The Architecture of Social Reform: Housing, Tradition, and German Modernism

Abstract

Architecture and housing are embedded in their social, cultural, and political context. Historical treatises on the idealized notions of family, household, and community uncover the continuous and complex interplay between the printed and the built. The Architecture of Social Reform: Housing, Tradition and German Modernism by Isabel Rousset examines the productive dialogue between social policy and architecture by analyzing a variety of sources ranging from historic publications over floor plans and master plans to drawings of interiors and photographs. The author, focusing on the era of Social Reform following the revolution in 1948, explores the discursive processes that shaped concepts of German housing in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author investigates several nineteenth-century publications on the ideals of housing and town planning that formed German modernism. The book starts with an in-depth analysis of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl’s traditionalist and conservative approach to social reform, which this Bavarian folklorist and proto-sociologist had based on the studies of geography, family, and society. According to Rousset, Riehl’s notion of building from the inside out and his ideas on the ideal household based on the self-enclosed, detached house decisively influenced early modernist architecture in Germany. In the second chapter, the author assesses the concept of interiorization of dwellings by studying floor plans and interpreting the tenement versus suburban settlement debate. The cultural mission of the German middle class is expressed through the design of the dwelling. In the third chapter, Rousset explores the linkages between the principles of modern city planning (Städtebau) and the medieval archetypes as well as urban planning and housing. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the concept of “Sachlichkeit” (objectivity). The author describes how architects, Paul Schulze-Naumburg, Paul Mebes, and Hermann Muthesius, translated this idea into the principles of straightforward housing design. Photography (of extant housing facades) was crucial to the promotion of ‘the culture of the visible’. In this chapter, the author also analyses the use of publications in popularizing principles of simplistic design that amalgamate tradition with modernity. In conclusion, Rousset highlights the continuity of concepts between the nineteenth-century traditionalist architects and town planners with CIAM and Modernist avant-garde. The author closes with a pledge to reconsider the productive alliance between social reform and architecture to resolve class antagonisms and reenact communities by focusing on the ‘good, modest and traditional housing’ (p. 197). The chapters of the book are self-contained and can be read separately.