when he wrote, disapprovingly, in 1925 of semidetached houses

whose surrounding open spaces are covered by a multitude of auto drives and garages—that is Flat-bush. Rows of mean little single-family houses, backed by wretched little drying-greens and alleys—that is West Philadelphia and Long Island City. Three, four and five-story apartment houses with every modern improvement, but lacking in sunlight, fresh air, beauty, freedom from noise and privacy—that is Boston, Chicago, and the Bronx. These are not permanent homes for women and children; they are dormitory slums.7

In professional circles sympathy for the ordinary was rare.

Some designers pursued a more active posi-tion than critique, although small-scale opera-tions in homebuilding and primitive financing typically limited the impact of these efforts. In the early twentieth century, leading landscape architects and planners like John Nolen and Har-land Bartholomew courted corporate clients for company town commissions, while architects like Ernest Flagg, who designed philanthropic apartments in Manhattan and developed a sub-urban subdivision in Staten Island, and Irving Gill, a pioneer in concrete construction and in the apartment-court type in Southern Califor-nia, worked to reimagine production for the mass market through a variety of formal and technological innovations. In the 1920s New York City architect Andrew J. Thomas helped to improve speculative housing by forging partner-ships with successful developers, as at Jackson Heights, Queens, where he pioneered a new variety of perimeter-block garden apartment. Around the same time, architect Clarence Stein, an associate of Mumford, convinced developer

Alexander Bing to form a development company, the City Housing Corporation, to produce model subdivisions at Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, and Radburn, in New Jersey.8

The crisis of confidence in market-based devel-opment wrought by the Great Depression opened new opportunities for architects in mass hous-ing. Critic Catherine Bauer, a protégé of Stein and Mumford, conceived of a program of “modern housing for America” that built on ideas circu-lating since the 1910s for replacement of specu-lative development with a centralized system of housing production controlled by designers and other trained experts. There was little grassroots support for her idea, however. Instead, Congress gave the nation a much narrower public-housing program and the FHA.9 FHA, under the direc-tion of lenders and builders, modernized home-building without reimagining it. The primary result was new kinds of little boxes—and lots of them. All but excluded, architects, especially reform-minded architects, were fiercely critical.

Yet even under FHA the profession had a voice. Architects were especially active in the early multifamily housing program. Although the agency was staffed primarily with men from real-estate circles, progressive designers led the Rental Housing Division. Under this program staff architects worked patiently with develop-ers to generate new, broadly appealing models of multifamily housing. Most complexes rejected the scientific austerity of the avant-garde strate-gies Existenzminimum and Zeilenbau in favor of nostalgic suburban real-estate vernaculars like Tudor and Georgian. Decorative half-timbering, along with front yards and wood-burning fire-places, spoke to families of “home.” At the same time, the large scale, low site coverage, and in-clusion of community facilities like playgrounds and shopping centers announced complexes as efficient, up-to-date, and, in their own cautious way, innovative (Figure 2).10

Postwar ArchitectsIn many respects the postwar era was one of diminution for the U.S. architect. In higher edu-cation architecture degree programs expanded in number and size, and the number of architects




Figure 2. Tudor-style FHA-insured apartment complex Garden Bay Manor, partial blocks bounded roughly by Astoria Boulevard North, 19th Road, 75th Street, and 81st Street, East Elmhurst, New York, B. Robert Swartburg and William F. Bennett Jr. (architects), N. K. Winston (developer), 1938–39. Detail from rental brochure. Courtesy of the New York Real Estate Brochure Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, item 1, image 3, YR.0659.QNS.001.003.




rose from four thousand at the start of World War II to twelve thousand by 1957 to fifty thou-sand or more by 1970.11 Much of the new work, however, was in increasingly large and complex public buildings, such as schools, shopping cen-ters, churches, and office and industrial parks. In housing—historically a primary arena for the profession—it was, apart from the small social-housing sector, the era of mass-built tracts of identical houses developed by production build-ers, often with loans insured by FHA (or the Vet-erans Administration) on FHA-approved plans (Figure 3).

The priorities of builders, policymakers, and consumers under this regime were speed and volume. World War II temporarily brought a more rigorous, émigré experimentation to mass-market housing in the United States with several projects designed by leading modernists. Changes at FHA, however, saw the departure of the initial design pioneers and a shift in emphasis to formula and repetition. FHA administrators, like mainstream speculative builders, became wary of architects and architectural innovation, preferring convention to experimentation. Good architecture—and the architect—hardly seemed to matter, at least for developers’ profitability. As the professional trade journal Architectural Forum put it in 1950, FHA’s “rigid insistence on routine planning” and its “impregnable conservatism” quickly “reduced the architect to the status of a draftsman.”12 There were exceptions: Eichler Homes in California and American Community Builders in Chicago both gave freedom to their architects. But these were relatively uncommon. Meanwhile, a modest growth in custom build-ing in the first postwar decade began to reverse by the late 1950s. Increasingly, as social-housing architect Sam Davis has observed, the postwar system made the profession “superfluous.”13

Postwar architects were often frustrated by the limited roles assigned to them. They protested in a variety of ways. Some wrote disapprovingly of the situation; many designed avant-garde proto-types. Yet others advocated for new subfields like urban design.14 At least a few, however, worked to expand disciplinary boundaries by moving into the adjacent fields of construction and develop-

ment. The best known were Bertram Goldberg in Chicago and John Portman in Atlanta. Both began to work as developers in the late 1950s to produce new kinds of large-scale privately fi-nanced urban redevelopment projects. The more obscure figures I discuss in this article antici-pated their efforts.15

Crucial to these forays into residential devel-opment were, perhaps paradoxically, the same welfare state programs that also helped render the architect redundant, especially FHA. The postwar welfare state in housing tends to be as-sociated with public housing and urban renewal. Programs like FHA, however, which used the power of the state to change private market rela-tions, were far more ubiquitous. They worked by lowering barriers to the production of housing through ease of financing and through standard-ization of unit design, site planning, building codes, and construction materials and tech-niques. Amplifying possibilities for large-scale production helped marginalize the designer. At the same time, it made it possible for anyone with a basic knowledge of building to navigate the de-velopment process, including architects. At least some took up this challenge.

In pursuing this course, the designers dis-cussed in this essay each followed a distinct

Figure 3. Mass production of postwar housing at Levittown, Long Island, 1948. Photograph by Tony Linck for Life. Courtesy of Getty Images.




path. DeMars understood conventional suburbia as a problem that innovative community plan-ning and higher-density housing could remedy. He rallied city leaders in Richmond, California, to allow him to showcase his ideas. Brown and Guenther, too, were motivated by desire to coun-ter the suburban trend, although they were less interested in improving the quality of everyday domestic architecture than in the specific task of stemming middle-class flight from New York City. This priority is evident in the generic ap-pearance of many of their projects, whose chief allure, suggested one ad, was their economy and central location: “The height of value at the high-est point in Manhattan” (Figure 4).16 Gerber, by contrast, was motivated chiefly by an appetite for profligacy, and profit. He was a skilled produc-tion architect who had worked at FHA and used his expertise to mass produce expedient but up-to-date housing during the postwar shortage. His specialty was the suburban apartment complex.

As individuals these designers were power-less to reverse the tide of professional obsoles-cence in the age of mass production and con-sumption. But as a group they helped rescue the professional architect from obsolescence. Along the way, I argue, they advanced the cause of more

choice, and better choice, in housing, in an in-creasingly monolithic market.

Vernon DeMarsAmong the most ardent critics of midcentury housing who engaged in design-development was Vernon Armand DeMars (1908–2005). He is best known for his campus buildings at the University of California in the 1960s and migrant-worker housing designed for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s and early 1940s, such as at Chandler, Arizona (Figure 5). To realize—and demon-strate market acceptance of—new housing ideas, DeMars also engaged briefly with speculative residential development, both before and after World War II. This kind of work was never a pri-mary interest for him and rarely distracted him for long from design and teaching. But his ex-ample suggests how and why architects engaged with real estate and how fluid the boundaries be-tween architects and developers could be.17

DeMars was never radical in his politics but like many U.S. architects he found fault with the American system of housing production. Well before World War II his work—designing pro-gressive communities for FSA, as a member of Telesis (an avant-garde Bay Area planning group), and as a draftsman for conservative middle-class houses—convinced him that trained profession-als ought to play a broader role than they had in shaping housing. “Why,” unlike in Europe, he wondered, “didn’t anyone other than a specula-tive builder build houses for people?”18

Emboldened by FSA, he and several colleagues formed a development company around 1940 called California Housing, Incorporated. They rented an office in San Francisco’s North Beach and bought three parcels on the outskirts of San Carlos on the Peninsula, south of San Francisco. “Thinking we knew all about housing from our experience in Farm Security,” DeMars recalled, we planned to “show the trade how to do it. The ideal at the time was that what America needed, in addition to the five-cent cigar, was a $2,500 house [$82,000 in 2012 dollars]. That includes the lot. We set out to do it.” Their plan was to take “the prototype of one of our little Farm Security

Figure 4. Inwood Tower, New York, New York, Brown & Guenther (architect), George D. Brown Jr. (developer), circa 1961. Detail from sales prospectus. Courtesy of the New York Real Estate Brochure Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, item 1, image 1, YR.1527.MH.001.001.




houses” and modify it with slightly more gener-ous rooms and a bit of architectural “pandering.” Unfortunately, costs ran over, and the houses were slow to sell. California Homes soon dis-banded.19 World War II brought new opportuni-ties for working outside the market as well as new critiques of it. In 1943 DeMars took a position at the Housing Standards Section of the Techni-cal Division of the National Housing Agency in Washington, D.C. He spent most of his time gen-erating new housing ideas. Of particular interest to him was a concept first discussed in Telesis: that housing developments should include a range of sizes and types to accommodate a broad social mixture.

