Collective Housing Atlanta - Vienna: Mapping Interwar Connections

Atlanta, Georgia, USA, was the site of both the first New Deal neighborhood clearance project in the United States, in 1934, and of America's first completed federally-funded public housing.This proposal investigates how architectural ideas and forms traveled and transformed across the Atlantic. Of particular interest for this research are the two fact-finding missions that Charles F. Palmer, real-estate mogul turned housing crusader behind the Atlanta projects, took to Europe in 1934 and 1936 to document housing sites he deemed worthy of possible replication in Atlanta. For Palmer the “primary object of the trip is to study low-cost housing," and he did so by visting housing estates in Italy, Germany, Austria, Poland, the USSR, the Netherlands, and the UK. Vienna was a key site of investigation for Palmer.Between 1919 and 1934, the widely celebrated architecture and planning effort in so-called Red Vienna provided 63,000 new affordable dwellings for the city’s working class. Through this period, new housing projects of Red Vienna became ones of the most impactful examples of social housing in Europe.This research exchange project aims to expand the interwar architectural map to establish connections between the Austrian and American housing efforts. Through a detailed investigation of the ties between the Viennese estates and urban initiatives and Techwood and University Homes in Atlanta, the research seeks to establish Atlanta’s role as a clearinghouse for European social housing ideas, and as the site of the earliest home-grown housing precedents in U.S.The first goal of this proposal is to produce new historical knowledge concerning the Palmer’s mission in Vienna.The second goal of this research project is to explore the architectural results of this housing-focused exchange.The third goal of this research proposal is to go beyond historical understanding to provide a critical contemporary perspective of these accomplishments.The main hypothesis of the proposed research project is that the connections established between Atlanta and Vienna realized collective housing accomplishments that were innovative during the Interwar period and are still relevant references for contemporary and future housing design from a collective perspective.This project proposes new analytical tools and methodology to carry out an original and comparative study about these outstanding, yet not yet well-known connections. For the first time, the housing initiatives from the Interwar period are not only considered as a regional phenomenon, but as a global one.