American Empire: The Rise of a Global Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home, 1945–2000; Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World; and Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II.
Freeman applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia, with the following results:
Page 99 of Garden Apartments describes two residential complexes built by the United States government during World War II. During the war, all civilian housing production was suspended, except for projects for war workers. For some of these, the government hired inventive, modernist architects, who during the postwar years would become architectural stars. Discussed on this page are Aluminum City Terrace, in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, for workers at a nearby aluminum plant (with a photograph of it), and the Centerline Defense Housing Project, outside of Detroit, designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen and their partner Robert Swanson, for workers at a nearby tank plant and naval armory (with photographs on the next page).Learn more about Garden Apartments at the University of Chicago Press website.
Page 99 does, and does not, give a good sense of this book as a whole. It examines what were in effect exceptions that illuminate the norm. Garden Apartments traces the origins of the two- and three-story apartment complexes, set on large landscaped sites, that are common across the United States, to early twentieth-century efforts to provide affordable housing to European workers and their families. In shows how, when brought to the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, such residential complexes generally were stripped of their most radical and innovative social and design features. During World War II, however, there was a moment when a convergence of progressive New Deal officials, left-leaning labor unions, and modernist architects led to a short burst of construction of brilliantly-designed, affordable, pathbreaking projects for ordinary working people, like the two described on page 99. The moment was short-lived. When, after the war, garden apartment construction resumed, with government assistance, on a mass scale, much more conventional, even banal, designs became near-universal. Garden Apartments recounts how these buildings nonetheless served their residents well. Many still do (as do the page 99 projects). Page 99 thus suggests mostly unrealized possibilities for a form of housing which, even when dumbed-down, represented a significant social achievement.
Garden Apartments: The History of a Low-Rent Utopia is the first history of a widespread form of housing almost completely ignored by scholars and policymakers. It is simultaneously a political, architectural, and social history, with the text complimented by extensive illustrations. Written at a time of an intense crisis of housing affordability, it argues that we might learn something about how to address it by looking at our past.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
