Ackerman, Frederick L.

An architect and housing reformer, Frederick Lee Ackerman (1878–1950) supported proactive engagement of the federal government to supply quality housing for the working class and to oversee national planning, integrating transportation, housing, [Page 3]commercial uses, and open space responsive to community needs. He participated in the federal government's earliest housing program, collaborated with architects Clarence S. Stein and Henry Wright on their celebrated projects Sunnyside (1924) and Radburn (1928), and worked for the New York City Housing Authority. While he favored traditional architecture and lower income housing, one of his most acclaimed designs was a modernist, luxury apartment building in New York City.

Following a trip to Great Britain in 1917 at the behest of Charles Whitaker, editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, to survey that country's government housing program, Ackerman became town planner for the United States Shipping Board's Emergency Fleet Corporation, overseeing the design of new communities for war workers. Ackerman advocated largescale development efficiently realized through combining individual lots and locating the structures, typically lowscale garden apartments, on the perimeter with common open space in the interior, a layout employed at Sunnyside and the early public housing projects of the 1930s. He shared the community-building ideas of Stein and Wright, advocating deconcentration of the congested metropolis into autonomous, inter-connected new towns of limited population with communal land ownership and joined these architects in forming the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA).

Considered by social critic and fellow RPAA member Lewis Mumford among the most radical thinkers of that group, Ackerman based his proposals for restructuring the capitalist system of land ownership and development to better accommodate the working class on the ideas of social economist Thorstein Veblen and land reformer Henry George. The technical expert or technocrat had the expertise to formulate new strategies of land development informed and coordinated by centralized government to ensure that any increase in property values due to population growth or public improvements accrued to the people rather than to a few land speculators. Ackerman believed that the architect, armed with a combination of planning tools, cost analysis, design skills, and a holistic, regionalist perspective, occupied a central role in this process.

Following the establishment of the federal public housing program, Ackerman headed the technical staff of the New York City Housing Authority (1934–1939). He designed a variety of projects from faculty housing at his alma mater Cornell University to New York City's first public housing project to the commercial Plaza Building at Radburn. His circa 1938 luxury apartment building in New York City at East 83rd Street is renowned for its modern exterior featuring glass block that expressed the technological advances inside—the first apartment building in the city with central air.