The architecture of social reform: Housing, tradition, and German Modernism 9781526159694

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The architecture of social reform

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To buy or to find out more about the books currently available in this series, please go to: https://​manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/​series/​ studies-​in-​design-​and-​material-​culture/​

general editors Elizabeth Currie Sally-​Anne Huxtable and James Ryan founding editor Paul Greenhalgh

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The architecture of social reform Housing, tradition, and German Modernism Isabel Rousset

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022 The right of Isabel Rousset to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN

978 1 5261 5968 7  hardback

First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: Detail of the Fuggerei in Augsburg city map, c 1521. Later coloured. Courtesy of akg-images.

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For my uncle, Jean-​Marc Lenoir

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Contents



List of figures Acknowledgements

Introduction

page viii xv 1

1 Building from the inside out

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2 The interiorisation of life

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3 Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

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4 The culture of the visible

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Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

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Figures

0.1 ‘A general room modelled on an inn in Reichertshausen near Pfaffenhofen’. (From Georg Hirth, Das deutsche Zimmer der Renaissance: Anregungen zu häuslicher Kunstpflege (Munich: Hirth, 1880), p. 61.) page 6 1.1 Etching of a carpenter’s workshop in the Encyclopédie. (From Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot, Recueil de planches sur les sciences, les arts libéraux et les arts méchaniques, avec leur explication, vol. 7 (Paris: Briasson, 1765).) 16 1.2 ‘Shelter of the poor’. (From Claude-​Nicolas Ledoux, L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation (Paris: self-​published, 1804), plate 33.) 17 1.3 Frontispiece from Justus Möser, Osnabrückische Geschichte (Berlin: Nicolai, 1819.) 20 1.4 Saxon farmhouse, elevation. (From Rudolf Henning, Das deutsche Haus in seiner historischen Entwickelung (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1882), p. 30.) 27 1.5 Heinrich Stuhlmann, Entrance Hall with Cooking Peasant Woman, etching and drypoint, 1839. (Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Muriel and Philip Berman Gift, acquired from the John S. Phillips bequest of 1876 to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, with funds contributed by Muriel and Philip Berman, gifts (by exchange) of Lisa Norris Elkins, Bryant W. Langston, Samuel S. White III and Vera White, with additional funds contributed by John Howard McFadden, Jr., Thomas Skelton Harrison, and the Philip H. and A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1985, 1985-​52-​19302.) 28

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Figures 1.6 Heinrich Stuhlmann, Mother and Child in a Farmyard, etching, 1871. (Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Muriel and Philip Berman Gift, acquired from the John S. Phillips bequest of 1876 to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, with funds contributed by Muriel and Philip Berman, gifts (by exchange) of Lisa Norris Elkins, Bryant W. Langston, Samuel S. White III and Vera White, with additional funds contributed by John Howard McFadden, Jr., Thomas Skelton Harrison, and the Philip H. and A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1985, 1985-​52-​19294.) 1.7 Educational picture sheet depicting the story of Hansel and Gretel. Drawn by Theodor Hosemann, c. 1868. (Courtesy of the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig. Inventory number VoBi140.) 1.8 A children’s picture sheet depicting houses, chapels, and towers in the Black Forest. Drawn by August Exleben, c. 1860. (Courtesy of the Spielzeugmuseum, Nuremberg. Inventory number GS13.3156.) 1.9 Farmhouses in Kürnbach and Haslach. Print on paper by F. Eble. (In Verband deutscher Architekten und Ingenieur-​ Vereine, Das Bauernhaus im Deutschen Reiche und seinen Grenzgebieten (Dresden: Kühtmann, 1906). Courtesy of Architekturmuseum TU Berlin. Inventory number B 1920,115.) 1.10 Farmhouses in the Kraichgau region. Print on paper by B. Kossmann. (In Verband deutscher Architekten und Ingenieur-​Vereine, Das Bauernhaus im Deutschen Reiche und seinen Grenzgebieten (Dresden: Kühtmann, 1906). Courtesy of Architekturmuseum TU Berlin. Inventory number B 1920,012.) 2.1 Educational picture sheet depicting ‘scenes from family life’. Etching by Johann Peter Wolff, c. 1746/​55. (Courtesy of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg. Inventory number HB16442.) 2.2 The ‘servants’ room’. Part of a series of prints designed to amuse and educate girls on domestic and societal life. Coloured engraving by Johann Michael Voltz, c. 1825. (Courtesy of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg. Inventory number HB25888.) 2.3 The ‘nursery’. Engraving by Johann Michael Voltz, c. 1825. (Courtesy of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg. Inventory number HB25890.) 2.4 Print of the ‘Hobrecht Plan’. (Ferdinand Boehm, Plan von Berlin und Umgegend bis Charlottenburg (Berlin: Keller, 1862).) 2.5 Municipal planner Gustav Assmann’s plans for apartments. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), p. 101.)

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The architecture of social reform 2.6 Plan of Meyers Hof. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), p. 100.) 2.7 Illustration of the model cottage displayed at the 1851 Great Exhibition. (From Henry Roberts, The Dwellings of the Labouring Classes, 3rd edn (London: Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, 1855), p. 58.) 2.8 Jean-​Nicolas-​Louis Durand, ‘Various layouts of buildings specific to the city’. (From Jean-​Nicolas-​Louis Durand, Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique, vol. 2 (Paris: self-​published, 1805), plate 21.) 2.9 Living room ground plans. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), p. 4. Originally illustrated in Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude (Stuttgart: Gustav Weise, 1868).) 2.10 ‘Most common basic forms of dwelling’. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), plate 11. Originally illustrated in Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude (Stuttgart: Gustav Weise, 1868).) 2.11 ‘Abnormal forms’: polygonal dwelling plan. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), plate 12. Originally illustrated in Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude (Stuttgart: Gustav Weise, 1868).) 2.12 ‘Abnormal forms’: English country house plan. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), plate 12. Originally illustrated in Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude (Stuttgart: Gustav Weise, 1868).) 2.13 Typical Parisian bourgeois apartment plan. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), plate 101.) 2.14 Plan of typical Viennese rent-​bearing house. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), plate 94.) 2.15 Feilner house plan. (From Wilhelm Petrus Tuckermann, ‘Der Berliner Wohnungsgrundriss’, Der Bär, 6:37 (1880), 463.) 2.16 Typical tenement plan. (From Wilhelm Petrus Tuckermann, ‘Der Berliner Wohnungsgrundriss’, Der Bär, 6:37 (1880), 463.) 3.1 Brick architecture characteristic of old middle-​class housing in Lübeck, taken from an old city panorama. (From a review of Rudolf Struck, Das alte bürgerliche Wohnhaus in Lübeck by H[ubert]. Stierling, in Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Architektur, 2:10/​11 (1909), 268.) 3.2 Image of the medieval marketplace of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, taken from a section of an altarpiece and reproduced

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Figures in Brinckmann’s Deutsche Stadtbaukunst. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.031.627.) 3.3 Old map of Mannheim from 1758. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.096.581.) 3.4 Typical tenement block resulting from the Hobrecht Plan. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.073.124.) 3.5 Goecke’s proposed superblock model. (From Theodor Goecke, ‘Von den Beziehungen der Zonenbauordnung zum Bebauungsplane’, Der Städtebau, 2:1 (1905), 4. Originally illustrated in Theodor Goecke, ‘Verkehrsstraße und Wohnstraße’, Preussische Jahrbücher, 71:1 (1893), 96.) 3.6 René Kuczynski and Walter Lehwess’ proposed ‘new’ block system (right) against the ‘old’ system (left). (From René Kuczynski and Walter Lehwess, ‘Zweifamilienhäuser für Grossstädte’, Der Städtebau, 7:6 (1910), 71.) 3.7 Piazza delle Erbe and Piazza dei Signori in Verona. (From Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (Vienna: Carl Graeser, 1889), p. 57.) 3.8 Illustration of a variety of modern traffic intersections. (From Josef Stübben, ‘Über die Anlage öffentlicher Plätze’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 11:80 (1877), 404.) 3.9 ‘Old organic street network of a small city with regulation plan for the new city’. (From Joseph August Lux, Der Städtebau und die Grundpfeiler der heimischen Bauweise (Dresden: Kühtmann, 1908), ­figure 2.) 3.10 ‘Regulation plan!! The new city quarters under the hegemony of this scheme’. (From Joseph August Lux, Der Städtebau und die Grundpfeiler der heimischen Bauweise (Dresden: Kühtmann, 1908), ­figure 3.) 3.11 Ludwigstraße, Munich, c. 1910. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.096.686.) 3.12 Historicist facade of apartment/​commercial house on Kurfürstendamm 234, Berlin. Constructed in 1901 by architects Zaar & Vahl. (From Architektonische Rundschau, 20 (1904), plate 54.) 3.13 City plan of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.065.056.) 3.14 Old passage through a church in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.019.283.) 3.15 Rail line in Frankfurt. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.092.397.) 3.16 Nuremberg marketplace. (From Robert Breuer, ‘Der Städtebau als architektonisches Problem’, Kunstgewerbeblatt, 22:11 (1911), 202.)

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The architecture of social reform 3.17 Renaissance and Baroque spatial design. Top: Piazza San Marco in Venice. Bottom: Piazza San Pietro in Rome. (From Robert Breuer, ‘Der Städtebau als architektonisches Problem’, Kunstgewerbeblatt, 22:11 (1911), 203.) 3.18 Example of uniform block front. (From Walter Curt Behrendt, Die einheitliche Blockfront als Raumelement im Stadtbau (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1911), plate 1.) 3.19 Single-​family double houses for industrial workers, near Bremen. Constructed in 1910 by architect Hugo Wagner. (From Rudolf Eberstadt, Handbuch des Wohnungswesens und der Wohnungsfrage, 2nd edn (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1910), p. 255.) 3.20 Residential path (Wohngang) serving a charitable housing complex in Lübeck. (From Rudolf Eberstadt, Handbuch des Wohnungswesens und der Wohnungsfrage, 2nd edn (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1910), p. 206.) 3.21 Main residential street in the Fuggerei. (From [Alexander] Former, ‘Städtebau und Denkmalpflege in Augsburg’, Der Städtebau, 12:7/​8 (1915), plate 45.) 3.22 An entry into the Fuggerei. (From Paul Wolf, ‘Die Kleinwohnung –​eine Forderung künftiger deutscher Baukultur’, Der Cicerone, 11 (1919), 177.) 3.23 Layout of the Fuggerei in Augsburg. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.063.458.) 3.24 Top (a): Design for residential streets in Breslau. Architect: Max Berg. Bottom (b): Design for a housing complex in Steglitz, Berlin, 1907–​8. Architect: Paul Mebes for the Berlin Civil Servant Housing Association. (From Theodor Goecke, ‘Allgemeine Städtebau-​Ausstellung Berlin 1910’, Der Städtebau, 7:7/​8 (1910), plate 47.) 3.25 Hermann Jansen, entry for the 1910 Greater Berlin Competition, development plan for Tempelhofer Feld. (Courtesy of Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität Berlin. Inventory number 20563.) 3.26 Aerial view of proposed superblock intended for the suburb of Wittenau. Part of Rudolf Eberstadt, Bruno Möhring, and Richard Peterson’s entry to the Greater Berlin Competition. (From Albert Hofmann, ‘Beilage für Wettbewerbe’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 44:29 (1910), 216.) 3.27 Ground plan of Wittenau superblock. (From Rudolf Eberstadt, Handbuch des Wohnungswesens und der Wohnungsfrage, 2nd edn (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1910), p. 202.) 4.1 Gentleman’s office. (From Hermann Muthesius, ‘Mein Haus in Nikolassee’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 23 (1908), 16.)

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Figures 4.2 ‘Example of the transformation of form with changes in prevailing taste’. (From Hermann Pfeifer, Die Formenlehre des Ornaments (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1906), p. 259.) 4.3 ‘Old farmhouse with brick cladding in Tenterden, Kent’. (From Hermann Muthesius, Das englische Haus, vol. 1 (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1904), p. 100.) 4.4 Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, two-​family country house. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 174.) 4.5 William Dunn and Robert Watson, country house in Surrey. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 170.) 4.6 Myron Hunt, Jenks House in San Francisco. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 184.) 4.7 Paul Korff, workers’ houses and farm buildings in Wendorf. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 38.) 4.8 Hermann Muthesius, Seefeld country house, Zehlendorf, Berlin. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 31.) 4.9 Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, Schuster country house. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 58.) 4.10 Guest house in Neuflemmingen. (From Paul Schultze-​ Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Hausbau, 3rd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), p. 30.) 4.11 ‘Counterexample’. (From Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Hausbau, 3rd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), p. 31.) 4.12 House in Torgau. (From Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Hausbau, 3rd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), p. 62.) 4.13 Shooters’ association clubhouse. (From Paul Schultze-​ Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Hausbau, 3rd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), p. 38.) 4.14 Community house in Saalfeld. (From Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Kleinbürgerhäuser, 2nd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), plate 5.) 4.15 Urban houses in Minden in Westfalen. (From Paul Schultze-​ Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Kleinbürgerhäuser, 2nd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), plate 41.) 4.16 Small houses on the old city wall in Hirschhorn am Neckar. (From Paul Schultze-​Naumburg,

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The architecture of social reform Kulturarbeiten: Kleinbürgerhäuser, 2nd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), plate 38.) 4.17 Corner house in Nuremberg. (From Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Kleinbürgerhäuser, 2nd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), plate 49.) 4.18 Albert Gessner, courtyard apartment facade. (From Albert Gessner, Das deutsche Miethaus (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1909), p. 51.) 4.19 Paul Mebes, housing for civil servants in Steglitz, Berlin. (From Hermann Jansen, ‘Neubauten des Beamten-​Wohnungs-​ Vereins zu Berlin’, Der Baumeister, 7:5 (1909), 49.) 4.20 Sculptural detail of housing in Steglitz. (From Hermann Jansen, ‘Neubauten des Beamten-​Wohnungs-​Vereins zu Berlin’, Der Baumeister, 7:5 (1909), 54.) 4.21 Paul Mebes, housing in Zehlendorf Garden City. (From Erich Leyser, ‘Die Wohnung des kleinen Mannes: Ein Kapitel aus der gemeinnützigen Bautätigkeit Gross-​Berlins’, Berliner Architekturwelt, 17 (1915), 224.) 4.22 Feilner House, facade. (From Hans Mackowsky, ‘Das Feilner Haus’, Kunst und Künstler, 8:1 (1910), 5.) 4.23 Dwelling in Krefeld. (From Paul Mebes, Um 1800, vol. 1 (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1908), p. 14.) 4.24 Middle-​class townhouse. (From Paul Mebes, Um 1800, vol. 2 (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1908), p. 80.)

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many colleagues, anonymous peer reviewers, and students who have shaped this work over many years. For their comments on various drafts, I owe special thanks to Eve Blau, Hilde Heynen, Andrew Leach, Cameron Logan, John Maciuika, Susanne Meurer, Matthew Mindrup, Itohan Oseyimwese, Francesca Perugia, Dallas Rogers, Bill Taylor, Tijana Vujosevic, and Tom Weaver. I am grateful to the countless librarians and archivists who assisted with my difficult requests. Some of the text in this book has appeared in Architectural Theory Review, the Journal of Architecture, and the Journal of Urban History. I thank the relevant editors and publishers for allowing me to reprint material from those articles here. Last, I wish to thank my parents Lois and Pierre Rousset, and my sister Verity Rousset, for their support.

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Introduction

While architecture has held an important social role since its very beginnings, the notion that it should serve society is a modern one. In late-​nineteenth-​century Germany, housing came to encapsulate the demand to confront class-​ based social conflict through good design. There is a consensus among historians that the birth of architecture’s engagement with social politics began when Germany became a republic in 1918, after which the shock tactics of the immediate pre-​ war artistic avant-​garde became fully absorbed into a series of socially and formally ambitious housing schemes in Berlin and Frankfurt. As architects began to find, in the ashes of war, the ‘new man’ ready and waiting to embrace the radical language of architectural modernism, the lessons of the avant-​garde became fully absorbed into mass culture. The image of societal cohesion that modern architects projected on to the populations they wished to transform through housing was, of course, full of contradictions that have long been noted by architectural historians seeking to grasp the failures of modernist planning. Yet, as this book demonstrates, many of the contradictions latent in the modernist social ethic were already present in nineteenth-​century debates on housing, which largely occurred within a traditionalist mindset. While it took something like the immediate shock of the First World War to provide momentum for new housing provision, the modern architects involved in this pursuit were utilising a multitude of ideas about society that had long been brewing in Germany.1 Focusing on German-​language discourse from 1848 to 1918, this book traces how architecture became intimately intertwined with the social politics of dwelling provision at large. It presents a new genealogy for modern architecture’s obsession with housing, locating in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a dynamic period of exchange between a heterogeneous group of actors, including architects, urban planners, art critics,

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The architecture of social reform and social scientists, who called for society to be freed from class antagonism not through revolution, but through modest, traditionally minded domestic design.2 It perhaps comes as no surprise that Germany figures centrally in this history. Following the political turmoil of 1848, Prussia became a hotbed for ideological debates between socialists, liberals, and conservatives concerning the nature of class society. Germany’s perceived lack of synchronicity with French and English patterns of modernisation, including its delayed industrialisation, delayed national unification, delayed experience of social democracy, and the apparent political lag of its bourgeoisie, caused the nation’s intellectuals to ‘trouble’ the notion of modernity from its very beginnings. In the late nineteenth century, Germany took a leading role in launching a full-​scale, transatlantic assault on laissez-​faire principles, giving rise to the transnational field of social politics.3 The growth of the social sciences in Germany gave decisive shape to notions of reform, social cohesion, health, happiness, and welfare, sanctioning new strategies for reading social interaction through built form and space, and providing a crucial index for theorising architectural progress. New sociological understandings of the historical nature of class antagonism, labour, exchange, production, and capital transformed architecture’s imagined economic value and social significance. Yet the impact of these developments on German architectural culture has generally been neglected. Late-​nineteenth-​century Germany has long been understood as a period of intense economic growth accompanied by relative architectural poverty. The flurry of industrial and commercial activity that occurred in the immediate wake of German unification in 1871 was so characteristic of this era that it came to be known as the Gründerzeit (literally ‘founders’ years’, in reference to the speculators who founded joint-​stock companies). The 1870s witnessed the emergence of a powerful transnational bourgeois class of industrial entrepreneurs and financiers, whose economic ambitions were soon absorbed into a project of imperialist expansion. Real estate became a vital circuit for surplus capital investment, leading to a rapid growth in building activity in key European colonial cities. Architectural production was marked by an eclectic pastiche of historical reference (‘historicism’) that gave representational weight to the new bourgeoisie. As the familiar story goes, housing reform emerged as the distinctive province of well-​meaning philanthropists and religious reformers who were, above all, concerned with the spiritual lives of the urban poor.4 These reformers achieved little success in terms of actual housing provision, until the world’s first mechanised war, along with the flowering of socialist theory in Europe and the parallel invention of Taylorist principles of scientific management in North America, brought housing into the spotlight as a principal instrument of social rationalisation. Under the banner of ‘functionalism’, architectural theory is largely understood to have come

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Introduction into maturation in this period, artistically sanctioning housing design as a privileged realm of applied social-​scientific expertise.5 While most historians would agree that these post-​First World War developments provided the necessary levers to pull architecture out of the cultural quagmire of historicism, this book shows that the path from historicism to functionalism in modern architectural culture was much more complex. One idea remained central to forging the path to modern functionalism: cultural tradition. Tradition was more than simply historicism’s last breath. In fact, historicism was first identified and criticised by advocates of tradition. Tradition was an idea that thrived in its capacity to sustain productive alliances with the realm of social politics through debates on housing, generating new principles that came to shape modern architecture’s functionalist ethos.6 As German cities became overrun with tenements that possessed what critics viewed as an empty and pompous architectural eclecticism, the task of reforming the design values of urban inhabitants along more authentic traditionalist lines became closely linked to the task of modernising the nation at large. The growth of interest in cultural tradition and its related ideals, such as domesticity, history, folklore, localism, and a return to the ‘simple life’, occurred everywhere in Europe in the late nineteenth century and was central to the process of nation-​building in a rapidly globalising world.7 In England, the desire to revive medieval craft tradition was strongly associated with the socialistic counterculture of the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly through the work of William Morris and John Ruskin (Nicolas Pevsner’s ‘pioneers’ of modern functionalist design).8 Within Germany, interest in pre-​modern traditions was not confined to countercultural circles. Traditionalism permeated everyday habits and social commitments across the political spectrum. It became an important conceptual reference point for ideas about social reform, from lifestyle questions concerning diet and clothing to broader issues of environmental preservation, which found their way into the agendas of German university departments, pressure groups, and professional associations. The widespread appreciation for cultural tradition in Germany has been the subject of intense debate in relation to whether the nation’s modernisation process followed a ‘unique path’ (Sonderweg) that led to the rise of National Socialism.9 In their classic accounts of the era, Fritz Stern, George Mosse, and Fritz K. Ringer argued that the emphasis on traditional cultural values owed itself to the pessimism, nostalgia, despair, and sense of crisis felt by upper-​middle-​class intellectuals over the forces of modern civilisation.10 From the 1990s, new scholarship began to challenge this narrative by illustrating how German modernists’ engagements with tradition, history, regionalism, memory, and the domestic sphere offered a sophisticated and frequently progressive ‘hybrid’ architectural modernism in response to the experience of modernity.11 Other scholarly works have

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The architecture of social reform considered the stable presence of traditionalism in the Deutscher Werkbund, which sought to reform society through good (largely domestic) design and stake out a new social role for architects between private industry and the state.12 Collectively, these works have shown that traditionalist ideals were not always inherently proto-​fascist and came to structure modern architectural thought in ways that extend beyond the moment of National Socialism. One particularly pervasive traditionalist cultural ideal in the German popular imagination was that of ‘homeland’ (Heimat). In Germany, nationalistic sentiment was cultivated not through promoting abstract ideals like the French ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ but rather through exploiting feelings of intimacy, attachment, and familiarity that accompanied the love for one’s native home town.13 Before unification in 1871, Germany was still a mere agglomeration of independent cities, territories, and kingdoms that each had a unique character and set of traditions. National identity was gradually forged not through the dissolution of regional difference but through explorations of the richness and plurality of local custom. A common striving for the concrete experience of one’s Heimat as well as a healthy suspicion of cosmopolitanism gave substance to the abstract idea of the German nation in the late nineteenth century.14 The German homeland protection (Heimatschutz) movement arose in 1904 to exploit these feelings and proved critical in encouraging architects to respond to local idioms. In political terms, the distinct brand of nationalism that emerged in Germany was based on what conservative reformers viewed as a latent source of societal and moral cohesion in the modern period: the petit-​bourgeois artisans, or Mittelstand, whose traditional family values, attachment to the craft practices of their Heimat, and capacity for self-​help appeared to transcend modern class politics. Following the onslaught of industrial capitalism and the rapid rise of both the nouveau-​riche bourgeois class and the working class, the Mittelstand became a bastion of old-​world values. Guaranteeing their economic security became the rallying cry of late-​ nineteenth-​century reformists in Germany.15 While the development of social politics geared towards reforming the Mittelstand was anti-​Marxist, traditionalist, and, for much of the time, intensely conservative, it was also self-​consciously pragmatic, secular, and realist. While the images of rural buildings and cosy interior settings featured in this book might appear at odds with a modern approach, the culture of tradition tied to Mittelstand pragmatism nonetheless became central to the growth of a modern architectural culture keen to stake out productive links between new economic demands and time-​honoured craft values. Housing design took on a particularly important role in forging these links. In Germany, economic ideas had long been understood in relation to the orderly interior world of the home rather than to the world of

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Introduction movement and exchange beyond.16 It is apt that the German words for house and home can both be expressed by the term Haus. The meaning of the house as a material and economic unit (the Greek oikos) was inseperably tied to questions about what it meant to be ‘at home’ (zu Hause) in the world. Similar to the Ancient Greek conception of household management (oikonomia), the term ‘domestic economy’ (Hauswirtschaft) arose in early modern Germany to describe the daily running of the extended family household. Popular manuals produced in the German states from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries offered wide-​ranging advice on good household management, covering matters concerning mostly agriculture but also engineering, architecture, and the moral relationships between family members.17 Through the use of such manuals, the household as a ‘moral community composed of the humans, animals, plants, and natural resources’ was constructed in the agrarian imagination as the locus of all practical, economic, and religious matters.18 Brought on by revolutions in science, industry, and politics across Europe, the arrival of modernity in the eighteenth century rapidly dissolved the small world of the extended family household that lay at the centre of the Christian universe in agrarian Europe. The divine hand of good government that established this universe was quickly replaced with the sovereignty of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. The secular notion of Homo economicus emerged in its wake –​the notion of the economical producer and calculating individual on the market, whose virtues were not strictly political, philosophical, or theological, but predominantly guided by rational self-​interest. Homo economicus became something of a redemptive image in modern society, capturing the activities of a rising transnational bourgeois class, whose right to accumulate property and seek profit was considered to be unassailable. For many German social conservatives, Homo economicus was an alien notion that failed to capture the authentic life of the German ‘people’ (Volk). They preferred to use the term ‘people’s economy’ (Volkswirtschaft) rather than the more foreign ‘national economy’ (Nationalökonomie) to describe Germany’s economic modernisation –​in effect associating it more with good management and allocation of resources rather than with exchange on the market.19 The term Wirtschaft came from der Wirt, meaning the innkeeper or head of the household. In early modern Germany, good inns, like good households, provided basic sustenance for guests as well as good hospitality, making these places intrinsically social (Figure 0.1), obfuscating clear notions of what constituted private and public realms in German social life. While the social nature of the ‘big family’ –​the nation –​ was still widely unknown territory in German political economy, the notion of the people’s economy nonetheless implied the existence of a deeper reality of sociability within this family, to which all political and economic matters were made accountable.20 Like the good family household manual,

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The architecture of social reform

Figure 0.1  ‘A general room modelled on an inn in Reichertshausen near Pfaffenhofen’, from Georg Hirth’s Das deutsche Zimmer.

German political economy developed in the nineteenth century as a distinctly pragmatic field of reasoning, seeking its logic from all the elements in the burgeoning nation that was habitual, customary, and traditional. Even the German metaphysician Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel began his theory of politics not by deducing a core rationality from human nature, but by recognising the centrality of ‘ethical life’ –​the concrete world of social interdependencies, traditions, customs, and norms that shaped individual character, feelings, and attitudes. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, the social world was a living element within the dialectical unfolding of human reason. Hegel’s recognition of society as a distinct object with its own naturally occurring dynamic was critical to the development of the social sciences in Germany. Following the revolutionary turmoil that hit Europe in 1848, two distinct camps emerged in social theory: one endorsing revolution and the other proposing comprehensive reform.21 In the former camp stood Karl Marx, who absorbed Hegel’s critical rationalism into his materialist conception of history, identifying the proletarian struggle as a dynamic revolutionary force. For Marx, the political fragmentation of 1848, while only managing to fracture the crust of the old order of European society, was nevertheless successful in exposing the ‘abyss’ that lay underneath it.22 Marx’s style of negative critique, however, would not find its way into the social sciences until the establishment of the Frankfurt School in the 1920s.

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Introduction In the other camp stood prominent social theorists like Lorenz von Stein and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, who believed that reform policy could be developed through the extensive empirical documentation of the customs of the German people. While Marx’s theory of social progress stressed struggle, reformists stressed social interdependence. They viewed their empirical work, which drew from the prevailing wisdom ingrained in social tradition, as the wellspring of practical state-​based reform policy.23 For the reformist camp, the apparent lack of coordination among revolutionaries was cause to highlight the failures of partisan politics in producing order, further exposing the need for practical reform. Standing back from the action, figures like Stein turned to the production of practical manuals for handling radicals like Marx (who along with Friedrich Engels had published the Communist manifesto in the midst of the revolutions). It was the latter camp that ultimately defined the trajectory of debates on housing in the second half of the nineteenth century as conservative reformists railed against what they saw as the intrusion of a French-​ imported bourgeois culture, characterised by pomp, conceit, and over-​ refinement, into the homes of good middle-​ class families –​and, by implication, into the heart of the German nation. These qualities were apparent among the European nouveau-​riche but were seen as foreign to the true German middle classes. The quality of being middle class (bürgerlich) in Germany stood for more positive values such as modesty, sobriety, familial conviviality, and personal self-​cultivation. In the modern period, these authentic middle-​class values came to be read as defining the Mittelstand. Unlike the term ‘bourgeois’, the quality of being bürgerlich did not allude to abstract fault-​lines in the modern social order, but rather to a more authentic form of sociability that was fostered in the home. Middle-​ class architecture sprung from ‘below’. Seeking to enlighten his readers about a buzzword that seemed to be everywhere in architecture circles by the end of the nineteenth century, one critic wrote that ‘middle-​class architecture’ (bürgerliche Baukunst) could be considered synonymous with peasant art, folk art, and local art (Heimatkunst), and could be used to describe any architecture that sought deeper truths.24 In reality, most of the intellectual figures involved in housing reform discussed in this book belonged firmly to an upper-​middle-​class milieu. The task of designing suitably middle-​class homes for themselves and others in their milieu could not have appeared more different from the task of staving off the threat of social-​ democratic identification among a declining Mittelstand base by providing them with a comfortable dwelling. The search for an authentic architecture of the ‘middle ground’ nonetheless became a rallying cry that united their diverse intellectual projects. The major figures involved in the search for an appropriately middle-​ class architecture can be identified across diverging points on the political

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The architecture of social reform spectrum, although most shared a conservative social orientation and a deep suspicion of the revolutionary premise of socialism. As Engels astutely observed in his 1872–​3 tract The housing question, which took aim at reformists of diverse political stripes, from Manchester liberal Julius Faucher to anarcho-​socialist Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon, the housing question tended to turn poignant political theory into banal bourgeois commentary. Engels argued that class antagonism could not be solved by providing workers with a comfortable, healthy dwelling that would impart feelings of responsibility and propriety, as was the common consensus among reformers. The betterment of working-​class housing would only arrive, he maintained, after a major transformation –​a revolution, in effect –​in the social structures that had arisen as a result of industrial capitalism.25 Engels’ critique fell on deaf ears in the ensuing decades, with the academic and professional literature on housing barely citing his text. Through the discourse on housing design, genuine political plurality gradually folded into a shared project of managing a form of conservative corporate capitalism based on the ‘big family’ of the nation.26 As the pre-​modern household developed into the national household, the old discipline of household management found its proper subject in housing, which emerged as a privileged object for organising what was viewed as the bastion of stability against class antagonism in Germany: the family –​or, more specifically, the authentic middle-​class family. Tradition provided the cultural armature for this socio-​political project, granting permission for housing experts to reach into the reservoir of history in order to turn architects and industrialists into modern master artisans, as well as reformers, politicians, and urban planners into modern innkeepers. Traditionalism allowed the political commitments of housing experts to recede into the background, as housing became a self-​ consciously scientific endeavour through its engagements with architectural convention, forming a reconciliation of the past with the experience of industrial modernity. While reformists viewed their activities in the realm of housing as operating above political interest, this book shows that housing reform remained a powerful conservative ideological instrument that often hid behind progressive credentials. Since its beginnings in the work of eighteenth-​century thinker Justus Möser, a major strand of socially conservative thought developed in Germany that rejected a nostalgic return to the past and held that genuine ‘organic’ forms of progress came from collective wisdom enshrined in tradition rather than the opinions of radical individuals.27 The typical conservative position, as encountered frequently in this book, was aptly described by one reformist as advocating a form of ‘conservative progress’ (konservativen Fortschritt).28 Advocating conservative progress did not mean rejecting civilisational forces out of hand but rather critically adapting them to established social conditions. It meant promoting social stability through continuity and evolution rather than

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Introduction radical change. While the epithet of conservative progress sounds oxymoronic, there was a marked sense among conservatives that their position was not antithetical to socialism but represented a more authentic form of it. They believed that if one looked to past building traditions, one would find in them latent ideals, such as community, social belonging, democracy, welfare, and the commons, that were so cherished by radical revolutionaries. For housing reformists, the goal of reviving tradition was not to retrieve a lost past but rather to remove anachronism from architecture and relocate in history more authentic, inherited forms of artistic continuity. Rejecting what they viewed as elitist theoretical precepts of philosophical aesthetics and Beaux-​Arts pedagogy that accounted for some of the most distasteful of late-​nineteenth-​century historicist buildings, traditionalists sought to cultivate more democratising artistic values and didactic principles that would make building knowledge accessible to the traditional middle classes once again. At the same time, traditionalists for the most part eschewed populism and were less concerned with identifying the racial, mystical, and primordial elements of Germanic art as they were with identifying its more pragmatic socio-​cultural elements. However, as this book demonstrates, it was often the cultural-​historical rather than explicitly racial argument that justified the most insidious forms of insular thinking about the merits of family, community, and nation, and forms of distrust towards those who appeared as strangers to these institutions. Ultimately, traditionalists did not merely seek an architectural idiom that represented the status quo; they sought an ideology of the status quo that could structure the architectural discipline’s fundamental theories and practices. The first chapter of the book considers the significance of Riehl’s popular folklore studies of the 1850s in bringing architectural problems to bear on the broader question of social reform. The second chapter investigates the crystallisation of traditional family life in the German home by analysing house plans and sections that appeared in discourses on housing and house design from the 1860s to the 1880s. Focusing on the birth of city planning in the 1890s, the third chapter investigates the intriguing ways in which urban archetypes from the medieval past were integrated into the technical housing requirements of the modern metropolis. The fourth chapter reflects on how the modern principle of objectivity (Sachlichkeit) was shaped by rural and old-​ town historical housing archetypes in key photographic books published by architects Hermann Muthesius, Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, and Paul Mebes in the first decade of the twentieth century. The broad chronology covered across the four chapters reveals a more complex picture of modern architecture’s response to social issues than is suggested by oft-​cited aphorisms about social transparency (‘coloured glass destroys hatred!’) that accompanied the formal and technological radicalism of avant-​garde practice.29 It allows

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The architecture of social reform for a broader historical reference point through which to test and challenge ongoing assumptions that underpin architecture’s ethical role in providing good housing. In order to fully grasp how housing came to occupy the centre of the modernist project, it is necessary to take a historiographical approach that reads the emergence of key concepts and paradigms (for example, ‘functional design’, ‘urban design’, and ‘type’) as forming at complex intersections in the histories of political theory, sociology, aesthetics, and art history. Prying apart artistic visions, technological innovations, and formal solutions in architecture from what are habitually taken to be their historically determined social rationales, the book attends to the critical moments in which architectural knowledge was called upon to generate new social possibilities and insights. This approach requires striking a series of careful balances in identifying the relative influence of ideas across oeuvres, milieus, and discursive terrains –​between the written text and the built work, between the contributions made by powerful individuals to those of anonymous designers, and between the academy and the profession. In addressing the complex socio-​political contexts that framed debate on housing design, the book draws from perspectives in governmentality studies. The emergence of housing as a welfare instrument designed to maintain social equilibrium and moderate the excesses of laissez-​faire capitalism was decisive in shaping a more substantive discourse on social regulation that has since, inadvertently, aided the development of modern capitalism. The concept of welfare described here deals not so much with a set of social insurance schemes initiated by Otto von Bismarck (although it is not coincidental that Germany was the first ‘welfare state’). Nor does it deal with the machinations of power within a social milieu that led to decisions about housing provision being made. Rather, the concept of welfare discussed in this book relates to a broader strategy of reform in the sociological imagination based on observing and efficiently regulating a deeper reality of social equilibrium latent in the German population, which would limit the need for direct disciplinary intervention by a sovereign state. Michel Foucault described this type of regulation as ‘governmentality’.30 While for Foucault the rationality underpinning modern governmentality was expressly liberal, more recent studies to examine the German path to modernity expose a complex and contradictory set of welfare practices around which modern capitalism came to organise itself.31 The parameters of good housing design that emerged in Germany were frequently shaped by norms, such as home ownership and prudence in household matters, which would come to underpin the social logic of capitalism. These norms were directed just as much towards securing the social welfare of the middle classes as they were towards securing their economic freedom.

