The VAC Rotterdam's Work on Model Home Exhibitions (1951-1956): Women's Voices in Housing Must be Heard

Abstract

In the post-World War II period in the Netherlands, a women’s organization set the agenda for improving the quality of social housing projects. Beginning in 1946, the Vrouwen Adviescommissie (Women Advisory Committee, VAC) in Rotterdam established a pathway in the 1950s for women’s interventions at a municipal level through bureaucratic procedures, particularly by engaging in intensive advisory activities. Consciously or not, those voluntary consultants were also making politics and defining space: their expertise influenced housing and urban design. However, their early role as organizers of model home exhibitions has been little explored. Why did the VAC Rotterdam believe that such exhibitions were necessary? This article documents the conceptual and design work of the VAC through the model homes exhibitions they produced in the postwar neighborhoods of Rotterdam from 1951 to 1956. Even before the well-known model homes were exhibited in the mid-1950s and 1960s in the Netherlands by the organization Goed Wonen (Good Dwelling) to improve standards for furnishing homes, the VAC made visionary efforts to strengthen the public’s relationship with social housing and practical interior design.