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The fields of professional architecture and mass-market homebuilding have stood in opposition to one another since the nineteenth century in the United States. Boundaries between the two, however, were always permeable. This article explores an overlooked chapter in this dialogue: three architects who worked, in part, as developers of multifamily housing in the fifteen years after World War II, Vernon DeMars in the San Francisco Bay Area, Brown & Guenther in New York City, and Erwin Gerber in suburban New Jersey. Each followed a distinct path to design-develop and was motivated by a different set of concerns, from financial profit to the desire to advance professional values like high-quality design. All were enabled by the postwar welfare state that while encouraging homogeneity through the large-scale production of generic houses also empowered small-scale actors, including architects, to build alternatives. In employing policy toward this end, designers-as-developers generated opportunities to move beyond the incremental give-and-take of patron and client to better control production, injecting creativity, variety, and innovation into American housing. Their example highlights the complexity of midcentury housing policy and real-estate practice and reveals new ways in which these forces helped determine the shape of the U.S. built environment.

ATLANTA — John Portman is a hometown boy who made good, and his vision has helped reshape the urban landscape.

The Greyhound property acquisition follows an eight-year growth spiral for AMERICASMART-ATLANTA, which houses the world's largest single collection of consumer gift, home furnishings, area rug and apparel goods, and which retailers from every U.S. state and 80 countries attending its trade shows recognize as the most important wholesale marketplace for their business.* \"We have executed the first phase of our vision -- to build the world's largest department store for retailers,\" notes founder [John C. Portman, Jr.], who launched an AMERICASMART-ATLANTA forerunner home furnishings trade show in 1957 and who has subsequently designed and engineered the complex's 47-year evolution. *As reported in independent research -- The July 2003 Market Buyer Benchmark Study -- conducted by Moore & Symons, Atlanta, for AMERICASMART-ATLANTA. SOURCE AMERICASMART-ATLANTA