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Langston Terrace Dwellings

Architect
Hilyard Robert Robinson
City
Washington, DC
Langston Terrace Dwellings
Photo: Smallbones, CC0
See it on the map

Langston Terrace Dwellings, near 21st Street and Benning Road NE, was built between 1935 and 1938 as the first federally funded housing project in Washington and one of the first four in the country, developed under Franklin Roosevelt's Public Works Administration. It was named for John Mercer Langston, a 19th-century abolitionist attorney who founded Howard University's law school and served Virginia in Congress.

the building

Open where Techwood was not. Unlike Techwood Homes in Atlanta, the first public housing project in the United States, Langston Terrace was built to house African American families, making its construction a deliberate break from the segregated model of the earliest New Deal housing.

Bauhaus meets landscape design. The complex was co-designed by Bauhaus-trained Washington architect Hilyard Robinson and Los Angeles architect Paul Revere Williams in the International Style, with site planning and landscape design by David Williston.

the style

The International Style design, stripped of historical ornament, reflected Hilyard Robinson's Bauhaus training in Germany and marked a deliberate architectural modernism for public housing rather than the more traditional row-house forms used elsewhere in the city.

the architect

Hilyard Robinson was a Bauhaus-trained Washington architect who co-designed Langston Terrace with Los Angeles-based architect Paul Revere Williams, bringing European modernist training to one of the earliest federal housing projects in the country.

significance

Langston Terrace is a DC Historic Landmark and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987, recognized as the first federally funded housing project built in Washington, D.C., and one of the first four built anywhere in the United States.

nearby

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