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Introduction Through its participation in housing design, architecture did not merely represent these political values but moulded and reinforced them. In dealing with the history of artistic change, this book takes an approach that brackets out contemporary assumptions about the boundaries that determine architectural theory in order to grasp how the paradigm of tradition emerged to fulfil a critical programme of social reform. It traces the complex twists and turns of intellectual production that gave meaning to architecture as a social practice. It goes beyond the study of mere attitudes, in which dichotomies such as optimistic/​pessimistic, progressive/​reactionary, pro-​urban/​anti-​ urban, etc. are given a sense of historical inevitability regarding an architect’s essentially modern or anti-​modern aesthetic stance, positioning architecture outside of modernity, in its judgement. Indeed, it frequently seems as if the term ‘building’ serves to embody all the negative developments of modernity, such as surveillance, totalitarianism, state-​sponsored violence, nostalgic populism, capitalist greed, and mass conformity, while capital-​ ‘A’ Architecture sides with enduring ideals that cannot be collapsed into modernity, including activism, negative critique, and the political. However, the intellectual parameters that register architecture’s flows in and out of modernity are constantly shifting and creating new blind spots. The emergence and absorption of sociology and its historiographical assumptions into architectural theory has become one such blind spot in our assessment of the broader social legacy of German modernism. In nineteenth-​century debates on social reform, architectural knowledge about the past became intrinsic to a modern understanding of progressive change –​one that was grounded in a cultural paradigm of traditionalism. Since then, architecture’s most radical political procedures have arguably become limited to thinking innovatively about domesticity. Accounting for the emergence of housing design as a sphere of social action renders intelligible the contradictions latent in an architectural discipline tasked with producing an object that simultaneously serves as means of ensuring social welfare and economic freedom. The book ultimately seeks to offer a clearer understanding of what architecture actually does, or can do, in a social field that seems to constantly generate new crises. As this book argues, the perpetual conflicts, problems, and crises that continue to plague housing were, in fact, built into it as soon as it was conceived as a coherent object of design intervention.

Notes 1 Note on translations: unless otherwise noted, all translations of texts cited in German and French are my own. For clarity for readers unfamiliar with the German language, I have translated some German passages more loosely, such as breaking up excessively long sentences. For readability, I have translated all titles to English in the text and have provided original titles in the notes. I have cited any English translations that exist for German sources.

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The architecture of social reform 2 Late-​nineteenth-​century German architectural culture has largely escaped attention from architectural historians who have predominantly focused on the neo-​classical period of the early nineteenth century and the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement active in the 1920s. However, many recent studies have emphasised the longue durée of German modernism, taking the mid-​nineteenth century as a departure point. See Alina Payne, From ornament to object: Genealogies of architectural modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Mark Wigley, White walls, designer dresses: The fashioning of modern architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); and Erin Eckhold Sassin, Single people and mass housing in Germany, 1850–​1930: (No)home away from home (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 3 See Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic crossings: Social politics in a progressive age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 4 Nicholas Bullock and James Read, The movement for housing reform in Germany and France, 1840–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 5 See Mary McLeod, ‘ “Architecture or revolution”: Taylorism, technocracy, and social change’, Art Journal, 43:2 (1983), 132–​47. 6 While comprehensive histories exist of late-​ nineteenth-​ century German architectural theory, few have considered its interactions with social politics. See Mitchell Schwarzer, German architectural theory and the search for modern identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Mari Hvattum, Gottfried Semper and the problem of historicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 7 See Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf (eds), Vernacular modernism: Heimat, globalization, and the built environment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); and Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin (eds), Folklore and nationalism in Europe during the long nineteenth century (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 8 Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the modern movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Faber & Faber, 1936). 9 For an overview of this debate, see Jürgen Kocka, ‘Looking back on the Sonderweg’, Central European History, 51:1 (2018), 137–​42. 10 Fritz Stern, The politics of cultural despair: A study in the rise of the Germanic ideology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961); George Mosse, The crisis of German ideology: Intellectual origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964); and Fritz K. Ringer, The decline of the German mandarins: The German academic community, 1890–​1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). 11 Vittorio M. Lampugnani and Romana Schneider, Moderne Architektur in Deutschland 1900 bis 1950: Reform und Tradition (Stuttgart: G. Hatje, 1992); Leif Jerram, Germany’s other modernity: Munich and the making of metropolis, 1895–​1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Erik M. Ghenoiu, ‘ “Tradition” as modernism in German architecture and urban design, 1888–​1918’, DPhil thesis, Harvard University, 2008; Jeannette Redensek, ‘Manufacturing Gemeinschaft: Architecture, tradition, and the sociology of community in Germany, 1890–​1920’, DPhil thesis, City University of New York, 2007; and Maiken Umbach, German cities and bourgeois modernism, 1890–​1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 12 Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design theory and mass culture before the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); and John V. Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, politics, and the German state, 1890–​1920 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 13 Literature on the idea of Heimat in Germany is too numerous to list here. Some key texts include Celia Applegate, A nation of provincials: The German idea of Heimat (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); Alon Confino, The nation as a

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Introduction local metaphor: Württenberg, Imperial Germany and national memory 1871–​1918 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the nation in nature: Landscape preservation and German identity, 1885–​ 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 14 Other broad studies on nationalism that have shaped my approach in this book include Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five roads to modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 15 Erik Grimmer-​Solem, The rise of historical economics and social reform in Germany, 1864–​1894 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 101. For a social history of the Mittelstand, see Shulamit Volkov, The rise of popular antimodernism in Germany: The urban master artisans, 1873–​1896 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 16 See Mack Walker, German home towns: Community, state, and general state, 1648–​ 1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1971] 1998). 17 Marion W. Gray, Productive men, reproductive women: The agrarian household and the emergence of separate spheres during the German Enlightenment (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000). 18 Ibid., p. 49. 19 See David F. Lindenfeld, The practical imagination: The German sciences of state in the nineteenth century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 60. 20 For an account of the development of political economy in Germany, see Keith Tribe, Governing economy: The reformation of German economic discourse, 1750–​ 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 21 See Joachim Singelmann and Peter Singelmann, ‘Lorenz von Stein and the paradigmatic bifurcation of social theory in the nineteenth century’, British Journal of Sociology, 37:3 (1986), 431–​52. 22 Quoted from Marx’s lecture from 1856 in Marshall Berman, All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 19. 23 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and revolution: Hegel and the rise of social theory (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1960). 24 F[riedrich]. Schultze, ‘Bürgerliche Baukunst’, Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, 23:22 (1903), 138–​9. 25 Friedrich Engels, The housing question (London: Martin Lawrence Limited, [1872–​ 3] 1935). Original published as Zur Wohnungsfrage in the newspaper Der Volkstaat. 26 See Parker D. Everett, Urban transformations: From liberalism to corporatism in Greater Berlin, 1871–​1933 (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2019). 27 Klaus Epstein, The genesis of German conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 13. 28 Paul Bröcker, ‘Baustoffindustrie und Heimatschutzbewegung’, Tonindustrie-​ Zeitung, 37:68; 71; 76; 77 (1913), 997. 29 This aphorism by Paul Scheerbart was written on the base of architect Bruno Taut’s Glashaus at the exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund in 1914. 30 Michel Foucault, Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–​1978 (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Michel Foucault, The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–​1979 (New York: Palgrave, 2008). 31 George Steinmetz, Regulating the social: The welfare state and local politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Edward R. Dickinson, ‘Biopolitics, fascism, democracy: Some reflections on our discourse about “modernity” ’, Central European History, 37:1 (2004), 1–​48; and Young-​Sun Hong, Welfare, modernity, and the Weimar state (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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Building from the inside out

From the mid-​nineteenth century onwards in Germany, a new kind of ethic entered into the architectural imagination, centred on the household. This household was conceived in a twofold social context, referring both to the traditional family household and to a household that was only just coming into being: the nation. The family and the nation became fundamental points of reference in a large number of academic fields concerned with epistemological questions over the nature of modern society. In broad terms, these fields included political science, economics, ethnography, and, indeed, architecture. Both family and nation began to be viewed in these fields as engaging in a dynamic social interplay, albeit one moving towards equilibrium rather than enacting a dialectical transformation. The growing impulse to manage this dynamic –​to enable a kind of ‘visible hand’ of social government –​was based on a growing belief among a variety of experts that knowledge procured from the family household could be used to reform society and regulate the economic growth of the nation at large. This reform project came to underpin a new ethic in architecture, which called for the discipline to reconsider the terms of its agency within a framework of society that privileged the operations of the family home. The intellectual scaffolding for this project came from a curious source: the conservative folklorist and proto-​sociologist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823–​97), whose mandate of ‘building from the inside out’ achieved immense popularity among modern architectural critics and theorists. Folklore research exploded across Europe in the nineteenth century as nations sought to strengthen their political identity through studying their native traditions, including oral languages, epic poems, songs, and building practices.1 The need to acquire social knowledge of the broader German population was growing in importance leading up to German unification. Previously to that, the German Empire consisted of scattered territories that possessed their own systems of administration and statistical information. While romantic folklorists like the Grimms sought to recover

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Building from the inside out

German values and customs in order to bolster national understanding, the more rigorous folklore emerging in Riehl’s work served a dual purpose of pragmatic social inquiry and administrative intervention.2 In the context of Riehl’s folklore studies, ‘building from the inside out’ referred to the traditional Germanic spirit that appeared to pervade pre-​modern ways of building. It connoted certain types of buildings, such as ramshackle cottages and quaint chapels hidden in the woods, from which the spirit of the German people seemed to emanate through their very materiality. Instigating a polemic on the importance of the traditional German family as well as fuelling anti-​Semitic, anti-​Romani, and anti-​ Ottoman sentiment, Riehl’s conservative folklore played a crucial part in building German national identity. While Riehl’s social theory was ideologically conservative in its endorsement of both the pre-​modern estate system and the extended family as models of social self-​sufficiency in the modern era, his methods and assumptions were novel. He perceptively recognised that cultural knowledge of the German population could be used as a vital source of modern political power. In this sense, Riehl’s work represents a critical moment in which the rhetoric of architecture was transferred from an epistemological frame considered too static, abstract, and philosophical to a frame considered dynamic, concrete, and scientific. It was the latter frame that modern architecture came to occupy in its turn to housing as a privileged field of architectural intervention. Riehl’s style of folklore research was ineluctably shaped by the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions, when the tenets of Enlightenment social politics were being violently put to the test. The waves of revolutionary upheaval that swept across the states of the German Confederation in 1848 resulted in major political and social fragmentation that prevailed until the unification of Germany in 1871. Within the burgeoning social sciences, numerous efforts were made to interrogate and challenge the philosophical assumptions that underpinned the socialist movements believed to be the main culprits of the unrest. Concerns over the threat of organised labour movements emerged across Europe as soon as the medieval guild system collapsed. French philosophes Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert were the first to reflect on the social effects of industrial labour conditions, dedicating a significant portion of their monumental Encyclopédie (1751–​72) to representing the state of the ‘mechanical arts’ in France –​in part an effort to reveal trade secrets and thus undermine the strength of the guild system. Yet Diderot’s documentation conveyed a degree of sympathy for the state of workers’ wellbeing under dispersed guild-​based conditions –​conditions which were disappearing through the increasing centralisation of industrial production. In his entry on the state of industry, Diderot warned of the dangers of the large factory for breeding workers’ exploitation and discontent, encouraging instead the dispersion of manufacturing via smaller-​scale workshops (Figure 1.1).

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Figure 1.1  Etching of a carpenter’s workshop in the Encyclopédie, from Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot’s Recueil de planches sur les sciences, les arts libéraux et les arts méchaniques, avec leur explication.

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Building from the inside out

French architect Claude-​ Nicolas Ledoux’s designs for workers’ houses, published in his 1804 treatise Architecture, represent some of the first proposed architectural solutions to the growing problem of social alienation under modern industrial conditions. These designs were dually intellectual and didactic. His model for a worker’s house at a saltworks company town in Chaux was a utilitarian design overlayed with a Palladian grammar. His designs for rural workers’ houses displayed a similar paternalistic intent, with a woodcutter’s house and workshop affording dignity to the woodcutter’s hitherto unruly trade in the forest by articulating it in the classicising grammar of a primitive wooden order. These workers’ houses represented Ledoux’s attempt to reconcile Diderot’s two models of unified and dispersed manufacture into a single architectural vision of the French physiocratic landscape. This vision was both enlightened and consoling, seeking ultimately to reform disorderly workers’ associations by constructing a bucolic, quasi-​feudal image of ‘productive man in a physiocratic arcadia’ in accordance with the language of high architecture.3 The social gulf opened by industrialised work could be thus reconciled through Enlightenment ideals. Accordingly, Ledoux assigned a prominent place for the figure of the architect in his vision, with another plate in his treatise depicting a poor man standing under a solitary tree, hands reaching out to be struck by the rays of sunlight cast by an architect standing in the clouds among the muses of art and science (Figure 1.2).4 Early-​ nineteenth-​ century utopian socialist sects born in France continued to ignite conservative fears in Germany over the growth of secret

Figure 1.2  ‘Shelter of the poor’, from Claude-​Nicolas Ledoux’s L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation.

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The architecture of social reform societies, unionisation, and revolution. While based on an Enlightenment faith in a renewed social world born from the power of the intellect, these sects possessed a feverish religiosity, worshipping the artisan as a cult figure within their visions of cooperation.5 In Germany, the conservative reaction against the spread of mystical socialism reached its peak in the work of Riehl in the wake of the turbulent revolutionary years. His populist writings on German society were instrumental in bringing to an end the influence of utopian socialist doctrine, which had quickly spread in Germany by means of popular pamphlets combining ‘apocalyptic reference to the end of the world’ with ‘vernacular prophesies about the nation’s political future, Delphic monastic oracles, and predictions of clairvoyants’.6 Riehl saw the benefits and dangers of the French encyclopaedists’ approach from the previous century. In taking stock of the past and present goals of social reform, he praised their empirical work, but criticised their impulse to apply quasi-​universal values (Rousseauesque abstract notions of a ‘social contract’) to the social conditions they documented in the French countryside –​which were largely responsible for the spread of the kinds of radical doctrine Riehl feared. If the question of reform for Ledoux was still largely framed in terms of what could be done for the worker (the gift of intellectual refinement brought by the architect-​philosophe), the question of reform for Riehl concerned what could be done to the worker. Towards this task, Riehl took inspiration from the empiricism of conservative German jurist and historian Justus Möser, whose epic account (published 1768–​80) of his own native town of Osnabrück (a Holy Roman principality in northern Germany) is widely held to be the first social history. Like Diderot and Ledoux, Möser nostalgically seized upon idealised images of pre-​modern craft production, using them as guiding threads in his historiography. One such image, to which Riehl was particularly drawn, described the prototype of a Saxon farmhouse, which Möser believed characterised Osnabrück’s peasant life from the era in which the Roman scholar Tacitus wrote Germania (98 ce) to his own time. The dwelling of a common peasant is so complete in its plan that it cannot possibly be improved and may serve as a prototype. The hearth is almost in the middle of the house and is arranged so that the woman who sits by it can oversee everything at the same time. Such a large and comfortable viewpoint exists in no other type of building. Without having to leave her chair, she sees all three doors at once, greets those who come in and invites them to sit, keeps an eye on children and servants, her horses and cows, guards the cellar and chamber, all while spinning and cooking.7

Möser’s quaint characterisation of the origins of linen manufacturing (Osnabrück’s chief export) as domestic (i.e., a matter of the household) points to a relatively enclosed social system of production and reproduction,



Building from the inside out

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which in his hands and those of his readers served unabashedly as a conservative defence of the autonomy of local politics, of local institutions such as guild systems, and of the idiosyncrasies of local peasant families, whom he imagined not as serfs, but as property-​owning farmers. Tacitus remained a principal source for Möser’s characterisation of the archetypal German dwelling. The Roman historian described the German house thus: It is well known that none of the German peoples live in cities and that they cannot even bear to live in adjoining houses. They dwell apart from one another, scattered about, wherever a spring, a plain, or a wood attracts them. They do not lay out their villages in our style, with buildings joined and connected together. Each of them leaves an open space around his house, either as a protection against the risk of fire, or because they lack skill in building. They do not even use stones or bricks. They employ timber for all purposes, roughly cut, for they are not concerned to achieve a pleasant external appearance. Some parts, however, they smear quite carefully with clay that is so pure and shining that it resembles painting or coloured design. They also have the practice of digging underground caves and loading piles of manure on top of them, as a refuge in the winter and a storehouse for crops. Places like this mitigate the harshness of the cold weather –​and, if an enemy comes, he ravages the open country, while the excavated hideouts are either not known about or escape detection because they have to be searched out.8

The frontispiece of a later edition of Möser’s history of Osnabrück (Figure 1.3) presumably depicts this pre-​ Charlemagne, early-​ Saxon phase described by Tacitus as a semi-​ anarchical, agriculturalist Eden (with Möser’s dwelling prototype seen in the distance). From the dawn of the Romantic movement in Germany, the forest was seen as unruly but not uncivilised, subsequently functioning in the nineteenth century as a reservoir of national history –​providing built settings, such as gingerbread houses, where moralising lessons could take place (and from which architects could learn). Opposing the universalising tendencies of Enlightenment rationalism, Möser viewed history writing as attending to all the organic, individualistic, and particular elements of society that belonged to this reservoir of folk knowledge. Yet a more idealistic aspect of Möser’s writings concerned what he imagined as a yardstick of authenticity: the ‘common man’ (which included the peasant, the artisan, and even the middle-​class burgher). The restoration of the dignity of Möser’s common man was achieved by giving him an historical identity, and by following him ‘through all the twists and turns of fate’.9 Besides Möser’s historical writing, Riehl also found inspiration in Möser’s newspapers articles on local Osnabrück politics which, while intensely practical in tone, became classics of the German Enlightenment and were collated in the volume Patriotic fantasies (and included ‘A contribution for the rural population about the policing of pleasure’ and ‘A certain method for eliminating the all too frequent

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Figure 1.3  Frontispiece from Justus Möser’s Osnabrückische Geschichte.

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Building from the inside out

drinking of coffee’).10 For Riehl, unlike the encyclopaedists, Möser was able to see the people ‘clear and pure’.11 Möser’s historiography and his writings on practical reform policy acted as guides for each respective side of a knowledge/​power coin that constituted the title of Riehl’s influential four-​volume sociological treatise, The natural history of the German people as the foundation of German social policy (1851–​5), in which he produced elaborate typologies of family, society, and state through penetrating empirical work that examined local customs, including architectural ones. Locating in the reservoir of history the inherent dignity in certain modes of labour and cooperative organisation embodied within (idealised) social types and the types of buildings they inhabited, Riehl imagined that his folklore research would be instrumental for developing national social policy –​placing a mirror upon society in order to reform the modern worker from within. Riehl’s theory of a dynamic social state, irreducible to metaphysical postulates or philosophical modes of reasoning, exposed the limits of architecture hitherto theorised in Enlightenment science as a form of universal knowledge, inadvertently drawing new parameters for its potential social agency. He thus inaugurated a shift in ideas about architecture that would see a generation of modern architects, architectural theorists, and urbanists continually refer to his work, or to his most prominent theories, to legitimise new modes of architectural practice capable of acting within the social world.12 Natural history provided an enduring framework through which to negotiate the terms of architecture’s political agency –​ terms, however, that needed to be constantly renegotiated due to inconsistencies and prejudices in Riehl’s own work.

Society as a work of art Many historians have characterised the period of reform following the 1848 revolutions as critical to a longer trajectory of intellectual despair over modernisation. However, the response mechanisms to perceived social crises that developed during this period helped invent perhaps the most powerful intellectual apparatus of modernity: the idea of social welfare.13 Welfare (or what was commonly described in Germany as the ‘social question’) arrived as the answer to the threat of revolt from an expanding class of wage labourers, addressing itself to a realm of pauperism that appeared to stand in between political and economic questions (until wageworkers become more politically organised in the 1860s).14 The ‘social’ world described a more authentic field of relations –​a ‘reality’ that could be observed empirically and addressed only through social policy, not through enlightened politics or classical economics (as an individualistic, market-​based faith in the ‘invisible hand’). As George Steinmetz observes, social policy emerged in Germany as ‘order’ for its own sake.15

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The architecture of social reform It became a business of identifying risks to welfare and determining non-​repressive solutions (including workers’ housing as a self-​help technology), such that any aggression fought either on the Pnyx or the factory floor essentially represented a failure of social policy. In subjecting French socialist utopian movements (including Saint-​ Simonianism and Fourierism) themselves to empirical analysis, the German economist Lorenz von Stein was the first to articulate a theory of the proletariat, moving the study of the social world from the domain of philosophy to the domain of science.16 His work presented a fork in the road for new social theory. On the one hand, Stein expressed sympathy for the capacity of members of the proletariat to organise themselves into movements and exert social pressure via a ‘labour question’, thus opening a route to understanding class struggle that was pursued critically by Marx. On the other hand, Stein emphasised that social movements were precisely that –​organised groups of agitators who possessed no special historical destiny as Marx later imagined. Stein held a firm conviction that inequality could be resolved purely through social welfare policy rather than through proletarian struggle. Riehl more vehemently stressed the unfoundedness of modern socialist mass movements, and, in the process, brought ‘social policy’ into common parlance in the hopes of providing a positive model for how the nation could work to secure social equilibrium (although neither Marx nor Riehl engaged with Stein’s well-​known work –​ perhaps testimony to their association of his oeuvre with the particular route they found reprehensible).17 At the same time as Engels was documenting working-​class conditions in England, Riehl set off to the German countryside to observe the conditions of the peasantry. In opening Natural history, he drew upon the 1848 revolutions that occurred across Central Europe to note that if occurrences of political unrest were turning the German states into further disorder, it was because historically German society tended towards separatism and particularism, and such group interests were being confounded with other, more inauthentic forms of social idealism originating from French radical socialist literature. Natural history was largely dedicated to dismantling the intellectual apparatuses of modern political philosophy that were fuelling this unrest. He criticised philosophes like Rousseau, who placed at the apex of his political philosophy ‘not a study of the social organism as historical fact but rather the abstract notion of a “social contract” ’.18 Equally critical of the bureaucratic and centralist nature of Prussian state administration, Riehl championed Möser’s organic conception of society that viewed the German people not as a homogeneous mass but as a multilayered complex of social communities around which the nation’s political life rotated. In Riehl’s eyes, genuine political reform would not come from philosophical abstractions but rather from the study of the peculiarities of geography, family, and society, which combined to form a ‘harmonious work of art’.19

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Building from the inside out

Riehl likewise criticised the abstractions of classical political economy as the principal source of illusion among the proletariat of a fateful ‘struggle between labor and capital’.20 For Riehl, economics could not be made into an isolatable scientific system; a true science of society involved recognising the historicity of economics itself, and locating it within the socially and geographically particular qualities of the German people. This critique was largely derivative. From Möser onwards, the idea of economic history as organic pervaded economic thought, particularly in the work of German economists Karl Knies and Wilhelm Roscher. Knies suggested that environmental factors such as soil and climate, as well as cultural custom (Sitte) ought to become important components of the study of political economy.21 In his 1854 book Principles of political economy, Roscher argued for closer alignments between economics and ethics, stressing that if equality was the dominant moral sentiment of the modern era, it ought not to be reduced to the levelling tendencies of socialism.22 Thus, for Riehl, political and economic questions were always made answerable to knowledge of the social realm. In the third volume of Natural history, titled Civil society (1851), he provided a sociological analysis of the traditional medieval estate structure, composed of ‘forces of continuity’ (independent peasants and the nobility) and ‘forces of movement’ (middle-​class citizens or burghers). Riehl argued that all social groups had their rightful place in the social order, since, in the language of Möser, it was only through diversity that society could develop in a ‘vital, organic fashion’.23 Situating the Germanic-​speaking lands at the heart of his medieval social idyll, Riehl’s vision for the future was one in which modern society arose organically out of traditional estate-​based hierarchies and where every member of the German nation –​from the peasant to the artisan to the upper-​class citizen –​was happy to accept their place in this hierarchy. Like many conservative thinkers before him, Riehl imagined pre-​ modern German society as a world of orderly interiors defined by walls, gates, and town fortifications that gave the German population their identity and history. Even burghers involved with trade had their beloved ‘home towns’ to which to return, giving them a solid footing in the social order.24 If Riehl ignited strong sentimental feelings over the comforts of Heimat among his readers, he ignited an equally strong sense of hatred towards populations who appeared to breach the terms of those comforts –​ in particular, the Jewish and Romani peoples who had a centuries-​long presence in Germany. While it would be easy to claim Riehl’s ethnocentrism as a by-​product of growing anti-​Semitic and anti-​Romani sentiment in Germany, it is difficult to underestimate the extent to which his efforts alone ignited a culture of racialist thought that would have devastating consequences in the twentieth century.25 His classification of the ‘fourth estate’ was crucial

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The architecture of social reform in formalising popular racial stereotypes into a system of social theory. In Civil society, Riehl defined as the ‘fourth estate’ those figures that had fallen out of the traditional estates, including the modern classes born out of the French Revolution (the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) as well as the ‘denatured’ Jewish peddlers and Romani. Society naturally tended towards inequality, and one’s traditional (‘authentic’) social vocation was defined at birth. The ‘fourth estate’ seemed to function as a convenient catch-​all term to describe members of an expanding industrial working class, as well as the collective greed of Jewish capitalists, who existed outside a band of moral cohesion sustained by the traits of the ‘common man’ (which, for Riehl, like Möser, encompassed peasants, artisans, and burghers). He described the vocation of the Jewish peddler thus: ‘he brings to his business only a congenital talent for calculation […] he simply sweats and strains until he has made himself into –​a capitalist’.26 Despite the self-​acknowledged conservatism of his own social theories, Riehl’s proposed methods were innovative, combining quantitative surveys, which he called moral statistics, with vivid descriptions of regional cultural life, although these largely remained exhortations for further study (Natural history matched nothing in empirical breadth, for example, to French statistician Frédéric Le Play’s research on French workers’ household budgets). Riehl explained the significance of his approach in the 1858 lecture ‘Folklore as science’, in which he described his vision for a ‘new system of national economy based on cultural history and the study of folklore’.27 In its most pure scientific sense, Riehl insisted, folklore would automatically function as a mode of reform. ‘The clearer a nation comes to understand itself as a nation’, he proclaimed, ‘the higher climbs not only its general civilisational behaviour, but its historical knowledge’.28 Indeed, Riehl described folklore as the closest thing to a genuine art of government. The fruits of its study would bring ‘into unison the welfare of the individual with the welfare of the whole’, that is, if state administration were to be understood in its true vital sense as ‘cultural and economic policing’.29 Under these conditions, every police action could be adapted to ‘the nature of the people’ such that the people ‘would come to believe that even in troublesome matters, the police only commanded and acted on behalf of their sentiments’.30 What Riehl proposed was a productive form of governance that reached into the social body of the population, such that the political operations of the nation-​state would essentially remain limited to servicing a feedback loop. Under these conditions, the nation would be safe from political unrest, for it would no longer be progressive or reactionary, liberal or repressive, left-wing or right-wing. Cultural policy would provide the means to achieve the optimum welfare of an existing social reality –​of identifying social forms of equilibrium in the German population and adjusting policy around the elements in society shown to be most capable of taking care of themselves.



