The Architectural League of New York has awarded Acting Associate Dean Mersiha Veledar AR’03 and Associate Professor Kayla Montes de Oca AR’20 a 2025 Independent Projects Grant for their proposed project, A New Residential Grammar: Herman Jessor and Abraham Kazan's Housing Cooperatives and Shared Living Elements. They are one of 25 teams from throughout New York State to be awarded the $10,000 grant. Jessor, who earned a bachelor's of engineering degree from The Cooper Union in 1917, teamed with trade unionist Kazan to build housing across New York City starting in the 1920s. Their developments include Amalgamated Dwellings on the Lower East Side, Penn South in Chelsea, Co-op City in Bronx, and Rochdale Village in Queens, which remains the largest Black-majority housing co-op in the world. They produced more than 40,000 units of housing still occupied today.

The two Cooper professors will study the influential work of Jessor and Kazan to derive what they’re calling a “residential grammar of elements,” a visual catalog of collective spaces and their supporting policies. The goal is to explore this important part of New York housing history to glean solutions alleviating aspects of today’s housing crisis, which due to various market and political forces, has eroded equity, stability, and access for so many New Yorkers. The grammar will act as a toolkit for architects, policymakers, and community organizers, offering strategies to support cooperative forms of living for New York City.  

Jessor, deemed “the most important radical architect you’ve never heard of” by Architectural Review, worked with Kazan and numerous unions to design buildings noted for their affordability, comfort, and communal elements such as gardens and collective kitchens. According to Veledar and Montes de Oca, those innovative shared spaces “became intrinsically linked with the development of more efficient construction techniques and novel approaches to affordability. By centralizing kitchen functions, developers could streamline building processes, potentially reduce material costs, and ultimately contribute to more economically viable housing options for a wider range of residents.” Jessor and Kazan’s work, they argue, had broad social, ethical, and economic reverberations: their designs shaped space as well as the patterns of daily life and social interaction within communities.  

Essential to Veledar and Montes de Oca’s project is a thorough examination of  all New York based housing developments constructed by Jessor and Kazan, which, they point out, were not conceived in isolation, “but as porous systems intentionally folded into urban fabric.” Jessor and Kazan didn’t see housing as mere shelter but as a means for promoting mutual aid, care, and collaboration. By producing a detailed catalogue of “collective living” elements, Veledar and Montes de Oca propose using these residential precedents as models for resolving current housing challenges within the affordability crisis, which requires more than simply building more units; it demands a reconsideration of what housing is today and how it functions in people's lives. Their work will also demonstrate the profound impact of zoning, which for the better part of the 20th century favored traditional family structures with little shared space. Their project will build a case for zoning that supports non-conventional living arrangements and housing diversity through shared spaces and cooperative living systems.  

Thanks to the Architectural League grant as well as support from The Cooper Union and the New York State Council on the Arts, they will conduct on-site research and interviews with current residents of different generations in all New York City housing developments designed by Jessor and Kazan. They also plan to consult with community leaders and housing professionals, some of whom have expertise in the city’s zoning regulations and ways to accommodate a wide spectrum of residents and users, such as single individuals, people living with physical disabilities, and multi-generational households.  

This documentation will also carefully map and translate these historical precedents into new design approaches through construction of experimental model prototypes of collective rooms and architectural elements that address our current housing challenges. Through this new spatial grammar, which serves as both an analytical framework and design methodology, Veledar and Montes de Oca plan to evaluate existing housing models and propose new configurations that support cooperative living practices today. The New Residential Grammar will also be the focus of a public exhibition at Cooper’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture in 2027 consisting of new analytical drawings, photographs, and physical model prototypes of the Jessor-Kazan oeuvre.