Carl Koch (architect)

The time he spent at Harvard overlapped briefly with the arrival of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus in Germany, who had come to lead GSD.

The development was hailed as "one of the best known and most significant groups of contemporary houses in the world" in a 1946 article in Progressive Architecture, with photographs by Ezra Stoller.

In one of the earliest examples of prefabrication, in 1947 Koch and two associates created the "Acorn House",[7] which was designed to be assembled from parts in one day and then be "demountable" so it could be easily transported to a new location.

Although to modern readers some of the gender assumptions about how people live are jarring, the basic ideas about the usefulness of prefabrication and flexible plans still ring true in the 21st century.

Early on, the implications of this approach came under fire, most persuasively by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities[14] While Koch's innovations were largely technical in nature, one of his projects, Academy Homes in Roxbury, Massachusetts, was the subject of neighborhood demonstrations with residents asking for more community control.

[16] In his project to transform Lewis Wharf into luxury housing, Koch embarked on a dual role of architect and developer.

[17] Completed in 1973, his reuse of the beautiful but obsolete 19th century structure predated the better-known redevelopment of historic Faneuil Hall Marketplace by architect Ben Thompson and developer James Rouse in 1976.