Studying Friendship in Housing: the MIT School of Architecture at MIT in the Postwar Years

Abstract

The architect Burnham Kelly hired social scientist Leon Festinger to analyze friendship among residents living in veteran housing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946. Festinger accomplished this by linking friendship to mundane social events—such as neighbors chatting in common courtyards—and he attributed these events to the subtle but meaningful ways that architecture organized people in space. In studying social relations between neighbors, Festinger wondered if class or racial attitudes played a role in whether or not tenants became friends. Festinger framed his housing study in apolitical terms, but his research provided a methodological framework for later analyses of desegregated public housing that had major political consequences. These studies of racially integrated housing found their way into the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, where they provided evidence for the plaintiff’s claim that desegregation could be accomplished peacefully.