SHELTER
April 1939
A Correlating Medium For Housing Progress
Maxwell Levinson [Editor]
Maxwell Levinson [Editor]: SHELTER [A Correlating Medium For Housing Progress]. New York: Shelter Research, Volume 3, Number 8, April 1939. Slim quarto. Printed stapled wrappers. 32 pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Cover photograph: Cedar Central Apartments, Cleveland, Ohio by Walter R. McCornack. Neat parallel crease from mailing, wrappers worn and nearly splitting at spine, but a good or better copy.
9 x 12 vintage magazine with 32 pages devoted to dream and lie of Public Housing before World War II. Assistant Editor: Nancy Gantt; Contributing Editors: Simon Breines, Frederick Kiesler, and Richard Nuetra [sic].
- Housing in Politics [Editorial]: Charles Abrams
- A Program for State and Local Participation in Public Housing: Harold S. Butterheim
- Housing Highlights: Frederick T. Paine
- Community Support for Public Housing: Thoms Humphries
- The Future of Planning is Now: Anna Shepard
- FSA—The Rural Housing Program: Baird Synder
- We Question Your City’s Housing Authority: Nancy Gantt
- The Housing Amendment: Andree Emery
- The New Agrarianism: Heyden Estey
- “How New York Lives,” Citizens’ Housing Council Photographic Competition
- Summer Housing Events
- Letters
Wikipedia defines "Shelter magazine" as a publishing trade term used to indicate a segment of the U.S. magazine market, designating a periodical publication with an editorial focus on interior design, architecture, home furnishings, and often gardening. Among Design aficionados the term is frequently used in the pejorative sense. How times have changed.
Back in 1932, a progressive group of architects formed an umbrella group called Shelter Research devoted to "achieving an adequate public housing program for the American people." Shelter Research then proceeded to intermittingly publish their magazine Shelter [A Correlating Medium For Housing Progress] over the next seven years.
The publishers boldly claimed "Shelter is the only publication in America solely devoted to modern architecture, the development of industrial housing and an adequate public housing program." They further stated that "Shelter does not concern itself with out-of-date issues, but only with those ideas which seek to fully utilize the products of technological advance."
Contributing Editors included Catherine Bauer, Maxwell Fry, Walter Gropius, P. Morton Shand, L. Moholy-Nagy and Frank Lloyd Wright. Each issue presented the newest progressive ideas in public and private dwelling, via exceptional [and uncredited] graphic design and typography.
Shelter clearly presented the Public Works Administration's agenda in both form and content. I don't think we will ever see its type again.