The architects of the Amsterdam Houses were Grosvenor Atterbury (1869 – 1956), Harvey Wiley Corbett (1873 – 1954)and Arthur C Holden (1890 – 1994). The landscape architects were Gilmore D Clarke and Michael Rapuano.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the country’s best architects designed not only famous buildings for wealthy clients, but also applied their skills to designing modern housing for the poor and middle-class.
The Amsterdam Houses is part of this historical moment. Its architects were responsible for some of New York City’s most famous buildings.
Grosvenor Atterbury, for example, designed the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1936), the Blue Room in New York’s City Hall (1915) before he turned his attention to designing the Amsterdam Houses. So, if you live in the Amsterdam Houses, you and the Mayor spend your days in spaces designed by the same person – not many New Yorkers can say that!
Criminal Courts Building, known as “The Tombs”
(1939)Corbett was also part of a team that designed the Rockefeller Center. If you compare the layout of Rockefeller Center below with the blueprints for the Amsterdam Houses elsewhere in this exhibit, you will see that there are many similarities in how both developments are laid out. Both have what architects call a “central axis,” a walkway that runs down the middle of the plan. A central axis is something that comes from Ancient Roman city planning.
A Vision of Housing
The architects for the Amsterdam Houses had career-long interests in better housing for the poor and middle class.
Atterbury in particular, had been working on and writing about ways to get modern housing into the hands of those who had trouble affording it.
Atterbury diagnosed why housing was so expensive and proposed a solution in an article entitled “Model Towns In America” in the July 1912 issue of Scribner’s Magazine. He eventually got to apply these ideas in the Amsterdam Houses.
Atterbury described what he thought the problem with housing was in America. Atterbury felt that as housing materials got sold (“disributed”) from one middleman to the next, the price of those materials grew. This increase in the basic costs pushed the price of decent housing beyond the reach of many Americans.
Atterbury had a solution to this problem.
He thought that if instead of using a system of middlemen, buyers of housing got together (“collective action”) and designed, purchased, and built housing as a group, the price of housing would go down far enough that many more people could afford to live in decent housing.
Atterbury repeated this argument in an updated fashion in a February 13, 1931 article in the New York Times.
Atterbury argued that if the same assembly-line techniques used in making cars and clothes could be used in making building materials (“standardization of home building”), the cost of housing could fall by half.
To Atterbury and his fellow architects, the New York City Housing Authority was a chance to use the government to group housing customers together to share the costs of designing and building housing. The design of these developments could use the “standardization of home building” to get more housing for less into the hands of people who really needed it.
As the last page of the NYCHA manual given to new residents of the Amsterdam Houses in 1947 – 8 (elsewhere in this exhibit) said, “careful construction and the best equipment combines to give you the apartment designed for healthier, happier living.”
