Thank you, Herman Jessor is an exhibition by Zara Pfeifer and Daniel Jonas Roche. It presents myriad works by the late New York architect Herman Jessor (1894–1990), a Cooper Union alum who designed more than 40,000 units of cooperative housing throughout his sixty-year career. It includes vignettes of Co-op City in the Bronx, Rochdale Village in Queens, Penn South in Manhattan, Amalgamated Warbasse Houses in Brooklyn, and other complexes Jessor’s office designed that constitute some of the largest cooperatively owned developments in the world today. These buildings embody the full spectrum of the modern movement, all the way from William Morris to Ludwig Hilberseimer, but also a forlorn approach to housing, when homes weren’t considered commodities, but rather a universal human right. 
 
This exhibition marks the first public display of photography and research by Pfeifer and Roche, who have spent the past two years documenting Jessor’s output. It is both a historical project and a timely political one. Amid a devastating housing crisis in New York City, politicians today are increasingly interested in revisiting the United Housing Foundation, Jessor’s client, and the Mitchell-Lama program, which created thousands of affordable, subsidized homes. Thank you, Herman Jessor was created to help fuel the imaginations of architects, housing activists, and city officials in the present who are interested in this grandiose scale of planning that past generations championed. 
 
Zara Pfeifer is a photographer based in Berlin and Vienna. She teaches at TU Vienna and recently received the MAK Schindler Scholarship in Los Angeles. 
 
Daniel Jonas Roche is news editor at The Architect’s Newspaper. He teaches at Parsons and is co-authoring a new book, Antifascist Architecture (Park Books: 2025).


Held in the Foundation Building's Third Floor Hallway Gallery. 

Open to the general public:
Tuesday–Friday, 12pm – 7pm
Saturday & Sunday, 12pm – 6pm

This exhibition is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.