Building from the inside out

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The family For Riehl, the institution proven to be most capable of self-​help in Germany was the extended family –​the lifeblood medieval European society. In the third volume of Natural history, Riehl produced a sociology of the family –​the first of its kind to subject the social structure of the family to extended empirical analysis. He dedicated a chapter to discussing the role of domestic architecture, which he considered to be the raw material of family life, the study of which would enable the social scientist to know the real moral sentiments of the population. ‘The statesman should not just be afforded a glimpse into church registers’, Riehl claimed; ‘he should also have the opportunity to see into the home’.31 True to his commitment to avoiding metaphysical claims, Riehl was just as ambivalent about the authority of Christianity as he was about the authority of the modern market’s ‘invisible hand’ in imparting a universal system of ethics to society. While Riehl’s study of peasant households was similar to Le Play’s work, the latter’s Catholic morality was essential to the importance he placed on the family. For Riehl, the reverse was the case. His Protestant upbringing was important only inasmuch as it served as another bastion of cultural tradition that preserved paternal authority: ‘My religious confession, seemingly the most individual thing that I possess, was essentially inculcated in me by the authority of the family.’32 For Riehl, the pre-​modern extended family represented a microcosm of estate hierarchy, with the patriarch representing a force of movement in society, and the woman representing a force of tradition in the rearing of children and the management of the domestic hearth. Growing out of these relations was what Riehl described as the moral personage of the extended house, which included children, servants, and other relatives (such as bachelors and spinsters). Riehl envisaged many ways in which modes of knowledge traditionally developed by artisans and architects could inform social policy at the scale of the family dwelling. Encouraging an ethnographic approach to the study of architecture, he urged cultural historians to study the effects that building materials exerted on national character. He was the first theorist to speculate on the psychological effect of street patterns, which would intensely occupy the writings of modern urban planners and critics.33 His main interest was the study of building types according to traditional conventions of use. Riehl attributed the radicalism of French politics to the customs of ‘polite society’ that were cultivated in the space of the salon –​a ‘foreign growth’ that was beginning to appear in German houses.34 Indicating a fundamental disruption to the most intimate space of familial conviviality and to women’s traditional roles, Riehl argued that the salon had ‘only negative implications for the family. The salon, as focal point, moves the architectural logic of the house outside of the social order, and distorts

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The architecture of social reform the extended house.’35 Riehl bemoaned the increasing Parisianisation and militarisation of German cities such as Berlin and Munich, which were imitating the strict symmetry of Italianate-​French ‘palace-​styles’ and subordinating the familial function of the dwelling (building organically from the inside out) to the greater service of societal representation (guided by the principle of building mechanically from the outside in).36 Describing Berlin’s modern apartments as ‘cramped, stinking, fetid crannies’ perpetually cut off from sunlight, Riehl saw the broader proliferation of tenements in the major cities of Europe and North America as an equally disturbing development.37 While he was distrustful of the Jewish speculators widely perceived to be driving tenement construction, Riehl argued that the spread of the tenements was not principally the fault of building contractors. He attributed the loss of the vast hall space that once characterised the pre-​modern burgher townhouse and peasant farmhouse, which had previously secured privacy of family space from the streets, to the general loss of prominence of the extended family in German society. As tenement life spread to North America, dwellings were increasingly being turned into disposable commodities, thrown into the ‘maelstrom of the larger urban capitalist economy’.38 Likewise, as each individual household lost its family name in favour of a street number, the true expression of family life was lost. Riehl lamented over the loss of the German names of rooms as an indication of ‘how deeply the French outlook has bitten into our domestic customs. We use Souterrain [basement], Parterre [ground floor], Beletage [piano nobile] etc. just as frequently as the corresponding German words. […] Luckily we cannot likewise translate “salon”.’39 The worst of these developments in modern housing included the proliferation of rooms for individual members of the family as the central family room got smaller, as well as the increasing absence of the conjugal bed and the relegation of children, who once slept at the foot of the parents’ bed, to a separate nursery. For Riehl, the lobbies, galleries, courtyards, and alcoves found in German regional farmhouses (which the housing speculators had considered superfluous) contained important ethnographic parallels. They represented a still-​surviving type of spatial arrangement for ideal family life that characterised both the pre-​modern peasant farmhouse and the burgher townhouse. Their architectural layout functioned not just as a symbol for the impenetrable sanctity of family life, but also as a physical articulation of the social order of the extended family. In the north and south of Germany, Riehl claimed, a ‘prosperous and self-​sufficient peasantry’ had survived where ‘large and stately entrance halls are still the norm’, whereas in the Rhineland one could still make a ‘fairly accurate estimate of a peasant’s prosperity from the size of the entryway in his house’.40 The way to improve housing styles, he claimed, was ‘not to add entryways but

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Building from the inside out

to arouse a new familial spirit. If that were to happen, stately entrance halls would return of their own accord, even in the poorest of households.’41 One of his more idiosyncratic observations concerned the situation of housing for single people. Riehl observed that traditional German houses provided alcoves or ‘sulking corners’ in the family room whereby bachelors could withdraw ‘for work or relaxation’ but not shut themselves off completely from the family.42 Various late-​nineteenth-​century legal mechanisms in Germany, such as limiting property inheritance to bachelors and initiating celibacy tax laws, were initiated in an effort to maintain the traditional structure of the family and the stability of the nation at large.43 In providing the ‘architectural symbol’ of the relationship of the individual to the family, for Riehl the traditional alcove provided the ‘basis on which the extended house ought to be designed’.44 While Riehl’s mandate of ‘building from the inside out’ would prove compelling, his own examples of building in such a fashion constituted a sort of populist pseudo-​ science that reinforced crude myths of civilisational progress and decline. Borrowing his description of the archetypal peasant’s house directly from Möser, Riehl cited the old Saxon farmhouse as one of the few surviving building types in which the pre-​modern family room, dominated by the hearth and the housewife’s spinning wheel, could still be observed, truly expressing the basic concept of the extended household and thus serving as a ‘time-​honoured model’ for designing the family house (Figure 1.4).45 This model remained central to Riehl’s naïve worldview, which positioned the Germanic-​speaking lands at the centre of European civilisation progress, with the culturally decadent France and the despotic Ottoman East existing as threats on either side.46 Civilisational differences could ultimately be read at the scale of the family household;

Figure 1.4  Saxon farmhouse, elevation, from Rudolf Henning’s Das deutsche Haus in seiner historischen Entwickelung.

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The architecture of social reform

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Riehl suggested that the particularly inward architectural orientation of Turkish harems served as an indication of the extreme and overpowering influence of the family in Ottoman culture.47 His characterisation of the Parisian salon and the stereotypical ‘Oriental’ harem represented two extremes of women’s positions in the household (complete emancipation and imprisonment, respectively), which in contrast to the traditional Saxon house represented ultimate societal decline.

Anonymous architecture Despite his endeavours to establish folklore as a legitimate science, when it came to regional architecture Riehl’s search for traditional archetypes was indebted to a literary tradition of romantic nationalism instigated by writers like Möser and the Grimm brothers. Along with the flowering of folklore research in the nineteenth century, there was a growing popular fascination with German peasant life among the middle classes. Kitsch paintings depicting rural life and farmhouse architecture, such as those by Heinrich Stuhlman (Figures 1.5–​6), as well as children’s picture books depicting buildings in German forests, served as didactic tools (Figure 1.7). One particularly vivid children’s picture sheet depicting houses, chapels, and towers in the Black Forest brought the nation’s beloved vernacular architecture to an almost miniaturised scale. Roofs covering farmhouse interiors enter into a rhetorical dialogue with roofs framing utilitarian

Figure 1.5  Heinrich Stuhlmann, Entrance Hall with Cooking Peasant Woman, etching and drypoint, 1839.

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Figure 1.6  Heinrich Stuhlmann, Mother and Child in a Farmyard, etching, 1871.

Figure 1.7  Educational picture sheet depicting the story of Hansel and Gretel. Drawn by Theodor Hosemann, c. 1868.

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The architecture of social reform

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objects like fountains and water pumps, underscoring their shared status as anonymous, functional objects (Figure 1.8). These popular didactic images created mass cultural interest among middle-​class families for books like Riehl’s Natural history (the volumes of which would typically run over a dozen editions for the remainder of the nineteenth century). While Riehl did not consider his work to belong to the genre of romantic

Figure 1.8  A children’s picture sheet depicting houses, chapels, and towers in the Black Forest. Drawn by August Exleben, c. 1860.

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Building from the inside out

nationalism, his historical analysis was full of descriptions of lyrical elements, such as fairy tales, peasant costumes, and odes as expressions of cultural custom that blurred the boundaries between art and life. His privileging of the family as an instrumental unit in the development of national culture consequently gave the objects that served the family as domestic tools and protective skins, such as combs, vases, and farmhouses, new licence to speak both poetically and scientifically about the nation at large. Imagining the German nation as a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), Riehl’s functionalist mandate of building from the inside out brought forth new conditions through which the architectural discipline could reorient itself towards a realm of anonymous artistic production closely aligned with the domestic sphere as a privileged field of research and societal intervention. Riehl regarded traditional architecture as a simple and honest craft, remarking that ‘there is not the slightest hint of anything proletarian about architects as a social group, whereas a proletariat of musicians and stage folk catches our attention at every turn’.48 His ethic towards architecture as a traditionally stable vocation was primarily levelled against the excessive intellectualism of the professional ‘academic’ architects who studied at the Building Academy (Bauakademie) under Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. These architects helped instigate a tradition of regionally inflected residential construction in Prussia through the publication of sketchbooks which featured, alongside Mediterranean motifs typical of Italianate villas, explorations of Swiss chalet and German medieval motifs.49 Riehl resented these architects’ creative abuses of regional styles, which he perceived as inauthentic.50 In his schema, it was the task of folklorists to document the ‘inner life’ of the people and place a mirror upon the nation, such that a new authentic architectural style would emerge on its own, and architects would be at a loss as to how it came about, ‘for the style would have come to them, rather than the other way around’.51 In helping architects to understand their embeddedness in the social world (himself admitting that it was ‘hardly customary to evaluate artistic developments from a social standpoint’),52 Riehl provided a crucial point of reference for ideas about anonymous architecture that were circulating with great influence in German-​language architectural theory, particularly through the writings of Gottfried Semper. Building upon the classification methods of French naturalist Georges Cuvier and German cultural historian Gustav Klemm, Semper’s monumental Style in the technical and tectonic arts; or, practical aesthetics: A handbook for technicians, artists, and patrons of art (1861–​3) taxonomised an array of artistic motifs to map the growth of civilisation through its anonymous objects.53 Semper identified four ‘elements of architecture’, ceramics, carpentry, textiles, and masonry, which were created out of basic human need but which nonetheless conveyed important symbolic content that infused architecture

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The architecture of social reform with poetic significance.54 Corresponding to the art of ceramics, Semper considered the hearth to be the first ‘moral element of architecture’.55 As the place where the first social groups and alliances formed, and where the first religious concepts and customs grew, the hearth remained a historical locus that gave order to society, retaining its symbolic significance while its pragmatic function shifted. Semper’s conception of art, which he called ‘practical aesthetics’, likewise brought the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk to fruition as a socially productive, not merely representative, artistic concept.56 Semper’s architectural theory exposed a fundamental tension within modernity that is equally characteristic of Riehl’s approach to architecture: of the need to save the ‘poetic essence of architecture’ while at the same time giving the discipline of architecture a ‘scientific legitimacy’.57 Riehl’s theory of architecture helped put Semper’s scientific approach into dialogue with the questions of a German ‘national style’ that was circulating in nineteenth-​century architectural debates. His high regard for the architecture of the German Middle Ages as the historical epitome of an anonymous, socially oriented architecture gave new legitimacy to a widespread sentiment among architects and philosophers of art that a true German modern architecture was somehow to be found in this era. Riehl’s evaluation of this matter, though, set off a new trajectory of functionalist thinking about Germany’s architectural past –​avoiding the kinds of metaphysical speculations that characterised, for instance, the claims to a ‘spirit of the age’ (Zeitgeist) that underpinned Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1772 analysis of the Strasbourg Cathedral, or the deep religiosity that underpinned architect Heinrich Hübsch’s invention, in the 1830s, of the Romanesque revival style (Rundbogenstil) as the true German style. The new impulse to document regional architecture that occurred after Riehl’s work in this area witnessed the increasing convergence of disciplinary concerns across art history, architecture, and the emerging folkloric field dedicated to ‘house research’ (Hausforschung).58 The art historian Gustav von Bezold’s 1881 article ‘The Saxon farmhouse and its significance for general architectural history’ was particularly notable for bringing Möser’s and Tacitus’ accounts together with Vitruvius’ notes on architecture to form a more comprehensive historical description of regional domestic built forms for an architectural audience. For Bezold, it remained a crucial task to bring the efforts of the ‘house researchers’ into mainstream art and architecture history. He predicted that the domestic architecture of Slavic, North Germanic, and Alpine regions would be ‘one of the most important criteria for evaluating the state of culture’.59 German economist and statistician August Meitzen, among others, gave the field of house studies more empirical rigour in the following decades, with lengthy studies documenting regional and historical variations of the German farmhouse.60 Many of these studies were published in popular magazines and garnered widespread interest. By



Building from the inside out

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the turn of the century, the architecture professional fully embraced the study of anonymous architecture for the clues it might provide towards the realisation of a truly modern functionalist idiom. In 1906, the Association of German Architects and Engineers published its comprehensive volume

Figure 1.9  Farmhouses in Kürnbach and Haslach. Print on paper by F. Eble.

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The architecture of social reform

Figure 1.10  Farmhouses in the Kraichgau region. Print on paper by B. Kossmann.

The farmhouse in the German Reich and its bordering areas, which included detailed investigations of almost 100 different regional house types that appeared to exude a modern sensibility in their modesty and fitness for purpose. Each investigation reproduced site plans, floor plans, sections, and elevations, as well as gestured towards interior quality and ornamental programme (Figures 1.9–​10).61

The right of the drawbridge While the ideal of anonymity that drove Riehl’s architectural theory was constructed specifically through idyllic rural images, Natural history also provided the tools that were able to reconcile these images with the housing needs of modern society. Riehl’s idealisation of the authentic ‘German house’ –​the detached, gabled, single-​family dwelling, owned outright by the family –​provided important but paradoxical images that strengthened the rhetoric of urban housing reform in the ensuing decades. While Riehl widely acknowledged that the world he described in Natural history was quickly fading away, he also remained hopeful in the reforming capacity of the family house and the tight-​knit community. Good housing and neighbourhood design, he believed, could help turn the modern wageworker into a model middle-​class citizen.

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Building from the inside out

For Riehl, traditional middle-​class values were all but dead in modern Germany, having thrived among a lower-​middle-​class base known as the Mittelstand (literally ‘middle estate’), composed of peasant proprietors, artisans, small businessmen, and shopkeepers, whose traditionalism formed a bulwark against both big business and socialist upheaval.62 For conservative theorists, the Mittelstand was ‘considered a model of economic and social self-​discipline, a group captured neither by the reckless spirit of laissez-​faire capitalism nor the “class hatred” of the workers’.63 For Riehl, the lifestyles of the medieval town burghers engaged in urban commerce represented the apogee of social self-​discipline. Burghers possessed a distinctive character trait of striving to achieve wealth and eminence, while doing so ‘for the sake of honor, whereas others do it for the sake of reward’.64 For Riehl, this trait was evident not in the nouveau-​riche bourgeois class but in the modern Mittelstand. He argued that the member of the Mittelstand was the ‘original burgher’, and that this social group was to be understood in the ‘proudest and most worthy sense as constituting the centre –​the actual heart –​of modern society’. Members of the modern Mittelstand possessed traits of ‘moderation, conciseness, and plainness. One often uses middle-​ class [bürgerlich] synonymously with “sober”.’65 These historical values, for Riehl, were so socially specific that even Protestant church architecture was ‘middle class to a fault –​simple, sober, rational, practical’.66 As society became increasingly fractured along class lines, the domestic household remained the privileged site through which to cultivate traditional middle-​class cultural and aesthetic values. Housing represented a new form of cultural citizenship. Riehl wrote that the ‘customs of the home represent one place where every individual can accomplish great deeds in helping to “reform society” (to use the fashionable expression)’ and ‘in helping to arouse a healthy sense of citizenship’.67 The ‘reform of society’ began with the ‘repentance, confession and conversion’ of individuals, and Riehl imagined his Natural history as having ‘an ascetic character, and its dominant moral inclination towards self-​moderation for individuals and social groups is likewise Christian in character’.68 While Riehl conceded that the home of the peasant represented an ideal of a different age, he claimed that the ideal middle-​class house of the future would assume the task of reforming society from within through re-​establishing traditional familial custom. He asked his readers to project their minds forward to the twentieth century, and to imagine a future middle-​class house of moderate size (suitable for an extended family). It would be located on a newly laid out street of crooked and irregular dimensions, gable side facing the street (‘for by now the burgher has attained sufficient historical awareness to know that this is a distinguishing feature of a German house’), featuring a prominent alcove where the children can romp, an inner courtyard, and a proper living room (instead of a salon), where ‘conviviality and sociality will once more begin within the family circle’.69

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The architecture of social reform While much of Riehl’s discussion on the peasant farmhouse took on a nostalgic tone, there is little pessimism either in his vision of a future middle-​class domesticity or of the power of the normalising technologies of home and home ownership in helping to reform modern society. ‘There is a natural norm governing the proper size of a residential building’, he maintained, and ‘where this norm is significantly exceeded, or where it is not achieved, a dangerous social situation is invariably indicated. In the former case the result is a tenement, a product of overcivilisation; in the latter case it is a hovel, an uncivilised home.’70 The single-​family house of the middle-​class citizen would function as a yardstick in determining such norms. Alongside the family house, Riehl placed equal emphasis on the reforming capacity of the old-​world concept of the community (Gemeinde) –​ the closed-​off and tight-​knit sphere of social familiarity that strengthened the individual’s bonds with their Heimat. For Riehl, the notion of community emerged out of a historical tendency towards social exclusivity that appeared most strongly within the German nobility. Riehl labelled as ‘drawbridge rights’ the nobility’s inclinations to build castles and to install moats and drawbridges around them. These tendencies may have initially been political or military, but they found their moorings in society as the nobility grew in self-​awareness, realising that its paternalistic role as a bastion of traditional values required its autonomy from the rest of society. This ethic cultivated by the nobility, according to Riehl, inspired the peasant to cultivate their own identity and autonomy as an independent landowner. So, too, did ‘drawbridge rights’ enter into the imagination of the burgher, not by acquiring family property but in witnessing the construction of walled cities. ‘As cities became great fortresses that could be “closed off” ’, Riehl noted, ‘the burgher order began to emerge as an organic component of society’.71 This ethic was based upon a fundamental belief in the inequality not of humanity, but of society, and thus required a level of self-​moderation among individuals. [T]‌ he value of the community was the great glory of the common man [gemeinen Mannes] –​that he remained sound to the core at a time when more refined society [Gesellschaft] was growing degenerate. The village community was and remains the peasant’s entire political universe […] the petty burgher of the old imperial cities of the eighteenth century likewise found his entire world in the community. His town –​not his house –​was his castle.72

As with the single-​family house, Riehl’s ideal of community may seem quaint, but the ethos behind it became a mainstay of modern urbanism. From the notion of the ‘neighbourhood unit’ to the ‘gated community’, the modern city has by and large been conceived as a series of middle-​class zones of exclusivity, privacy, and propriety that structures understandings of inclusion and exclusion.

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Building from the inside out

The twin ideals of the single-​family home and community provided the foundation for Riehl’s positive appraisal of contemporaneous experimentations in welfare-​based models of housing provision. Over the decade that Riehl was writing Natural history, there were few welfare-​ minded housing schemes implemented in Germany. The Berlin Cooperative Building Society (Berliner gemeinnützige Baugesellschaft [BgB]) was established in 1847 and represented the earliest attempt to develop new urban residential building types suitable for families as a critical response to the welfare imperative. It was co-​founded by the conservative Prussian politician Victor Aimé Huber, who was largely responsible for bringing the ‘housing question’ (Wohnungsfrage) into common parlance in the 1840s, using it as a platform to champion models of cooperative ownership.73 The founding of the BgB was motivated by the publication of Huber’s 1845 article ‘On inner colonisation’, in which he rejected mere charity as a suitable response to the social question and instead promoted the formation of paternalistic cooperative housing associations. These were to function as share companies financed by affluent members of society, providing rent-​ to-​buy housing for the lower classes –​a model which stood between the self-​help initiatives of socialist cooperatives and pure charity.74 Huber initially envisaged that the BgB would build cottages for its workers. However, when this model proved financially unfeasible, urban apartments were designed, which nonetheless aimed to impose a nuclear family model on the working classes by limiting zones of contact between families –​a move that proved unpopular with those same families.75 The initiative largely failed, since the apartments proved too expensive for the lower classes to eventually own. Nonetheless, Riehl praised the society as an exemplary welfare institution and a model of genuine self-​help. He argued that the construction of such single-​family dwellings would achieve the task of ‘revitalising a sense of family among the workers’, preventing them from joining the fourth estate. Over time, good housing would turn ‘many a dependent day labourer back into an independent burgher’.76 Riehl suggested that the company’s projects bore a remarkable resemblance to the Fuggerei –​the housing complex built by the wealthy Fugger family in 1516 to provide low-​cost apartments to the city of Augsburg’s workers. He even suggested that the modern joint-​stock company’s rent-​ to-​buy model had far surpassed the Fuggerei in its ability to ‘understand poverty in the context of social life, and to devise appropriate methods to alleviate it’.77 Where welfare-​based housing provision schemes in Germany failed, adapted, and changed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a central faith in the ability of society to reform through individual self-​ moderation, domestic life, home ownership, family life, and community life remained. Solutions to the problem of social disorder continued to be sought through the same architectural ideals which got continually

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The architecture of social reform reasserted in various bourgeois design discourses on house and home; women’s manuals on home decor, applied arts magazines, architecture journals promoting cottage design, and so forth all served as technologies that continued to render invisible the class relations driving uneven patterns of urbanisation in German cities during the nineteenth century. While even Riehl’s contemporaries read his nostalgic image of the peasant house as an entirely obsolete vision, his Natural history arguably accomplished some of what it set out to achieve. He was successful in rendering static images of a golden age, such as the peasant women sitting at her spinning wheel by the farmhouse hearth, into sources of practical reform policy. When the discipline of sociology in Germany became formalised through the creation of the Association for Social Policy (Verein für Sozialpolitik) in 1882 (with Riehl himself a founding member), much of his rhetoric about the Mittelstand became institutionalised in research and policy. This association provided an important scientific platform for the articulation of reform solutions to the housing question, based on a shared faith in the Mittelstand as a stable source of conservative values. Riehl’s xenophobic brand of nationalism continued to inform a range of conservative architectural projects and agendas well into the twentieth century, including the homeland protection movement, the implementation of racist housing programmes led by the Prussian Settlement Commission, and the expansion of settlement in the German colonies.78 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, though, the images Riehl constructed around his ideal welfare society, based on pre-​modern estate structures, began to appear to be more and more obsolete. His faith in the paternalism of the nobility was replaced by a general faith in a new class of experts working in statistics and the social sciences to guide housing policy. His notions of social exclusivity and ‘drawbridge rights’ were replaced with more sophisticated biological analogies and notions of community, particularly as developed by sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. The extended family was replaced with the nuclear family as the ‘norm’. Riehl’s dismissal of the metropolis was reconsidered as modern sociologists, such as Karl Bücher and Georg Simmel, began to historicise its emergence and understand its unique logic. The ideal of the peasant farmhouse was (in part) replaced by a more sophisticated architectural vocabulary associated with the model of the English cottage. Yet when architect Hermann Muthesius returned to Germany from London to encourage architects to rediscover the ‘German house’, when members of the German Garden City Association (Deutsche Gartenstadt-​ Gesellschaft) were promoting a return to the traditional crafts and models of community, and when urban theorist Karl Scheffler claimed that family was to be considered the basic cell of the modern metropolis, in each instance critical ideas were drawn from an apparatus of social understanding largely developed by Riehl. The social theory advanced



Building from the inside out

by Riehl represents a crucial moment in which the family and the nation became knowingly mobilised as reform technologies, and wherein architecture collapsed into a quasi-​organicist field of anonymous social relations in the emergent national economy.

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Notes 1 Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin (eds), Folklore and nationalism in Europe during the long nineteenth century (Leiden: Brill, 2012). 2 Uli Linke, ‘Colonizing the national imaginary: Folklore, anthropology, and the making of the modern state’, in Sarah C. Humphreys (ed.), Cultures of scholarship (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 97–​138. 3 Anthony Vidler, ‘The theatre of production: Claude-​Nicolas Ledoux and the architecture of social reform’, AA Files, 1 (1981–​2), 62. 4 Anthony Vidler, Claude-​Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and social reform at the end of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 302. 5 Pamela Pilbeam, ‘Dream worlds? Religion and the early socialists in France’, The Historical Journal, 43:2 (2000), 499–​515. 6 Wilhelm H. Riehl, The natural history of the German people, trans. David J. Diephouse (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), p. 149. Original title: Die Naturgeschichte des Volkes als Grundlage einer deutschen Sozial-​Politik. Unless indicated otherwise, all quotes from Natural history have been taken from the abridged Diephouse translation in consultation with the original source. Original German terms have been added in parentheses where appropriate. 7 Justus Möser, Osnabrückische Geschichte (Osnabrück: Schmid, 1768), p. 151. 8 Tacitus, Agricola and Germany, ed. Anthony R. Birley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 46. 9 Frederick C. Beiser, The German historicist tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 89. 10 Uli Linke, ‘Folklore, anthropology, and the government of social life’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32:1 (1990), 134. 11 Riehl, Natural history, p. 28. 12 The epistemological strands linking Riehl’s social theory to modern architectural culture have been identified in a number of recent studies. See Laurent Stalder, Hermann Muthesius, 1861–​1927: Das Landhaus als kulturgeschichtlicher Entwurf (Zürich: gta Verlag, 2008); Jeanette Redensek, ‘Manufacturing Gemeinschaft: Architecture, tradition, and the sociology of community in Germany, 1890–​1920’, DPhil thesis, City University of New York, 2007; Georges Teyssot, A topology of everyday constellations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); and Kenny Cupers, ‘Bodenständigkeit: The environmental epistemology of modernism’, The Journal of Architecture, 21:8 (2016), 1226–​ 52. Lewis Mumford cited Riehl as a key methodological influence. See Lewis Mumford, The culture of cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), p. 503. Interpretation of Riehl, however, is still prone to an anachronistic type of accounting, whereby his negative response to Enlightenment ideals, his defence of pre-​modern estate hierarchies, his championing of the peasantry, and his rejection of the city are framed in contrast to the development of a ‘genuine’ sociologically informed architectural practice that accepted the reality of the modern metropolis and eventually freed itself from the grip of Riehl’s theorising. See, for example, Andrew Lees, ‘Critics of urban society in Germany, 1854–​1914’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 40:1 (1979), 61–​83. 13 See George Steinmetz, Regulating the social: The welfare state and local politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

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The architecture of social reform 14 Ibid., p. 61. 15 Ibid., p. 56. 16 Lorenz von Stein, Der Sozialismus und Communismus des heitigen Frankreich (Leipzig: Wigand, 1842). For an abridged English translation of this work, see Lorenz von Stein, The history of the social movement in France, 1789–​1850 (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press, 1964). See also Sabine Hake, The proletarian dream: Socialism, culture, and emotion in Germany, 1863–​1933 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). 17 On the immediate influence of Stein’s social theory, see Joachim Singelmann and Peter Singelmann, ‘Lorenz von Stein and the paradigmatic bifurcation of social theory in the nineteenth century’, British Journal of Sociology, 37:3 (1986), 431–​52. 18 Riehl, Natural history, p. 28. 19 Ibid., p. 32. 20 Ibid., p. 236. 21 Karl G. A. Knies, Die politische Oekonomie vom geschichtlichen Standpunkte (Braunschweig: C.A. Schetschke, 1882), p. 68. 22 Wilhelm Roscher, Principles of political economy, vol. 2, trans. John J. Lalor (New York: Henry Holt, 1878). Originally published as Wilhelm Roscher, Die Grundlagen der Nationalökonomie (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1954). Roscher’s elaborate dismantling of classical economics, however, consisted of a less-​than-​convincing theory of economic development based on psycho-​biological stages of childhood, youth, maturity, and decay (which would receive much derision from Marx). On the history of historical economics, see Keith Tribe, Governing economy: The reformation of German economic discourse, 1750–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Woodruff D. Smith, Politics and the sciences of culture in Germany, 1840–​ 1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 23 Riehl, Natural history, p. 186. 24 See Mack Walker, German home towns: Community, state, and general state, 1648–​ 1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1971] 1998), p. 2. 25 See Peter G. J. Pulzer, The rise of political anti-​Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Nicholas Saul, Gypsies and Orientalism in German literature and anthropology of the long nineteenth century (London: Manley Publishing, 2007). On the history of racist thought in German culture and literature, see the classic text by Fritz Stern, The politics of cultural despair: A study in the rise of the Germanic ideology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961). 26 Ibid., p. 251. 27 Lecture reproduced in Wilhelm H. Riehl, Kulturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1859), p. 216. 28 Ibid., p. 216. 29 Ibid., p. 225. 30 Ibid., p. 225. 31 Riehl, Natural history, p. 291. 32 Wilhelm H. Riehl, Die Familie (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1855), p. 167. 33 See David Frisby, ‘Straight or crooked streets? The contested rational spirit of the modern metropolis’, in Iain Boyd Whyte (ed.), Modernism and the spirit of the city (London: Routledge, 2003). 34 Riehl, Die Familie, p. 219. 35 Ibid., p. 218. 36 Ibid., p. 225. 37 Riehl, Natural history, p. 318. 38 Ibid., p. 325. 39 Riehl, Die Familie, p. 219. 40 Riehl, Natural history, p. 319. 41 Ibid., p. 319. 42 Ibid., p. 322.

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Building from the inside out

43 Ulrike Vedder, ‘The bachelor: A case of failed generativity in nineteenth-​century literature and science’, in Staffan Müller-​Wille and Christina Brandt (eds), Heredity explored: Between public domain and experimental science, 1850–​1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), p. 31. 44 Riehl, Natural history, p. 322. 45 Ibid., p. 335. 46 For a concise overview of German perceptions of the ‘East’, see the chapter ‘Germany looks to the West (and the East)’ in Mark Hewitson, Germany and the modern world, 1880–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 47 Riehl, Natural history, p. 208. 48 Ibid., p. 236. 49 These publications included Architektonische Entwürfe aus der Sammlung des Architekten-Vereins zu Berlin, Architektonische Album, and Architektonisches Skizzenbuch. For an account of the history of the Schinkel school, see Eva Börsch-​ Supan, Berliner Baukunst nach Schinkel: 1840–​1870 (Munich: Prestel, 1977). 50 Riehl, Natural history, p. 323. 51 Ibid., p. 322. 52 Ibid., p. 239. 53 Originally published as Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik: Ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1863). Published in English as Style in the technical and tectonic arts; or, practical aesthetics: A handbook for technicians, artists, and patrons of art, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles, CA: Getty, 2004). 54 Gottfried Semper, The four elements of architecture and other writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Originally published as Gottfried Semper, Die vier Elemente der Baukunst (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg, 1851). 55 Semper, Four elements of architecture, pp. 102–​3. 56 Mari Hvattum, ‘Gottfried Semper: Towards a comparative science of architecture’, Architecture Research Quarterly, 1:1 (1995), 74. 57 Hvattum, ‘Gottfried Semper’, p. 74. 58 For example, see Rudolf Henning, Das deutsche Haus in seiner historischen Entwickelung (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1882), p. 29. 59 Gustav von Bezold, ‘Der niedersächsische Wohnhausbau und seine Bedeutung für die allgemeine Baugeschichte’, Allgemeine Bauzeitung, 46 (1881), 80. 60 August Meitzen, Das deutsche Haus in seinen volkstümlichen Formen (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1882). Other important studies include Henning, Das deutsche Haus; Rudolf Meringer, Das deutsche Haus und sein Hausrat (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1906); Willi Pessler, Das altsächsische Bauernhaus in seiner geographischen Verbreitung (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg, 1906); and Otto Lauffer, Das deutsche Haus in Dorf und Stadt: Ein Ausschnitt deutscher Altertumskunde (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1919). 61 Verband deutscher Architekten-​und Ingenieur-​ Vereine, Das Bauernhaus im Deutschen Reiche und seinen Grenzgebieten (Dresden: Kühtmann, 1906). 62 David Blackbourn, ‘The Mittelstand in German society and politics, 1871–​1914’, Social History, 2:3 (1977), 409. 63 Ibid., p. 412. 64 Riehl, Natural history, p. 209. 65 Wilhelm H. Riehl, Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1851), pp. 189–​90. 66 Riehl, Natural history, p. 210. 67 Ibid., p. 308. 68 Ibid., p. 41. 69 Ibid., pp. 251–​2. 70 Ibid., p. 325. 71 Ibid., p. 187.

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The architecture of social reform 72 Ibid., p. 71. 73 Nicholas Bullock and James Read, The movement for housing reform in Germany and France, 1840–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 26. 74 Ibid., p. 28. 75 Thomas Adam, Philanthropy, civil society, and the state in German history, 1815–​ 1989 (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), p. 89. 76 Riehl, Natural history, pp. 249–​50. 77 Ibid., p. 250. 78 See Hollyamber Kennedy, ‘Infrastructures of “legitimate violence”: The Prussian Settlement Commission, internal colonization, and the migrant remainder’, Grey Room, 7 (2019), 58–​97, and Itohan Osayimwese, Colonialism and modern architecture in Germany (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittburgh Press, 2017).

