(C) Common Dreams
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New Deal–Era Leftists Tried to Win Beautiful Social Housing for the Masses [1]
['Gail Radford', 'Tyler Austin Harper', 'Jared Abbott', 'Fred Deveaux', 'Cori Bush', 'Shawn Fain', 'Dan Darrah', 'Galen Herz', 'Meagan Day', 'Ryan Cooper']
Date: 2024-09
Gail Radford
Catherine Bauer started out as a person who was very interested in art, architecture, and culture. When she was just out of college, she went to Paris and took in these various streams of modern art and culture. And as time went by, she became involved with Americans and Europeans who were interested in the housing question. Partially by accident, she ended up being part of a study group of architects and urban planners in the United States who were influenced by the European housing movement. They were very much concerned with creating a more egalitarian way of living.
Bauer traveled through Europe and met a number of the leading architects in the 1920s. There were a lot of cities throughout Europe that were funding housing, and so the leading architects of the time — who we associate with international-style modernism — were very excited about these commissions that were available to them, where they could build on a large scale and also use some new materials and techniques to bring costs down.
Bauer was taken with all of this. She wrote about it and spent a lot of time with Americans who were interested in implementing some of these ideas here in the United States. And that’s the basis of her book, Modern Housing. She didn’t mean modern in the sense of more modern architecture, necessarily. She meant up-to-date housing, with the kinds of amenities and possibilities that the new kinds of building could bring. As you say, she is the heroine of my book — that’s where I pick up my title, Modern Housing for America.
Bauer was able to move in a lot of different circles and integrate a lot of ideas, and she was able to kind of package them in a way that made them more legible and understandable to a fairly wide audience. But as time went by, she changed. She was no longer a kind of art dilettante, and she was no longer just focused on design questions the way she had been when she kind of got started.
She started to understand that to put some of these ideas into practice, there had to be a political movement, and one had to attend to the financial dimensions, which she initially was not really concerned with.
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[1] Url:
https://jacobin.com/2023/04/public-housing-history-new-deal-catherine-bauer-labor-housing-conference
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