JESSOR
JESSOR presents a myriad of works by New York architect Herman Jessor, who designed more than 40,000 units of cooperative housing, including Co-op City in the Bronx, Rochdale Village in Queens, Penn South in Manhattan, and Amalgamated Warbasse Houses in Brooklyn, along with other complexes that constitute some of the largest cooperatively owned developments in the world today. These buildings embody the full spectrum of the modern movement, but also a forlorn approach to housing, when homes weren’t considered commodities, but rather a universal human right.
Since 2023, Zara Pfeifer has been documenting various housing structures designed by Jessor throughout New York. Together with architecture journalist Dan Roche and architect Brad Isnard, she curated the exhibition Thank you, Herman Jessor at The Cooper Union and JESSOR at Citygroup in New York.
Interview by The Architect's Newspaper, Hell Gate and Union Magazine. Review by Samuel Stein in the New York Review of Architecture.
Lectures at Cooper Union "The Social Life of Cooperative Housing in New York and Vienna", Westlicht Vienna "Living Together" and Van Alen Institute "We <3 Cookie-Cutter Housing". The project is ongoing.
