Journal Article

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

Matthew Gordon Lasner

2014

Overview

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.

• Publisher: University of Minnesota,University of Minnesota Press
• Subject: Anderson, Paul L / Apartments / Architectural control / Architectural design / Architecture / Brochures / Communities / Houses / Housing / Portman, John C., Jr / Publishing industry / Real estate developers / Residential buildings / Row houses / Urban design