Historically, most U.S. neighborhoods were the product of multiple small-scale operators working incrementally, resulting in at least some diversity. By the late 1920s, however, real-estate leaders, influenced in part by the experience of well-capitalized, larger-scale “community build-ers” like J. C. Nichols in Kansas City, came to frown upon this model. They believed that vari-ety engendered instability and, in turn, lowered a neighborhood’s status and, thus, investment value. As a corrective they made homogeneity—physical, social, and racial—a central priority, both in their own development work and in shaping FHA standards for design and under-writing. As a consequence American housing by the 1940s was being developed increasingly in uniform blocks: whole tracts of two-bedroom houses, three-bedroom houses, or one- and two-bedroom apartments, all catering to one segment of the market.20

DeMars agreed with the diagnosis that un-trammeled speculation was undesirable, writ-ing that ordinary developers—the “curbstoners,” “fly-by-nighters,” and “land butchers” identified by planning historian Marc Weiss—“placed all emphasis on the object of sale—the house—and ignored the neighborhood.”21 But he rejected the community builders’ remedy of homogeneity. He said he was influenced, in particular, by writ-ing on the matter from planners in Britain, who regarded the uniformity of early social-housing estates there as a mistake. As DeMars under-stood the problem, “Where did Grandma live?

There would be no apartment nearby. And when the kids were ready to get married they couldn’t afford to live there, and they couldn’t rent. The British were spelling this all out, and I thought, My God!”22

DeMars began imagining an alternative to the community builder model while working for the federal government. His vision took shape in an unbuilt plan called Fort Drive Gardens proposed for a site outside Washington, D.C. (Figure 6). During the war Architectural Forum invited teams of architects and developers to speculate about what the postwar American community might look like. Building on ideas generated by Telesis, DeMars and Technical Division col-leagues Mary Goldwater, Carl Koch, and, later, John Johansen, along with Washington builder Paul Stone, used the exercise to work out how to mix a range of housing types in a single super-block, with generous facilities for recreation, na-ture, and the automobile (Figure 7). It included houses, duplexes, attached row houses, walk-up apartments, and high-rises, which the architects believed would accommodate a range of family types, ages, and incomes. The argument, as De-Mars framed it, was that “the American dream is mobility, socially and economically, and why shouldn’t you be able to have this mobility within a comparatively small area?”23

Fort Drive Gardens, published in 1943, seems to have had a profound impact on DeMars. Re-alizing its mixed-type model became a central goal of his career. He refined the idea in a second concept town, commissioned by Ladies’ Homes

Figure 5. Farm Security Administration row houses at Chandler, Arizona, Vernon DeMars (architect), 1939–40. Courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34–014280-E.




Journal, which he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1945 in a show called Tomorrow’s Small House (Figure 8).24 It also influenced the work he took, beginning with a commission for a project called Bannockburn, in 1944. The client was a group of progressive families who had read about Fort Drive Gardens and invited him to design a complex on a tract of land they had bought outside of Washington, D.C. Unfortunately for DeMars, who delayed his

return to California until 1950 to take the job, only the single-family houses were completed because homeowners in neighboring tracts op-posed higher-density types.25

Back in the Bay Area DeMars tried again. As a consultant to the San Francisco Redevelop-ment Authority, he helped conceive of plans for the Western Addition, a neighborhood that city leaders had targeted for slum clearance, and for Diamond Heights, a steep, underdeveloped hill-

Figure 6. “Family Needs, Shelter Answers” diagram from Fort Drive Gardens proposal, Vernon DeMars with Carl Koch, Mary Goldwater, and John Johansen, 1943. From “Planned Neighborhood for 194x—Projected Postwar Neighborhoods—2. Mixed Neighborhood of Rental Housing, Washington,” Architectural Forum 10, no. 4 (October 1943): 79–87, 80. Courtesy of Environmental Design Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Vernon DeMars Collection.




top site where they hoped to see a new commu-nity of middle-class families with children. Both schemes strongly reflected the DeMars ideal—and the faith he had in the redemptive power of well-designed housing, even when the price was wholesale clearance. Nothing materialized at ei-ther site, however, until the 1960s.26

Richmond, CaliforniaDeMars’s big break came in late 1950 when a younger architect, Donald Leigh Hardison (1916–2012), recruited him to help design Eas-ter Hill Village, the first postwar public-housing project in Richmond, California. Richmond was a depressed industrial town just north of Berkeley on the San Francisco Bay. Thanks to its Standard Oil refinery, Ford assembly plant, and massive Kaiser shipyard that opened in 1941, the city had grown tremendously, from a population of 23,000 in 1940 to nearly 100,000 in 1943, of whom about 13,000 were black. But after the war came high unemployment and, as upwardly mo-bile whites left, deepening racial conflict.27 Hardi-son’s experience made him a natural choice for Easter Hill. Like DeMars he had studied archi-tecture at the University of California, Berkeley.

He spent the first years of his career designing temporary housing for Richmond’s war workers. After demobilization he stayed put and opened a small office. DeMars, a rising national star in housing with his FSA and Washington experi-ence, promised to bring a bit of celebrity to the struggling city.28

The mixture of building types that intrigued DeMars was not permitted in a federally financed public-housing complex. Nevertheless, he was able to inject enough variety into Easter Hill to

Figure 7. Community proposal by Telesis, Vernon DeMars, 1940. Courtesy of Environmental Design Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Vernon DeMars Collection.

Figure 8. Model of community proposal by Vernon DeMars for Tomorrow’s Small House exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1945. Courtesy of Environmental Design Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Vernon DeMars Collection.




hint at the strength of his vision. The project also spoke for the possibility of a physical form that DeMars had become increasingly enamored of since FSA: the attached row house (Figure 9). Building on a prototype he had created for Ladies’ Home Journal, DeMars used staggered lot lines, rich varied color, and an innovative site plan by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin to prove the row house desirable, flexible, and modern (Figure 10).

The design garnered much favorable atten-tion for Richmond.29 It also opened the door to DeMars’s second venture into real estate: The Plaza. During World War II Richmond had filled with emergency housing. It was expedient, tem-porary, and, by the 1950s, decaying. City leaders hoped to see it replaced by new market-rate de-velopment. But Richmond languished as other parts of the Bay Area prospered, foreshadowing the struggles many industrial cities would face in later decades. By 1953 hardly any new hous-ing had been built at all except Easter Hill. Worse yet, the city’s racial problems were escalating. When the Richmond Housing Authority began

Figure 9. Model of “Good Neighbors” row house prototype by Vernon DeMars for Ladies Home Journal, 1945. Courtesy of Environmental Design Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Vernon DeMars Collection.

Figure 10. Row houses with varied colors and setbacks at Easter Hill Village public-housing complex, along Foothill, Martin Luther King Jr., and Hinkley Avenues, South 23rd to South 28th Streets, Richmond, California, Hardison and DeMars (architect), Richmond Housing Authority (developer), 1950–53 (demolished 2004). Courtesy of Environmental Design Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Vernon DeMars Collection.




demolishing temporary wartime public housing, in 1952, black tenants, who had few options for relocation, staged a major protest.30

City fathers, skittish about the slow pace of reconversion and negative publicity, turned to DeMars and Hardison for help. Hardison was by then a member of the city’s planning com-mission. Presumably under his guidance the city proposed, in late 1953, that a private devel-oper be found to buy a cleared wartime housing site and build a racially integrated subdivision. The city proposal, called The Pilot, was clearly the work of DeMars (Figure 11). (As he explained with feigned reserve to the architecture critic Frederick Gutheim in 1955, “You can perhaps recognize some influence of my fine Italian hand in the range-of-dwelling-types proposal.”31) The pair, unsurprisingly, won the commission. Their project was called The Plaza. Perhaps shy from DeMars’s earlier foray into real estate they partnered with long-standing Bay Area contrac-tor Barrett Construction, to which DeMars had several professional and social connections. Bar-rett’s staff handled most of the day-to-day work as well as the financing and contracts with FHA, which insured the project’s mortgages.32

The Plaza’s primary distinguishing feature was DeMars’s mixture of housing types. At a flat site like Richmond this meant single-family houses, semidetached houses, and row houses, which DeMars arranged on a new superblock with a cul-de-sac (Figure 12). Walk-up apartments were also planned but never built.

