“Order, Convenience, and Beauty”: The Style, Space, and Multiple Narratives of San Felipe Courts

ABSTRACT:San Felipe Courts (1939–1942), a low-income housing development designed by Karl Kamrath in Houston, Texas, was built under the impetus of New Deal progressivism. A modern complex modeled on the Zeilenbau superblock, the development was intended to house white residents in Houston’s Fourth Ward, a neighborhood historically home to the city’s African American community. The style and spatialization of San Felipe Courts paid little heed to the concerns of the local community, as municipal leaders and housing officials imposed a new vision of modernity on the city. This vision, drawn from the political context of Southern progressivism and purveyed through various urban revitalization efforts of the 1920s and 1930s, entailed an aesthetic and spatial remapping of race within Houston to create a curated landscape from suburb to downtown, setting the formal language of San Felipe’s modernism in opposition to the extant built environment of the Fourth Ward. By using San Felipe Courts as a case study, this paper both supports and challenges national narratives regarding the efficacy of American public housing by situating this conversation in its local context.