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These buildings provided not only bright and airy apartments, but also communal baths and great open parks that completely altered urban architecture’s relationship to nature.

Their efforts included massive new public housing estates, built for the city’s working population. Activists transformed enormous areas of Vienna under the mantra “Licht, Luft und Sonne” (“light, air and sun”). In 1920s Vienna, then the capital of a socialist government, planners had a much greater ability to shape urban space. The mandated changes ironically created a type of socialism of the sky, framing sunlight as a shared urban resource in the city’s most commercial sector. One can see the results of these codes throughout Manhattan in structures built between the 1910s and the early 1960s. The resulting buildings-with setbacks that reduce the upper floors in size so that the structure narrows toward the top-ensured that, in heavily built-up areas, some light would reach the interiors of lower floors and the streets below.

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To protect their investments, the city’s powerful real estate sector initiated a significant redrafting of the city’s building code to protect their buildings from shadow, transforming New York City’s urban sky. The erection of massive buildings in Lower Manhattan often cast smaller neighboring structures in permanent shadow, reducing their market value. The anti-darkness legislation for New York tenements extended to the city’s commercial sector in the 1910s. These inadequate slivers of space resulted in floor plans shaped like exercise weights, giving rise to the nickname “dumbbell tenement.” The building type remains a common feature in many Manhattan neighborhoods. In New York, urban reformers sought to transform tenements by demanding that developers include two interior open shafts for light and air. Given the tendency of developers to maximize profit by minimizing sunlight, one can easily understand the general distaste for darkness in the built environment. Benoit in Her Hudson Street Attic, 1897, gelatin silver print, 7 3/4 by 9 5/8 inches. All of this is to say that these spaces made significant impressions on their inhabitants. In early twentieth-century Vienna, one of the city’s many unhappy residents mentioned the dark and miserable housing conditions in a notorious memoir titled Mein Kampf. He was among the first to introduce early techniques for flash photography from Germany to the United States-this process was necessary to capture the lightless interiors of the city’s architecture. Riis initiated a reassessment of tenement building practices, and transformed American documentary photography at the same time. In New York, Danish-American activist Jacob Riis (1849–1914) famously documented the lightless interiors of so-called pre-law tenements. Nevertheless, the darkness of the cities’ residential, commercial, and public spaces became associated with otherness, disease, and poverty. In Vienna, renters of the city’s tenement apartments, many of them windowless and subterranean, essentially “hot desked” their homes to pay the rent and address the housing shortage-leaseholders who worked during the day would rent their beds to others who worked at night.ĭaytime darkness was probably the least of New York and Viennese residents’ problems. In both cities, numerous families could be legally squeezed into these cramped apartments. Such tenement buildings lacked adequate interior sunlight and ventilation, due to exploitative real estate markets and an absence of civic planning practices: the structures were built to pack in as many residents as possible. In both cities, developers quickly erected dwellings for a burgeoning population of the working poor and lower middle class. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, laissez-faire development practices in New York and Vienna resulted in extensive physical transformations that can still be seen in those places today.

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