The row houses were of the greatest interest to DeMars. They also posed the greatest chal-lenge. The American dream was to own a de-tached house. Especially in the age of FHA and freeways, row houses seemed outmoded. At low-cost projects like Easter Hill, where the client was the housing authority, this stigma hardly mat-tered. But at a speculative development like The Plaza, which catered to prospective homeowners, it was a serious concern. A row house, DeMars explained,

was not six families living communally in a piece of sausage that hadn’t been sliced yet. They didn’t share anything, except their party walls. . . . As an

architectural expression, it was not a bar. If you had an apartment house with a single entry, and had internal halls, then the expression was a unit. Row houses, even if they’re built at once or what-ever, are discreet family things.33

To make them appealing, DeMars staggered setbacks and used copious color and distinctive entrances, overhangs, and carports, to give each unit an individual identity (Figure 13). He also broke them into groups of just three or four to maximize the number of end units with dual ex-posures and side yards.34

The strategy worked. The Plaza sold quickly.35 More important, it attracted a diverse group of homeowners, although not in the same way that DeMars had imagined, with “Grandma” down the block from “kids” just married. Most buyers, to the contrary, were families with chil-dren. But the occupational and racial diversity were unprecedented. Among the group were a storekeeper, a welder, two truck drivers, a cook, a postman, a policeman, a fireman, an electri-cian, a carpenter, a cashier, and several machine operators, as well as a secretary, a “counter girl,” a waitress and two housekeepers (in a third of households both the men and the women worked outside the home). But there were also a dentist, a physician, a pharmacist, a reporter, a real-estate

Figure 11. Request for proposals for The Pilot project showing a mixture of housing types (walk-up apartments, row houses, detached houses) based on prototypes by Vernon DeMars. From Richmond, California, City Planning Commission, A Preliminary Plan for Redevelopment: 1B the Pilot Project (Richmond, Calif.: 1954). Courtesy of Environmental Design Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Vernon DeMars Collection.




agent, three nurses, five chemists, and six engi-neers. Yet more remarkable was the ethnic mix-ture: 70 percent of households were white, 13 per-cent black, 8 percent Chinese or Japanese, and 7 percent Filipino.36 The diversity was a significant

achievement in the age of mass-built tract sub-urbs, especially given Richmond’s postwar racial climate.

Although DeMars withdrew from the Rich-mond venture after an initial phase of eighty-four houses, his goal of reforming the market, physi-cally and socially, endured. Barrett went on to develop hundreds more of DeMars’s row houses in the city, all racially integrated; other develop-ers emulated them. In the process Richmond transformed from a racially segregated wartime way station to a new, unique kind of metropolitan community (Figure 14).37 Nowhere else, observed Roger Montgomery, was “this architecture”—that is, the progressive combination of a variety of compact typologies—“popularized in a way and for a market so nearly like that envisioned in the enthusiastic New Deal days. Richmond, and DeMars and his colleagues, present one of the few American monuments to social housing ideas.” Meanwhile, as leading trade magazine House &

Figure 12. Aerial view of The Plaza, block bounded by Cutting Boulevard, Fall Avenue, South 45th Street, and South 49th Street, Richmond, California, Hardison and DeMars (architects), Barrett Construction (builder), 1955–57, photograph circa 1957. Courtesy of Environmental Design Archive, University of California, Berkeley, Vernon DeMars Collection.

Figure 13. Group of four row-type houses in The Plaza, 4721–33 Fall Avenue, Richmond, California. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2011.




Home noted in the mid-1960s, the project “may well be the best integrated subdivision in the en-tire country.”38

Brown & GuentherParalleling DeMars’s efforts in California were those of Brown & Guenther in New York City. Unlike DeMars, whose interests were chiefly architectural—that is, about physical form—Brown & Guenther were welfare-state techno-crats. They employed rational planning tech-niques to address the more specific problem of how to build spacious, up-to-date housing at low suburban prices in one of the world’s most ex-pensive city centers. If in this respect DeMars was heir to earlier West Coast figures like Irving Gill, Brown & Guenther followed in the footsteps of New York City housers like Ernest Flagg and Andrew J. Thomas.39

George David Brown Jr. (1906–94) and Ber-nard William Guenther (1904–80) were well into midlife by the time they entered development in the late 1950s. Both had strong backgrounds in social housing. After completing his training at Columbia University in 1933, Brown worked on Knickerbocker Village, the nation’s first feder-ally aided slum-clearance project. Later, he took a job with Andrew J. Thomas and then, in 1938, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The following year, longtime housing reformer Louis Pink appointed him secretary of the New York State Division of Housing, the agency that administered statewide low-cost housing pro-grams. During the war Brown followed Pink to the federal Office of Price Administration and then to Mutual of New York, a life insurance company that served as a major lender for social housing.40 Guenther, meanwhile, had gone to work after high school for Robert T. Lyons, a lead-ing New York designer of high-class apartment houses, where he remained for twelve years while studying at New York University and the Pratt In-stitute. He went into public service in 1935, first at the state’s Mortgage Commission and then at the city’s Department of Public Works. In 1941 he joined Brown at the state Division of Housing. The pair went into practice together in 1948.41

From the start the firm focused on progressive

residential projects. Their first job was Queens-view, a racially integrated limited-equity co-op in Long Island City, Queens. Pink conceived of the project in 1948, and it was completed in 1950. The design was efficient, with more than seven hundred apartments arranged in fourteen point-block red-brick elevator buildings with oversized windows, set on a ten-acre superblock furnished with ample play space for children (Figure 15). This tower-in-the-park format contrasted sharply with older multifamily models in the borough, such as Andrew J. Thomas’s garden apartments at Jackson Heights, and with the bulk of contem-porary development, which was in single-family detached houses and new kinds of low-rise FHA-type apartment courts (see Figure 27). Much of Queens remained suburban, even rural, until well after the war, thanks in part to limited tran-sit access.

Although elegant, Queensview’s form was chiefly a means to an end: more, and better, city housing for families with children. Its real achievements were, in this light, functional and financial: high-quality housing at low cost. To reach this goal Brown and Guenther employed several innovations that saved on construction costs. One was to eliminate basements. Mechani-cal equipment and storage for perambulators and bicycles were instead moved up to the first floors, along with play areas and office space for management. Laundry went on the roof, with ad-jacent outdoor playpens. Another advancement was a “unit plan,” which grouped just one size of apartment in most of the buildings.42

Within units Brown & Guenther worked to

Figure 14. Aerial view of The Plaza, circa 2013 (top left), and later row-type development in surrounding sections of Richmond (bottom). Courtesy of Google.




achieve “roominess” with an off-the-foyer plan, eat-in kitchens accommodating tables for five, and ample storage. Apartments were arranged four to a floor, allowing each to occupy a cor-ner to ensure cross-ventilation and maximize daylight. To avoid casting shadows, buildings were widely spaced; even north-facing windows received five hours of direct sunlight in winter. Baseboard heating rather than conventional ra-diators allowed windows to run close to the floor, admitting unusual amounts of natural light given modest ceiling heights.43 Housing reform-ers were unanimous in their praise. Several com-missions for similar projects followed, as well as jobs in public housing and in speculative market-rate construction. The firm was also hired as a consultant by NYCHA and by the City Planning Commission.44

These kinds of partnerships with the state were central to Brown & Guenther’s agenda. So, too, was progressive housing policy. When speaking about Queensview, Brown was quick to credit the state’s Redevelopment Companies Law of 1942 for making it possible for “private enterprise, with the cooperation of the city” to rebuild run-down areas for middle-class fami-lies.45 Then, in 1954, he served as technical consultant to New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. in the drafting of the Limited-Profit Housing Companies Law.46 Known popularly as Mitchell-Lama (after the chair and vice chair of the state legislature’s Joint Legislative Commit-tee on Housing), the bill, which passed in 1955, created new subsidies to support middle-income projects on the Queensview model. The postwar American system, as embodied by FHA, Levit-town, and Lakewood, made privately built new housing—single-family or apartment—available to the great mass of ordinary families for the first time in history. But it required inexpensive land, which meant most were built at the urban periphery. Mitchell-Lama, which was based on reform proposals first advanced in the 1910s, tried to address this gap by offering extra-long loans at below-market interest rates to builders of limited-dividend, income-restricted housing. Subsidizing the cost of well-equipped housing for middle- and working-class families was spe-cifically intended to allow New York City to better compete with suburbia. As Mayor Wagner noted when promoting the bill, “Our city must be made a healthy and pleasant place in which to live as well as in which to work. We must never become a city solely of factories, offices and workshops. The movement of people to the suburbs, which has been so evident in the past, must be reversed if our city is to prosper.”47

Building Mitchell-LamaAlthough the record is sparse, it appears that Brown and Guenther took their firm into de-velopment to demonstrate the feasibility of the Mitchell-Lama thesis. Brown believed that as an architect he was uniquely positioned to do so. Designers were not “studious and remote techni-cians,” he explained (as recounted by a reporter),

Figure 15. Queensview, bounded by 21st Street, 33rd Road, Crescent Street, and 34th Avenue, Long Island City, New York, Brown & Guenther (architect), Louis Pink (lead developer), 1949–50. From Bette Jenkins, “4. Civic Aid: Queensview,” Journal of Housing 10, no. 9 (October 1953): 335–37, 346, 348, 353; image on 337. Courtesy of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.




