Drexel Town and Garden Houses First Floor Unit, Chicago, Illinois, Isometric

Built on the once-magnificent Drexel Boulevard in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago, Goldberg’s Drexel Town and Garden Houses were planned as a racially integrated community of 64 townhouses, placing homeownership within the reach of lower- and middle-income families. The first floor of each townhouse features large windows that extend the open plan of the main living space to rear patios enclosed with perforated concrete-block walls to provide privacy while preserving the cohesion of the site plan. While the press linked Drexel to larger mechanisms of urban renewal, Goldberg carefully framed his project as one focused on the improvement rather than the transformation of an established neighborhood where good transportation and other desirable features already existed. Poised between individual and mass housing, the Drexel Town and Garden Houses signaled a new direction in Goldberg’s work, focusing onissues of density, resources, and context—in short, “a thing called urbanism.”