CONTRIBUTOR:

Marta Gutman

AFFILIATION:

TITLE:

Professor

DEPARTMENT:

Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture

INSTITUTION:

City College of New York, City University of New York

BIOGRAPHY:

Marta Gutman is a professor of architecture at the Spitzer of Architecture, City College of New York, a professor of art history and earth and environmental science at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a distinguished CUNY research fellow in 2018. An architectural and urban historian and a licensed architect, her teaching and research focus on ordinary buildings and neighborhoods, the history of cities, and issues of gender, class, race, and especially childhood as they play out in the everyday spaces, public culture, and social life of modern cities. Before receiving her doctorate in architectural history from the University of California at Berkeley (2000), her work as an architect included designing housing for the New York City Housing Authority and shelters run by nonprofit organizations for battered women, abused children, and homeless New Yorkers. Prof. Gutman is also a graduate of Brown University (Honors in Art, 1975) and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Planning (1981) where she taught design, history, and theory. Prof. Gutman’s current book project is Just Space: Architecture, Education, and Inequality in Postwar Urban America, under contract with the University of Texas Press. The honors that her previous book, A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2014) received include the 2015 Kenneth Jackson Award from the Urban History Association and the 2017 Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Gutman has also written about the WPA swimming pools in New York City (showing how kids racially integrated them), edited Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum from 2009 to 2015, and co-edited the critically acclaimed Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space and Material Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2008). She has won fellowships and awards for her work from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Danish Humanities Research Council, the Advanced Research Collaborative at the City University of New York, and other organizations At the CUNY Graduate Center Gutman advises doctoral students in architectural and urban history, and at City College, she coordinates the history-theory program at the Spitzer School of Architecture. She represents the architecture school on the President’s Task Force on City College (2018), the Faculty Senate, and the Faculty Committee on Personnel Matters and chairs the College-wide Resources Committee. She’s been commended for her service (2013) and her outstanding teaching (2014); the Architecture Alumni Group awarded Gutman the 2015 Faculty Achievement Award.