This project, the result of five years of doctoral research, offers an interesting opportunity to address the study of New York public housing from the standpoint of architectural history. While focusing on the Swiss-American architect William Lescaze and restoring him to his rightful place in the history of twentieth-century architecture, the book deals with a number of fundamental architectural and social concerns: the role played by a first generation of European emigre architects in the definition of New York architecture during the New Deal; these émigrés social responsibility and the role of architecture itself in the shaping of public housing programs; and the encounter between the American planning tradition of the 1920s with European models that gradually came to be accepted by housing reformers and federal agencies for North American public housing until the 1960s.

Gaia Caramellino is a postdoctoral fellow at the Politecnico di Torino. She teaches architectural and urban history at the Politecnico of Turin and Milan and is the principal investigator of the Italian national research project "Architectures for the Middle Class in Italy 1950s–1970s: for a social history of dwelling." She specializes in the circulation of housing models between Europe and the Americas, with a particular focus on the interwar period. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and research grants and is visiting scholar at the Canadian Center of Architecture for 2011. Her most recent work on Willliam Lescaze’s involvement in New York public housing was published in Italy in 2010.