Techwood Homes (1937) in Atlanta, Georgia, was both the first federally funded public housing in the US and a synthesis of early twentieth-century European mass housing accomplishments. This article uses Techwood as a lens through which to view transnational design exchange in the Interwar/New Deal period — here, between Red Vienna and Jim Crow Atlanta. In 1933, Atlanta real-estate mogul turned housing crusader Charles F. Palmer secured funding through Roosevelt’s New Deal for Techwood Homes. In 1934, Palmer took a grand tour of European social housing sites to gather precedents for Atlanta. Vienna was a highlight of his trip. Palmer met policymakers to learn about financing, toured the Karl Marx-Hof and other municipal socialist housing projects, took his own photographs and moving picture films, and gathered promotional materials. Concrete urban design connections between the Hof and the Homes include: low site coverage (around 15%), rational yet non-rigid site planning, efficient housing units, abundant collective facilities, and high-quality garden and playground design. A comparative analysis of the two sites allows for critical assessment of why, how, and in what ways European housing principles crossed the Atlantic, and how urban design ideas are globalised then adjust to local scale.