Matthew Lasner

Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Harvard University, 2007
phone: 404-413-6386
e-mail: mlasner@gsu.edu

Matthew Gordon Lasner studies the history and theory of the built environment, with primary focus on urban (and suburban) form in the late nineteenth- and twentieth century U.S. His current research concerns the emergence, between the 1880s and 1970s, of owner-occupied multifamily housing (apartments, townhouses) as an alternative to the single-family subdivision. His book-in-progress, No Lawn to Mow: Condos, Co-ops, and Collective Homeownership in Metropolitan America, is under contract with Yale University Press. He earned his Ph.D. in Architecture at Harvard and joined the history faculty at Georgia State University as an assistant professor in 2007. He teaches courses in urban and architectural history, as well as on ordinary American
built environments. Publications include essays on limited-equity co-ops in postwar New York City in Robert Moses and the Modern City, edited by Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, and an article on postwar multifamily housing in Southern California in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Lasner is an active member of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Vernacular Architecture Forum, and the Urban History Association.