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The interiorisation of life

In 1808, the French philosopher Charles Fourier believed himself to have discovered the laws of ‘passional attraction’, which would propel society out of chaos and into eternal ‘Harmony’. In The theory of the four movements, Fourier outlined twelve passions, composed of luxurious passions (the pleasures of the five senses), affective passions (ambition, friendship, love, and family), as well as three ‘distributive passions’ of his own invention: cabalist (intrigue), butterfly (variety), and composite (rapturous enthusiasm). When the social world was recalibrated according to all twelve passions, Fourier believed it could reach a state of perfection (‘Harmony’).1 The ideal community that Fourier imagined to be able to achieve Harmony was called the Phalanx, and its main building was called the phalanstère. This utopian community would be composed of around 1,600 people of sufficient variety in passions, such that each member of the Phalanx could find their own sociability in ‘parties’ that came together around a shared set of desires –​from sexual to gastronomic. In Fourier’s utopia, there is no normality, and no morality. The passions harmonise the human soul just as notes harmonise the musical score. For Fourier, the kind of economy needed to sustain Harmony sprang only from ‘large combinations’, for ‘God had to create a social theory applicable to large masses and not to three or four families’.2 He criticised the traditional village community and the typical ‘dwelling-​house’ within it, which produced an ‘unproductive outlay in enclosure –​walls, barricades, fastenings, landmarks, dogs, ditches’, etc.3 While Fourier’s utopia resembles a socialist one, in which the workers (including women) have been liberated, the underlying motive behind it, as Roland Barthes argued, was not equality, justice, or liberty, but passion –​the ‘everlasting principle of social organisation’.4 The spectre of the Fourierist self-​sufficient ‘people’s palace’ haunted debates on housing in the following decades in Europe and across the Atlantic, providing a provocative image of cooperation for architects and reformers across the political spectrum.5 However, as Fourier began to

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The architecture of social reform work out the logistics of the phalanstère, the epistemological claims that structured his universe were being increasingly challenged by the positivism of the modern sciences. The burgeoning field of psychology swallowed the philosophical study of the passions. In Germany, there was increasing currency in academic and reform circles around the role of emotions in maintaining social cohesion, specifically regarding ‘moral feeling’ (sittliches Gefühl). As advances were made in the discipline of folk psychology, moral convention (Sitte) was increasingly read as an emotional practice that was able to hold urban populations together.6 Within folk psychology, morality did not exist externally as a force to suppress passions (to be handed down by a ‘sermon, a small treatise, or a Cabinet order’, as one psychologist mocked) but internally, to be cultivated through the right social conditions.7 While it was clear that passions like love were innate in humans, morality also came naturally to humans as an emotional practice that stabilised feelings such as love, making them into more permanent connections, such as marriage.8 For German folk psychologists, the expression of emotion in France had long been overtaken by the affectedness of French manners, as exemplified in the exaggerated facial features portrayed by painter Charles Le Brun in his 1688 study of the passions.9 Such theatrical renderings of desire distorted genuine and sincere actions and feelings, leading French urban society to imitate the kind of pageantry of daily life that characterised Louis XIV’s court (making it somewhat apt that Fourier’s own design for the phalanstère resembled the Palace of Versailles). The concept of Sitte as it emerged in the psychological and behavioural sciences in the mid-​to late nineteenth century resonated well in a society and culture profoundly influenced by the rise of Pietism. The morality embedded in Pietism was based not on pure faith, but on practical and habitual forms of observance that centred on the family home. Even conservative German housing reformers like Carl Wilhelm Hoffmann reproached the communitarianism espoused by more radical Pietists across the Atlantic, just as much as Hoffman reproached Fourier’s phalanstère ideal.10 The Christian yearning towards moderation over bourgeois excess increasingly aligned with a growing self-​awareness among the emerging German middle classes in the early nineteenth century, whose social values coalesced around the ‘plain, comfortable, domestic world of the Biedermeier home, with its sewing and reading corners, and gentle family pleasures’.11 The secularisation of family values began to be made possible precisely through the material values bound to the family home. Indeed, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl’s mid-​nineteenth-​century work on the German family would focus precisely on seeking the social dimensions of Protestantism in the distinctly restrained and closed-​off domestic qualities of the family home –​qualities that Fourier considered ‘unproductive’. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, popular didactic picture books, designed to cultivate children’s understanding of proper familial

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The interiorisation of life

customs, increasingly utilised the house’s spatial, material, and environmental dimensions to convey their message. An illustration from 1746–​55 depicting various forms of appropriate housekeeping, such as washing, ironing, and childrearing, displayed the religious earnestness that penetrated German society in this century (Figure 2.1). However, in the nineteenth century, picture-​book scenes like these were almost entirely transferred into the interiors of middle-​ class houses (Figures 2.2–​3). Every room depicted in such illustrations was labelled, designating its function (such as the servant’s room, the spinning room, the children’s room, the kitchen, the washroom, the sewing room, etc.), and visualising specific activities that ought to take place in them (such as housekeeping, childrearing, family discussion, etc.) and objects that ought to be placed in them (such as gender-​appropriate children’s toys or a crucifix hanging in the corner). Illustrations such as these served an important pedagogical function (alongside toys such as dolls’ houses as well as emergent domestic traditions such as Christmas trees) in instilling appropriate middle-​class morals into children and aligning them with the material world of the home.

Figure 2.1  Educational picture sheet depicting ‘scenes from family life’. Etching by Johann Peter Wolff, c. 1746/​55.

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Figure 2.2  The ‘servants’ room’. Part of a series of prints designed to amuse and educate girls on domestic and societal life. Coloured engraving by Johann Michael Voltz, c. 1825.

Figure 2.3  The ‘nursery’. Engraving by Johann Michael Voltz, c. 1825.

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The interiorisation of life

The practice of good morals was intimately intertwined with the spatial layout of the family home throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, as the long-​standing middle-​class ideal of self-​cultivation (Bildung) became increasingly associated with dual process of internalisation/​interiorisation (Verinnerlichung), which was at once psychological and spatial.12 As housing reformers and statisticians sought to define more rigorous ways of counting, ordering, and, in effect, normalising German families, links between behaviour, environment, and morality were heavily scrutinised. German housing discourse relied upon a faith in both the empirical sciences to observe where genuine and sincere emotions articulated themselves in urban society, as well as a faith in social reform policy to practically adjust to this given ‘reality’ –​not for the optimum pleasure, as in France, but for the optimum welfare of the population. For most German reformers, the portion of society shown most capable of self-​ moderating their desires was the traditional middle classes (Mittelstand), who possessed, among other things, a clear feeling for familial love, tradition, sobriety, and thrift. Since the mid-​nineteenth century, floor plans and interior sections became increasingly used as instruments that communicated new truths about architecture’s moral purpose. While these representational devices traditionally conveyed more abstract notions of ideal proportion and structure, in the climate of reform of the late nineteenth century, they began to be read against new criteria of measurement derived from symbolic and practical conventions of social use. They required the designer to visualise the anonymous inhabitant and their environment in distinctly sociological terms. English middle-​class design notions of domestic privacy, cosiness, and comfort became highly politicised concepts as they were translated into the German context, feeding into the dominant welfare ideal of the Mittelstand family. As this chapter illustrates, objects as mundane as plans depicting the arrangement of living room furniture achieved new heights of scientific pretention and design ambition in the mid to late nineteenth century, testifying to a shared confidence among architects and social reformers in the capacity of the domestic realm to speak directly to the future of the nation at large.

The housing question While Fourier’s phalanstère remained a tantalising image of reform, German planners were observing with equal fascination Baron Haussmann’s transformation of Paris, which provided a forecast for urban developments likely to transform Germany’s own cities. In 1862, the municipal planner James Hobrecht began to implement an equally ambitious urban development programme for Berlin, which came to be known as the Hobrecht Plan, under the auspices of the Prussian Police Planning Authority

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The architecture of social reform (Baupolizei) (Figure 2.4). The plan was an expansive grid composed of a series of housing blocks and ring roads which extended past Berlin’s old eighteenth-​ century fortifications. It aimed to address the housing needs of the city’s rapidly expanding lower-​class population.13 Hobrecht’s tabula rasa design approach encouraged rampant real estate speculation and facilitated the spread of Berlin’s infamous tenement blocks, or ‘rental barracks’ (Mietskaserne). These blocks were usually composed of a street-​facing front house with the addition of a rear building accessible only through the courtyard. While middle-​class families typically occupied the street-​facing apartments, poorer classes tended to occupy the rear apartments (Figure 2.5).14 These blocks came to dominate Berlin’s poor immigrant neighbourhoods, particularly in the northern districts of the city. The decrepit tenements gave vivid representation to what, in German politics, was becoming a heavily debated problem posed in the form of a question: the ‘housing question’ (Wohnungsfrage). Shortly following its implementation, Hobrecht articulated his social vision for the city in a text on public hygiene where he weighed in on the housing question. Having travelled to both London and Paris, Hobrecht rejected English

Figure 2.4  Print of the ‘Hobrecht Plan’.

Figure 2.5  Municipal planner Gustav Assmann’s plans for apartments.

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The architecture of social reform

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suburban planning principles, instead using Paris as a model for promoting the dense expansion of urban blocks for Berlin. ‘Who could deny the advantages of the villa over the tenement’, Hobrecht wrote, ‘and who could deny that anyone who lives in their own house can better protect himself from the harmful effects, both moral and physical, of the so-​called “tenement barracks?” ’. Nevertheless, Hobrecht conceded that planning the city around villa suburbs would: do little to solve the housing question. It should be remembered that in such matters, the poor are the ones that deserve special consideration. At least if one does not put himself in the comfortable, egotistical position and asks ‘how do I live best?’ but instead asks ‘how do all the occupants of a city live best?’15

Hobrecht believed that Germany’s laissez-​faire economic conditions would naturally generate housing models desired by the market and would thus create a higher standard of housing for all. Tenement apartment housing would have a levelling social effect for Hobrecht; the affluent would have closer contact with the lower classes and would thus gain everyday insight into the general conditions affecting most urban dwellers. In turn, the wealthy could act as exemplars for the poor.16 However, as Berlin’s population dramatically rose in the following decades, it was obvious to many that the tenements were facilitating the reverse social effect, creating a downward levelling effect, rather than an upward one. The encroachment of illicit activities such as prostitution into everyday urban life was widely perceived to damage the ‘public feeling of Sitte’.17 The expansion plan would infamously fall short of achieving Hobrecht’s moralising ideals in the following decades, contributing to the image of the ‘top-​down’ state planner as a suspect figure, with urban historian Werner Hegemann describing the plan in 1930 as a ‘crime against the Berlin population’, due to it facilitating the spread of tenements.18 The section of Berlin society that ultimately benefited most from the plan were not the working classes who inhabited the grid but rather those who controlled the parcelling of the land. Given the large amount of capital needed to manage and partition the large blocks created by Hobrecht, this fell inevitably into the hands of large companies.19 Those individuals with vested interests in the swift privatisation of Hobrecht’s grid belonged to the new business elite consisting of a heterogeneous group of ‘real estate corporations, banks, individual speculators, contractors and landlords’.20 This left the vast majority of the lower-​middle classes and the working classes to bear the brunt of excessively high rental prices, which created overcrowding. The regulations to control the utilisation of land space did little to improve urban conditions. The famous building ordinances of 1853 dictated a maximum height for a residential building of twenty-​two metres that was limited to five storeys, and a minimum courtyard size of 5.6 metres by 5.6 metres.21 Builders extracted the greatest benefits possible from

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The interiorisation of life

these regulations, favouring narrow courtyards and dark, dank tenement interiors. The most infamous tenement block in Berlin was ‘Meyers Hof’, which consisted of a street-​facing block and six blocks accessible through a grandiose series of portals and rear courtyards (Figure 2.6). Its rows of nondescript rooms easily facilitated overcrowding and spawned prostitution and infidelity, and its labyrinthine stairways and corridors supplied tenants with escape routes from police and landlords. The majority of middle-​class Berliners who never set foot in Berlin’s north became aware of Meyers Hof through occasional newspaper reports, in which the tenement complex was claimed to be a breeding ground for vice and unrest, remaining too formidable and too large-​scale to be effectively controlled by police. As far as Berlin’s real estate was concerned, the most lucrative profits were to be had speculating on land values, with only marginal profits to be made in the building industry itself, as speculators quickly sold off plots of land, leaving builders scraping together enough capital for tenement construction. Ideals surrounding property ownership were strong among the middle classes, yet these ideals far exceeded their reality, with most Berliners remaining renters.22 The era of rampant housing speculation came to an end with the stock market crash of 1873. Accompanying the crash was a wave of anti-​ Semitic backlash in the conservative media. Riehl’s stereotype of itinerant and intellectual Jews as socially ‘uprooted’ had long defined the popular image of the international banker as distinctly Jewish. In a series of articles for the popular conservative family magazine Die Gartenlaube, the journalist Otto Glagau, having lost money in the stock market himself, claimed that 90% of speculators were Jews and famously attributed the crash to their reckless acting in the housing market.23 Glagau blamed fraudulent Berlin speculators who had exploited the ‘most sacred feelings’ of national fervour that accompanied unification and brought enthusiastic crowds of the population into the nation’s capital. Glagau complained of the speculative builders who, in the dizziness of buying and selling in the housing market, had created a monopoly over land prices in the best

Figure 2.6  Plan of Meyers Hof.

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The architecture of social reform areas of Berlin, forcing the middle classes into perpetual housing uncertainty while constructing ostentatious villa suburbs for themselves in the greener outskirts of the city. In his view, the true victims remained the deserving poor –​the ‘ordinary families’ of craftsmen and workers who had been displaced due to rising rents and overcrowding, forced to make do in shanties on the city’s periphery.24 The image constructed around the shanty dweller within the media was that of the honest, hardworking, and industrious craftsman, who shunned the city’s workhouses and found a place within the shanties as a productive entrepreneur and self-​builder rather than as an idle beggar. One journalist, writing in Die Gartenlaube, related a semi-​fictional visit to the shanty, where he found a thriving community full of honest, thrifty, and entrepreneurial families who tended to their hearth and cultivated private gardens. Explaining why these families preferred their shanties to the city’s poor shelters, the writer explained: ‘the workhouse is actually only a penitentiary for work-​shy vagabonds and wanton prostitutes. One cannot hold it against the honest worker or industrious craftsman that he only turns to them in extreme need, because he shies from contact with such rabble.’25 With an estimated readership of over 1 million (the largest of any magazine in Germany during the nineteenth century), Die Gartenlaube formed a crucial frame of cultural reference for Germany’s liberal-​conservative middle-​class base. The popular historical literature that it published served the task of nation-​building (especially in the literature directed at educating women about the national importance of maintaining home life), setting an important reading context for a range of social issues.26 Its creative reportage on the housing shortage helped fuel xenophobic sentiment, particularly fears of the proletarian ‘other’, that inevitably arose in times of housing crises.27

The visible hand The entangled relations between hygiene, family-​oriented morality, and the urban environment that were captured in populist discourse on the shanties in Die Gartenlaube also characterised professional debates on housing reform. While articulated in the kind of moralising rhetoric typical of the day, the underlying concern behind these debates was an entirely reasonable one; for millennia, the German peasant lived and thrived in conditions not much better than those that appeared in the shanties. Enlightenment ‘progress’ had transported him and his family into the dank and overcrowded cellar, and it was not yet clear what effect two decades of living in such conditions would have on traditional social customs that had evolved for thousands of years. The publications of the Association for Public Health (Verein für Öffentliche Gesundheitspflege) were significant in bringing morality and

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The interiorisation of life

hygiene into a common frame through analyses of housing conditions in German cities.28 Founded in 1858, the Congress of German Political Economists (Kongress Deutscher Volkswirte) likewise emerged as an important politically liberal platform for debating the mechanics of social policy in relation to urbanisation. The housing question underwent significant theoretical elaboration via the Congress’ aims to reconcile the authority of the empirical social sciences (established by social theorists such as Riehl) with an economically liberal urban regime –​one that promised an upward rather than a downward socially levelling effect. The liberal social ideals of the Congress were heavily oriented towards the nuclear family. Paradoxically, the nuclear family was a mainstay in classical liberal thought and its principal ideology of the ‘separate spheres’. In the field of historical economics in Germany, the idea of the family household served as both an ‘object of and framework for economic thought’.29 While political economy addressed production at the scale of the nation –​ the ‘big family’ –​it addressed policy intervention at the scale of the nuclear family, which, based on ethical love rather than fleeting passions, served to ennoble self-​interest. The family was viewed in liberal ideology as a necessary ethical mediator between the individual and society.30 As folk psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt were demonstrating empirically the sheer complexity of the human psyche, it likewise became viewed among economists as irresponsible to continue to blindly accept the psychic law of Homo economicus and other simplified notions of self-​ interest that governed the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Liberal economists increasingly acknowledged the fact that to place economics ‘outside the realm of human action’ and into the realm of a ‘celestial law’ was not only ‘quaint and theological’, but ethically wrong and economically dangerous.31 The emergence of new statistical data on cities fostered more empirically grounded economic studies on the housing question. The 1861 Berlin census data comprehensively identified the extent of the city’s housing crisis. Counting relevant details like the number of rooms per dwelling, the number of occupants per room, and the number of rooms which contained heating, the census data revealed the extent of overcrowding caused by the mass arrival of immigrants into the city. Within the Berlin tenement block, immigrant workers generally spilled out into the attics, basements, and rear-​courtyard houses. As they constantly changed addresses, their movements remained on the margins of dwelling statistics. Nonetheless, the data proved useful in assessing the degree of overcrowding in the city. The most influential intellectual to utilise the Berlin census data was the liberal journalist Julius Faucher, a key member of the Congress and a proponent of suburban residential communities of detached family houses for Berlin. Faucher had lived in England as a reporter in the 1850s, where he championed the laissez-​faire tenets of Manchester liberalism. In Prussia, he founded the Free Trade Association of Berlin and, as a

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The architecture of social reform journalist, wrote extensively in endorsement of freeing government trade sanctions. Faucher’s theoretical concerns, however, were arguably more comprehensive. He believed that the problem of worker unrest had been too narrowly conceived as a short-​term political problem, with socialist thinkers merely providing logical refutations of arguments made by classical political economists. He believed both sides of the political spectrum were short-​sighted. At the same time, the extent of Faucher’s attack on classical economics was largely limited to expressing his hatred of its socialist variants. Like many liberal intellectuals, he considered these variants to be accountable for the most violent repercussions of modern class politics. When he founded the Congress’ official journal in 1893, the Quarterly for National Economy, Politics and Cultural History, Faucher sought to unite the fields of economics and cultural history, proclaiming that new empirical knowledge, developed especially through statistical research and historical analysis, could serve as the foundation upon which liberal ideals could be redeemed.32 For Faucher, housing reform policy remained central to this task. In the context of Faucher’s work, the housing question was no longer to be narrowly confined to party politics; rather, it was to be redefined on the basis of solid historico-​cultural and ethical foundations. In an 1865 article, ‘The movement for housing reform’, Faucher asked how an increasing majority of Germans could still be sleeping in basements under the earth during a period of unprecedented cultural advancement and economic prosperity. He believed that as long as this barbaric practice continued in the major European cities, neither the splendour of Saint Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospect nor the appalling streets of London’s East End could provide an adequate measure against which a given nation’s culture might be judged. The aesthetic order and representational value of exterior architecture could no longer serve to convey a higher level of culture as it had in the Baroque era, where the task of architecture was to embellish the power of the state. The social reformer needed to venture beyond the streets and into private dwellings to ascertain the level of cultural advancement an individual society had attained. Despite these apprehensions, Faucher was generally an admirer of the modern metropolis, praising the shift from socialising within one’s own private residence to socialising within the city’s expanding public spaces. With the shrinking of space in the private residence of all classes, we find a substitute in the growing spaces of coffee houses, beer and wine bars, and restaurants. The public ballroom makes the grand hall in our own dwelling superfluous […] The growth of cities makes possible and makes necessary a continually stronger transition from the individual to the common economy, from the sociability of the small circle to the sociability of the entire world, and precisely therein lies the main attraction of metropolitan life.33

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The interiorisation of life

Yet he remained fearful that the shrinking of domestic space would likewise impede family life. Having spent time in London observing developments such as the new lodging houses for single working-​ class men, which represented ‘no economic and moral elevation but a decay’,34 Faucher was concerned that urban life was increasingly invading the family’s private existence. He and Hobrecht held similar ideals about the potential of the urban environment to foster healthy morals. However, both had radically different ideas about how this might be achieved. While Hobrecht believed that the fundamental advantage of the modern metropolis lay in the comingling of classes and the transfer of moral principles from the upper classes to the lower classes through their public interaction, Faucher believed that the middle-​class family needed to be isolated within separate residential communities in detached houses, in order for the right social virtues to be cultivated at a distance from the city. Faucher bemoaned the world of sub-​tenanting, which was draining the married couple of the savings that might be put towards home ownership.35 The transitoriness that characterised the domestic lives of renters within the modern metropolis increasingly led to households falling into disrepute. ‘Newspaper reports based on court hearings have alerted us to the sinister things that frequently go on in these dwellings’, Faucher warned, ‘for the landlord, who needs the renter because he himself cannot hold his house, it is better not to concern himself at all with the tenant’.36 For Faucher, the management of the dwelling was beyond the control of the police or landlords. He placed importance instead on owning one’s furniture in the creation of an inner art of the dwelling, insisting on the ‘cultural foundations of land ownership’.37 The dwelling belonging to the family, to be managed and decorated as one wished without needing to take on additional tenants, was labelled by Faucher as the ‘enclosed household’ and served as the foundation upon which daily habit grew, and came to define one’s moral striving for self-​improvement.38 Having defined the dwelling’s moral capacity, Faucher combined statistical data he accumulated from Europe’s major cities in order to extract what he understood to be a ‘normal form of life’ (normale Lebensform), establishing a yardstick for measuring national cultural prosperity that was rife with xenophobic sentiment. Faucher acquired population statistics such as dwelling numbers, as well as the number of heatable rooms per dwelling, to determine an average surplus of the population living in each dwelling that exceeded what he considered the desired family size for the cultivation of a normal form of life. This surplus excluded a portion of society that he believed fell outside the scope of its cultural life and into the domain of pauperism. This included Irish and Jewish immigrants as well as other paupers who were merely ‘preserved artificially by industry between life and death’ and who held no aspirations for a normal form of life within the enclosed house.39 To these people Faucher attributed a

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The architecture of social reform ‘moral sickliness’.40 The surplus was generally composed of lower-​middle-​ class married couples of a more noble occupation, who strove for a normal form of life but fell short of the means to attain such a life because of long periods of renting. The cultivation of a normal form of life within the private sphere of the dwelling was essential to national economic life, for the healthy dwelling provided the inhabitant with a ‘necessary zeal’ that led to the formation of capital.41 As Faucher noted, ‘the correct way to approach such efforts [the creation of capital] is not in the sphere of political economy, but essentially in cultural-​historical and mass-​psychological research’.42 The enclosed dwelling, shielded from the homogenising and levelling psychological effects of the metropolis, was able to become a measurable unit through which researchers could locate the initial zeal that created capital, and national prosperity more generally. The use of the census to reframe the housing problem was typical of the growing and pervasive belief in the power of numbers to define the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’ in all aspects of social life. As philosopher Ian Hacking noted, the invention of the census in the early nineteenth century brought forth ‘new kinds of people to be counted’ as well as new ‘statistical meta-​concepts of which the most notable is “normalcy” ’.43 Things like suicide, death, and crime became objects of vast statistical collections, beginning in the 1830s in the work of the Belgian astronomer and statistician Adolphe Quetelet and French statistician André-​Michel Guerry. In Faucher’s work, statistics became intertwined with a powerful racialised discourse on proletarian ‘otherness’ that would continue to underpin debates on the housing question. Many German statisticians turned to Paris as a case study to forge links between overcrowding and moral contagion –​and to warn of the housing crisis towards which Berlin was heading. In 1869, the German economic statistician Ernst Louis Étienne Laspeyres published his study The influence of dwelling on morality: A moral-​statistical study of the working classes of Paris. It brought together statistics from an 1849 survey on the chambres garnies (furnished rooms) in Paris and the workers who occupied them. Laspeyres mapped four levels of morality and four levels of dwelling that the worker could possess. This ranged from ‘good’ (a full-​time and industrious worker; occupies an orderly, clean room with furniture in a good state) to ‘very bad’. ‘Very bad’ involved that which transcended licentiousness and drunken behaviour, or, ‘in a word, individuals whose lives are nothing but series of wicked behaviours and excessiveness of all types’.44 This category also included those who occupied a room of grime and pests, with no light or air, no furniture other than rags, and a ‘stifling stench’ that could only be cultivated through a learned routine.45 When directed to the study of housing, moral statistics, alongside discourses on public health, reinforced a close parallel between physical overcrowding and immorality. Laspeyres observed and compared

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The interiorisation of life

the kinds of dwelling workers of all moral types occupied across the city districts, concluding that a ‘pleasant domesticity is the mother of all domestic and public virtue’.46 Departing from the tradition of moral reform that stemmed from Christian teaching to the working classes, he insisted through his findings that morality could be cultivated directly through addressing the housing question, by providing workers with a suitable dwelling that would instil the right behaviours and psychological traits. ‘I am convinced that moral elevation is not achieved through moral preaching but by external factors’, Laspeyres concluded, ‘and such external advantage by which one should possess an inner striving is the acquisition of a dignified dwelling’.47 If the primary concern of German moral statisticians observing circumstances in France was documenting the health of the worker, a more obvious measure for the study of German conditions remained the unit of the middle-​class family. Where French statisticians such as Frédéric Le Play were driven by a strongly Catholic sense of paternalism, in Germany the use of statistics gained a more practical, historically oriented character that was typical of German economics, driven by the pervasive belief that the organic growth of the family unit played a critical part in creating a society’s housing preferences. Statistics needed to be read in such a context. The call among economists for stronger empirical foundations for the study of families thus brought architecture to the forefront of debates on housing. As statisticians began to acknowledge a direct link between the care of one’s dwelling and the potential for moral improvement, the question of whether the Berlin tenement type itself was able to provide such ‘external advantage’ for its inhabitants remained open.

Figure 2.7  Illustration of the model cottage displayed at the 1851 Great Exhibition.

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The architecture of social reform There was a general consensus among members of the Congress that the English cottage type was an exemplary architectural model, not merely because of its obvious health benefits, but because its features were reminiscent of the domestic architecture of early Germanic settlement. Many housing reformers spoke favourably of Henry Roberts’ model workers’ cottages for the 1851 Great Exhibition, as well as the English middle-​class suburban tradition in general (Figure 2.7). Having spent time in London, Faucher offered the most authoritative endorsement of the English cottage as a model to be copied in Germany. He justified this appropriation by arguing that the concept behind the English cottage house had descended from the Germanic ideal of the extended house and its etymological roots lay therein. Unlike Riehl’s concept of the extended house, Faucher’s conception of the enclosed house more closely mirrored the household of the nuclear family. It did, however, share certain elements typical of the former. Faucher observed that the character of the English house ‘comes from within rather than from the outside –​the kernel (the furniture) is customarily more valuable than the shell (the house)’.48 According to Faucher, when a ‘normal’ level of society was reached in England, ‘wealth and rank in terms of room numbers and room dimensions differ only very gradually’.49 He had observed that in England, ‘the rule goes that every family lives in an extended house, which is often very small and seldom very big’.50 For Faucher, the sense of domesticity still cherished by the English nuclear family created a positive levelling tendency in society and was thus an ideal model for Germany to re-​establish. After Faucher, it became largely accepted among economists (both the liberally inclined as well as those who encouraged more active state intervention) that the discovery of cultural norms underpinned the mechanics of social policy, and that the material dimensions of housing were at its heart. Another prominent member of the Congress, Eduard Wiss, advised that the housing question ought to be expanded further to incorporate knowledge developed in art history, but regretted that traditional art historiography was too focused on the ‘external form’ of buildings rather than the ‘purposiveness of the construction’.51 Instead, the discipline should strive to capture the ‘social forms of life of the people through the construction and furnishing of their dwelling houses’.52 Wiss encouraged architectural historians to bring their discipline closer to the kinds of studies of material culture already being popularised in magazines like Die Gartenlaube.53 For Wiss, traditional German building culture ought not to be of interest purely to the antiquarian, but could be made into an instrument of housing reform. He argued that if such a knowledge base were developed, housing reformers would know, for example, that English cottages had developed from old Germanic customs, and that the tenements that characterised many German cities were, in fact, Roman in origin.54 Considering the general political aims of the Congress, the evocation of the history of the English cottage was indicative less of a deep-​seated

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The interiorisation of life

passion to develop architectural solutions to the housing problem. It was more a method of ultimately establishing the empirical foundations of the liberal ethic and maintaining a liberal economic doctrine for urban development in Germany. From a liberal political perspective, it was clear that the laissez-​faire processes that had created the tenement city could not be left unchanged –​such a response would be disastrous for morality and subsequently for social stability. Faucher maintained that governmental intervention was desirable but should be directed towards the promotion of villa suburbs around a green belt, within which healthy liberal values could be cultivated.55 Such planning would encourage the upper classes to move out to the periphery of the city, lowering housing prices and in the process creating a higher standard of living and culture towards which the working classes would naturally aspire, turning many a worker into a good middle-​class citizen. While Faucher was an economist, his theories were quickly absorbed into the language of urban planning. In his 1876 handbook on city expansion (the first comprehensive text on zoning), the German planner Reinhard Baumeister likewise appealed to Faucher’s conception of ‘a normal form of life’ as a yardstick to establish the moral foundations of planning intervention through the zoning of residential areas. Baumeister’s objectives were likewise directed towards the maintenance of morality, arguing that a miserable apartment would not cultivate a ‘love of the domestic hearth’ but would result in useless expenditure at the pub, further propelling the family’s economic prosperity downward.56 In his 1869 article ‘On enterprises in house construction in the spirit of the time’, Faucher returned once again to the question of housing and remarked pleasingly on elite housing developments in Berlin that were fulfilling his initial vision for a green suburban belt.57 However, his ignorance of the reality of conditions driving inequality in the housing market earned him a special place on Engels’ list of misguided petit-​bourgeois reformers whose answers to the housing question lay in paraphrasing Die Gartenlaube. In 1872, Engels ridiculed the lamentable state of political economy across Europe. Focusing on the work of Austrian economist Emil Sax, who had provided a review of the state of the housing question, Engels set out to lambast the Austrian housing reformer’s dubious sources, which included the ‘recognised authority’ Faucher, as well as pieces from Illustrated London News and Über Land und Meer (‘all that is missing in this list of sources is Die Gartenlaube’, Engels sneered).58 Engels challenged the popular caricatures of speculators that pervaded housing discourse, placing speculation in the broader context of capitalism and its many ills. Engels quoted Sax: ‘Good dwellings are so expensive that it is absolutely impossible for the greater part of the workers to make use of them. Big capital […] is shy of investing in houses for the working classes […] and as a result these classes and their housing needs fall mostly a