“concerned only with grinding out sketches, blueprints and specifications.” Rather, he ar-gued, they played a crucial role in “the construc-tion field—in the related areas of city planning, urban renewal and building products manufac-ture,” with “such diverse talents as a knowledge of financing methods; familiarity with laws . . . and an ability to deal with a long list of regulatory agencies.” The architect, Brown continued, “may be called upon to advise the builder whether the plot under consideration is large enough, how tall a structure can be under the applicable zon-ing laws, how many dwelling units are feasible, whether the proposed building will fit the pat-tern of community growth, and what laws may affect construction.”48

He and Guenther used this expertise to be-come their own developers. In 1957 the firm—in partnership with architects John M. Kokkins and Stephen C. Lyras, about whom little is known—announced it would develop the first two Mitch-ell-Lama co-ops in Manhattan: Inwood Terrace and Inwood Heights. Shortly thereafter, Brown announced he would sponsor a third: Inwood Tower (see Figure 4). All were sited on vacant

parcels on steeply sloped Fort George Hill in northern Manhattan, near Guenther’s home. Six Mitchell-Lama projects had been announced pre-viously for the city but all were in outer sections of town. With one exception their sponsors were trade unions or nonprofits: groups that already had a vested interest in social housing. Brown & Guenther would prove that with the right hous-ing the city center could compete with the sub-urbs for middle-class affections, and that it was possible for anyone to build.49

The great challenge was that even with Mitch-ell-Lama the high price of Manhattan land made it difficult to pay for the ever greater number of amenities that middle-income households were expecting (Figure 16). To make the Inwood proj-ects work the firm reprised earlier economies like eliminating basements, placing boilers, in-cinerators, and laundries on first floors. (Brown became so convinced of the merits of this ar-rangement that when the city’s new Zoning Resolution of 1961 required such facilities go in cellars or subcellars, he demanded that the law be revised.) They also consulted with tenants.50

Unlike at mainstream developments, where

Figure 16. Detail of sales prospectus for Inwood Tower marketing the building to middle-class families. Courtesy of the New York Real Estate Brochure Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, item 1, image 2, YR.1527.MH.001.002.




pressure to make quick leases and sales de-manded builders regard tenants chiefly as con-sumers, Brown & Guenther made it a priority to consider them as long-term users. In practice that meant avoiding showup façades of glazed brick, glass, and steel, which were becoming popular in market-rate construction, in favor of ordinary red brick, which was both cheaper and more durable. As Guenther noted, “The imaginative use of simple materials can create a decorative effect without large expenditure.” Conversely, they reserved higher-grade finishes for where they offered long-term savings, like terrazzo in main lobbies. As Brown explained, “Economy is always a prime objective in designing . . . under the state and city middle-income programs. . . . But to carry initial economy to great lengths can result in substantially higher maintenance costs over the years.”51

In the planning of individual apartments Brown & Guenther also listened to their tenants. Postoccupancy research was uncommon in this

Figure 17. Red-brick cladding and balconies at Inwood Tower. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2010.

Figure 18. Typical floor plan of Inwood Heights, New York, New York, Brown & Guenther with Kokkins & Lyras (architects), George D. Brown Jr., Bernard Guenther, John M. Kokkins, and Stephen C. Lyras (developers), 1957–61. Detail from sales prospectus. Courtesy of the New York Real Estate Brochure Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, item 1, image 3, YR.1525.MH.001.003 (FF).




era. A few larger-scale builders like Levitt & Sons seem to have pioneered the idea at suburban sub-divisions where phased development demanded constant adjustment to keep up with the market. But in city apartments, perpetually high demand meant there was little incentive to track the latest preferences. As part of Brown & Guenther’s user-directed approach, however, the firm made post-occupancy surveys, beginning in the early 1950s at Queensview. Through the surveys they learned most families installed wall-to-wall carpeting so asphalt-tile flooring could replace hardwood. When site-assembled cabinets warped, however, more expensive prefabricated units became a pri-ority. Likewise, when tenants complained about small refrigerators, ranges, and countertops and the lack of accommodation for washing machines and air conditioners, kitchens were enlarged, wir-ing was improved, and “sleeves” were included in outside walls. When mothers asked for balconies to use as outdoor playrooms, the firm similarly revised designs (Figure 17).52

In part to pay for these improvements, Brown & Guenther jettisoned the point-block format used at Queensview for a slab plan, with units ar-ranged along double-loaded corridors (Figure 18). Brown believed the new format inferior because it compromised circulation of light and air. But it lowered costs by distributing core services, in-cluding elevators and stairways, among a greater number of units.53

Mitchell-Lama did not stop decentralization.

Prices at Inwood never matched those at lower-end suburbs. Moreover, the apartments, which were roughly the same size as the original post-war Levitt & Sons houses (800 square feet), did not offer the same range of built-in features. Nevertheless they sold well. Ninety percent were bought by families with children. Soon, there were Halloween committees and playground committees and a full range of activities that marked the buildings as “vertical subdivisions”: up-to-date middle-class oases in an increasingly poor and decayed city.54 Their success made them a template for many future Mitchell-Lama projects, offering tens of thousands of New York families an alternative to suburbia in the age of white flight (Figure 19).55

Erwin GerberDeMars’s and Brown & Guenther’s engagements with development were fleeting. They were also polemical. Other architects pursued develop-ment as an everyday part of their practices, for more everyday reasons. Unfortunately, these individuals remain obscure, with little record of their activity apart from occasional reports in local newspapers and trade papers. The example I offer, Erwin Gerber, might help root out others.

Little is known about Gerber (1903–82). He studied at Case Western and Columbia Univer-sities but does not appear to have earned any degrees in architecture, although he was later licensed in several states and joined the AIA in

Figure 19. Highbridge House Mitchell-Lama complex, 1158 Ogden Avenue, Bronx, New York, Brown, Guenther, Battaglia & Galvin (architects), Biltman Construction (developer), 1965–72. Detail from sales prospectus. Courtesy of the New York Real Estate Brochure Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, item 1, image 2, YR.0259.BX.001.002.




1965. He seems to have begun practice in the 1920s and in 1935 became a deputy chief archi-tect at FHA, perhaps in a regional office, perhaps in Washington. Later, he became a chief architect in charge of apartments at the agency. In 1944 he went into private practice in Newark, New Jersey. He was enormously productive, designing more than $40 million worth of housing by late 1947 and an additional $25 million by 1950.56

Gerber’s projects drew heavily on FHA for-mulas. Among his first major commissions were Elmwood Village Garden Apartments, a complex of one hundred units (later expanded) in Elm-wood Park, New Jersey, and Warwick Garden Apartments, with fifty-nine units, in Red Bank, New Jersey. Initially intended for sale as coopera-tives, both opened in late 1946. It is likely that Gerber helped to develop them.57 In style they re-sembled the great majority of early postwar hous-ing in the architect’s embrace of the Colonial Re-vival, with the wood-frame structures clad in a

mixture of red brick and clapboard (Figure 20). In form they followed FHA Rental Housing Divi-sion protocols established in the mid-1930s, with units arranged in small, widely spaced walk-up buildings on green campuses (Figure 21).58

This arrangement was both popular and effi-cient. It allowed more privacy than typical apart-ment houses as well as quicker access to the car and the out-of-doors, including semiprivate out-door space (Figure 22). And in contrast to more conventional apartment-house types, with units grouped around interior corridors, it economized by eliminating all interior spaces for circulation except stairways, including lobbies. Gerber char-acterized it as “modern garden-type apartments” (and critics as “FHA’s court fetish”). Where land was inexpensive enough to make the shift of cir-culation from inside to outside economically fea-sible, it was ideal.59

Unlike DeMars and Brown & Guenther, Ger-ber showed little interest in reforming main-stream settlement patterns. Gerber had moder-ately progressive tendencies, and his scores of commissions included two pioneering, racially integrated, FHA-insured apartment complexes in metropolitan New York. But his instincts generally lay to the center, if not right. Whereas DeMars’s The Plaza and Brown & Guenther’s In-wood buildings truly helped advance the cause of racial integration in housing, for example, it appears that Gerber’s “integrated” projects were, from start to finish, intended by their developers for African American occupancy.60

Gerber also fought against progressive hous-ing programs like public housing. Housing de-ficiencies could be eliminated instead, he told Congress in 1947, by eschewing union labor, eliminating middlemen in the market for build-ing materials, and encouraging conservative de-sign. “The private builder,” he testified, “is doing an honest job with the tools he is able to use. However, he will be able to do a much better job if labor will give him an honest day’s work, and the manufacturer will get away from the horse-and-buggy days of doing business and instead will deal directly with the builder.” Meanwhile, he contrasted the “wasteful” and “idiosyncratic” work “of some architects in the FPHA [Federal

Figure 20. Mixture of clapboard and red-brick cladding, hallmarks of the vernacular modern Colonial Revival style, at Elmwood Village. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2012.

Figure 21. Aerial view of Elmwood Village, circa 2013. Courtesy of Google and DigitalGlobe, New York GIS, USDA Farm Service Agency.




Public Housing Authority]” with that produced under FHA. “If more effort was put forth by the public housers in technical research for devel-opment of new ideas of construction similar to the work done by the Technical Division of the Federal Housing Administration,” he explained, “low-cost housing will truly be low cost.” Only in private housing did developers permit architects genuine “freedom in economical design.”61

In his own work Gerber appears to have been motivated chiefly by profit. FHA’s multifamily program restricted all the financial facts of a complex, including rental rates and the develop-er’s return on his or her investment. The reason for this was that unlike FHA’s single-family pro-gram, the apartment section had been conceived of in compromise between housing reformers and real estate interests. For decades, reformers had campaigned for a broad program of public housing (referred to by some advocates as “mod-ern housing”) that would have shifted produc-tion of most working- and middle-class homes to consumers’ cooperative groups, trade unions, and other nonprofit entities, using loans at below-market interest rates subsidized by the federal government. Those in real estate, by contrast, believed public housing was unnecessary. When public housing was enacted, in 1937, most of the modern-housing provisions were excised in favor of a very limited program of low-rent, state-built construction. In exchange, FHA’s apartment program was made to operate on a limited-divi-dend basis, with returns fixed at a very modest 5 or 6 percent, reflecting the idea’s origins in nine-teenth-century philanthropic housing.62

Despite profit restrictions, FHA apartments remained lucrative for savvy operators like Ger-ber who knew how to exploit loopholes. Gerber’s strategy, which helps account for his enormous productivity, was two-fold: keep expenses under those allowed by the agency and sell completed projects quickly. FHA allowances determined the size of a project’s construction loans. By spending less he could squeeze additional prof-its. He did this by building on land that he had bought in less expensive times, working faster than FHA timetables, using in-house contrac-tors, and developing at volumes large enough to

accrue special economies of scale. Selling after construction then allowed him to multiply prof-its by repeating the cycle rather than operate as a landlord. (Unlike DeMars’s houses in Richmond and Brown & Guenther’s towers in Inwood, most of Gerber’s complexes were rentals.)

