Highlight from the Journal of Planning History 

Herman Jessor. Typical floor plan of the First Building of the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative in the Bronx, completed in 1927 using the “garden apartment” typology. Source: 30 Years of Amalgamated Cooperative Housing, 1957.

Ana García Sánchez, Ana Torres Barchino, Jorge Llopis Verdú, and Nicholas Dagen Bloom examines the success of “towers in the park” in New York City in “The ‘Tower in the Park’ in New York City (1930–1965): A Comparative Analysis between Cooperative and Public Housing.” This article focuses on cooperative and public housing’s physical aspects over the middle decades of the twentieth century through the work of two architectural firms that spent their careers designing affordable housing complexes: Herman Jessor and Frederick G. Frost. To do so, four pairs of projects were explored in more depth, belonging to four stages in the history of this typology. The analysis concludes that systemic differences between these types of housing were determined by funding and policy while showing that these architects’ design approaches were quite similar.

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