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The architecture of social reform prey to the speculators.’59 Engels replied to this with sarcasm: ‘Disgusting speculation –​big capital naturally never speculates! But it is not ill will, it is only ignorance which prevents big capital from speculating in workers’ houses.’60 The Congress itself began to splinter as some of its members believed it was not going far enough in addressing social inequality. As a result, the Association for Social Policy (Verein für Sozialpolitik, ASP) was founded in 1872 by prominent economics professors including Gustav Schmoller, Lugo Brentano, and Adolph Wagner. In the tradition of Knies and Roscher, their research work was more intensely historical than that of the Congress. If socio-​ economic problems were ultimately ethical problems, and the answers to those problems lay dormant in a human history that spanned millennia, it would require far more intense methodological revising and empirical research work to uncover the ethic of the present form of capitalism than hitherto imagined by economists associated with the Congress. For the ASP’s leader Schmoller, social inequality could not be solved overnight, and it would not be desirable to do so, for the psychological feelings that established moral convention grew and changed over long periods of time. The ASP provided an inner circle of academic inquiry and social criticism that would be crucial in fostering the later work of important sociologists, including Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and Karl Bücher. While the academic work of the ASP was derisively labelled ‘socialism of the chair’ (Katheder-​Sozialismus), its members did not consider themselves socialists, and they did not share any of Engels’ deep ideological conflicts with liberal economists. They simply questioned if prevailing liberal economic ideals had gone far enough to curb revolutionary forces.61 The ASP remained instrumental in transforming Riehl’s initial vision for the development of social policy into a comprehensive research programme. Schmoller was particularly wary of party politics and believed that advances in social knowledge were best developed into policy via the more neutral force of a sophisticated Prussian–​German bureaucracy. While the ASP’s policy recommendations ultimately had only limited consequences for Otto von Bismarck’s social insurance schemes, it played a critical role in popularising social reform and promoting the ideal of the ‘society of the middle classes’ (Mittelstandsgesellschaft), which subsequently made Schmoller a key influence for the American Progressivist movement.62 There was a consensus within the ASP that social policy should be structured to support the Mittelstand –​the portion of society that viewed itself as having replaced traditional burghers to become the heart of modern civil society and a bastion of good morals. This came down to the values that the Mittelstand believed they possessed, including sobriety, self-​moderation, and stable family life. Indeed, many members of the ASP identified themselves as belonging to the Mittelstand, and the basic challenge that they posed to both laissez-​faire liberalism and

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socialism was crafted from their sense of an affinity with handicraft production.63 The direction of their social policy emphasised this particular group’s economic stability and equilibrium above all other groups. In Schmoller’s major work on the history of the German handicrafts, the economist revealed that large-​scale industry alone did not account for the declining handicraft economy, with social, cultural, and psychological conditions having a more profound effect on traditional artisan families.64 Like Faucher, Schmoller’s economic ideals were based on an attempt to control and normalise an image of the German population based on what he felt constituted its hard-​working middle-​class ‘majority’. Schmoller argued that the national economy was a ‘dwelling house’, the transformation of which ultimately lay in the hands of the people. It was up to future generations to ‘work out the rules of coexistence, morality, and outlook, which make dwelling in the new building [the nation] a blessing for all, or at least for the majority’.65 His response to the housing question further helped cement the imagined historical role of the Mittelstand and the perceived normality of its moral traits. In an 1887 essay, Schmoller emphasised the ethical and historico-​cultural foundations of the housing problem. ‘The starting point [of the housing question] is a psychological one’, argued Schmoller; ‘the question is what effect the various types of dwellings exert on human, mainly moral, traits’.66 He began his impassioned article by situating the house as an ‘infinitely complicated product of spiritual and material influences’ from which one could derive knowledge about the entirety of human culture. ‘One could name our entire cultural history a history of the dwelling’, Schmoller maintained; ‘we can designate the construction of the first house as the end of prehistory and the beginning of higher culture. […] It was always the house that differed, on the whole, from the holes in the ground and huts of the time of Tacitus.’67 If the hearth marked the social origins of architecture for Semper, the hearth signified the beginning of history for Schmoller. Schmoller did not have a particular interest in the housing question in terms of design issues per se but viewed the architecture of the German dwelling as the privileged material of economic history. For Schmoller, the cultivation of grain and the building of the first house and garden for the single family released man from the ‘crude tribal associations of the clan’ and bound him to the earth.68 He further suggested that it was the very act of constructing enclosure that allowed economic thought to initially occur. The four stakes of his own house now envelope and enclose a singular existence […] It is initially in the house that the father collects supplies for the children and children’s children. Only within the house begins a certain division of labour and capital formation, only in the house begins diligence, parsimony –​indeed all economic virtues. It’s not for nothing that we use the Greek word for house, ‘oikos’, to term these traits and virtues.69

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For Schmoller, it was precisely the formation of the house that made the autonomous existence of the family possible, as the all-​too-​loose social relationships between family members within the prehistoric tribe were consolidated within the household economy. The virtues he listed as underpinning the moral foundations of the single-​family house were naturally ones central to the historical identity of the Mittelstand. He continued: Inasmuch as man is not content to protect himself against the cold and his enemies in caves and holes in the earth, inasmuch as he uses every natural requirement of need as an occasion for fixed, typical forms of commerce towards the configuration of a well thought-​out way of life, inasmuch as he lines up his actions in the cohesion of a covering which binds the present and the future, inasmuch as he divides his house into various rooms with various purposes, inasmuch as he allocates every family member and every activity its fixed place, he simultaneously expands [ausbaut] his own inner self, he establishes firm barriers for his basic urges, he submits himself, through the home [häuslichen] to a moral order of life. With the house he builds the altars of tradition and morality. It is an unshakable connection that links each advancement in our inner culture and our dwelling habits and requirements.70

For Schmoller, the physical acts of protecting, configuring, fixing, covering, and allocating were both architectural and social. Likewise, mental acts of improving one’s inner emotions, fixing barriers to control one’s passions, and establishing moral order all pertained initially to architecture before they were expressly psychological traits. The architectural foundation of the home created history and enabled progress. Schmoller further argued that the processes of configuring, ordering, arranging, furnishing, and decorating in the household all helped give expression to moral custom.71 In grounding the model for a liberal economic ethos on the myth of the first house, Schmoller effectively undermined the abstractions that had long characterised classic economic thought –​and, for that matter, the socialist utopian schemes such as Fourier’s phalanstère that arose to challenge it. Schmoller believed that the answer to the housing question was a simple one; it required educating the lower classes about good domesticity, so they could realise that it would be more dangerous for the preservation of morality to ‘renounce a good room than to renounce the Sunday pleasure of a glass of beer’.72 While clearly lacking any rigorous historical premise, Schmoller’s rhetoric was nonetheless effective. His work laid the foundations for a number of ethical stances that became common sense in housing literature, including the privileging of immediate spatial experience in shaping psychological drives and notions of the moral self and the privileging of architectural methods of enclosing, organising, and barricading of the family in the establishment of positive economic traits. In Schmoller’s view, the development of effective housing policy would involve adjusting policy to that element of society that was already



The interiorisation of life

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able to care for itself. In Germany, this element was the Mittelstand nuclear family. The establishment of norms in housing thus offered concessions to socialist dissenters through evincing the moral and cultural values to be gained if individuals took efforts to improve their own housing standards. The invisible hand would be made visible in the hands of the Mittelstand itself.

The interiorisation of life By the late 1880s it became part of common sense in social scientific discourse that architecture and domestic design had an important role to play in the development of social policy. On the professional design front, theories of domestic architecture would undergo a similar process of consolidation to come to largely the same conclusions. Modes of functionalist and organicist thought continued to inform theories of architectural type, particularly through Semper’s influence. Following German unification in 1871 and the spurring of nationalistic sentiment following the Franco-​ Prussian War, apartment and house design textbooks began to strongly emphasise critical differences between the French bourgeois dwelling and the German dwelling as indications of differences in morality that cut across purely monetary standards. These differences were read predominantly through the floor plan. In his 1868 text The arrangement of dwellings, Albert Geul, architect and professor at the polytechnic school in Nuremberg, attempted to lay out a rational system of residential building in the analytical manner of French architect Jean-​ Nicolas-​ Louis Durand (1760–​ 1834) and the

Figure 2.8  Jean-​Nicolas-​Louis Durand, ‘Various layouts of buildings specific to the city’.

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The architecture of social reform classically trained Karlsruhe architect Friedrich Weinbrenner (1766–​ 1826). Weinbrenner had brought the French teacher’s rational textbook method into unison with his own utilitarian and Kant-​inspired aesthetic theory of purposiveness, which posited that architecture should attempt to bring form and building purpose into complete unison (a theory which would underpin the utilitarianism of Weinbrenner’s anti-​classicist pupil, Heinrich Hübsch).73 Both Durand and Weinbrenner sought to provide a textbook method for contriving basic shapes for residential construction (Figure 2.8).74 Perhaps attempting to match Durand and Weinbrenner on level of difficulty, Geul developed an obsessive system of dimensions for urban residential building based on the ideal proportions of the single living room and the purposeful arrangement of furniture within it. He laid out a set of conventionalised shapes that could serve as a basis for a complete system of residential construction (Figures 2.9–​10). He also outlined two distortions of this ideal: the bizarre polygonal French villas that went too far in the direction of ideal form, and the English country house that, while attending to domestic function, still gave way to arbitrary picturesque (painterly) ideals of beauty that were not true to architecture (Figure 2.11–​12). Underpinning Geul’s aesthetic assessment was an ideological commitment to distinguishing national traditions in domestic construction. While critical of the picturesque, he admired the vernacular English building tradition because it was based on the proclivity for closed-​off family life, producing floor plans that encouraged privacy and limited contact between families. He noted how the living room as it existed ‘in the German sense of the word’ was absent in the Parisian apartment, with the nearest space that fitted that description being the petit salon, which in the smaller apartments was the main bedroom and the ‘habitual abode of the woman’.75 In his 1883 book How Europe builds and lives, architect Emil Asmus likewise sought to categorise features of European apartments from which it was possible to pinpoint moral and familial values that conveyed profound national differences. Paraphrasing Geul, Asmus argued that the Parisian apartment (Figure 2.13) tended to express a scarcity in proper living space for the family, which could even be observed in bourgeois apartments. The most probable explanation for the modest ratios of the Parisian apartment is that the French woman is no housewife [Hausfrau] in our sense, and the French man is no house father [Hausvater]. He lives in society, in the cafes, etc., she at the bar counter or in the boudoir. Here, one only needs night quarters. […] As soon as the French man can escape the world of commerce, which completely defines his thoughts and energies, he lives as a Rentier on the land in his own house with greater comfort and ease than the German and Dutch themselves.76

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The interiorisation of life

Figure 2.9  Living room ground plans from Albert Geul’s Die Anlage der Wohngebäude.

The petit salon was not a space for the family in general but was a place for the woman to retire with company; it was viewed as more a public space than a private one. Used frequently to conduct affairs, the Parisian bedroom was, as Asmus noted, ‘equipped with all sorts of coquetry’ and contained ‘other than very opulent bedding, nothing that reminds one of its purpose’.77 There existed no need in the Parisian apartment for such a family room, as the French man had his own bedroom and study space on the other side of the salon, and the children, who typically occupied rooms at the back of the apartment, were almost always sent to boarding school.78

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Figure 2.10  ‘Most common basic forms of dwelling’ from Albert Geul’s Die Anlage der Wohngebäude.

The proto-​feminist mentality that dictated the Parisian apartment stood in contrast to the London apartment, which was seen to contain higher ideals of private family life, having inherited a notion of private comfort that evolved from the German sense of domestic cosiness. As Asmus noted, while the French apartment ‘opened the bedroom up to strangers and turned it into an auxiliary salon’, the London apartment, with its generous hall, living and dining space, and conjugal bedroom, ‘sharply manifested the isolation of the English family from the world’.79 These two tendencies formed a dichotomy into which the entirety of European culture could be divided –​while the German house was seen to align itself with England in its adherence to the higher concept of dwelling and its emphasis on the family, the Viennese apartment was seen to mirror Paris in its treatment of the apartment as a commodity lacking in ‘internal life’. The Viennese apartment (Zinshaus) (Figure 2.14) literally translates as ‘rent-​ bearing house’. Critics perceived it as an object of pure financial transaction. The dwelling as a higher concept does not exist in the ‘Viennese rent-​bearing house’ as it does in the London house! The Viennese man is born in the business of acquiring rent and if he builds his own house, it will always remain a Zinshaus, where he resides on the first floor and occupies himself, in his capacity as landlord, as little as possible with the renters.80

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The interiorisation of life

Figure 2.11  ‘Abnormal forms’: polygonal dwelling plan from Albert Geul’s Die Anlage der Wohngebäude.

As a series of nondescript rooms designed to yield the greatest possible amount of rent, the Zinshaus apartment floor plan was viewed as particularly injurious to family life. Even the German urban planner Josef Stübben, who enthusiastically embraced modern metropolitan life, deplored the loss of family life in these apartments and argued that the ‘task of the apartment house’ should be to create pleasant circumstances corresponding as much as possible to the ‘particular circumstances of the family’. He criticised the Zinshaus, claiming that it has no ‘intimate, one could say, psychological connection to the inhabitant. It must suit everyone and relinquish any idiosyncrasy.’81 Both the Parisian and the

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Figure 2.12  ‘Abnormal forms’: English country house plan from Albert Geul’s Die Anlage der Wohngebäude.

Viennese apartments were soulless products of mass production, yet to be colonised by appropriate familial customs and values. The dichotomy of apartment cultures, with the Parisian tendency to consider the dwelling as a commodity on the one hand, and the Germanic understanding of the dwelling as a higher concept rooted in family life on the other, expressed, for some, the most telling difference in middle-​class values that defined national character. Comparisons such as these also incited more poetic reflections from writers who wished to infuse the hitherto mundane character of the apartment with romantic nationalistic sentiment. In his 1895 newspaper article ‘European house types’, Berlin art historian Oskar Bie argued that the culture of the people lay not in the palace or villa styles but the ‘familiar, typical apartment styles’ that are built in the most ‘traditional, uniform way’. He asked how something as pragmatic as a floor plan could speak ‘about a tribe of people so entirely distinctly and so completely individually’.82 Bie noted that the floor plan could at once tell both of a ‘sober

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The interiorisation of life

Figure 2.13  Typical Parisian bourgeois apartment plan.

theory of practical room utilisation’ and, likewise, of the most ‘intimate matters of comfortable family life’.83 He attributed the London apartment floor plan to a ‘practical, well-​ordered vitality’ whereby the ‘foreign world is closed off –​the family belongs to itself. […] The English man is strict and conservative in family matters. He does not enjoy contemplating issues of revolution in the evening.’84 In his 1875 guide The freestanding family dwelling, architect Max Hittenkofer noted the confusions over the production of endless classifications of domestic types that were plaguing the architectural profession in designing suitable middle-​ class dwellings (i.e., houses

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Figure 2.14  Plan of typical Viennese rent-​bearing house.

for low-​ ranking officials, houses for high-​ ranking officials, petty burgher houses, workers houses, burgher houses, stately houses, etc.). For Hittenkofer the answer for lay in developing a ‘normal template’ based on the ‘indispensable’ requirements of the individual family home, whether that was for the worker, the burgher, or the official.85 Likewise, in his 1888 book The English house, Robert Dohme set out to document the culturally sophisticated English suburban house tradition, which built upon modest middle-​class requirements of convenience, privacy, and comfort, exemplified in works by architects including Richard Norman Shaw and Robert Kerr. While Dohme admitted that money was decisive in creating good housing (‘when is it not!’), he noted that the initial desire for comfortable domesticity was the most important driver behind the expansion of English suburban life, which created a positive levelling effect. He noted that English families of the same means as Germany’s ‘well-​off Mittelstand’ lived entirely better off because they sought to live in comfort, seeking not to emulate the expensive tastes of the nouveau-​riche bourgeois class.86 Aside from the above tracts, the architectural profession throughout these years generally remained silent on the problem of housing design for the Mittelstand. In Prussia, the Building Academy came to dominate architectural discourse in matters of pedagogy and taste. The architects trained at the academy worked privately in elite residential architecture, continuing the picturesque Italianate villa tradition established by Schinkel through suburban construction in Berlin, with little concern for social issues.87 The academy’s central organisational initiative, the Architects’ Society (Architektenverein), served as a chief organ for disseminating the research interests and pedagogical initiatives of its members.88 The Society hosted weekly lectures from 1832, the titles of which give

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The interiorisation of life

a good indication of its central concerns. Architects mostly lectured on their travels to Greece and Italy. Some society members lectured on German medieval architecture following the tradition of Goethe, whose famous 1773 essay on the Strasbourg Cathedral had long since renewed architects’ interests in developing a national architectural style.89 Others lectured on new methods in church, theatre, and railway construction. While very few lectures addressed explicitly social concerns, some turned to housing, including the lectures ‘Design for a building code for Berlin’ (1848), ‘Workers’ housing from the London industrial exhibition’ (1851), ‘Dwellings of poor people in Holland’ (1862), ‘On workers’ housing’ (1862), and ‘[Financial] housing collapses in Berlin’ (1864), the last of which was given by the municipal building officer Gustav Assmann, who had produced the influential pattern book for Berlin’s tenement construction.90 In 1867, leading liberal-​conservative art historian Max Schasler wrote an article titled ‘Villa or tenement? A study on the natural conditions for the architectural development of the metropolis’, which began to bridge the concerns of architects with those of social and health reformers. The article posed the question of which dwelling type –​the villa or the tenement –​should dictate Berlin’s outward growth ‘not only in reference to the more or less artistic character of [the dwelling’s] external appearance, but also in connection to its inner life’.91 Schasler began by noting the general tendency towards tenement construction in large cities such as Paris and Berlin, where the ‘inwardness of feeling, the quiet tranquillity and familiarity of family life, is lost in the deafening noise of business and the rushing splendour of external pleasure’.92 These cities, he noted, had similarly experienced the expansion of ‘villa facilities, i.e., small two-​, rarely three-​storied picturesque-​style houses located in between pleasant gardens, each of which is usually inhabited by a family’ in their south and south-​western parts.93 If these suburban settlements occurred only sporadically in Paris, Schasler argued, it was because of the ‘specific peculiarity of the French national character or corresponding temperament, in which the isolation of private life and family life is less of a requirement’ than in other nations.94 In the Parisian dwelling, he argued, there was more of an inclination towards ‘the externalisation of life more so than the interiorisation of life’.95 Not surprisingly, Schasler cited Faucher’s study in this description of the English national character. It differs in England, whose Germanic undertones in national character lie chiefly in the sympathy for the home [Daheim], which reveals the interiority and intimacy of familial existence. In London we thus find, as opposed to the tremendous activity of the public life of the city, the edification of the family in a special world, a city in itself, which exists only in the villas (cottages) at a distance from the centre of commercial business.96

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The architecture of social reform For both Faucher and Schasler, the existence of appropriate zoning measures that enabled the consolidation of moral virtue within the suburban dwelling did not undermine the commercial world of the metropolis. Rather, the insularity of the single-​family dwelling could foster the internalisation of virtues that formed the basis of modern society. ‘Domesticity! [Häuslichkeit!]’, proclaimed the art historian, ‘with admirable instinct our good German language gives away, in this word, the most intimate connection between the happiness and joy of the family, and the dwelling’. The absence of proper familial domesticity in the metropolis was, for Schasler, the root cause of modern alienation and the ‘general corruption of those in the higher strata of society’.97 Predictably, Schasler’s own answer to his initial question was that the villa better provided for the moral wellbeing of the inhabitant than the tenement inasmuch as it followed English cottage ideals. Like most reformers, Schasler saw close parallels between physical surroundings and the cultivation of good morals, arguing that the ‘healthy, cheerful, and comfortable abode affects the physical comfort of the man, and, in consequence, his spiritual and moral wellbeing’.98 As new notions of organic function began to be applied to theories of urban domestic architecture, the inculcation of positive social virtues within the family was thought to be possible through the proper construction, organisation, and management of the freestanding single-​family dwelling. Defining the well-​designed ‘functional’ family dwelling came to increasingly depend on slippages between medical, managerial, and art-​historical discourses for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Physicians such as Max von Pettenkofer famously attempted to prove a close relationship between the body, clothing, and the dwelling. Such a position gained more authority via the cross-​fertilisation of medical knowledge with knowledge in other emerging ethnographic disciplines, including linguistics and cultural history.99 In his short 1885 book Man and his dwelling in their interrelationships: A cultural-​historical outline, the physician Christian Ruepprecht weighed in on the important reforming role of the dwelling by appealing to a broad disciplinary base. He brought together the work of Riehl, Laspeyres, and Emil Sax (best known as the figure against whom Engels levelled his attacks in The housing question) to plea for a renewal of German dwelling culture. Quoting Sax, Ruepprecht argued that those who ‘showed all stages of economic and moral decay’ became ‘entirely better people after being assisted with a pleasant, neat dwelling. A pure family life and all of its related virtues: domesticity, orderliness, thrift, sobriety, a moral way of life was gradually found.’100 Ruepprecht’s text likewise drew from emerging popular ideals about domestic interior decoration that appeared in both applied arts museums and in popular journals and manuals, particularly in German art historian Jacob von Falke’s 1871 book Art in the house, which provided scientific

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The interiorisation of life

advice for interior decoration.101 Reform movements in the applied arts and interior design trades, particularly in Munich during the 1870s and 1880s, drew upon a constellation of old German, Bavarian, and Alpine folk sources to theorise the artistic and psychological effects of certain materials (such as the coarseness of Alpine pub interiors) on the creation of comfort and cosiness in domestic interiors.102 Describing the variety of dwelling practices in Germany, France, England, China, Japan, and America, as well as Ancient Greece and Rome, Ruepprecht claimed that those societies prone to nomadism prohibited the development of higher culture. We try to make [the dwelling] as easy as possible to transport in order to save on cost and difficulty. Here certainly lies a great danger. ‘The greater convertibility of the house and household contents’, said Riehl, ‘the greater convertibility of the customs of the house, naturally.’103

Ruepprecht urged for the continued study not merely of ‘the climate and the general level of education which gives expression to our type of houses’ but of all aspects of interior design as they pertained to customs related to race, nation, and ‘family life, to which the position of women is entirely related’.104 Indeed, the domestic efforts and managerial skills of the German housewife (Hausfrau) were seen as equally indispensable to a well-​functioning house as that of the architect’s design skills. The 1884 instructional manual The book of the housewife, for example, urged women, as its subtitle put it, to ‘secure domestic prosperity and comfort’ through the care and careful design of the dwelling.105 The opening paragraph of the chapter on home decor stressed the architect’s as well as the ethnographer’s importance in helping the housewife understand her role: Since the middle of our century architecture has fulfilled a variety of roles according to the various demands placed on it by the dwelling house [Wohnhaus] as well as the tenement rental [Miethaus]. The living and developmental needs of various populations have been studied, likewise the English and American family house, as well as the traditional German house, has undergone extensive scrutiny regarding both functionality and aesthetics. All national peculiarities came under study, much of which had been applied to the new construction of our dwelling houses […] As the field of architecture shifted, meticulous studies and examinations performed by ethnographers and philanthropists went hand in hand with praxis.106

The book featured a variety of illustrations showing the evolution of the human dwelling from the Assyrian house to the Roman house and finally to the modern-​day house, using new areas of ethnographic knowledge to emphasise to the housewife her instrumental role in maintaining traditional dwelling culture. Giving detailed descriptions of the use of each room, The book of the housewife guided the woman in all matters of decoration and

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The architecture of social reform furniture arrangement as well as the proper management and care of the household.

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Schinkel’s legacy While it appeared that most housing reformers and design professionals equated the fostering of Sitte with the single-​family suburban dwelling, there were some that perceived the modern tenement to have historical links to a rich tradition of early-​nineteenth-​century apartment house construction in Germany –​links that could also impart moral lessons. For some, the Biedermeier age represented a time when the Mittelstand reached the pinnacle of respectability through the development of a pragmatic, sober and ‘truthful’ architectural language in the urban apartment house. Architect and teacher at the Technical University of Berlin Wilhelm Petrus Tuckermann, for example, argued that the modern Berlin tenement could ultimately be traced back to this golden age of middle-​class respectability. In 1880, he gave a widely publicised lecture for the Society of Berlin History entitled ‘The Berlin apartment floor plan, and its historical development in the last two centuries: A word to home owners and tenants’, which was later published in the Society’s journal. As the title suggested, Tuckermann aimed to retrace the lineage of the typical Berlin floor plan. However, as his subtitle suggested, his more implicit goal was for social reform. Like most reformists, he viewed Mittelstand families as the bearers of social progress and the facilitators of a dwelling culture that would allow the natural evolution of the Berlin apartment building to continue into the future. Tuckermann argued for the importance of preserving the sanctified spaces of family life from morally corruptive lodgers, as well as the importance of curbing the family’s material desires in order to preserve the modesty of the Mittelstand. However, his critique was not quite as extreme and ethnically rooted as that of conservative commentators like Riehl. Rather, Tuckermann saw potential for moderate Christian reform within the tenement apartment type. He began the lecture emphasising the importance of the sanctity of the private dwelling by reiterating the familiar argument of moral decay during the Roman Empire. The housing question was a minor issue for the [Roman] citizen. A member of the Mittelstand who could not procure his own mansion was dependent on five-​to six-​storied tenements, which sunk into mere night accommodation; he instead sought his daily residence within the public buildings of the state: the baths, gymnasiums, basilicas, forums, circus, and theatre. […] This ruin of the family dwelling was simultaneously the ruin of Roman pagan cultural life. In comparison, the strong emphasis that Christianity laid on the elevation of the family was actually the salvation and redemption of the world.107

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Having witnessed similar social maladies in the more advanced industrialist cities of Paris and London, Tuckermann urged Berlin’s population to avoid a similar fate, beginning with the salvation of the family dwelling. Tuckermann proceeded to trace the lineage of the Mittelstand floor plan by limiting his historical analysis to dwellings estimated to let for 600–​1,200 marks per annum according to contemporary rental prices (the average annual rental value of a single dwelling in 1880 was around 600 marks, with most petit-​bourgeois families needing to take on lodgers).108 While being an unrealistic bracket in terms of the typical incomes of those belonging to the Mittelstand, it nonetheless effectively omitted both the overcrowded facilities of the working classes and the palaces of the aristocracy. Any dwelling within this bracket, he argued, represented a more or less consistent type, the occupants of which formed the bedrock of the nation. ‘Through the band of social cohesiveness and merging of all things similar in type’, Tuckermann noted, ‘one can locate, in the great diversity of dwelling forms, similar types that speak of a distinct language and speak of the advancement of our culture, as well as the more or less prominent follies of fashion’.109 With this in mind, the architect isolated three key historical eras in the evolution of Berlin’s floor plan, which demonstrated three ‘distinct languages’. The first was the seventeenth-​century Baroque period defined predominantly by Dutch influence. The second was the eighteenth-​century French-​inspired period of building led by architect Carl von Gontard under the patronage of Friedrich Wilhelm II. Despite the dwelling types of both eras being imports, Tuckermann commended their clarity and argued that their cohesive building style had helped unite Berlin citizens by reminding them ‘of their faith in the governmental future’, which in turn promised political stability.110 The third period, Tuckermann declared, began with the neo-​classical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel who ‘fought all his life against insobriety’. Schinkel’s Feilner House of 1829, designed for the upstart artisan pottery manufacturer Tobias Feilner, represented the nineteenth-​century arrival of Berlin’s self-​consciously middle-​class domestic culture through the ‘organic connection of the street-​facing house with the side-​wing, which offered itself for the first time in a very original and peculiar way in Berlin’.111 Tuckermann was referring to the forsaking of the usual vestibule entry into the front salon rooms in order to consolidate living space at the centre of the apartment, forming a kind of organic hearth that lent itself more to convivial family gatherings. This area as it appeared in the tenement was so ubiquitous as an informal space for family meals that it gained the epithet ‘Berlin Room’ (Berliner Zimmer). Tuckermann continued: It was [Schinkel’s] dearest wish to invent only the best for the middle class [Bürgerstand], the largest base of the nation, which meant that in this instance,

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apartment construction leaned heavily towards wellbeing, convivial pleasure and suitable economy.112

While not taking the needs of the Mittelstand into direct account in his built works, Schinkel’s Feilner House was rather that of a ‘quiet preparation and mental clarification’ of the future domestic needs of a growing but stable middle-​ class base. Tuckermann considered the transformation of Berlin from provincial capital to industrial world city as ‘a new, healthy, and organic growth that corresponded proportionally with the conditions among the citizens’ and thus gave the floor plan of the third era its ‘material background’.113 The 1853 building ordinances along with Assmann’s pattern book plans were, according to Tuckermann, the first material realisation of Schinkel’s initial project to consolidate family space and the ‘first public recognition of the new urban Berlin floor plan type’.114 In the published lecture, he showed both plans developed by Schinkel and Assmann alongside one another to point out the close theoretical connection between them (Figure 2.15–​16). The initial visual connection between the two floor plans, Tuckermann conceded, was ‘not immediately apparent –​even less so because Schinkel’s direct objective was not the needs of the Mittelstand’.115 Nevertheless, the evolution of the plan from Schinkel to Assmann was one characterised by a striving towards an economy of space that corresponded to the Mittelstand’s own striving towards greater organic integration of domestic functions. Tuckermann suggested that despite criticisms from economists, who deemed the standard of Berlin’s housing as low compared to London and Paris, Assmann’s floor plan designs ‘had proven to be a great blessing’ because they corresponded proportionally to the needs of the growing Mittelstand.116 Tuckermann emphasised that while the designation of rooms within the tenement apartment was frequently changing, it was always in response to a quest for greater practicality. He emphasised that it was not the general design of the tenement itself that was to blame for the present corruption of the family, but rather external speculative forces. As fraudulent entrepreneurs created fictitious sale and rental values, home owners and tenants were forced to take on lodgers –​ effectively turning family dwellings into mass living quarters. While during the previous centuries civilian housing had been a tactic for political stability, the laissez-​faire policies that turned housing into profits for greedy speculators essentially undermined the solidarity of the Mittelstand. For Tuckermann, the typological solutions to urban housing –​theorised in Schinkel’s Feilner House and clarified and popularised in Assmann’s floor plans –​had solved the question of designing for the moral regulation of family life. The disintegration of the Mittelstand towards proletarian lifestyles was in this case ‘less the fault of dwelling, and more out of the

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The interiorisation of life

Figure 2.15  Feilner house plan, from Wilhelm Petrus Tuckermann’s ‘Der Berliner Wohnungsgrundriss’.

habit of modern forms of society’.117 Here Tuckermann referred not just to the fraudulent real estate entrepreneurs but also to the increasing consolidation of domestic technologies within apartment blocks, from mass heating to central kitchens, that were gradually making servants’ positions unnecessary and invalidating the role of the German housewife: ‘No material saving will outweigh the moral disadvantage that family life will suffer if the housewife is deprived of her economic duties.’ Should this occur, Tuckermann warned, the ‘most valuable agent of educating youth will disappear under the conformity of mass supply’.118

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Figure 2.16  Typical tenement plan, from Wilhelm Petrus Tuckermann’s ‘Der Berliner Wohnungsgrundriss’.

If high land prices were driving the nuclear family into a proletarian existence, the penchant in modern society to economise domestic labour offered an equal threat to the German housewife and her central domestic role and pedagogical duty. The Berlin apartment floor plan functioned as the perfect network for the maintenance of the traditional family unit; it was small enough to limit its facilities becoming justifiably shared by multiple families, but large enough to feature an individual kitchen and ancillary servants’ quarters in close proximity to the living rooms in order for the housewife to effectively maintain her household. By placing the architecture of the Mittelstand apartment within clearly identifiable historical origins, Tuckermann hoped more than anything else that his lecture would make this quiet portion of society realise its political potential, consequently changing how middle-​class citizens occupied their dwellings –​even if the physical reality of tenement conditions would



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continually be condemned by public health experts. What emerged from the tenement-​versus-​suburbs debate by the end of the 1880s, regardless of which side one stood on, was a shared understanding that housing reform should be directed towards leading middle-​class society towards realising its historical destiny as a bastion of genuine cultural progress. The strength and harmony of a society based on traditional middle-​class values, enacted through the well-​designed home, could act as a critical buffer against both revolutionary socialism and the excesses of capitalism.

