The Surprising Origins of FAR: How Housing Reformed Zoning
Who invented FAR? or how did FAR get written into the New York City zoning law? The idea seems to develop in the movement for large-scale public housing in the mid-1930s and the architects and planners of the Technical Division of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The key figure was the department’s head, Frederick L. Ackerman (1878-1950), a determined technocrat who worked, researched, and wrote with William F. R. Ballard (1905-1993). Ballard carried these ideas forward in the 1950 consultants’ report Plan for Rezoning New York City, and 1963, he became the Chairman of the NYC Planning Commission.
Lecture Series
“From Tenements to Towers,” the subtitle of the exhibition HOUSING DENSITY at The Skyscraper Museum, described the arc for this series of lectures and panel programs that examined the history and strategies of development – both private market and publicly-assisted – for housing New York’s multitudes. The programs brought together leading historians of New York’s architecture, housing, and urban history to consider how debates about “density” had shaped and reshaped New York from the early 20th century reforms of tenement crowding to the problematic urbanism of the “towers in the park” models in the postwar era.