Participant Info

First Name
Marta
Last Name
Gutman
Country
United States
State
NY
Affiliation
Spitzer School of Architecture @ CCNY | CUNY
Website URL
https://ssa.ccny.cuny.edu/blog/people/marta-gutman/
Keywords
public architecture for children, US
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Marta Gutman, PhD, an architectural and urban historian, is dean of the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York | CUNY, the city’s premier public school of architecture. Expert in the history of public architecture for children and in repurposing architecture as a strategy for city-building, she studies ordinary places in cities. Through this work, she tackles power and culture in all walks of life, emphasizes the activism of women especially on behalf of children, and ties local stories to national and international histories. Gutman’s commitment to social justice has been manifest since she started her career as an architect designing housing for the New York City Housing Authority and shelters for battered women, abused children, and homeless New Yorkers.

Gutman’s A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland won the Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book (North American) in urban history (2015) and the Spiro Kostof Book Award (2017). A Distinguished CUNY Research Fellow in 2018, Gutman is the immediate past president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, a founding coeditor of PLATFORM, and a former coeditor of Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. Her chapter “Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem,” in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, eds. Ansley T. Erickson and Ernest Morrell (Columbia, 2019), received the Catherine W. Bishir Prize in 2021. She’s currently writing Just Space: Modern Architecture, Public Schools, and Racial Inequality in New York City (University of Texas Press).

Recent Publications
  • “Making and Unmaking the Neighborhood: Boundaries in Postwar Cities,” introduction, guest editor, special section of the Journal of Urban History 46, no. 6 (Nov., 2020): 1191-1205, first published online May-04-2017.
  • “Intermediate School 201: Race, Space, and Modern Architecture in Harlem” chapter 8 in Educating Harlem: A Century of Schooling and Resistance in a Black Community, ed. Ansley Erickson and Ernest Morrell. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
  • “The Spaces of Childhood” with Marci M. Clark. In Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies, ed. Heather Montgomery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
  • A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
  • “Teaching Marshall/Marshall Teaching: Encounters with Berman,” in Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman, edited by Jennifer Corby (New York: UR /Terreform, 2015): 52-61.
  • Response to Justin Binder’s ongoing Vacated project for Design and Violence, edited by Paola Antonelli and Jamer Hunt (MomA, 2013 +), http://designandviolence.moma.org/vacated-justin-blinder/.
  • “The Physical Spaces of Childhood,” chapter 13 in The Routledge History of Childhood in the West, ed. Paula S. Fass, 249-66. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Media Coverage
Country Focus
United States
Expertise by Geography
North America, United States, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
19th century, Modern, 20th century, 21st century
Expertise by Topic
Art & Architectural History, Children & Youth, Gender, Material Culture, Pedagogy, Race, Urban History, Women