Nancy Stieber, Housing Design and Society in Amsterdam: Reconfiguring Urban Order and Identity, 1900–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. vii + 268 pp. $45.00 cloth Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919–1934. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. xvii + 509 pp. $60.00 cloth.

Abstract

These two books concern major chapters in the history of mass housing: Amsterdam in the first two decades of the century and “Red Vienna.” Both programs were models of state welfare reform, but the political contexts are totally at odds: Amsterdam, with its settlement initiatives achieved through a corporatist compromise among moderate parties, and Vienna, where the Social Democrats attempted literally to build socialism in the midst of “a highly charged, often violent political conflict between left and right” (Blau, 13).