Notes 1

Charles Fourier, The theory of the four movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1808] 1996). 2 Charles Fourier, Design for utopia: Selected writings of Charles Fourier (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), p. 137. 3 Ibid., p. 153. 4 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 83. 5 Nicholas Bullock and James Read, The movement for housing reform in Germany and France, 1840–​1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 315–​16. 6 Joseph B. Prestel, Emotional cities: Debates on urban change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860–​1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 7 Moritz Lazarus, quoted in Prestel, Emotional cities, p. 24. 8 Ibid., p. 30. 9 Ibid., p. 31. 10 Carl W. Hoffmann, Die Wohnungen der Arbeiter und Armen (Berlin: E. H. Schroeder, 1852), p. 10. 11 David Blackbourn, The long nineteenth century: A history of Germany, 1780–​1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 118. 12 On the development of the notion of the interior in architecture, see Charles Rice, The emergence of the interior: Architecture, modernity, domesticity (London: Routledge, 2007). 13 Horst Matzerath, ‘Berlin, 1890–​1940’, in Anthony Sutcliffe (ed.), Metropolis, 1890–​ 1940 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 293. 14 On the architecture of the Berlin tenement, see Katharina Borsi, ‘Drawing and dispute: The strategies of the Berlin block’, in Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton, and Marina Lathouri (eds), Intimate metropolis: Urban subjects in the modern city (London: Routledge, 2009); Douglas Klahr, ‘Luxury apartments with a tenement heart: The Kurfürstendamm and the Berliner Zimmer’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 70:3 (2011), 290–​307; Albert Gut, Das Berliner Wohnhaus des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1984); and Johann F. Geist and Klaus Kürvers, Das Berliner Mietshaus: 1862–​1945 (Munich: Prestel, 1984). 15 James Hobrecht, Über öffentliche Gesundheitspflege und die Bildung eines Central–​ Amts für öffentliche Gesundheitspflege in Staate (Stettin: Th. von der Nahmer, 1868), p. 13. 16 Ibid., p. 13. 17 Prestel, Emotional cities, p. 25. 18 Werner Hegemann, Das steinerne Berlin: Geschichte der größten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt (Berlin: Ullstein, [1930] 1963), p. 232. 19 Håkan Forsell, Property, tenancy and urban growth in Stockholm and Berlin, 1860–​ 1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 122.

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The architecture of social reform 20 Harald Bodenschatz, Platz frei für das neue Berlin (Berlin: Transit Berlin, 1987), p. 53. For an overview of Berlin’s private housing market, see Christoph Bernhardt, Bauplatz Groß-​Berlin: Wohnungsmärkte, Terraingewerbe und Kommunalpolitik im Städtewachstum der Hochindustrialisierung (1871–​1918) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998). For the best English overview of private housing, see Forsell, Property, tenancy and urban growth. See also the section on ‘Housing by private enterprise’ in Bullock and Read, The movement for housing reform, pp. 187–​206. 21 Bullock and Read, The movement for housing reform, p. 91. 22 In Berlin self-​owned apartments numbered around 5% of the total housing stock in 1971. Forsell, Property, tenancy and urban growth, p. 142. 23 See Peter G. J. Pulzer, The rise of political anti-​Semitism in Germany and Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 84. 24 Otto Glagau, ‘Der Börsen-​und Gründungsschwindel in Berlin: Häuserschacher und Baustellenwucher’, Die Gartenlaube, 23 (1875), 383. 25 Max Ring, ‘Ein Besuch in Barackia’, Die Gartenlaube, 28 (1872), 458. 26 See Sylvia Paletschek, ‘Popular presentations of history in the nineteenth century: The example of Die Gartenlaube’, in Sylvia Paletschek (ed.), Popular historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Cultural meanings, social practices (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), pp. 34–​53; Kirsten Belgum, ‘Domesticating the reader: Women and Die Gartenlaube’, Women in German Yearbook, 9 (1993), 91–​111. 27 Reick discusses the difficulty of the working classes asserting their agency over urban space in Berlin. Philipp Reick, ‘Desire or displacement? Working-​ class notions of urban belonging in late nineteenth-​century Germany’, Journal of Urban History, 45:6 (2019), 1193–​211. 28 On the relationship between housing and social hygiene, see Clemens Zimmermann, Von der Wohnungsfrage zur Wohnungspolitik: Die Reformbewegung in Deutschland 1845–​1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1991). 29 Marynel R. van Zee, ‘ “Self-​ interest ennobled”: The family in German political economy’, History of Political Economy, 46:4 (2014), 641–​75. 30 Ibid., p. 646. 31 Erik Grimmer-​Solem, The rise of historical economics and social reform in Germany, 1864–​1894 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 124. 32 Julius Faucher, ‘Die Bewegung für Wohnungsreform’, Vierteljahrschrift für Volkswirtschaft, Politik und Kulturgeschichte, 3:4 (1865), 137. 33 Faucher, ‘Die Bewegung für Wohnungsreform’, p. 139. 34 Ibid., p. 141. 35 Ibid., p. 154. 36 Ibid., p. 165. 37 Ibid., p. 188. 38 Ibid., p. 166. 39 Ibid., p. 175. 40 Ibid., p. 166. 41 Ibid., p. 191. 42 Ibid. 43 Ian Hacking, ‘How should we do the history of statistics?’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 183. 44 Etienne Laspeyres, Der Einfluss der Wohnung auf die Sittlichkeit: Eine moralstatistische Studie über die arbeitenden Klassen der Stadt Paris (Berlin: Harrwits & Gossmann, 1869), p. 5. 45 Ibid., p. 4. 46 Ibid., p. 1. 47 Ibid., p. 3.

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48 Faucher, ‘Die Bewegung für Wohnungsreform’, p. 151. 49 Ibid., p. 142. 50 Ibid. 51 Eduard Wiss, Über die Wohnungsfrage in Deutschland (Berlin: Dr. Krause, 1872), p. 12. 52 Ibid., p. 12. 53 See Wilhelm Jungermann, ‘Dorfanlage und Hausbau in Deutschland’, Die Gartenlaube, 48–​9 (1864), 763–​5, 78–​80. 54 Wiss, Über die Wohnungsfrage in Deutschland. 55 On Faucher’s theory of suburbanisation, see Christa Kamleithner, ‘ “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”: Liberalism and the image of the city in German planning theory around 1870’, in Arnold Bartetzky and Marc Schalenberg (eds), Urban planning and the pursuit of happiness: European variations on a universal theme (18th–​21st Centuries) (Berlin: Jovis, 2009). 56 Reinhard Baumeister, Stadterweiterungen in technischer, wirtschaftlicher und baupolizeilicher Beziehung (Berlin: Ernst & Korn, 1876). 57 Julius Faucher, ‘Über Häuserbau-​Unternehmung im Geiste der Zeit’, Vierteljahrschrift für Volkswirtschaft, Politik und Kulturgeschichte, 17:2 (1869), 48–​74. 58 Engels, The housing question (London: Martin Lawrence, [1872–​3] 1935), p. 40. 59 Ibid., p. 43. 60 Ibid. 61 Grimmer-​Solem, The rise of historical economics, p. 114. 62 Ibid., p. 12. 63 Ibid., p. 101. 64 Shulamit Volkov, The rise of popular antimodernism in Germany: The urban master artisans, 1873–​1896 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 37. See Gustav Schmoller, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kleingewerbe im 19. Jahrhundert (Halle: Waisenhaus 1870). 65 Emphasis mine. Schmoller, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Kleingewerbe, p. 662. 66 Gustav Schmoller, ‘Ein Mahnruf in der Wohnungsfrage’, Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich, 11 (1887), 426. 67 Ibid., p. 426. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., pp. 426–​7. 70 Ibid., p. 427. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., p. 435. 73 Hanno-​Walter Kruft, History of architectural theory: From Vitruvius to the present (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), p. 295. 74 See Friedrich Weinbrenner, Architektonisches Lehrbuch, vol. 3 (Tübingen: Cotta, 1819) and Jean-​Nicolas-​Louis Durand, Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique (Paris: self-​published, 1823), published in English as Précis of the lectures on architecture: With graphic portion of the lectures on architecture, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2000). 75 Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude (Stuttgart: Gustav Weise, 1868), p. 71. 76 Section on ‘Das Pariser Miethaus’ in Emil Asmus, Wie Europa baut und wohnt: Eine vergleichende Darstellung von Typen eingebauter Wohnhäuser der Hauptstädte Europas in gleichem Maßstabe zusammengestellt und erläutert (Hamburg: Strumper & Co., 1883) (unpaginated). 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 ‘Das Londoner Familienhaus’ in Ibid. 80 ‘Das Wiener Zinshaus’ in Ibid. 81 Josef Stübben, Der Städtebau (Darmstadt: Arnold Bergsträsser, 1890), p. 16.

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Oskar Bie, ‘Europäische Häusertypen’, Hamburger Anzeiger, 28 August 1894, p. 9. Ibid. Ibid. Max Hittenkofer, Das freistehende Familien-​Wohnhaus: Die Vorführung kleinerer und grösserer Wohnhäuser, die nur von einer Familie bewohnt werden (Leipzig: C. Scholtze, 1875), pp. 3–​4. 86 Robert Dohme, Das englische Haus: Eine kultur-​ und baugeschichtliche Skizze (Braunschweig: George Westerman, 1888), p. 64. 87 Friedrich Hitzig and Eduard Knoblauch were key architects within this tradition. Examples of Schinkel’s villa designs can be found in Karl F. Schinkel, Sammlung architektonischer Entwürfe, enthaltend theils Werke welche ausgeführt sind, theils Gegenstände deren Ausführung beabsichtigt wurde (Berlin: Ernst & Korn, 1858). 88 For an account of the history of the Schinkel school, see Eva Börsch-​Supan, Berliner Baukunst nach Schinkel. 89 See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Von deutscher Baukunst (Frankfurt: D.M. Ervini a Steinbach, 1774). 90 A full list of lectures given at the Architects’ Society can be found in Börsch-​Supan, Berliner Baukunst nach Schinkel, pp. 812–​21. 91 Max Schasler, ‘Villa oder Mietskaserne? Eine Studie über die architektonische Erweiterung der Großstädte’, Die Dioskuren, 12:39–​45 (1867), 305. 92 Ibid., p. 306. 93 Ibid., p. 321. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. For the general uptake of English domestic ideals in Germany, see Stefan Muthesius, Das englische Vorbild: Eine Studie zu den deutschen Reformbewegungen in Architektur, Wohnbau und Kunstgewerbe im spateren 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Prestel, 1974). See also Wolfgang Brönner, Die bürgerliche Villa in Deutschland, 1830–​1900 (Worms: Werner, 1994). 96 Schasler, ‘Villa oder Mietskaserne?’, p. 321. 97 Ibid., p. 306. 98 Ibid., p. 305. 99 Didem Ekici, ‘Skin, clothing, and dwelling: Max von Pettenkofer, the science of hygiene, and breathing walls’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 75:3 (2016), 281–​98. 100 Christian Ruepprecht, Der Mensch und seine Wohnung in ihrer Wechselbeziehung (Munich: Theodor Ackermann, 1885), pp. 17–​18. 101 Jakob von Falke, Die Kunst im Hause: Geschichtliche und kritisch-​ästhetische Studien über die Decoration und Ausstattung der Wohnung (Vienna: C. Gerold’s Sohn, 1871). 102 Stefan Muthesius, ‘The “altdeutsche” Zimmer, or cosiness in plain pine: An 1870s Munich contribution to the definition of interior design’, Journal of Design History, 16:4 (2003), 269–​90. On the history of the interior design trades during these years, see Stefan Muthesius, ‘Communications between traders, users and artists: The growth of German language serial publications on domestic interior decoration in the later nineteenth century’, Journal of Design History, 18:1 (2005), 7–​20. On the history of applied arts museums, see Mitchell Schwarzer, ‘The design prototype as artistic boundary: The debate on history and industry in Central European applied arts museums, 1860–​1900’, Design Issues, 9:1 (1992), 30–​44. 103 Ruepprecht, Der Mensch und seine Wohnung, p. 6. 104 Ibid. 105 Johanna von Sydow, Das Buch der Hausfrau: Mitgabe für Frauen und Jungfrauen zur Beglückung des Hauses sowie zur Sicherung häuslichen Wohlstandes und Komforts (Leipzig: Spanier, 1884).

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106 Ibid., p. 125. 107 Wilhelm P. Tuckermann, ‘Der Berliner Wohnungsgrundriß nach seiner historischen Entwicklung in den letzten zwei Jahrhunterten’, Der Bär, 6:37 (1880), 450. 108 Bullock and Read, The movement for housing reform, p. 63. 109 Tuckermann, ‘Der Berliner Wohnungsgrundriß’, p. 450. 110 Ibid., p. 451. 111 Ibid., p. 462. 112 Ibid., p. 463. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., p. 464. 115 Ibid., p. 463. 116 Ibid., p. 464. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid., p. 465.

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As the new capital of Germany, Berlin experienced immense growth in the second half of the nineteenth century that could not have been predicted by the urban officials who devised the city’s major urban expansion plan in 1862. The rapid urbanisation and ‘Haussmannisation’ of Berlin provoked an intense reaction among reformers, who sought to re-​establish good morals in the space of the single-​family home in order to counteract the alienating effects of urban life. As the era of rampant overspeculation and ostentatious architectural historicism characteristic of the 1870s came to an end, the housing question largely disappeared from debate during the 1880s. It reappeared in the 1890s as part of a transatlantic project of progressive reform.1 Many smaller German cities experienced a cultural renaissance in this decade, which was closely linked to the birth of the life reform movement, the development of Jugendstil and Heimat-​inspired art, and the revival of the tradition of self-​cultivation (Bildung) in upper-​middle-​class society. Scholars including Jennifer Jenkins, Leif Jerram, and Maiken Umbach have explored how urban citizens in Hamburg and Munich cultivated a pluralistic modernism during the fin-​de-​siècle era, which rejected the ostentation of the previous decades of eclectic historicism through more nuanced engagements with history, memory, and tradition.2 Advances in the applied arts continued to be directed towards reforming the sphere of the family home, yet, unlike the preceding decades in which the private home functioned as a necessary retreat from the detrimental psychological effects of the commercial city, the fin-​de-​siècle era witnessed a renewed appreciation for urban tradition, whereby domestically rooted concepts of community and neighbourhood were integrated into the praxis of planning. With the emergence of the discipline of city planning (Städtebau) in Germany from 1889 to 1910, the functionalist ethos that materialised in prior discourse on the dwelling interior was expanded to the problem of designing the city at large. Städtebau more literally translates into ‘city building’, but is more frequently translated into the less awkward-​sounding

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‘city planning’, ‘urban planning’, or ‘urban design’. These translations put the German Städtebau disciplinary tradition in closer dialogue with other national traditions, such as English ‘town planning’ and the French urbanisme. Yet the strong applied-​arts focus implied in the literal act of ‘city building’ distinguished the German city planning tradition from international variants. The ideology of city planning eschewed the professional expertise of the academic architect, the bureaucrat, and the engineer. Its discourse inhabited the world of the urban middle-​class artisan –​although many of its key proponents came from thoroughly elite backgrounds. Austrian architect and applied-​arts teacher Camillo Sitte’s 1889 book City planning according to artistic principles fuelled traditionalist thinking in planning circles, which reached its heights at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century with three seminal events: the formation of an academic seminar on city planning at the Technical University of Berlin, the publication of economist Rudolf Eberstadt’s Handbook for housing (1909), and the hosting of the Greater Berlin Competition and subsequent exhibition in 1910. Experts associated with advancing the city planning tradition in Germany belonged to two distinct categories: those who were artistically inclined, including Sitte, Cornelius Gurlitt, and Walter Curt Behrendt, and those who were inclined towards addressing socio-​economic problems, including Eberstadt and Theodor Goecke. These experts did not stand in opposition but, in fact, worked closely together through shared journals, exhibitions, and competition entries. They shared a common mission to overcome the excessive rationalisation and bureaucratisation of Haussmannian planning. They shared ideals about the social world that rested not on utopian speculation but on broad scholarship and historical understanding. They drew fruitfully on both old and new social theories on the historical emergence of the modern city in order to modernise it along traditionalist lines. Traditionalism might appear like an odd frame through which to grapple with the rise of modernist planning –​perhaps because much of the classic 1980s historiography on modern urban thought emphasised sharp binaries that equated pro-​urban and anti-​urban attitudes with modern/​anti-​modern and progressive/​ traditional attitudes.3 Indeed, the story of modernist urban planning is usually told along distinctive ideological lines; conservative urbanists were known to have rejected the industrial city in favour of building planned settlements in the image of pre-​modern, ‘natural’ towns; liberals idealised what they perceived as the natural growth of the chaotic ‘unplanned’ extant industrial-​capitalist city; and social progressives urged for comprehensively planned functionalist cities for the socialist ‘new man’ of the future. The field of city planning in Germany in the pre-​war period is largely understood to have pursued projects aligned with the first two categories, while the English garden city model and the ‘functionalist’

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The architecture of social reform urbanism of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) offered utopian paths towards progressive reform. This familiar narrative crystallised during the 1960s, when the authority of the functionalist city came undone and new postmodern movements in architecture fostered a renewed appreciation for the seemingly ad hoc design of the pre-​modern town as well as the sublime chaos of the nineteenth-​century industrial-​ capitalist city. The ideas of figures belonging to the German city planning tradition, including the traditionalist Sitte and liberal-​conservative Karl Scheffler, began to be cherry-​picked in order to serve new professional agendas about the essential goodness of ‘natural’ urban growth, as well as theories about what people wanted all along from cities.4 However, judging the ideological commitments of modernist planners against contemporary social assurances about what makes the ‘good city’ tends to obscure just how significant the field of German city planning was in providing the initial intellectual tools to make urban politics available to architecture at all. In city planning discourse, housing remained an essential tool for theorising how the functionalist ethos of ‘building from the inside out’ could instigate large-​scale social transformation. While utopian models for large-​scale planning, such as Theodor Frisch’s City of the Future and Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, were much discussed in German architectural circles, their speculative nature often made them suspect in the eyes of city planning theorists and practitioners.5 The German garden city ideal materialised in pared-​down garden suburbs linked to established urban cores, which were used as testing grounds for ideas about appropriate regionalist expression in residential architecture. While many city planning experts and commentators were also interested in the architecture of garden suburbs, their urban scholarship remained closely bound to questions over the emergence and fate of the extant city. Scheffler captured this sentiment well in his derogatory remarks over the romanticism of the English garden city movement, claiming that the modern metropolis (Großstadt) was ‘simply our fate; we can only think in terms of it’ and not ‘work romantically against it’.6 In order to grasp the significance of the city for modern architecture, it is necessary for historians to move past isolating particular positive or negative attitudes about whether or not an architect (or art historian or critic) was willing to accept ‘urban reality’ as a timeless value, and attend instead to the relational processes by which architecture came to bind its fundamental disciplinary truths to the fate of the city. In German city planning discourse, thinking ‘in terms of the city’ became a central part of speculating on how architecture could mediate between the interests of the individual and those of the public. Perhaps counterintuitively, city planning was instigated by the large-​scale re-​evaluation of the social life of the Middle Ages in the late nineteenth century. The meandering paths typical of medieval cities in Europe were famously mocked by Le Corbusier as

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being planned in the way of the ‘pack donkey’.7 Yet the Middle Ages has a more complex relationship with modernist planning than is suggested by Le Corbusier’s epithet. New-​fangled appreciation for the social world of the artisans and commercialists who thrived in the cities of the Hanseatic League (founded in the twelfth century) drove a powerful historical narrative about the medieval city as the cradle of modern capitalism –​a narrative that underwent a full-​scale absorption into planning praxis within city planning discourse. The shift in perception about the city and its value brought on several other significant shifts in architectural thought. First, the growing belief in the urban origins of the middle classes brought forth the idea that there existed a ‘natural city’ and a ‘natural’ urbanisation process that had sovereignty over what constituted good architecture and good planning. During this period, the notion of good planning came to mean understanding the positive social nature of urban growth and limiting intervention to restricting the ‘unnatural’ elements of this growth. Second, the prior emphasis on the social value of the market and commerce shifted to an emphasis on consumption and production, such that housing became central to finding an appropriate urban architecture (Stadtbaukunst). Third, the ethical task of planning shifted from representing the power of a sovereign ruler to understanding and intermediating the value of the city qua city in providing foundations for thriving social life. While the concept of tradition was largely traded in after the First World War for other more useful concepts, the key shifts it instigated in urban thought in the pre-​war period would prove to have an enduring impact on the development of modern urbanism.

The city in the sociological imagination Like Hegel’s owl of Minerva that spreads its wings at dusk, urban theory emerged in the sociological imagination precisely when the traditional city (Stadt) as a bounded political community had metamorphosed into the seemingly boundless commercial metropolis. The Spanish urban planner Ildefons Cerdà was the first theorist to reflect deeply on terminological issues that plagued modern planning.8 In 1867 he expressed dissatisfaction with terms like ‘city’, ‘village’, and ‘burgh’, which he felt reflected ideals of citizenship that had become archaic.9 Cerdà used the ancient Roman term urbs, which described the density of settlement inside ancient Rome’s Servian Wall, to emphasise the centrality of housing settlement in driving urban growth. For Cerdà, urbs ‘encompasses within its vast meaning every limited or numerous group, small or large, of luxurious or miserable dwellings, of masonry or of simple matting, from the haughtiest city to the humblest encampment’.10 While Cerdà wished to find the right terms to sever modern planning from administrative parlance that had roots in

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The architecture of social reform the pre-​modern past, urban theorists in Germany would soon reinvest in the Middle Ages as fertile ground for debate over the role of housing in the city. Many German-​speaking sociologists working at the turn of the twentieth century had trained under economists belonging to the historical school and sought to examine the historical emergence of cities during the Middle Ages in order to understand the modern middle classes in evolutionary terms. The era’s most notable sociologists, including Ferdinand Tönnies, Karl Bücher, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, all wrote about cities, gaining insight into the nature of modern society by casting a retrospective eye on the urban past. Their historical concerns remained inescapably political given the immense changes affecting German cities in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, which brought a range of issues into sharp focus, including environmental protection, protective tariffs, universal male suffrage, and rural-​to-​urban migration. Sociology provided a crucial frame of reference for urbanists, sanctioning their access to tradition and history as well as initiating a new appreciation for the archetype of the medieval city. The moral idea of the community was central to the material conception of the city in sociological thought. In his classic 1887 book Community and society, sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies defined two distinct sociological poles that governed human relationships. On the one side stood ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft), which embodied the traditional kinship values associated with the domestic structures of the household, neighbourhood village, and medieval city. On the other side stood ‘society’ (Gesellschaft), an arbitrary realm of social relations governed by abstracted forms of economic life, including capital, debt, usury, paper money, the metropolis, and the world market.11 Subtitled Communism and socialism as empirical forms of culture in the intellectual vein of Lorenz von Stein, the first edition of the book was clearly intended as an argument against internationalised socialism in favour of reconstructing the sort of communistic relations once present in the medieval village community. Tönnies’ community ideal lay in the historical image of the burgher city, which existed autonomously from, but in harmony with, the broader paternalistic structure that governed life in the Middle Ages. Although hugely influential, Tönnies’ book was an ambiguous scholarly work. His community ideal is frequently associated with a brand of despair later made famous by philosopher Oswald Spengler’s 1918 book The decline of the West, yet Tönnies’ book reads as a decidedly detached work of social theory in the vein of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, frustrating any simple reading of despair over a socially levelling civilisational force advancing upon the organic unity of pre-​modern community life.12 Having emerged from the intellectual milieu of the Association for Social Policy (Verein für Sozialpolitik), Tönnies’ categories were nonetheless entrenched in a historical approach from which images of an idealised past could

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easily be pulled. The community –​the quiet, familiar, stable, comfortable interior world of shared experiences, inherited values, and general orderliness, guarded by gates and fortifications –​was one such image. Tönnies was acutely aware of the material and visual aspects that gave the concept of community its potency. While his intellectual predecessor economist Gustav Schmoller’s descriptions of the architectural evolution of the family dwelling had a largely rhetorical purpose, in Tönnies’ work the external forms of buildings and cities closely mirrored the inner contents of communal life.13 Applying a biological metaphor, he maintained that the ‘study of the house is the study of the community, just as the study of the organic cell is the study of life itself’.14 For Tönnies, the common roof and hearth formed the ‘core and the very essence’ of the house where the family, as the most basic form of communal life, gathered for meals. The village neighbourhood (Nachbarschaft), defined by the close proximity of houses to each other, constituted an extended community. The medieval city (Stadt) occupied by the houses of master artisans and burghers constituted a further extension of communal life. While Tönnies located the historical seed of modern society, Gesellschaft, in the medieval burgher city’s focus on trade as a group of guilds united by a city council, it was largely defined by the community-​like (gemeinschaftlich) quality of artistic instruction and mutual cooperation.15 For Tönnies, house and village neighbourhood units were able to maintain communal relations symbolically through ancestral household cults and village festivals. In cities, tradition was largely maintained through the presence of art, which served the needs of the community by providing ‘architecture for the town walls, towers, and gateways, for town halls and churches; sculpture and painting to decorate such buildings outside and inside’.16 In the city, art was fused with religious spirit but was nonetheless an intrinsically conservative social force due to its basis in memory, artisanal instruction, and rules passed down. The forces of modern society had a distinctly spatial orientation. Tönnies described the world of commerce as ‘best expressed through the word ‘traffic’ [Verkehr]’.17 As the pinnacle of mechanised modern society, the metropolis was the external representation of ‘the world market and world traffic’.18 Similar to Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl’s formulation of society as composed of dual forces of stability and movement, Tönnies’ sociological categories dealt with spaces and movements. He aptly described the essential difference between community and society thus: ‘the head of the household, whether a peasant or burgher, turns his attention inwardly to the centre of the place, the community, to which he belongs. In contrast, the trading class orients itself outwards; it is only concerned with the lines that bind the places and means of movement.’19 Despite the enduring influence of Tönnies’ work, its impact on German planning culture was not immediately felt, lacking mention in the literature

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The architecture of social reform of the German Garden City Association (Deutsche Gartenstadt-​Gesellschaft), which, alongside drawing from Ebenezer Howard’s To-​morrow: A peaceful path to real reform as a principal theoretical source, modelled itself on the reform tradition of cooperative societies begun in the 1840s by Victor Aimé Huber. Yet key elements of Tönnies’ work would become defining elements of early-​twentieth-​century urban theory, such as his focus on community, the biological metaphor of the dwelling as cell, and the use of socio-​spatial analysis. Many of these elements were present in the notable 1903 essay collection The metropolis [Die Großstadt] –​an effort on behalf of a group of economists and cultural scientists known as the ‘Leipzig Circle’ to foster interdisciplinary analysis on the topic of the city.20 A significant contribution to the collection came from the geographer Friedrich Ratzel who, like Tönnies, studied modern metropolises not as bounded places but as fields of movement and migration. While Ratzel is best known for the uptake of his concept of Lebensraum in National Socialist ‘blood and soil’ ideology, his contribution to The metropolis expressed a fascination with migration and settlement patterns born through trade just as much as through agriculture. He had a long-​standing interest in commercial cities. In his notes on a trip to North America conducted during the 1870s, Ratzel remarked enthusiastically on the rapid sprouting of urban life in major North American cities, which had undergone a process of rapid industrialisation matched only by Berlin. Prefacing his notes, Ratzel remarked more generally that cities, as centres where life became blended, compressed, and accelerated, brought out ‘the greatest, best and most typical aspects of a people’, such that the ‘history of big cities comprises a history of the world’. The countryside, on the other hand, ‘has no history, often for thousands of years, for one generation ploughs, sows, and harvests there just like the next’.21 Far from endorsing a ‘return to the soil’, Ratzel’s civilisational ethos was bound to a historical conception of the importance of big cities. Also fond of biological metaphors, he claimed that in Europe, every seed of civilisation had to work itself out of the ‘dirt and dust’, whereas North American trade-​based cities offered ‘pertinent influences a receptive soil. These influences bypass parts of a nation’s cultural development, fructify others, and sometimes concentrate their effects so strongly on one aspect that here or there growth takes place, which later appears marvellous but inexplicable.’22 In his essay for The metropolis, Ratzel observed how world cities typically emerged like growth spurts along the veins of activity that took place in their hinterlands. These hinterlands could be agricultural but also commercial, in the case of thriving seaport cities including New York and Hamburg. Written in the context of intense political debate over protective tariffs in Germany, Ratzel’s essay served as an endorsement of global free trade. He remarked that the success of the ‘big cities of civilised

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peoples’ depended on their ‘open connections with the veins of world traffic [Weltverkehr]’.23 Another significant essay in The metropolis came from the economist Karl Bücher, whose 1893 book The rise of the national economy significantly challenged the primacy of commerce (Verkehrstheorie) in classical political economy, which he viewed as based on nothing more than Robinson Crusoe-​ esque fantasies that treated ‘primitive hunters and fishermen like two capitalist entrepreneurs’.24 In his book, Bücher argued that economic progress could not be measured through the realisation of commercial instinct but rather through examination of the evolution of social institutions that governed production, consumption, and labour. Bücher’s theory was based on three historical stages. The first was the family economy (Familienwirtschaft), which emerged from the ancient agrarian household as a closed economy of production and consumption. The second stage was the medieval town or city economy (Stadtwirtschaft), which was based on the mutual interests and cooperation of urban artisans and burghers. Like Tönnies, Bücher did not hide his admiration for medieval urban life, placing it in contrast to the ancient era of piracy and plunder, where cities of despotic kingdoms functioned as gathering places for booty and tributes, much like the ‘cave to which the predator drags its prey’.25 The third stage was the ‘national economy’ (Volkswirtschaft), which described the modern economies of industrialised nations. Rejecting both Smith and Marx, Bücher’s economic theory optimistically offered a third way towards socialised capitalism, within which diverse consumption patterns promised greater interdependencies and ‘ever-​greater socialisation’.26 In his altogether unremarkable contribution to The metropolis, Bücher spoke somewhat mournfully that the ‘heyday of urban life’ in the medieval period had come to an end with the arrival of the national economy, whereby one could no longer speak in economic terms about cities, but only about populations and their migrations.27 Effectively pushing commercial movements like mercantilism, physiocracy, and economic liberalism to the margins of economic history, the medieval city became a central image in Bücher’s dynamic theory of socio-​economic progress. The most famous essay to feature in The metropolis was Georg Simmel’s Metropolis and mental life. In his essay, Simmel argued that the modern metropolis, as the ‘seat’ of the money economy, created a fundamentally new psychological condition among its inhabitants. The sheer chaos of monetary exchange in the city caused inhabitants to detach from excessive stimuli and adapt by embracing a blasé attitude. Metropolitan inhabitants became calculative, rational, and, most importantly, free to develop their individuality –​a condition that was largely aestheticised in Simmel’s positive judgement of metropolitan life.28 He was ambivalent about the dissolution of traditional communal social bonds caused by the psycho-​social

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The architecture of social reform pull of the money economy. A progressive liberal, Simmel suggested that despite its alienating effects, metropolitan life had simultaneously fostered social emancipation, individualism, and new potential to seek the unlimited enjoyments and entertainments that the city had to offer.29 The city of Berlin remained a key context for Simmel’s ideas about the nature of the metropolis, which he began to consider in his essay on the Berlin Trade Exhibition of 1896. Simmel observed how the exhibition’s halls facilitated an intense concentration of movement and bombardment of visual delight, causing an excess of sensory stimulation further ignited by the constant exchange of money (one had to pay a fee to view every display). Similar to what critics observed in Alfred Messel’s Berlin Wertheim department store of 1896, Simmel noted that the exhibition encapsulated the metropolitan experience at large.30 Simmel’s methods transgressed the major currents of sociological thought in Germany.31 In contrast to the genre of the monumental four-​ volume monograph that searched for psycho-​social laws to describe historical change (of the kind produced by Riehl, Knies, Roscher, Schmoller, and Bücher), Simmel’s sociology was more radical. He painted a portrait of a modern metropolis in which the most transient, fortuitous, and fleeting things experienced within the urban web of the money economy held the most value for the sociologist. His relativistic approach abandoned ‘progress’ and ‘equilibrium’ as operative terms. Simmel placed the abstract, rational individual at the centre of his sociology. He did not seek to understand the psychological experience of urban life from the standpoint of moral custom (Sitte), which had hitherto provided the conceptual backbone of mid-​to late-​nineteenth-​century housing reform discourse. The emotional relationships preserved through the strength of the family, which endured through the material life of the family dwelling, were offered little agency or dialectical power in Simmel’s vision. Simmel’s essay inaugurated a new celebratory aesthetic programme for the financialised city, exposing the essentially fragmented nature of the metropolis but also challenging the scientific nature of sociology itself. Simmel’s method encouraged a spatialised sociology, requiring the philosopher to engage in a mode of flâneurie by strolling through the city and observing phenomena that were embedded in space rather than time.32 His method inspired vagabond Hans Ostwald’s famous feuilleton-​ like collection of urban snapshots of Berlin, the Großstadt-​Dokumente, which later inspired the work of the Chicago School of Sociology. Ostwald’s Großstadt-​Dokumente was groundbreaking in its relaxed morality, introducing its broad readership to the sheer diversity of subcultures in Berlin that they never knew existed. Deploying methods of casual observation as well as interviews, the volumes covered topics such as the café haunts of Berlin’s bohemia, the urban movements of pimps and prostitutes, the city’s club and gay scenes, and its working-​class and women’s movements.