Typical of the projects Gerber organized on this model were three buildings completed be-tween 1948 and 1950 in East Orange, New Jersey, just outside Newark: 66 Melmore Gardens, 266 South Harrison Street, and 444 Prospect Street. After identifying each site, Gerber recruited ad-ditional investors, sometimes family, sometimes “business associates.” Their role, presumably, was to share the cost of equity requirements and the financial risk. That his wife was often among them and that he ended up in federal tax court in 1959 suggest he may have also used this strategy to reduce his tax liability. Next, following com-mon real-estate practice, he established a unique corporation for each site, which bought the lot, secured mortgage commitments from FHA and financing from private lenders, built the

Figure 22. Semi-private outdoor space at back of apartments at Elmwood Village. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2012.

Figure 23. 66 Melmore Gardens, East Orange, New Jersey, Erwin Gerber (developer and architect), 1948–50. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2012.




apartments, and then sold them—ideally before tenants moved in.63

The profits were substantial. At Melmore Gar-dens, where Gerber owned just one-quarter of the shares, his portion of the profit, after fewer than three years, was more than $9,500 ($143,000 in 2012 dollars), exclusive of his design fees (Fig-ure 23). At Prospect Street, where he and his wife owned 90 percent of the shares, the couple real-ized $20,000 ($301,000) in just twenty months (Figure 24). At South Harrison they earned more than $39,000 ($586,000) in the same short span (Figure 25).64

These sums raised concerns. Critics claimed they represented an unearned, unauthorized, windfall taken at the public’s expense. Gerber defended himself on grounds that he had not violated policy and the scheme cost the taxpayer nothing, at least as long as rent rolls remained

sufficient to service the government-insured loans. To the contrary, the FHA program Gerber used was one of few in the federal system that generated a profit for the government.65 Pres-sure to generate profits by spending under bud-get nevertheless had real costs. As aerial views reveal, Gerber’s projects lacked the graceful de-sign, good landscaping, and generous common facilities of those conceived by Brown & Guen-ther and DeMars (see Figure 21).

Gerber was not only interested in returns, however. His buildings, he claimed, served a public purpose. Apart from the housing they provided they offered a model for other devel-opers. The projects in East Orange were, for ex-ample, among the first FHA-insured apartments built at in-town sites, and they employed what seems to have been a novel building type for the agency: the mid-rise courtyard building on a city lot (Figure 26). “I was the first one,” Gerber boasted in the late 1950s, “and I led the way for the other builders” who “couldn’t believe it could be done”—presumably in terms of FHA support for medium-density urban types as well as accep-tance in the market. “I showed them.”66

Working FHABeyond what Gerber’s example reveals about profit motive in design-develop and the complex-ities of federal housing policy, it also highlights how policies regarded as a scourge by architects could simultaneously empower them. According to Gerber, FHA did not just make his firm pro-ductive and profitable, it was what enabled him to work as a developer at all. He detailed how in an Architectural Forum exposé on the agency’s multifamily program, published in 1950. The primary informant was an anonymous architect named “John Smith,” identified only as a “profes-sional colleague” of Gerber—perhaps, we might presume, Gerber himself.67

The postwar apartment boom, with more than 700,000 units built in five years after the war, was “driven” by men like Smith, the Forum ex-plained. FHA made it “possible for almost any-body of moderate acumen to become an apart-ment owner [developer]” with very little money. The key was “to consult a local specialist in the

Figure 24. 444 Prospect Street, East Orange, New Jersey, Erwin Gerber (developer and architect), 1948–50. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2012.

Figure 25. 266 South Harrison Street, East Orange, New Jersey, Erwin Gerber (developer and architect), 1948–50. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner, 2012.




idiosyncrasies of FHA apartment building.” This expert “more often than not” was an architect like Smith. “Give me any smart business man,” Smith boasted, “and I can make him an apart-ment builder in three weeks.” An “intelligent man and competent architect,” people showed up at Smith’s office “by the hundreds.” He told them where and “exactly what” to build, how much to pay for land, and where to get financing. He also dealt with FHA on their behalf. They were on their own for materials and construction, but Smith was a “great boon” to them because of his “precise knowledge of current construction costs,” which he learned from developing his own projects with an in-house staff that included the plastering contractor, the carpenter, and the floor layer. Because he was so efficient—completing a plan in only three weeks—Smith charged as little as one-third of the permissible fees.68

Although generic, Smith’s buildings were not bad. The plans he furnished were simple and formulaic but, according to the Forum, improved upon FHA’s minimum standards. Most devel-opers of FHA-insured apartments, the maga-zine explained, were “interested only in a quick profit . . . [and] find they can add nothing to this by making their buildings any better than they have to.” Smith’s buildings, by contrast, were “prob-ably in advance of the great body.” Not only did he draw his own sketches, but he also made ef-forts “to relate siting to contour, to obtain enough interior wall space to take furniture, to provide ample closet space, [and] some ventilation in the bedrooms.” They could never appear in the Forum, but this was chiefly because they were conservative—“an indication of his own frankly expressed, prejudice against contemporary de-sign.” According to Smith, “No matter what kind of project these modern designers attempt, it al-ways turns out to look like a gas station.”69

Speaking in his own name in a sidebar, Ger-ber defended FHA’s apartment program from the perspective of “one who was in at its birth, helped to expand it and finally reaped a few of its benefits while on the outside looking in.” He conceded that the agency was imperfect. He claimed, for example, that he had “literally devel-oped high-blood pressure while in constant war

with the Land Planning Section of FHA over site lay-out, in which work I take particular care and pride.” But without some of the financial leeway that critics were alarmed by, allowances were so narrow that even a small, unforeseen variation could derail a project. Moreover, he added, archi-tect’s fees permitted by FHA had also to cover the cost of engineering and landscaping, and builders experienced enough to buy land and materials for less than going rates ought not to be vilified.70

As for style, Gerber made no apologies for building only in a streamlined Colonial Revival to the exclusion of more contemporary expres-sions (Figure 27). “In my experience as an FHA employee and later in my practice,” he recounted, “I never found any resistance to modern architec-ture by FHA because it was a different trend. The trouble was that allowance could not be made for the additional square foot area or the trimmings necessary over and above a typical house.” A gap of more than 5 percent between “cost figures” and FHA “capitalized figures” (limits) was, he emphasized, “the real bugaboo in Forum’s desire for modern thought in apartments.”71

In the wake of the windfall allegations a major investigation was conducted at FHA and Congress modified the multifamily program. Most developers of apartments quickly shifted to single-family. Gerber, however, stuck with it. He designed—and likely developed—scores more complexes in New Jersey, New York, and beyond. By the late 1950s he had one of the five largest architectural firms in the United States in terms of value of construction, alongside such giants as

Figure 26. 444 Prospect Street, East Orange, New Jersey, aerial view, circa 2013. Courtesy of Google.




Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall, and he estimated his of-fice to be “probably the biggest firm of apartment house architects in the country.”72

Professional Honor (An Epilogue)Desire on the part of architects to control, im-prove, and profit from ordinary mass-market buildings, especially housing, was hardly unique to the postwar era. These aims were al-ways surely central to the profession. But the stakes were uniquely high after World War II. Postwar affluence, the Fordist system of mass production and consumption, and the welfare state of FHA, Mitchell-Lama, and local redevel-opment brought new homes to Americans as never before. Yet systems devised to stimulate production, simplify construction, and central-ize design marginalized the architect. Many in the profession were alarmed. Homeowners and tenants hardly seemed to notice. All this would change, to some degree, in the 1960s and 1970s, when new towns, mounting interest in city living and historic preservation, and, later, a resurgence in custom building allowed architects to reclaim some of their authority. Long before these shifts, however, DeMars, Brown & Guenther, and Ger-ber fought to remain relevant by engaging in design-development.

It is likely that others also pursued this model. So little is known about speculative development and production architecture, however, that it is difficult to determine how many. Indeed, a major gap that remains in this story concerns singular-ity. How many architects pursued development in the age of FHA, mass production, and modern real-estate finance? To what extent did the mass-built postwar landscape reflect the priorities of professional architects rather than real estate? How much of it was shaped by the imperatives of development—expedience and profit motive—rather than aspirations for beauty, innovation, and community?

Although more research is necessary to an-swer these questions, clues from a later era, the 1970s, are suggestive. Unlike the immedi-ate postwar era, by the 1960s and especially the 1970s, hybrid roles in professional architec-ture were discussed openly. Growing interest in master planning and a surge in multifamily housing invigorated the profession and eased taboos against working in production housing. New FHA initiatives targeting lower-income groups all but invited architects, including well-respected firms like MLTW/Turnbull Associ-ates, to become developers. Of equal importance, a series of court cases concerning the degree to which professions, with their codes of ethics, were monopolies led the AIA to render its code voluntary. After decades in the shadows, old prohibitions against hybrid practices, including design-build and design-develop were lifted.73

Once out in the open, design-develop was revealed to be remarkably common. Surveys by Architectural Record in 1972 and 1976 found that one in four U.S. firms had designed a project in the previous two years in which it was at least part owner—that is, developer.74 Meanwhile, the architect-as-developer found a passionate, high-profile spokesman in John Portman. After repur-posing downtown Atlanta—made obsolete by the car and by racial fear—for the convention trade in the 1960s with the Peachtree Center, Port-man made a national name in the 1970s with the Renaissance Center in Detroit, the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, and the Embarcadero Cen-ter in San Francisco. In 1976 he and designer

Figure 27. Garden Hills apartment complex, Forest Hills, New York, Erwin Gerber (architect), Murray Sorin (developer), 1949–50. Detail from rental brochure. Courtesy of the New York Real Estate Brochure Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, item 1, image 1, YR.0463.QNS.001.001.




