When it comes to design, subsidized housing has earned a mostly dismal reputation over the decades, with New York City being no exception. But since he launched his own firm in the early 1990s in Harlem and taken on numerous projects, architect Victor Body-Lawson has reinvented the tired-old institutional-style template that has long dominated affordable housing design. With a groundbreaking portfolio of work, he has led the way to a new way of thinking about how it should look.
His design for a low-income senior housing complex that opened in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood in 2012 called Erbograph Apartments has been hailed as one of the city’s first aesthetically pleasing subsidized housing developments.