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It also gave fresh attention to Berlin’s poor residential quarters. In the volume dedicated to recording the worst of the city’s living conditions, the social-​democratic politician Albert Südekum described the state of the most poverty-​stricken housing blocks to be found in Berlin, arguing that ‘one could kill a person better with an apartment than with an axe’.33 While Südekum’s entry was sympathetic to the plight of Berlin’s poor, it was probably the least Simmelian in tone of all the volumes of the Großstadt-​ Dokumente, espousing typically bourgeois reformist warnings about racial degeneracy in the slums, and encouraging the provision of cottages for workers. Although famously remaining an outsider to the academy, Simmel was instrumental in co-​ founding the German Sociological Association (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie) along with Max Weber and Tönnies in 1909. This association sought to establish sociology as a science detached from praxis, breaking away from the prior moralistic goals of social reform represented by Association for Social Policy.34 Among this new generation of sociologists, Weber and Werner Sombart produced sophisticated analyses of the origins of Western capitalism. Although maintaining a historical perspective, both thinkers had little proclivity for bending their analysis around dialectical forces or developmental stages (of the kind that structured Bücher’s work) in anticipation of the arrival of a redemptive form of socialised capitalism. Their analytical style mirrored Tönnies’ in emphasising more arbitrary struggles between forces that structured the conditions of the present. The medieval city operated in both Weber and Sombart’s oeuvres as the cradle of modern capitalist subjectivity. For Weber, the emergence of the medieval city was central to the development of an economically and politically autonomous middle class, who pursued commercial desires free from feudal constraints and other clan ties. The economic rationality possessed by this new urban citizenry was central, Weber believed, to the unique capitalistic development of the ‘Occident’ in contrast to the despotic structure of Ottoman urban society.35 Similarly, Sombart’s magnum opus Modern capitalism (published over two volumes in 1902) sought to map the social conditions that gave rise to distinctive psychological traits upon which modern capitalism was based, including entrepreneurialism, rationalism, competitiveness, and a drive for endless acquisition. He noted the importance of emerging medieval trade cities like Danzig, Hamburg, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Ulm, and Breslau in fostering this new bourgeois economic spirit.36 In a 1907 essay, Sombart further explored questions about why people in the Middle Ages began to associate their lives with the city and what motivated them to leave behind a ‘natural mode of existence’ in agriculture to become city dwellers.37 He distinguished ‘city builders’, the landed proprietors who constructed cities as extensions of their household, from ‘city fillers’, who took up trades and services in cities purely to serve the

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The architecture of social reform needs and wants of other urban inhabitants. As ‘people who live and let live’, the city fillers began to develop psychological traits that would structure an early capitalist spirit.38 The medieval urban economy was thus the cradle of modern civilisation –​of Tönnies’ Gesellschaft. Yet for Sombart it had shown itself to be a peculiar and entirely circumstantial historical phenomenon.39 Sombart’s wary observations about the genesis of modern capitalism in cities provided grounds for his later conservative turn and his endorsement of garden cities and traditional village models.40 Modern sociology at the turn of the century thus initiated a series of important moves away from past methodological conventions in the field of historical economics from which it emerged. Yet, aside from the work of Simmel, this new generation of sociologists largely continued a project initiated by Riehl in placing middle-​class politics at the centre of their analysis. Academic interest in the psycho-​social make-​up of urban artisans and burghers in the Middle Ages was not limited to economic and sociological circles. In the late nineteenth century, there was an explosion of literature, particularly in the field of cultural history, dealing with medieval life and material culture. The prolific cultural historian Karl Lamprecht opened up the field of medieval studies with his three-​volume German economic life in the middle ages (1895–​6) and hugely popular twelve-​volume German history (1891–​1909), which matched Riehl’s Natural history in popularity.41 Lamprecht would later influence Belgian historian Henri Pirenne’s famous analysis of the origins of medieval cities and their importance for the development of modern society.42 In the field of art history, the Middle Ages quickly went from being read as socially stagnant to being understood as inherently dynamic. In the 1860s, the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt notoriously qualified the vibrancy of the Renaissance against the medieval ‘dark ages’.43 By the early twentieth century, this assessment was no longer tenable as art historians began to investigate the spirit of Gothic architecture on its own terms. An explosion of architectural research on medieval cities saw old artworks once used to convey the sovereignty of Christian icons and civic rulers become new sources of evidence for examining the unique architectural traditions of the burgeoning urban middle classes.44 For example, local historian Rudolf Struck used the medieval city panorama to examine the tradition of brick architecture that defined middle-​class dwellings in the powerful Hanseastic city of Lübeck (Figure 3.1), while art historian Albert E. Brinckmann cropped background scenes from church altarpieces to illustrate the character of old squares in romantic medieval tourist towns like Rothenburg ob der Tauber (Figure 3.2).45 While the medieval city provided a platform for many conflicting arguments, ideological positions, and methodological stances, it served as a powerful locus for understanding the role of tradition, community, and art in managing the forces of modern urbanisation. As Jeanette Redensek

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Figure 3.1  Brick architecture characteristic of old middle-​class housing in Lübeck, taken from an old city panorama.

aptly explained, the medieval town in modern sociology became ‘part, for better or worse, of a collective wish picture’.46 Yet this image was not simply nostalgic. It staged profound questions, such as: if the planning of cities needed to be radically re-​theorised as Cerdà urged, what was at stake for middle-​class prosperity in doing away with the traditional institutional structures that underpinned urban civic life? What did the future hold for the middle classes as a stabilising social force if cities were overtaken by the modern forces of Gesellschaft?

The development plan The burst of creative energy in sociology that occurred in a matter of two decades between 1890 and 1910 had completely changed the way the Middle Ages was perceived in scholarly circles. To be sure, medieval life had provoked much popular and literary fascination since Wolfgang von Goethe had marvelled at Cologne cathedral over a century before. Yet the work of sociologists and historians helped put the built work of anonymous urban artisans under the microscope. This fresh appreciation arrived at a time when the medieval fabric of modern cities had been greatly maligned within racialised discourse on population health. Stereotypes were rife

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Figure 3.2  Image of the medieval marketplace of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, taken from a section of an altarpiece and reproduced in Brinckmann’s Deutsche Stadtbaukunst.

concerning the people who occupied the old quarters of many German cities. When Hamburg was hit by a cholera outbreak in 1892, almost 10,000 people died in a matter of six weeks.47 The pandemic brought the deleterious health and moral effects of the city’s narrow and winding medieval alleys into the public eye, instigating large-​scale housing reform. Links between urban aesthetics and population health and welfare were nothing new. In his 1775 book Layout of a beautiful city, the German jurist Johann Peter Willebrand argued that the role of the ideal city should be, as indicated by the extended subtitle, to Ensure the comfort, joy, preservation, and increase in number of [the city’s] inhabitants.48 ‘Wise rulers of a city only recognise its growth as valuable to the enhancement of the felicity of their society’, Willebrand claimed, ‘if it consists of human beings who are fruitful to common welfare by their industriousness and wealth’.49 As an instructional text addressed to sovereigns, Willebrand’s book was in keeping with the principle, typical of eighteenth-​ century enlightened absolutism, that beautiful cities were ones that articulated the singular formal vision of a ruler who prioritised the economic success of their urban inhabitants. Willebrand favoured the Baroque aesthetic of royal capitals (Residenzstädte) like Mannheim, which was famous for its

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Figure 3.3  Old map of Mannheim from 1758.

militant chequerboard scheme (Figure 3.3), and Berlin, which featured spacious public squares and broad streets.50 The Prussian court painter Dismar Dägen strikingly captured the aesthetic of absolutist order so prized by Willebrand in his paintings depicting new burgher housing in Berlin, constructed at the behest of the king in Prussia and Elector of Brandenburg Friedrich Wilhelm I (the ‘Soldier King’) in the early eighteenth century. The king’s mercantilist policy emphasised the benefits of urban population growth and lively urban trade in Prussian cities. Dägen’s

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The architecture of social reform paintings successfully captured both the strength of the ruler’s controlled vision as well as a sense of the flourishing urban life offered to craftsmen and merchants whom the king wished to entice into the city. The 1862 Hobrecht Plan represented another milestone in centralised urban development in Berlin. In the footsteps of Haussmann, the Hobrecht Plan laid out (on still largely rural land) a gridded network of boulevards that symbolised the rise of the city as a centre for the flows of world trade. Critics were quick to note the contrast between these broad streets and the sub-​ par health standards of the city’s narrow tenement courtyards (Figure 3.4). Nonetheless, at the start of the twentieth century, English reformists began to write about the German example as a crowning achievement in housing reform. Foreigners praised the general proficiency of the urban street systems of many German cities, which owed itself to professionalisation and bureaucratisation of planning activities in the country.51 Central to this perception of German proficiency was the presence of the development plan (Bebauungsplan) in many German cities –​a legal document that dictated future urban growth for that city. These plans took the form of drawings. As the best-​known development plan, the Hobrecht Plan consisted of a two-​ dimensional print of street-​traffic lines drawn over a land surveyor’s map (Figure 2.4). Architects and engineers implemented the plan in a piecemeal fashion, working not from the entire map but from acquiring individual sections, which, as Tilo Amhoff has noted, caused them to perceive the city not as a whole but as a ‘set of islands’.52 The chief legal supplement to the development plan was the building code, which focused on ensuring basic hygiene and fire safety requirements for what was built on the blocks.

Figure 3.4  Typical tenement block resulting from the Hobrecht Plan.

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The Hobrecht Plan was instantly condemned in Germany by conservative and socialist critics alike for encouraging widespread speculative activity on the housing market through its consistently shaped blocks, leading to much-​ maligned tenement construction that buttressed the power of the liberal business elite and sent lower-​middle-​class families into poverty. Yet the plan was also condemned by liberal commentators. In an 1870 article for the Deutsche Bauzeitung, the liberal theorist Ernst Bruch described the gridded streets created from the Hobrecht Plan as an artificial ‘straitjacket’ that prohibited the natural economic development of the city based on private market-​based principles. Broad streets had become sacrosanct in Haussmannian planning discourse. For Bruch, they signified an overcompensation that gave the city an absolutist rather than truly liberal character, with the city’s boulevards serving not genuine health or commercial needs but rather the outdated representational needs of a royal capital. Under the present conditions, speculative builders were required to offset the costs of these unnecessarily broad and expensively paved streets. Bruch proposed a new system whereby a citywide street network funded and managed by the municipality would be limited to enhancing the city’s pre-​existing topography of traffic paths, leaving the provision of local side streets to private developers, allowing districts in the city to break away from mass uniformity and gain an independent physical character.53 The 1874 general meeting of the League of German Architects and Engineers’ Associations rendered Bruch’s ideas into a new set of principles for planning that aimed to loosen the straightjacket of the gridded street system and pay greater attention to local conditions.54 Bruch’s emphasis on the need to reconceive the city as a multi-​level system of streets was not elaborated upon until Rudolf Eberstadt published an article on the topic in 1892 while working as a banker in Berlin.55 Drawing from housing statistics, Eberstadt argued that an efficient development plan ought to recognise the economic benefits of providing narrower and more cheaply paved streets that could cater for residential needs outside of the basic traffic skeleton, in order to make more efficient use of expensive urban land in Berlin. Distinguishing commercial and residential traffic would allow for more decentralisation, which in turn would keep rents down and make home ownership achievable for the lower-​middle classes. Unlike Bruch, Eberstadt encouraged the municipalisation of all traffic and residential streets so as not to repeat the mistakes of the Hobrecht Plan. Nonetheless, he expressed faith that planning could help bring natural equilibrium to the private housing market. Warning of the perishing of freedom that would occur under communism, Eberstadt sought to reconcile the idea of comprehensive planning with a laissez-​faire ethos –​in effect shifting the liberal ideology of economic prosperity from the commercial elite to a home-​owning middle-​class base. Reasserting Bruch’s emphasis on the absolutist and anti-​liberal character of the 1862

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The architecture of social reform development plan, Eberstadt pointed out that Berlin’s predominantly rental housing market ‘contradicts our economic laws, which are based on private property’.56 Eberstadt’s reasoning closely mirrored Bücher’s economic theory, which held that economic liberalism was merely an outgrowth of the absolutist dogma of mercantilism. While liberalism played a crucial role for the development of the national economy, it did not intrinsically contain the seeds for social progress.57 For Eberstadt, those seeds lay in domestic life and home ownership, and not in the artificial dimensions of the bourgeois life associated with land speculation and the circulation of people and goods on the street. While the planner Reinhard Baumeister had first theorised the idea of zoning decades earlier, Eberstadt developed the idea of multi-​level street systems in terms that would strongly resonate with modern urbanists. His sharp distinction between residential and traffic streets captured the dynamics of modernity as an interplay between the forces of equilibrium and the forces of movement –​between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Coinciding with the favourable reception of his article among local experts, Eberstadt began studying economics in Berlin and Zurich.58 A year later, the architect Theodor Goecke assessed the viability of Eberstadt’s ideas at the scale of the block in an article on ‘Traffic streets and residential streets’.59 Compared to the typical perimeter-​ block construction necessitated by the Hobrecht Plan, which cut off the side and rear apartments from air and light, Goecke illustrated how the construction of narrow, cheaply paved residential streets for local use by pedestrians and milk carts could provide equal access to light and air across all apartments while achieving almost the same density as that allowed by the Hobrecht Plan. A new development scheme based on these principles would create a superblock (Figure 3.5), which would be concave-​shaped, integrating four different streets of decreasing width as one drew closer to the core. The outer periphery of the superblock would serve a similar mixed-​use function to the old block by including five-​storey apartments with shops, workshops, and stables, which faced traffic streets approximately fifteen metres in width (approximately half the width of the streets of the Hobrecht Plan). Residential streets in the superblock’s interior would measure around eleven metres in width, with smaller two-​storey terraced houses at the centre serving purely residential purposes. Goecke’s superblock principle was considered groundbreaking among his peers in city planning.60 While maintaining the basic principle of the urban grid, the superblock disrupted the social logic of the prior tenement system that sent the lower classes into the dark tenement interior, instead providing equal access to air and light across all dwellings. Goecke suspected that his proposal might be met with criticism from the proponents of modern Haussmannian planning (‘narrow streets,

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Figure 3.5  Goecke’s proposed superblock model.

small houses –​back to the Middle Ages!’).61 Nonetheless, he maintained that the medieval city provided important lessons for understanding the democratising function of planning. [I]‌f we compare medieval city plans with modern development plans –​the imagined difference could scarcely be greater. However, it would be wrong to assume that the difference constitutes progress in every respect. […] besides the few traffic streets, [medieval] plans contain a high number of what are obviously residential streets that divide the city into so many small blocks that even the humblest citizen could have a house toward the front.62

Other than these remarks, however, Goecke paid little attention to historical matters. As a socially inclined architect, he wrote thoughtfully on topics

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concerning the design of poor houses and charitable institutions.63 In an 1890 essay, he emphasised the worker’s rights to access urban amenities, praising the sense of community and solidarity offered by city living. Chiding well-​meaning paternalists and cooperative associations who sent workers to cottages on the suburban periphery, Goecke wrote emphatically in 1890: the fact is that the worker prefers to spend his time in the busy urban setting; he feels at home in the hustle and bustle of the streets; he knows the advantages of the much larger community when it comes to shopping for what he needs; his amusements are here […] There will always be some workers who actually prefer a more distant, but more agreeable, place to live, who wish to grow their cabbages in peace, who just want to live between their own four fences. The endeavours of [cooperative suburban housing associations] certainly deserve to be supported; but, in the end, is what they can achieve of any real significance measured against the overwhelming majority that prefers –​or is obliged willy-​nilly –​to make do with the minimal living space that is afforded by the tenement block?64

For Goecke, Eberstadt’s idea of reimagining the grid through incorporating interconnecting streets of differing functions offered an appealing intermediary solution between the tenement block and the garden suburb. Imagined as an oasis of community life within the meshwork of bustling traffic routes, Goecke’s superblock idea proposed a solution to reforming the extant city that was capable of recreating an appropriately human scale, inward orientation, and local character for workers’ housing, while keeping the schematism of the grid and the sense of working-​class fraternity offered by urban living intact. In drawing from Eberstadt, Goecke’s reformist approach was fundamentally different from that of architects such as Alfred Messel, who worked within the parameters of the existing plan and building code to limit the damage done by speculative builders. Anticipating the all-​pervasive planning concept of the neighbourhood unit, Goecke transformed the meaning of the urban block, from being a unit within a street pattern to being a unit for processing complex information about the social, economic, and health performance of the city at large. In Goecke’s scheme, the urban block stopped representing a tabula rasa urban condition and began to express new values concerning the ideal size and shape of the single residential community. In the ensuing decades, Eberstadt and Goecke’s statistical calculations would continually be tested and refined by architects as well as economists who took the residential superblock as the central departure point to reimagine a series of urban optimums capable of relating the scale of the single-​family dwelling to that of the expanding metropolitan region (Figure 3.6).65 This comparative strategy sought not simply to ameliorate but to economise urban living conditions –​to engage directly with the ‘natural’ socio-​economic dynamics of urban growth in order to correct the logic of the prevailing development plan.

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Figure 3.6  René Kuczynski and Walter Lehwess’ proposed ‘new’ block system (right) against the ‘old’ system (left).

Straight streets, crooked streets The biggest assault on Haussmannian planning came from the publication of Sitte’s famous book City planning according to artistic principles in 1889.66 Born in Vienna in 1843, Sitte had witnessed first-​hand the major urban renovations that turned the capital of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire into a veritable recreational park for the bourgeois elite. At the behest of Emperor Franz Joseph I, the city’s old fortifications were rapidly demolished in the 1850s to give way to what would become the famous grand boulevard encircling old Vienna, the Ringstrasse. This boulevard framed a number of new and important public buildings as well as private bourgeois apartment buildings –​all cast in the language of eclectic historicism typical of the era. As Carl Schorske observed, the era of ‘Ringstrasse Vienna’ conjured the same image of liberal ascension to power that characterised the French ‘Second Empire’ and the German ‘founders’ years’ (Gründerzeit). In the eyes of its critics, the Ringstrasse was seen as an artless response to modern traffic and hygiene concerns. The renovation recalled the Baroque predilection for open space but contained nothing of the latter’s careful architectonic framing of vistas.67 Along with Otto Wagner, Sitte became the leading critic of Ringstrasse-​ era planning and architecture. Sitte followed a path not too different from his father, who was a church builder and a proponent of anonymous arts and crafts.68 Having held positions directing applied arts schools in Salzburg and Vienna before publishing City planning, Sitte’s professional identity was closely tied to his status as an educator. As George Collins and Christian Crasemen Collins succinctly put it, Sitte concerned himself with the task of ‘abstracting principles from works that had been created anonymously, one could even say unconsciously, which would then guide individual artisans’.69 Indebted to the ideas of Gottfried Semper, Sitte’s notion of artistry was closely bound to technical skill and the act

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of making.70 However, unlike many of the modernist Semperians who searched in industrial materials and techniques for a single style to capture the Zeitgeist, Sitte was little interested in searching for a hidden essence that could guide all of modern art. He valued above all the importance of traditional artistic instruction in shaping the skills of the artist. In this sense, he was an unapologetic traditionalist and medievalist in the vein of William Morris and John Ruskin.

Figure 3.7  Piazza delle Erbe and Piazza dei Signori in Verona, from Camillo Sitte’s City planning.

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Sitte’s City planning represented the apogee of his years as an educator. Having accumulated many sketches from study trips abroad,71 his book reproduced over 100 ground plans depicting European (mostly Italian) squares and streets from the medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods that he considered to be of exemplary artistic character (Figure 3.7). Sitte defined and distilled elements from these examples to produce his artistic principles, the most important of which was the enclosed civic square. He believed that investing squares with an interior-​like quality could provide the necessary psychological respite from urban traffic. He emphasised that public monuments should not stand nakedly in public squares but should be integrated into the enclosure of the urban fabric. Sitte also admired curved and irregular streets and squares for their sensitivity to the natural topography and for their distinctly picturesque or painterly (malerisch) quality. Curved streets sealed off perspective views and thus had a positive psychological effect on the pedestrian. These principles were all absent from the Ringstrasse. While his book retreated into history, Sitte’s objective was not historical per se –​he did not set out to locate forces of stylistic progression latent in the past, but rather sought to establish a set of tried and tested compositional patterns that could productively inform modern requirements. In his introduction, Sitte insisted that the overriding modern concern for hygiene ‘must not prevent us from studying carefully all the features of the planning of the old cities –​ even the merely picturesque [malerisch] –​and establishing parallels to modern conditions […] it then remains to be noted precisely which of the motifs used by our ancestors we can still employ today’.72 Sitte’s book was by no means intended as a complete handbook for planning in the tradition of works produced by German planning luminaries like Baumeister and Josef Stübben. He did not give any thought, as had Eberstadt and Goecke, to the possibility of multi-​level intersections that could reconcile modern traffic and hygiene demands with more humane concerns for domestic scale and bounded community life. Sitte remained predominantly interested in civic and commercial areas of the city experienced by pedestrians. Yet this singular focus was exceedingly effective as an affront to Haussmannian planning. The text was decidedly pragmatic in tone. Unlike many reformist tracts on art, applied art, and architecture produced during the fin-​de-​siècle era, City planning dwelled little on the fate of the social world of the anonymous artisans –​a world in which the author intimately belonged. Sitte’s social commentary was, rather, coded in his valorisation of the town square, which in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had possessed a ‘vital and functional use’ as a place of community life, but which was increasingly threatened by modern planning systems.73 Underpinning Sitte’s instructional text was an argument for the inherently social task of ‘city planning art’ (Städtebaukunst) as

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The architecture of social reform a living tradition that was capable of reconstituting community in the city and bringing art to the masses.74 It is difficult to underestimate the impact of Sitte’s book on German planning circles. His voice became a rallying cry against the excessive bureaucratism and utilitarianism represented by the old guard of planning, which consisted squarely of planners Baumeister and Stübben. Born in 1845, Stübben served as the official planner of Cologne between 1881 and 1898, during which time he led the development of Cologne’s Neustadt (new town), which he constructed in the image of Haussmann’s Paris.75 Producing the first major handbook on city planning titled City planning [Der Städtebau] in 1890, Stübben’s writings focused predominantly on traffic issues (Figure 3.8), as well as the minutiae of street beautification not explicated by Haussmann, including the provision of greenery and street furniture.76 In this sense, the German Stübben was more Haussmannian than Haussmann himself. Contrary to the image painted by his critics, Stübben’s writings betrayed an enthusiasm for matters of historic preservation, aesthetics, and civic life, albeit curtailed by a sense of pragmatism obliged by his official responsibilities as a planner. In an 1877 article for the Deutsche Bauzeitung, Stübben noted the importance of providing enclosed public places situated away from business traffic to cater for the wellbeing of citizens. He suggested adapting existing parts of cities to serve these needs,

Figure 3.8  Illustration of a variety of modern traffic intersections.

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Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

including turning disused burial sites and monastery courtyards into public squares.77 In a vivid metaphor, Stübben emphasised the importance of proportion in designing public spaces, likening city planning to designing a house; an important traffic intersection should possess the quality of a vestibule, a grand architectural square should possess the spacious quality of a banquet hall or salon, and a quiet public square should possess the withdrawn quality of a boudoir or family room. Likening the city’s marketplace to the cramped feeling of a domestic business premise, Stübben even admitted that marketplaces that were too large would likely make the public feel isolated and less likely to make purchases. He insisted that ‘a certain sense of confinement and congestion is an essential attribute of the bustling market’.78 Stübben’s remarks anticipate the concerns of Sitte and his followers in their emphasis on the city as an interior, but most strongly recall the modernity of the Parisian arcades as well as anticipating Simmel’s analysis of the psychological effects of the Berlin Trade Exhibition. He was ultimately an apologist for modern Parisian commodity and display culture so despised by German applied arts reformists. For Stübben, the splendour of the broad Haussmannesque boulevard captured the essence of urban modernity. His 1890 handbook emphasised that public roads should be designed to serve the requirements of all types of traffic, from pedestrians to horseback riders to horse-​drawn carriages.79 As Stübben was writing, the arrival of motorised traffic was imminent. The chaos of such roads, with which urban inhabitants of every class needed to contend to survive, created a psycho-​social levelling that would become, for Simmel, the quintessence of the metropolitan experience. Some of Stübben’s other writings were more reformist. Similar to Goecke’s proposal, in 1907 Stübben acknowledged the potential for the municipality to offer incentives for private builders to construct narrow residential streets on large urban blocks, strictly to serve small apartments for lower-​class families. These streets could be cheaply paved and would measure no more than fourteen metres in width between building fronts. Where Goecke premised his reformed urban blocks on the potential democratisation of the grid through stepped building heights that provided equal access to light and air across all dwellings, Stübben’s proposal implicitly reasserted the desire to maintain social differentiation. In many German cities, the bourgeois elite were rapidly fleeing urban centres. Stübben’s proposal allowed for broad streets for commerce and promenading to once again exclusively serve luxury apartments. Lower-​class needs would be accommodated in facilities for childcare, education, and ‘alcohol-​free relaxation’ situated in the narrow residential streets.80 Stübben’s most vocal critic was Karl Henrici, an architect from Aachen, Germany. Henrici was a keen follower of Sitte, whose ideas on city planning

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The architecture of social reform he processed through a Riehlian nationalistic sensibility (Riehl was the first theorist to note the social artificiality of straight streets and the authentically Germanic quality of crooked streets). Henrici garnered significant attention in Germany for implementing Sitte’s principle of crooked/​irregular streets in a competition entry for an 1889 extension plan for Dresden as well as in a prize-​winning 1892 competition entry for Munich. In 1891, Henrici initiated a polemic with Stübben on the pages of the Deutsche Bauzeitung, in which he attacked Stübben’s handbook for bringing foreign models of planning into Germany. Criticising the contemporary emphasis on straight streets, Henrici held that the example of Haussmann’s Paris provided enough ‘incentive to repent and the resume the true, old, original German way [of city planning] with our hearts, minds and hands’.81 Stübben responded by suggesting that Henrici must have been ‘quite alone’ in his averse aesthetic assessment of Paris.82 As Gerhard Fehl has pointed out, underneath the Henrici/​Stübben debate over straight versus crooked streets lay deep-​ seated methodological questions concerning the nature of urban development under progressive capitalism.83 The debate was certainly posed as a fight for professional stakes over city planning, between artists and bureaucrats, and between applied arts and engineering. But more than that, it functioned as a sociological debate over the purpose of middle-​class social life and economic activity in cities. Both Stübben and Henrici addressed issues of scale, proportion, and psychological need in city planning by likening the urban interior to the house. It is apt that Stübben used French domestic spaces, such as the salon and the boudoir, as metaphors to understand the urban interior. Where Stübben’s urban aesthetic was rooted in the subject of the bourgeois flâneur, Henrici’s artistic ideals lay firmly in traditional, domestic, bürgerlich values. In advancing the project of artistic city planning (Städtebaukunst), Henrici assured his readers that: we want not to rob the public of enjoyments that have become habitual; we would only like to enrich these enjoyments in an artistic sense by seeking to draw attention to the enduring monuments and to the architecture of the streets and squares, beyond the whooshing impression of [window-​ store] kitsch. It is not enough for us to parade individual public buildings. We should also want to afford as many houses as possible the advantage of a good position and a beautiful view. To achieve this goal, we must move away from straight streets.84

Where Stübben privileged the views of the flâneur on the street, Henrici’s ideal urban subject was physically located within the bounds of the household. Like Eberstadt, his urbanist rhetoric railed against land speculation and the values of the commercial elite, reasserting the home-​bound values of the ‘good’ middle classes. Offering up his own solution for future planning, Henrici suggested dividing the metropolitan fabric into a series



Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

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of smaller, self-​contained cities, similar in size to those which existed in the Middle Ages. These cities would contain their own facilities and public squares amid ‘simple middle-​class [bürgerlich] housing’.85 Henrici’s own ideal small city within the metropolis closely mirrored Tönnies’ conception of community, recalling the golden age of medieval life when urban artisans and burghers asserted their exclusiveness and autonomy in the city through their art and architecture.86

The art of city planning When Goecke (now the Brandenburg State building officer and lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin) and Sitte co-​founded the Berlin-​based journal Der Städtebau in 1903 (subtitled ‘for the artistic design of cities according to their economic, health, and social principles’), the artistic questions advanced by Sitte would be fully brought into dialogue with the consciously socio-​scientific ones posed by Goecke and Eberstadt.87 Goecke had shown admiration for Sitte and Henrici’s written work in his 1893 essay on streets, in which he predicted that the Haussmannian system of rational planning would ‘collapse in its one-​sidedness, like all things that focus on the sharpness of intellect. The spirit desires to find its way back into the plan.’88 A relative silence on the topic ensued for a decade, until the German Cities Exhibition was held in Dresden in 1903. The German art historian Gurlitt was a vocal figure in planning debate in Dresden, publishing an article on German city planning in which he renewed Henrici’s initial call to develop national artistic expression in the area of city planning. He also reasserted the need for a sharp distinction between traffic streets and residential streets, considering this to be the ‘greatest task of the city planner’.89 By the time Der Städtebau was founded in 1904, it was relatively clear that the journal would serve as a mouthpiece for the advancement of these artistic and social goals. Sitte died in 1903, before the publication of the first issue. Before his death, Sitte was planning to write a follow-​up book titled City planning according to economic and social principles. In his introduction to the journal’s first edition, Goecke confirmed that the discipline of city planning should be an amalgamation of: all technical and fine arts into a unified whole. City planning is a monumental expression of genuine civic pride, a nursery for the growth of true love of Heimat. City planning has to regulate traffic. It has to provide healthy and comfortable dwellings for modern people (the overwhelming majority of whom now live in cities). It has to provide the most convenient accommodation of industry and trade. It has to support the reconciliation of social opposites.90

Over the next decade, Der Städtebau published wide-​ranging scholarly works on urban history, which were always closely linked to the journal’s

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reformist goals. Along Sittean lines, the journal’s effort to understand and recuperate the traditional practices of anonymous craftsmen and builders of old cities provided a crucial imperative for modern architects to relinquish the follies of academicism and subordinate themselves to the wider social task of designing the urban ensemble. The term Städtebaukunst (‘the art of city planning’) arose to represent this task. A veritable explosion in publishing on the topic of city planning soon followed as Der Städtebau gained popularity. The journal began to dedicate

Figure 3.9  ‘Old organic street network of a small city with regulation plan for the new city.’

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Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

Figure 3.10  ‘Regulation plan!! The new city quarters under the hegemony of this scheme.’

entire special issues to book reviews (written by Eberstadt) on the topic of housing and city planning. It seemed that by 1910, every notable figure with stakes in the realms of applied arts and industrial design in the German-​ speaking sphere had written works about city planning, including conservative German architect and writer Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, Hamburg architect Fritz Schumacher, and Austrian art writer Joseph August Lux.91

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The architecture of social reform All coming from highly artistic educational backgrounds, the topic of city planning undoubtedly provided a clear path for these individuals to establish their social credentials. The common enemy shared among this diverse literature was the ‘modern planning system’ and its excessive rationalisation, regularisation, and bureaucratisation by the ‘geometric man’ (Figures 3.9–​10). Germanophone scholars and writers continued to reprimand the presence of the ‘straight street’ in modern planning, which they equated variously with militarism, royalism, and bourgeois pretence. Used for state parades, Ludwigstrasse in Munich was a popular example of the supremely un-​ artistic quality of modern military streets (Figure 3.11). The newly constructed Kürfurstendamm, a genteel street in Berlin’s West modelled on Paris’ Champs-​ Élysées, became similarly derided. The historicist facades adorning the apartments and shops on this street, conceived in every imaginable stylistic variation, were frequently used as counterexamples among texts on good apartment design (Figure 3.12).92 These misplaced efforts to counter the monotony of the Haussmannian traffic grid, as Henrici put it, resembled ‘orchestral music, in which every instrument wants to play solo, and none is tuned to a common pitch’.93 While proponents of urban building art were thoroughly united by their common enemy, there was still much debate over the best methods to arrive at a common pitch. Sitte’s principles furnished a range of political perspectives.94 As in most other spheres of culture and art during the fin-​de-​siècle era, a heavily conservative and racialist discourse shaped by

Figure 3.11  Ludwigstraße, Munich, c. 1910.