Jonathan Barnett published The Architect as De-veloper. In part a catalog of Portman’s work, it also served as a manifesto for design-develop.75

Not all architects were in favor of this and other dual roles. Despite the lifting of AIA pro-hibitions many continued to worry that design-build represented a conflict of interests. Others argued, especially with respect to Portman, that design and development were too distinct for any individual to do well. As Richard Meier told the New York Times in 1980, “I don’t believe that one can adequately provide professional archi-tectural services and also be a financier or real-estate person. . . . You’re just spread too thin.”76 To be sure, development was not for architects who were content with conventional practice. A significant cohort, however, was evidently not.

A second set of questions to consider by way of closing are those of motive. Among the thou-sands of architects who engaged with develop-ment by the 1970s, how many were, like DeMars or Brown & Guenther, moved by the impulse to reform the housing market? How many were, like Gerber, chiefly in pursuit of profit? Does mo-tive change the significance of their work or the meaning of their professional transgressions?

Studies made in the 1970s and early 1980s—some journalistic, some semischolarly—showed that most architect-developers were motivated at least in part by money. After designing projects for other developers, they came to believe that they could do that job equally well while reap-ing financial rewards that could be considerably greater than design fees. Others saw develop-ment as a way to maintain a stable flow of work. At the same time, virtually all architect-develop-ers claimed to see their real-estate work as com-patible with, even advancing, professional values. Architects working in real estate liked developer profits. But they also believed they could develop better buildings than speculative developers. As Barnett professed in The Architect as Developer: “A developer may have creative investment ideas, but his assumptions about buildings are likely to be ordinary and stereotyped.”77

For this reason many architect-developers saw their work in moral terms: an extension of their professional commitment to educate the public

about good design. As one Atlanta architect ex-plained in 1980:

The quality of what was being done residentially, as far as developers were concerned, was awful. I think our product is far superior. . . . A devel-oper puts more importance in the financial crite-ria instead of the design criteria. . . . The market might not know the difference, but there is a cer-tain amount of responsibility I feel to educate the public. . . . The biggest difference is that they just do not know whether something is good or bad or well-proportioned . . . whereas we do.78

As another added, the developer “has to have a conscience about it [a project] to a degree, but his conscience is not nearly so much as the architect’s.”79

Of equal importance to many architect-de-velopers was the belief that they undertook im-portant projects that speculative operators would not. Architects often, for example, concentrated on smaller-scale residential projects, primarily multifamily, many at urban infill sites—having first cut their teeth “flipping” older houses (after renovating them) as an informal vocation. At a time of rapid disinvestment in cities and mount-ing distaste for wholesale slum clearance, these projects promised new avenues for improving distressed older neighborhoods. “Certainly the things that I have done,” claimed one architect, “have been more unique than anything done by the real estate people that I have ever had to deal with. Fortunately they [the projects] have been successful, and I think that is primarily be-cause of the design aspects—that of being able to make decisions that a more timid soul would not make.”80

In harnessing the welfare state toward these ends in the late 1940s and 1950s, pioneering architect-developers like DeMars, Brown & Guenther, and Gerber generated their own op-portunities to move beyond the incremental give-and-take of patron and client to initiate and direct production. In doing so, they injected creativity, diversity, and innovation into American housing in an age increasingly defined by the generic. As one contemporary later reflected, standard




real estate development in the 1950s “disgusted” him. “I think if you have the proper training, and the temperment [sic],” he argued, “it is much better for the architect to do the packaging, the building,” and be “the entrepreneur.” Develop-ers “are so motivated by the profit motive that they . . . screw everybody in sight.” For designers, he argued, things were different: “The architect would not do these things. By and large, I believe the profession is an honorable one.”81 DeMars, Brown & Guenther, and even Gerber would have agreed.

author biographyMatthew Gordon Lasner is assistant professor of urban affairs and planning at Hunter College in New York City. He is author of High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century (2012), awarded VAF’s Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize in 2013.

notes1. Roger Montgomery, “High Density, Low-Rise Hous-ing and Changes in the American Housing Economy,” in The Form of Housing, ed. Sam Davis (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977), 100; Richard Harris, Build-ing a Market: The Rise of the Home Improvement Indus-try, 1914–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Janet Ore, “Jud Yojo, ‘the Bungalow Crafts-man,’ and the Development of Seattle Suburbs,” in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, VI, ed. Carter L. Hudgins and Elizabeth Collins Cromley, 231–43 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997).

2. For work on postwar speculative housing, see Dianne Harris, ed., Second Suburb: Levittown, Penn-sylvania (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles: Plan-ning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Matthew Gor-don Lasner, High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012); D. J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Barbara M. Kelly, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuild-ing Levittown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Gregory C. Randall, America’s Original GI Town: Park Forest, Illinois (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hop-

kins University Press, 2000); Rob Keil, Little Boxes: The Architecture of a Classic Midcentury Suburb (Daly City, Calif.: Advection Media, 2006); Paul Adamson, Eichler: Modernism Rebuilds the American Dream (Salt Lake City, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2002).

3. Peirce Lewis, “Learning from Looking: Geo-graphic and Other Writing about the American Cul-tural Landscape,” American Quarterly 35, no. 3 (1983): 257.

4. On the suburban tract, see note 2. On shopping centers and office parks, see Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997); M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Alex Wall, Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City (Barcelona: Actar, 2005); Louis A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Land-scapes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).

5. Montgomery, “High Density, Low-Rise Hous-ing,” 99; Roger Montgomery, “Mass Producing Bay Area Architecture,” in Bay Area Architecture, new ed., ed. Sally Woodbridge (Salt Lake City, Utah: Peregrine Smith, 1988), 253.

6. Quotation from Dell Upton, “Pattern Books and Professionalism: Aspects of the Transformation of Do-mestic Architecture in America, 1800–1960,” Winter-thur Portfolio 19, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1984): 107. See also Mary N. Woods, From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Lisa Marie Tucker, “The Small House Problem in the United States, 1918–1945: The American Institute of Architects and the Architects’ Small House Service Bu-reau,” Journal of Design History 23, no. 1 (March 2010): 43–59; Jan Jennings, “Cheap and Tasteful Dwellings in Popular Architecture,” in Perspectives in Vernacular Ar-chitecture, V, ed. Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter L. Hudgins, 133–51 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995); Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), chap. 11.

7. Quoted in Roy Lubove, Community Planning in the 1920’s: The Contribution of the Regional Planning Association of America (Pittsburgh, Penn.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), 38.




8. Margaret Crawford, “The ‘New’ Company Town,” Perspecta 30 (1999): 48–57; Mardges Bacon, Ernest Flagg: Beaux-Arts Architect and Reformer (New York: Architectural History Foundation; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986); Thomas S. Hines, Irving Gill and the Architecture of Reform: A Study in Modernist Architectural Culture (New York: Monacelli, 2000); Lasner, High Life, 66–72, 99–106; Lubove, Commu-nity Planning in the 1920’s.

9. Bradford D. Hunt, “Was the 1937 Housing Act a Pyrrhic Victory?,” Journal of Planning History 4, no. 3 (August 2005): 195–221; Gail Radford, Modern Hous-ing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Alexan-der von Hoffman, “The End of the Dream: The Politi-cal Struggle of America’s Public Housers,” Journal of Planning History 4, no. 3 (August 2005): 222–53.

10. Laura Bobeczko and Richard Longstreth, “Housing Reform Meets the Marketplace: Washing-ton and the Federal Housing Administration’s Con-tribution to Apartment Building Design, 1935–40,” in Housing Washington: Two Centuries of Residential De-velopment and Planning in the National Capital Area, ed. Richard Longstreth, 159–80 (Chicago: The Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2010).

11. Data are unreliable on numbers of architects and vary depending on the source. Figures from 1940 and 1957 reflect AIA memberships. See Henry H. Saylor, The A.I.A.’s First Hundred Years (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 1957), 30. Figure for 1970 courtesy the U.S. Census. Princeton University, Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, “National Trends in Artist Occupations,” http://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/quickfacts/artists/lbrfrcartist.html.

12. “Apartment Boom,” Architectural Forum 92, no. 1 (January 1950): 101, 105.

13. Sam Davis, The Architecture of Affordable Hous-ing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 14. See also Montgomery, “Mass Producing Bay Area Ar-chitecture,” 251; Randall, America’s Original GI Town; Adamson, Eichler.

14. Critique of ordinary building is fundamental to the field of architecture—it is, arguably, what sepa-rates it from the larger field of building production. From this perspective virtually all architectural writ-ing and design may be understood as protest. See Dell

Upton, “Architecture in Everyday Life,” New Literary History 33, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 707–23; Dell Upton, “Architectural History or Landscape History?,” Jour-nal of Architectural Education 44, no. 4 (August 1991): 195–99; Upton, “Pattern Books and Professionalism”; Garry Stevens, The Favored Circle: The Social Founda-tions of Architectural Distinction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). On urban design, see Eric Paul Mumford, Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).

15. Paul L. Anderson, “Atlanta Architects as Real Estate Developers: Case Studies and Their Applica-tion” (M.Arch thesis, Georgia Institute of Technol-ogy, 1981); Robert Goldberger, ed., John Portman: Art and Architecture (Atlanta, Ga.: High Museum of Art, 2009); John Portman and Jonathan Barnett, The Ar-chitect as Developer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976); Igor Marjanovic and Katerina Ruidi Ray, Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision (New York: Prince-ton Architectural Press, 2010); Zoë Ryan et al., eds., Bertrand Goldberg: Architecture of Invention (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011); Jay Wick-ersham, “Ethics in the 1970s: From Neutral Expert to Market Competitor,” unpublished paper presented at the Sixty-Fourth Annual Meeting, Society of Architec-tural Historians, New Orleans, La., April 13–17, 2011.

16. Inwood Tower sales prospectus, item 1, image 1, YR.1527.MH.001.001, New York Real Estate Brochure Collection, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, http://nyre.cul.columbia.edu/images/view/62743.

17. Most of the limited scholarship on DeMars con-cerns the FSA projects. See Greg Hise, “From Road-side Camps to Garden Homes: Housing and Commu-nity Planning for California’s Migrant Work Force, 1935–1941,” in Perspectives in Vernacular Architec-ture, V, ed. Collins and Hudgins, 243–58; Eric Mum-ford, “National Defense Migration and the Trans-formations of American Urbanism, 1940–1942,” Journal of Architectural Education 61, no. 3 (Febru-ary 2008): 25–34. On his redevelopment work, see Richard Brandi, “San Francisco’s Diamond Heights: Urban Renewal and the Modernist City,” Journal of Planning History 12, no. 2 (May 2013): 133–53; Peter Albert Allen, “A Space for Living: Region and Nature in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1939–69” (PhD diss.,




University of California, Berkeley, 2009), chaps. 3–4; Damon John Scott, “The City Aroused: Sexual Poli-tics and the Transformation of San Francisco’s Urban Landscape, 1943–64,” (PhD diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2008), 55–60, 200–202.

18. Quotation from Vernon Armand DeMars, A Life in Architecture: Indian Dancing, Migrant Housing, Telesis, Design for Urban Living, Theater, Teaching, oral history conducted by Suzanne B. Riess in 1988–89, University History Series, University of California (1992). On his politics, see Montgomery, “Mass Pro-ducing Bay Area Architecture,” 231.

19. DeMars, A Life in Architecture, 192–93.20. See Bobeczko and Longstreth, “Housing Re-

form Meets the Marketplace,” 163; Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (1987; repr., Washington, D.C.: Beard Books, 2002), chaps. 1, 6.

21. Vernon DeMars, “Look Homeward, Housing,” Architectural Record 99, no. 4 (April 1946): 87; Weiss, The Rise of the Community Builders, 5.

22. DeMars, A Life in Architecture, 227.23. “Projected Postwar Neighborhoods 2: Mixed

Rental Neighborhood, Washington,” Architectural Forum 10, no. 4 (October 1943): 71–90; DeMars, A Life in Architecture, 228–33; quotation 231. Koch, through his work with Walter Gropius’s The Architects Col-laborative, also appears to have engaged in light real-estate development after the war. See Montgomery, “High Density, Low-Rise Housing,” 100–101.

24. Richard Pratt, Homes for Tomorrow from “La-dies’ Home Journal,” brochure for exhibition organized by Ladies’ Home Journal at The Emporium, San Fran-cisco’s Shopping Center, 835 Market Street (1945), Environmental Design Archive, College of Environ-mental Design, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as EDA), Vernon DeMars Collection, folder v154; Tomorrow’s Small House, reprint brochure with revisions of Elizabeth B. Mock, “Tomorrow’s Small House: Models and Plans,” Bulletin of the Mu-seum of Modern Art 12, no. 5 (Summer 1945): 3–19.

25. “D.C. Housing Co-op Planning Bannockburn ‘Dream’ Project,” Washington Post, April 16, 1946, 10; Eugene L. Mayer, “The Cooperative Spirit of Bannock-burn Lives,” Washington Post, February 13, 1986, MD1; “Mary Fox Herling, Activist in Labor, Service Group,” Washington Post, November 7, 1978, C4; “Plans for a Cooperative ‘Balanced Community,’” The American

City 62 (February 1947): 86–87; Conrad Harness, “First Families in Homes at Co-op’s Housing Project,” Washington Post, October 16, 1949, 1R; DeMars, A Life in Architecture, 235–41.

26. DeMars, A Life in Architecture, 286–88; Brandi, “San Francisco’s Diamond Heights”; George Duggar, “Building Types and Densities (A Preliminary Report Presented for Discussion by the Diamond Heights Planning Conference),” mimeograph, February 8, 1951, EDA, Vernon DeMars Collection, folder V152; “P/A Progress Preview: 28-Block Projects for Heart of San Francisco,” Progressive Architecture 34, no. 2 (February 1953): 17–22; “Two Renewal Projects Set a New Standard of Quality in Urban Housing Design,” House & Home 25, no. 2 (February 1964): 90–97.

27. Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our Deeds: The African American Community in Richmond, Cali-fornia, 1910–1963 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1993), chap. 8.

28. Donald Hardison, letter to Vernon DeMars, August 31, 1950, EDA, Vernon DeMars Collection, folder IV37; DeMars, A Life in Architecture, 289–90; “Donald Hardison, Prominent Bay Area Architect, 1916–2012,” El Cerrito Patch, September 21, 2012, http://elcerrito.patch.com/articles/donald-hardison-prominent-bay-area-architect-1916–2012.

29. On reception, see, for example, “Row Housing: Can It Help Solve the Builders’ No. 1 Problem?,” House & Home 8, no. 1 (July 1955): 102–16; Montgomery, “Mass Producing Bay Area Architecture,” 248; Don-ald L. Hardison, copy of letter to Lucinda Woodward, Office of Historic Preservation, California State Parks, Sacramento, July 25, 1998, EDA, Vernon DeMars Col-lection, folder V17.

30. Richmond, Calif., City Planning Commission, A Report on Housing and Redevelopment: An Element of the Richmond Master Plan (Richmond, Calif.: 1950); Richmond, Calif., City Planning Commission, We Plan for Richmond, annual report, 1953–54 (Rich-mond, Calif.: 1954); Moore, To Place Our Deeds, chap. 4, esp. 114–18, 190nn61–65; Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 215–28.

31. Vernon DeMars, carbon copy of letter to Freder-ick Gutheim, February 23, 1955, EDA, Vernon DeMars Collection, folder V47.

32. DeMars was the architect for an earlier single-




family project in Richmond developed by Barrett, called College Highlands, and he was a cousin of John H. Tolan, a lawyer who served as Barrett’s “consultant on governmental relations and financing” and later as a Barrett executive. Richmond, Calif., City Planning Commission, A Preliminary Plan for Redevelopment: 1B the Pilot Project (Richmond, Calif.: 1954); Barrett Homes, Inc., The Plaza Richmond: A Study of 1957–58 Sales in the Pilot Project Redevelopment Area (1958), 3–4; DeMars, A Life in Architecture, 304.

33. DeMars in a personal interview with Roger Montgomery taped in 1972, quoted in Montgomery, “Mass Producing Bay Area Architecture,” 248.

34. DeMars, A Life in Architecture, 304–6; Ver-non DeMars, letter to Douglas Haskell, Architectural Forum, July 17, 1956, EDA, Vernon DeMars Collection, folder II3; Barrett Homes, Inc., The Plaza Richmond, 5.

35. Barrett Homes, Inc., The Plaza Richmond, 12–32.

36. Barrett Homes, Inc., The Plaza Richmond, 17, 24.37. Johnson, The Second Gold Rush; Moore, To

Place Our Deeds; Donna Graves, ed., “Not at Home on the Home Front: Japanese Americans and Italian Americans in Richmond during World War II,” com-puter printout, 2004, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Donald Hardison, carbon copy of letter to Hayes and Smith, Architects, San Francisco, May 9, 1966, EDA, Vernon DeMars Collection, folder V47; Montgomery, “Mass Producing Bay Area Archi-tecture,” 249.

38. Montgomery, “Mass Producing Bay Area Ar-chitecture,” 248; “Minority Housing: A Puzzling Market Starts to Shape Up,” House & Home 7, no. 2 (February 1965): 80.

39. Other pioneers of the DeMars model, both based in Southern California, were modernists Rich-ard Neutra, who designed several innovative multi-family complexes for public and private clients, and Gregory Ain. Brown & Guenther also followed the lead of figures like I. N. Phelps Stokes, a contemporary of Flagg’s also engaged in tenement reform, and Spring-steen & Hammer, socialist architects of many of New York’s trade-union limited-equity co-ops. Thomas S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Ar-chitecture (New York: Rizzoli, 2005); Anthony Denzer, Gregory Ain: The Modern Home as Social Commentary (New York: Rizzoli, 2008); Roy Lubove, “I. N. Phelps Stokes: Tenement Architect, Economist, Planer,” Jour-

nal of the Society of Architectural Historians 23, no. 2 (May 1964): 75–87; Lasner, High Life, chap. 3.

40. “Named to Housing Post,” New York Times, Jan-uary 6, 1939, 41; “Housing Program Started by State,” New York Times, August 21, 1939, 29; The AIA Histori-cal Director of American Architects, s.v. “Brown, George David, Jr.” (ahd 1005363), http://www.aia.org/about/history/aiab082017; “Rent Registration Extended 15 Days,” New York Times, November 28, 1943, 3.

41. The AIA Historical Director of American Archi-tects, s.v. “Guenther, Bernard William” (ahd 1017372), http://www.aia.org/about/history/aiab082017; “Ber-nard W. Guenther Dies at 76; Ex-partner in Architec-tural Firm,” New York Times, November 28, 1980, B12.

42. Lee E. Cooper, “$8,00,000 Private Project to Offer Non-profit Homes,” New York Times, September 19, 1948, 1; “Closets Feature Plan for Housing,” New York Times, April 17, 1949, R4; “Architects Eye Cor-ners to Cut,” New York Times, October 4, 1959, R1.

43. Cooper, “$8,00,000 Private Project to Offer Non-profit Homes”; “Closets Feature Plan for Hous-ing,” New York Times; “Design for Queensview Omits Basements; Other Innovations to Cut Housing Costs,” New York Times, May 15, 1949, R1.

44. On Queensview and other social-housing com-missions, see Lasner, High Life, 133, 249; Thomas W. Ennis, “Co-op Buyers Get Tenant Training,” New York Times, January 19, 1958, R1; “Fort Greene Title I,” in Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York, ed. Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, 267–69 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); “City Hous-ing Agency Hires 2 Architects,” New York Times, Au-gust 19, 1958, 21; John P. Callahan, “Renewal Survey Set on West Side,” New York Times, December 16, 1956, R1. Public projects included the Jefferson Houses in East Harlem (1951), Fulton Houses in Chelsea (1960), and the Rosedale Houses (1960) and Monroe Houses (1961) in the Bronx. Market rate included Town House East (1957), Yorkgate (1957), and 400 East Eighty-Ninth Street (1961) on the Upper East Side and Law-rence House (1959) in Greenwich Village.

45. “Architects Hail Redevelopment Idea,” New York Times, December 21, 1952, R3.

46. Warren Moscow, letter to the editor, New York Times, March 16, 1986, R12.

47. Wagner quoted in Paul Crowell, “Shift to Sub-urbs Worries Wagner; 1954 Gains Listed,” New York Times, March 23, 1955, 1.




48. Quotations are reporter Glenn Fowler para-phrasing Brown—likely from text written by Brown for submission to the Times—in Glenn Fowler, “Fa-miliarity with Varied Fields Required of Today’s Ar-chitects,” New York Times, September 3, 1961, R1.

49. Thomas W. Ennis, “2 Co-ops Set Here under State Act,” New York Times, August 25, 1957, R1. On the difficulty, and history, of the Inwood sites, see Ed-mond J. Barnett, “Architects Use Difficult Sites,” New York Times, January 15, 1961, R1; “3d Inwood Co-op on Historic Site,” New York Times, March 19, 1961, R8.

50. Barnett, “Architects Use Difficult Sites”; “Ar-chitects Find Zone Code Flaws,” New York Times, May 6, 1962, R1.

51. Guenther quoted in “Architects Eye Corners to Cut,” New York Times, October 4, 1959, R1. Brown quoted in “Costly Materials Favored in Co-ops,” New York Times, May 7, 1961, R8.

52. “Costly Materials Favored in Co-ops,” New York Times, May 7, 1961, R8.

53. “Limited-Profit Projects Offer Growing List of Conveniences,” New York Times, November 20, 1960, R1.

54. Glenn Fowler, “Families Lured by Larger Suites,” New York Times, June 18, 1961, R1; Lasner, High Life, 150–52; Clara Fox, Community Living in Co-operative Housing: A Report on a Two-Year Pilot Proj-ect (New York: Play Schools Association, 1958); Clara Fox, Volunteer Leadership in Cooperative Housing (New York: Play Schools Association, 1960); Schick Gross-man and Susan K. Kinoy, Learning to Live in a Middle Income Cooperative, The Play Schools Association Co-operative Housing Report, 1961 no. 2 (New York: Play Schools Association, 1961).

55. On policy, see “Projects Stress Design Changes,” New York Times, April 22, 1962, R4. Other projects included Tower Gardens (1959), Schuyler House (1964), and Highbridge House (1972) in the Bronx; Ebbets Field Apartments (1962) in Brooklyn; and York Hill (1962) and the Bridge Apartments (1964) in Manhattan.

56. Erwin Gerber, membership files, American Institute of Architects Archives, The AIA Historical Directory of American Architects, s.v. “Gerber, Erwin” (ahd 1015693), http://www.aia.org/about/history/aiab082017; U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on Housing, 80th Congress, 1st session, Study and In-

vestigation of Housing, Hearings, Part 3 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1948), 1308; U.S. Tax Court, Reports of the Tax Court of the United States, April 1, 1959–September 30, 1959, Ella C. Thomas, re-porter (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Of-fice, 1960), 1201; Anna Katherine Farber Conrad, “In-formation about Erwin Gerber,” Descendent Tree of Josef Farber, Genealogy.com, http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/f/a/r/Anna-Katherine-Farber-conrad-Colorado/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-0006.html; “Apartment Boom,” Architectural Forum, 97.

57. Caption to photo standalone, “Housing Proper-ties in Suburbs Attracting Interest,” New York Times, October 4, 1946, R1; “Plans Are Filed for Warwick Apartments,” Red Bank Register, July 12, 1945, sec. 2:1; “New Apartments May Be Ready by December,” Red Bank Register, October 17, 1946, 1; caption to photo standalone, “New Housing Groups Figuring in Latest Realty Activity,” New York Times, October 27, 1946, R1.

58. Bobeczko and Longstreth, “Housing Reform Meets the Marketplace.”

59. U.S. Congress, Study and Investigation of Hous-ing, 1309; “Apartment Boom,” Architectural Forum, 104; Lasner, High Life, chap. 6.

60. African American projects were Montclair Gar-dens in Montclair, N.J. (1950), and Merrick Park Gar-dens in Queens (1952). See “Minority Housing to Rise in New Jersey,” New York Times, April 23, 1950, R6; “Cooperative Apartments for 116 Families Started on Old Collyer Realty in Jamaica,” New York Times, April 8, 1951, R9; “Merrick Park Gardens,” Journal of Hous-ing 10 (October 1953): 353; Madison S. Jones Jr., “Ne-groes Acquire Housing under Section 213,” Insured Housing Portfolio 17 (Summer 1953): 9–11.

61. U.S. Congress, Study and Investigation of Hous-ing, 1309.

62. Lasner, High Life, 118–24; Bobeczko and Long-streth, “Housing Reform Meets the Marketplace,” 163; Radford, Modern Housing for America; Hunt, “Was the 1937 Housing Act a Pyrrhic Victory?” On philan-thropic housing in the nineteenth century, see also, for example, Daphne Spain, “Octavia Hill’s Philosophy of Housing Reform: From British Roots to American Soil,” Journal of Planning History 5, no. 2 (May 2006): 106–25.

63. U.S. Tax Court, Reports of the Tax Court of the United States, 1144–48, 1201–3.




64. U.S. Tax Court, Reports of the Tax Court of the United States, 1202.

65. Joseph B. Mason, History of Housing in the U.S. 1930–1980 (Houston, Tex.: Gulf, 1982), 49–50.

66. U.S. Tax Court, Reports of the Tax Court of the United States, 1204.

67. “Apartment Boom,” Architectural Forum, 106.68. “Apartment Boom,” Architectural Forum, 97,

98.69. “Apartment Boom,” Architectural Forum, 97,

98.70. “Apartment Boom,” Architectural Forum, 106.71. “Apartment Boom,” Architectural Forum, 106.72. U.S. Tax Court, Reports of the Tax Court of the

United States, 1201. See also Karen Samuels, “Was Your Home Built on the Old Rentzheimer Farm?,” Hellertown-Lower Suacon [Penn.] Patch, August 15, 2011, http://hellertown.patch.com/blog_posts/was-your- home-built-on-the-old-rentzheimer-farm; Anna Kath-erine Farber Conrad, “Information about Erwin Gerber.”

73. Montgomery, “High Density, Low-Rise Hous-ing”; “Architects as Developers: Low-Income Housing on an Urban Site,” Architectural Record 148, no. 3 (Sep-tember 1970): 150–51.

74. Anderson, “Atlanta Architects as Real Estate Developers,” 2–4.

75. Anderson, “Atlanta Architects as Real Estate Developers,” 6; Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer.

76. Meier quoted in William G. Blair, “Should Ar-chitects Become Builders and Developers?,” New York Times, August 19, 1980, RE1.

77. Jonathan Barnett, “Why John Portman Became an Entrepreneur as Well as an Architect,” in Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, 4.

78. William Brewer, interviewed 1980 by Paul L. Anderson, quoted in Anderson, “Atlanta Architects as Real Estate Developers,” 60.

79. Daniel Metzler, interviewed 1980 by Paul L. Anderson, quoted in Anderson, “Atlanta Architects as Real Estate Developers,” 72.

80. Henry Schwab, interviewed 1980 by Paul L. Anderson, quoted in Anderson, “Atlanta Architects as Real Estate Developers,” 95.

81. I. E. (Ike) Saporta, interviewed 1980 by Paul L. Anderson, quoted in Anderson, “Atlanta Architects as Real Estate Developers,” 89.



Architect as Developer and the Postwar U.S. Apartment, 1945-1960

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