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Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

Figure 3.12  Historicist facade of apartment/​commercial house on Kurfürstendamm 234, Berlin. Constructed in 1901 by architects Zaar & Vahl.

Darwin and German biologist Ernst Haeckel emerged, which aimed to ascribe quasi-​biologistic laws to the art of city planning. Predicably, the German medieval cities that arose in the twentieth century represented the pinnacle of what proponents of racialist thinking understood as the true expression of an innate and primaeval Germanic character. In a 1906 article, the writer and publisher Julius Zeitler defined city planning as

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The architecture of social reform a ‘racial problem’ at its core.95 According to Zeitler, there existed two systems of planning: the schematic and geometrical Roman system, and the individualistic, artistic, and irregular Germanic system. Reproaching Sitte for his emphasis on Italian Renaissance cities, Zeitler observed how in medieval German cities, traffic routes were made to develop intuitively from local paths, which bent around the natural topography and came to possess an organic beauty that Zeitler likened to the veins and arteries of the human circulatory system (Figure 3.13).96 He recognised this innate Germanic artistic ingenuity in the instincts of the original medieval city burghers, whose public concern for the welfare of all citizens ensured that they brought each street to life and established a sense of comfort and intimacy in the street scenes viewed by each household. Curved streets and closed-​off perspective views reflected the Germanic national character of inwardness, familial comfort, healthy individualism, and interiority. According to Zeitler, this golden age of planning came to an end as the ‘new middle classes’ (Bürgerstand) began to fall under the classicising influence of the royals.97 Henrici was much cited in this racialised discourse on planning. Perhaps in apprehension of the increasingly racialist undercurrent developing in theories of picturesque irregularity, his writings from 1897 and 1903 began to disavow his prior focus on the innate beauty of crooked streets. Henrici turned his attention to examining city planning as an art of space formation (Raumgestaltung). In the German language, the term Raum expresses both the notion of ‘space’ and ‘room’ (i.e., a room in a house). Imagined thus, city planning was simply an extended form of interior design. New theories of spatial design were developed in the work of art historians Adolf von Hildebrand and August Schmarsow, who were keen to abandon philosophical aesthetics and find new disciplinary footing in empirical psychology.98 Experts including Henrici, Fischer, architectural educator Felix Genzmer, and art historian Brinckmann began to engage productively with theories of spatial perception, including exploring the interplay between spaciousness and narrowness, closeness and distance, experiences of inside and outside, and concave and convex forms –​all elements that the good architect should intuitively grasp.99 This new spirit of modern planning lay not in the land surveyor’s two-​dimensional map but in the architect’s exploration of three-​dimensional space. For Henrici, the builders of cities in the Middle Ages had clearly understood these formal and spatial principles. But more than that, they understood that the development of a genuine art of city planning required giving spatial definition and artistic purpose to sequences of movement between different parts of the city according to their socio-​ economic function. As Henrici explained, urban dwellers did not use city streets purely for business transit or for browsing shop windows. They used streets to go on relaxing walks and take visual delight in the changing impressions of the

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Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

Figure 3.13  City plan of Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

cityscape.100 He developed these intellectual connections in a 1903 article titled ‘Cityscapes and streetscapes in the Middle Ages and the modern period’, which drew closely from the economist Eberstadt (who received his habilitation under Gustav Schmoller in 1902).101 In Eberstadt’s 1903 study on German house forms and housing conditions, he considered the burgher cities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to be both architecturally and socially exemplary due to their ‘deliberate division of house

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The architecture of social reform forms and streets according to purpose’.102 Eberstadt was the first scholar to giver considerable attention to housing conditions in the Middle Ages, arguing that the absence of speculative activity on land and the emphasis on the social benefits of home ownership for each citizen allowed these cities to flourish artistically. The beauty of cities like Rothenburg ob der Tauber lay in their emphasis on strong cardinal streets for commercial activity and the free planning of the subdivisions of all other minor roads that served residential purposes.103 When Henrici claimed that medieval architects had created ‘masterpieces in the art of subdivision’, he meant it quite literally.104 This idea was not so different from the one proposed by Stübben, who equated city planning with designing domestic spaces according to social use. The influence of Eberstadt invested this concept with a certain social necessity. Against accusations of formal historical imitation of the kind commonly levelled against Sitte, Henrici maintained that modern planning systems would require new artistic formulas. In the image of the [medieval city] we find an enclosed, withdrawn family household, which stands entirely on its own […] That house has now opened and expanded, its inhabitants come and go more frequently, and it has adopted the character of an inn. The traffic streams in and out, there is little need for defence structures. In the process, much of the old, intimate character and sense of cosiness and privacy had to be sacrificed, but in exchange a fresh life flows in from the outside and again radiates out across the land.105

According to Henrici, modern planning should offer ‘tranquil space, which provides guests as well as hosts a sense of comfort and makes them feel at home’.106 Even if the nature of the city household had changed, for Henrici the task of modern planning remained the same as it had during the Middle Ages –​to unite commercial interest with the advancement of the common good. The field of city planning needed to find this equilibrium and give artistic expression to communal life in the expanding metropolis. Other experts continued to build on these ideas. In his 1908 essay ‘The old gate house and the modern block’, the Munich architect Carl Hocheder suggested utilising the spatial principle of the old gatehouse in modern planning. The incorporation of pedestrian archways into the building fabric could not only cater to modern traffic requirements but would yield an interior-​ like spatial effect, similar to the effect of modern light-​ rail lines (Figure 3.14–​15). Archways could symbolically frame transitions into residential streets. The socio-​economic hierarchy of traffic movements structured the artistic effect.107 Similar principles would later be realised in the famous Viennese social housing project of the 1920s, such as in the Rabenhof housing complex. The best-​ known text on spatial planning was Brinckmann’s 1908 book Square and monument, which analysed a somewhat eclectic range of

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Figure 3.14  Passage through a church in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

architecturally significant squares in Europe from the Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. Brinckmann’s historical analysis served as a stimulant for new artistic solutions that could help counter the impoverishment of Haussmannian planning. Yet he was no Francophobe. He was a deep admirer of monumental French classical squares. He railed against picturesque formulas for city planning, believing that architecture found its proper task through its ability to frame interior space. He wrote emphatically: For every piece of architecture as well as for the urban ensemble, the most important theoretical principle is spatial feeling [Raumgefühl], of which every architectural form is a visible expression. It first appears in single living rooms, then in the grouping of these –​in housing. The house determines the physiognomy of the street, then the city. The house is the material of urban architecture. Urban architecture is: space built with house materials!108

For Brinckmann, Sitte’s emphasis on the painterly qualities of old cities presented nothing more than a ‘new schematism’.109 Brinckmann’s analysis is most interesting not for the terms of departure it offered to Sitte’s purportedly romantic perspective, but for the way it highlighted Sitte’s unconscious influence on Brinckmann, whose notion of urban space was ‘fundamentally Sittean’.110 Indeed, Sitte, Henrici,

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Figure 3.15  Rail line in Frankfurt.

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and Stübben’s theorisations of urban architecture as a spatial art primed Brinckmann’s analysis for widespread acceptance among scholars and planners. As Brinckmann’s chief critic, Goecke defended his deceased co-​editor and questioned the originality of Brinckmann’s work, arguing that the goal of historically considered city planning was never to ‘make up pictures’, but had always been to ‘frame spaces in systematic purposefulness, from which pictures emerged by themselves. Sitte also wanted nothing other than that.’111 The conflict between Brinkman and Sitte’s followers lay deeper than the issue of intellectual authorship and was inescapably political. As a staunch political conservative and later member of the Nazi Party, Brinckmann’s post-​ war art-​ historical work was steeped in racial interpretation and a respect for totalitarianism. The political implications of the Brinckmann’s historical appreciation for the era of absolutist planning were always on the surface, if not blatant. This was, in part, owing to the growth of formalism in art history (particularly through the work of Heinrich Wölfflin, under whom Brinckmann studied), whereby architectural form came to be read as a political language and an ‘embodied relationship between the individual and the state’.112 In his 1896 essay ‘Sociological aesthetics’, Georg Simmel (under whom Brinckmann also studied) developed a similar premise in his argument that the aesthetic principle of symmetry lent itself to political absolutism. As a reliable liberal, Simmel warned that the goal of conceiving social life as a unified, symmetrical work of art attracted people to autocracies. A truly liberal art was bound to the quality of asymmetry, which permitted ‘broader individual rights, more latitude for the free and far-​reaching relations of each element’.113 For apologists for medieval planning like Eberstadt, Goecke, Sitte, and Henrici, the old burghers’ mutual interest in their own economic prosperity and the welfare for each urban citizen had resulted in the more piecemeal and individualistic approach to subdividing housing areas in the city. The social latitude to compose asymmetrical urban compositions gave medieval cities their beauty.114 The Berlin art critic Robert Breuer made similar formal-​ political distinctions between planning types in his 1911 essay ‘City planning as an architectural problem’. Breuer argued that city planning was more than simply a matter of fire regulation and the provision of an adequate sewerage system. At its heart, city planning represented an architectural will to form. The task of the architect was to make the ‘centre of power visible’ –​to grasp the organising will that flowed through the social organism in its moment of becoming and to immortalise it in stone.115 Historical examples of this process were rife. Breuer observed how medieval cities like Nuremberg and Rothenburg ob der Tauber asserted the political autonomy of the patrician families and guilds through their dominant central marketplaces, which were encapsulated on all sides by buildings

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The architecture of social reform

Figure 3.16  Nuremberg marketplace.

and thus gave ‘architectural form to the withdrawnness of the German middle classes [Bürgertum]’ (Figure 3.16).116 Likewise, the artistic will of strongly autocratic cities like Rome, Mannheim, and Karlsruhe was expressed through the magnificent spatial effects of orderly grids and vast church squares (Figure 3.17). Breuer’s artistic sympathies lay more with the latter form of organised planning. He considered the social politics of the Gründerzeit era, which gifted excessive power to usurious speculators, to be an unfortunate digression from what he implied to be a kind of dialectical unfolding of a form of state-​centred socialised capitalism. Ridiculing Sitte, Breuer maintained that a true art of city planning would not be achieved by bringing stone monuments back to life. He wryly pointed out how building speculators were now constructing neighbourhoods with crooked streets and closed squares and calling them ‘ultra-​modern’ due to Sitte’s influence.117 As a metaphysician in the vein of Hegel, Breuer emphasised that industrial cities like Berlin were still in a state of becoming –​the artistic quality of their exterior expression could only be grasped in retrospect. Nevertheless, architects could grasp the object of their planning efforts through harnessing the power of the producing masses. ‘If the heart of the city was once oriented towards the castle of the ruler, or the marketplace’, Breuer explained, ‘now the masses, the army of producers, have become the critical means of orientation for city expansion’.118 Modern planning was to be understood as the ‘spatial welfare of the people’ solidified in stone.119 The watchword

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document Figure 3.17  Renaissance and Baroque spatial design. Top: Piazza San Marco in Venice. Bottom: Piazza San Pietro in Rome.

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The architecture of social reform here was not so much symmetry (the main source of Simmel’s misgivings) but uniformity, as exemplified in the Beaux-​Arts unity of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan for Chicago, which Breuer much admired. Breuer’s analysis was no doubt informed by the writings of Karl Scheffler. Scheffler was a Berlin-​based critic whose views on city planning expressed a determination to make sense of Berlin’s own curious history as a royal residential city turned industrial capital and ‘Parvenu-​polis’.120 Born in 1869, Scheffler trained in decorative art in Hamburg and in 1888 moved to Berlin, where he worked as a designer at a wallpaper factory.121 He soon turned to writing and gained success as an art critic and urban commentator. As a self-​identified political conservative, Scheffler stressed uniformity in city planning. He ridiculed the architecture of the Gründerzeit, during which the eclectic tastes of the parvenu had run rampant in Berlin. He supported Eberstadt’s call for a strongly centralised housing policy, and endorsed a positively dictatorial approach to state planning.122 Scheffler laid out his urban ideals in his 1913 book The architecture of the metropolis. Interpreting Bücher’s theory of economic stages through a distinctively biologistic evolutionary lens, Scheffler conceived the metropolis as an organism that: consists of many cells. These cells can proliferate infinitely, group in different ways, and adapt themselves for certain functions. But, they cannot transmute into something else or dissolve completely. These cells are the building material from which, under any circumstance, the metropolis of the future must also be built. The fundamental cell of the city is the family.123

While Scheffler wholeheartedly embraced the dynamism of modern metropolitan growth as being productive for architecture, he likewise warned that the ‘building of the future metropolis is only possible through strengthening and renewing familial instincts’.124 While Bücher’s economic stages possessed a dialectical tension, in which the family and city economies became redundant as they fulfilled their historical role, in Scheffler’s somewhat crude interpretation, the traditional family and city economies never actually dissolved. The crucial task of the architect-​ planner was to realise these latent social bonds that underpin the seemingly chaotic forces of metropolitan growth. In his quest for artistic uniformity in city planning, Scheffler promoted the use of continuous facades that wrap around urban blocks, spatially framing streets and squares like wallpaper. He referred to Behrendt’s 1911 dissertation The uniform block front as a spatial element in city planning, which discussed the positive rhythmic effects of unified and aesthetically restrained block facades. Drawing principally from Eberstadt, Goecke, Gurlitt, Brinckmann, and Scheffler, Behrendt argued that the era of the individually designed house was over. Modern pragmatism demanded that housing design be reimagined as a system of dwelling cells. Adapted

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Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

to the needs of socially similar tenants, these cells could be grouped into types and standardised into larger ‘block units’ (Blockeinheiten), similar to Goecke’s proposed residential superblocks.125 Behrendt assured his audience that standardised block fronts would not be monotonous; residential superblocks could lend monumentality to the street scenes they framed. Their large scale allowed them to organise new subdivisions, creating a lively spatial variety as one moved through streets of differing purpose.126 Historical examples that best expressed this unity of form included old charitable housing complexes in Rostock and Lübeck, which held a distinctly spartan aesthetic in their laneway interiors (Figure 3.18). Like Scheffler, Behrendt was unapologetic in his belief that an artistic task of this magnitude could only come about through a strong central office working in the best interest of its citizens.127 For Scheffler, uniformity was the only appropriate artistic response to a modern liberal-​democratic culture that strove for equality. Architects could never go back to imitating the ‘picturesque [pittoreske] architecture of the Middle Ages’ just as much as the modern citizen could no longer walk around in costume to display their ‘special social rank’.128 If modern men wore the same dress, so too should every dwelling floor plan be cut to one size to suit all metropolitan dwellers.129 The future of metropolitan architecture lay in consolidating socio-​economic activity into standardised building types like residential superblocks, factories, office buildings,

Figure 3.18  Example of uniform block front from Walter Curt Behrendt’s Die einheitliche Blockfront.

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The architecture of social reform and department stores. Of course, these kinds of buildings required consolidating capital into large portions of real estate. Following Bücher, Scheffler believed that the era of liberal capitalism ‘exercised by worthless individuals’ would soon be replaced by a form of monopoly capitalism, whereby architects’ activities would be concentrated in guild-​like building trusts that could make large-​scale standardised construction possible.130 Therein lay the source of Scheffler’s conservative brand of modernism. He accepted that modern forces of international trade and industry were written into Berlin’s physiognomy –​forces that needed to be embraced in the city’s architecture. But for Scheffler, the rampant individualism that accompanied these forces was a mere passing phase. The new metropolis required the ‘strict organisation and social subordination of the individual where the public interest is concerned’.131 As a model for the future city, Scheffler proposed the construction of a series of partially autonomous urban townships (containing roughly 50,000 inhabitants) that radiated out from the historical business core. While not too dissimilar to the garden city model, Scheffler emphasised that these cities would not be quasi-​bucolic suburbs for ‘metropolis-​weary people’ but would interact dynamically with the central business core.132 Each of these small city-​suburbs would have their own town hall, church, theatre, and recreational and sports facilities –​perhaps even a university and a hospital. Most importantly, they would breed ‘healthy and conservatively minded citizens’, whose ability to own their own dwelling and partake in local municipal administration would gift them with a newfound appreciation for familial tradition and community life.133 For Scheffler, every German worker possessed ‘good middle-​class instincts’.134 In his ideal city, every good citizen, from workers to craftsmen to upper-​class merchants, would become united in civic feeling.

Housing builds cities Rudolf Eberstadt’s 1909 Handbook for housing and the housing question was a constant source of reference for architects and art critics like Behrendt and Scheffler who wished to root their art criticism in a social conscience. Before the publication of this handbook, the ‘housing question’ was largely a political catchphrase. For much of the first decade of the twentieth century, Eberstadt (by this time an economics professor at Humboldt University) found himself engaging in polemics with conservative commentators like Paul Voigt over the housing question. Where Voigt took a staunch laissez-​ faire position, arguing that the housing conditions in Germany were simply the result of the natural demands of the market, Eberstadt took a more socialistic position, arguing that excessive and unnatural land speculation had prevented the construction of good housing.135 While sympathetic to the plight of the working classes, Eberstadt’s socialism was still far

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removed from Marx and Engels’ revolutionary ideals, and he remained suspicious of communist agitation. Only comprehensive planning could improve urban living conditions for the lower classes.136 In the climate of fin-​de-​siècle progressivism, Eberstadt ultimately won much of public and professional opinion on the need for comprehensive planning. ‘The Germans have learnt to build cities before they have learnt to build dwellings’, Eberstadt complained, quoting an observation from an English reformer.137 Indeed, while German planners were admired abroad for their rigorous attention to traffic issues, the question of house forms long remained unanswered –​perhaps because they were marred by debates that pitted the economic benefits of the ‘tenement system’ against the clear moral and health benefits of the ‘cottage system’ or ‘villa system’. A key innovation of Eberstadt’s handbook was to establish a typology of urban house forms that would help standardise the language of housing and aid cross-​disciplinary communication between architects, economists, city administrators, and public health experts.138 Changing the terms of what had become a hopelessly circular political debate, in his handbook Eberstadt introduced the term ‘housing’ (Wohnungswesen, literally the ‘business of dwelling’) as a science akin to physiology. The ‘housing question’ on the other hand was to become an area that dealt not with politics, but rather with pathologies in housing. Eberstadt’s physiological metaphor resonated among artistic city planning experts who wished to establish housing as the design of a system of cells –​as the spatial design of the domestic interior on a large scale. Defining the architectural quality of the ‘healthy cell’ became just as much a task of urban planning as sewerage or land division. While his handbook was intended as a pragmatic guide for planners, Eberstadt could not hide his admiration for the medieval Kleinhaus (‘small house’) as the most ideal dwelling form for the single family.139 An urban counterpart to the farmhouse, the Kleinhaus was a known German vernacular archetype typical of the Middle Ages, denoting a small, privately owned, two-​storey, single-​family house. It usually featured three rooms, an attic, a pitched roof, a private garden, and a relatively modest facade. The Kleinhaus could be free-​standing, semi-​detached (Figure 3.19), or terraced (Figures 3.20–​21). Each house contained a separate entrance. When the photographic documentation of regional building types in Germany expanded during the fin-​ de-​siècle era, the Kleinhaus attracted widespread admiration. It served as a model in the work and writings of architects Heinrich Tessenow, Richard Riemerschmid, Hermann Muthesius, and Paul Wolf.140 For Behrendt, the Kleinhaus was an ideal model for standardised, uniform construction. The historical circumstances of its evolution accounted for its enduring aesthetic value. From the twelfth to the fifteenth century, nobles and wealthy citizens in German cities who sought to attract lower-​middle-​class ‘city fillers’ (to use Sombart’s phrase) offered them modest but dignified Kleinhäuser

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The architecture of social reform (small houses).141 The mass standardisation of dwelling units to serve this purpose created an aesthetic of the suprapersonal. The Kleinhaus became an artistic embodiment of the social virtues of life in the city qua city. Along with Goecke, Eberstadt had already established in prior writings the economic feasibility of two-​storey terraced housing in the residential interiors of urban superblocks. Yet his encouragement of more urban construction in the image of the Kleinhaus undoubtedly had a rhetorical purpose. Sharing his doctoral supervisor Schmoller’s aspiration to restore the economic strength of the modern Mittelstand, Eberstadt viewed this housing type as a representation of the power of a home-​owning middle-​class base. As a product of slow historical evolution and gradual organisational perfection in floor plan, the Kleinhaus demonstrated full correspondence between architectural form and social content. In his handbook, Eberstadt went as far as to suggest that the ‘systematic introduction of the Kleinhaus’ during the Middle Ages was of ‘far-​reaching importance’ to the development of middle-​class urban life.142 Historical precedents for this type of construction were typically attached to large building projects that sought to advance the common good, such as old charitable housing in Lübeck situated along cosy residential paths (Figure 3.20). These housing models lent an appropriately sober artistic sense to dwellings for the poor and lower-​middle classes.

Figure 3.19  Single-​family double houses for industrial workers, near Bremen. Constructed in 1910 by architect Hugo Wagner, from Rudolf Eberstadt’s Handbuch.

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Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

Figure 3.20  Residential path (Wohngang) serving a charitable housing complex in Lübeck, from Rudolf Eberstadt’s Handbuch.

Among Eberstadt’s stock of examples exemplifying good Kleinhaus construction was the Fuggerei, a sixteenth-​century social housing complex located in the Bavarian city of Augsburg (Figure 3.21). Architectural critics, historians and architects were intimately familiar with the Fuggerei through the work of Riehl. The folklorist had briefly mentioned its significance as a precursor to modern philanthropic housing in his volume The family. Its architecture became a central focus in another significant essay, ‘The city plan as floor plan of society’, penned in 1857 as part of Riehl’s cultural studies of Augsburg.143 In this essay, he reconstructed the city’s social history through its unique physiology. From the thirteenth century, Augsburg existed as a Free Imperial City and key intersection for major European trade routes. The city was also home to large commercial firms with strong banking ties to Venice and Antwerp. By the nineteenth century, Augsburg was mostly appreciated for its picturesque beauty. For Riehl, the city’s true beauty lay in the organic, corporatist social character of its medieval layout. From its topographical orientation to its street signs to its architecture, Augsburg’s urban fabric formed a palpable hierarchy of qualitatively different citizens. City districts were clearly grouped according to social type. The wealthy patricians had dwellings situated on the plateau of the main traffic street of Maximilianstrasse, among the ‘dust and bustle of trade’.144 The artisans had modest single-​family housing in their own quarters, while on the valley floor lay the modest dwellings of the lower classes as well as the Fuggerei, the ‘cosy little town for the industrious poor’ that almost existed as a world unto itself.145

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Figure 3.21  Main residential street in the Fuggerei.

Riehl’s portrait of the city was tinged with nostalgia. Augsburg’s layout was, to use Breuer’s favoured phrasing, a permanent stone monument to a social world that had long since disappeared. Nonetheless, Riehl’s emphasis on the social legibility of Augsburg’s urban fabric served as a foil for modern critics to point out the illegibility of the contemporary planning methods. His essay was frequently cited by planning experts, including Bruch, Eberstadt, and Behrendt. The monumental infrastructure of the Fuggerei, in particular, spoke of a society that understood how to respond to poverty in the context of rapid economic growth at the dawn of the capitalist era, and give architectural expression to the ideal of social welfare that was so central to the traditional idea of the city and its purpose. The Fuggerei was financed in 1519 by Jacob Fugger (born 1459) of the supremely wealthy Fugger banking family, which was to Augsburg what the Medici family was to Florence. A boom in Fugger research occurred in the late nineteenth century, catalysed by historians who saw parallels between the swift rise of the Fuggers in the sixteenth century and that of the ‘ “great business leaders” and “captains of industry” in their own times’.146 In excavating the Fuggers’ vigorous financial activities in pursuit of profit, these historians were looking for nothing other than the roots of modern industrial capitalism.147 For Sombart, Jacob Fugger’s ascetic striving for profit represented a burgeoning capitalist spirit. Historical parallels were manifold; Augsburg suffered its own housing crisis similar to

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the one that afflicted many German industrial cities. The sixteenth-​century upswing of trade brought upheaval in the countryside and, along with it, mass rural-​to-​urban migration. Augsburg’s population went from 18,000 to 52,000 between 1497 and 1520.148 Originally trained as a priest, the instinct to counterbalance his own riches with acts of benevolence had led the devoted Catholic Fugger to the construction of the Fuggerei, which served Augsburg-​based workers of all types, including carpenters, day labours, mail carriers, and cobblers. Each house contained a private garden. The Fuggerei even had its own chapel and hospital for plague sufferers.149 Architecturally, the Fuggerei embodied many of the key principles of a new urban architecture that were circulating in city planning discourse. The complex was not a ‘workers’ city’ that served the employees of the Fuggers. It did not stand outside of Augsburg but, as Riehl had shown, existed as a part of it, giving legibility to the city’s corporate structure. The entry gate of the complex signalled a clear qualitative change in urban speed and scale, from the bustle of the city’s main traffic routes to the ‘tranquil’ residential streets, which pedestrians could use as a shortcut (Figure 3.22).150 Its pronounced sense of interiority and concavity resonated with Goecke’s superblock model. Where the modern tenement produced a void-​ like effect in its courtyard, the Fuggerei’s residential streets were imbued with rhythm and intimacy. For many, the Fuggerei was emblematic of the perfection of the Kleinhaus as a standardised object. In accordance with Scheffler’s ideal, the houses in the complex reflected the true subordination of the individual will to the will of the community.

Figure 3.22  An entry into the Fuggerei.

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Figure 3.23  Layout of the Fuggerei in Augsburg.

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Rows of uniform Kleinhäuser formed a single mass dwelling unit that was capable of asserting an architectural presence in the cityscape. In his research on the Fuggerei, the Augsburg engineer Josef Weidenbacher took pains to carefully reconstruct the floor plans of each house in the complex (Figure 3.23), citing the Fuggerei as ‘the model of economical Kleinhaus construction for our present time’.151 Featured in Der Städtebau, Weidenbacher’s diagrams of the Fuggerei’s layout were compared directly to the reformed housing blocks of Berlin government architect Paul Mebes and Breslau government architect Max Berg (Figure 3.24). The Fuggerei was most notably referenced in the competition entry to the 1910 Greater Berlin Competition submitted by Eberstadt, architect Bruno Möhring, and engineer Richard Petersen. Announced in 1908, the competition to find a new master plan for greater Berlin was an important milestone in the formation of city planning in Germany, with entries

Figure 3.24  Top (a): Design for residential streets in Breslau. Architect: Max Berg. Bottom (b): Design for a housing complex in Steglitz, Berlin, 1907–​8. Architect: Paul Mebes for the Berlin Civil Servant Housing Association.

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The architecture of social reform reimagining the city as an integrated social organism composed of key functioning parts, including transport, industry, housing, and commerce.152 The competition entries were featured in a hugely popular accompanying exhibition in 1910, held at the Royal Academy of the Arts. This exhibition was organised by city planner Werner Hegemann, a key international voice in city planning and progressive housing politics. Hegemann’s writings vigorously denounced the past failures of Hobrecht’s laissez-​faire planning approach. For him, the Greater Berlin Competition heralded a new era of comprehensive planning.153 The competition entries clearly drew from many ideas about housing that were circulating in city planning literature, but they significantly introduced another tool: the three-​dimensional aerial drawing of the residential quarter. Architect Herman Jansen’s prize-​winning entry clearly exhibited the rhetorical power of this medium. Part of his entry was a plan for a housing quarter in Tempelhofer Feld (Figure 3.25). Jansen differentiated train lines from local traffic but maintained continuities with the old five-​storey courtyard tenement type, only exchanging commercial ground-​floor shops with arches that allowed air to flow through to the courtyards of uniform residential complexes. In Jansen’s plan, the block

Figure 3.25  Hermann Jansen, entry for the 1910 Greater Berlin Competition, development plan for Tempelhofer Feld.

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is split apart, warping and merging with traffic lines that create a dynamic interplay of urban interiors. The highly detailed graphic quality of the plan won Jansen praise. As Katherina Borsi notes, Jansen’s entry exemplified how the graphic medium made ‘the very concept of housing thinkable and practicable’ as well as helping to ‘entice further negotiations about the norms and ideals of healthy, hygienic and morally secure housing of the urban population’.154 Eberstadt, Petersen and Möhring’s entry (titled ‘Et in Terra Pax’) won third prize. It included a design for a residential district (Figure 3.26–​27) intended for execution in the suburb of Wittenau (ten kilometres from the centre of Berlin). It remained unrealised. The aerial view of the district vividly represented Eberstadt and Goecke’s ideal superblock, separated from the industrial district above by a tree-​lined pedestrian street, green space, a canal, and separate car, train, and bicycle lanes. Where the exterior perimeter featured tree-​ lined avenues and five-​ storey apartments, the prominent gated entry into the superblock interior marked a perceptible

Figure 3.26  Aerial view of proposed superblock intended for the suburb of Wittenau. Part of Eberstadt, Möhring, and Peterson’s entry to the Greater Berlin Competition.

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Figure 3.27  Ground plan of Wittenau superblock.

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Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

transition to a more human scale, incorporating two-​storey Kleinhäuser with individual garden plots. The main residential street cutting through the block led to a central village green with a distinctly civic feel. The core of the block featured a playground and other public facilities.155 Considering this plan was intended as an affront to Hobrechtian planning, the aerial graphic comes off as surprisingly schematic, and almost tyrannical in its commitment to regularity, uniformity, and orderliness. Unlike Jansen’s urban blocks that weave through the urban fabric, the Wittenau superblock’s exterior is rendered distinctly pedestrian-​ unfriendly. The apartments on the perimeter appear almost like ramparts that heighten the perception of spatial transition into the block’s interior. However, the plan for Wittenau was not intended to be prescriptive. Eberstadt, Möhring, and Peterson did not encourage the standardisation of residential blocks but rather recommended that their interior design should be left to cooperative-​based entities, emphasising that the ‘individualised, free design of single city districts should impart a sense among the urban population of the individuality of their residential district, and thus impart a sense of feeling for home [Heimatgefühl] in the middle of the city’.156 This metropolitan ideal was very similar to Henrici’s and Scheffler’s own conservative proposals for self-​contained urban communities. The Greater Berlin Competition and accompanying exhibition were overladen with discourse on the importance of good housing in creating bonds between the citizen and the state, and Eberstadt, Möhring, and Peterson’s statements on their entry were very much aligned with this conservative nationalist mentality.157 A Fuggerei for the twentieth century, the residential superblock would serve as a true people’s temple. In his enthusiastic review of Eberstadt, Petersen, and Möhring’s book that accompanied their competition designs, Goecke remarked that their entry successfully overcame: questions about whether a street should be broad or narrow, straight or crooked, long or short etc., […] those questions belong to technology –​they are artistic details. The foundation [of city planning] must first be a largely urban-​social one, and socially beneficial housing construction will, foremost, be able to create an urban architecture.158

It is not difficult to understand Goecke’s excitement over the entry. The tantalising aerial imagery of the Wittenau superblock represented a maturation of traditionalist city planning’s central faith in the ability of architecture to re-​establish community in the modern metropolis and reconcile the essential conflict of urbanisation between private interest and public good.

Notes 1 See Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic crossings: Social politics in a progressive age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

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The architecture of social reform 2 Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial modernity: Local culture and liberal politics in fin-​ de-​siècle Hamburg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Leif Jerram, Germany’s other modernity: Munich and the making of metropolis, 1895–​1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); and Maiken Umbach, German cities and bourgeois modernism, 1890–​1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3 See Andrew Lees, ‘Critics of urban society in Germany, 1854–​1914’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 40:1 (1979), 61–​83. See also Andrew Lees, Cities perceived: Urban society in European and American thought, 1820–​1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 4 See, for example, Alexander Eisenschmidt, The good metropolis: From urban formlessness to metropolitan architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2019). For an astute critique of the uses of urbanism in architectural theory, see John Macarthur, ‘Urbanist rhetoric: Problems and origins in architectural theory’, Architecture Research Quarterly, 2 (Autumn 1996), 8–​13. Recent scholarship on German planning has more closely observed how modernist planning principles, such as zoning, decentralisation, and the rationalisation of housing, had their origins not in the social utopianism of CIAM but in the more pragmatic German city planning tradition that sought not to reject, but to correct ‘natural’ patterns of centrifugal growth shaping capitalist-​ industrial cities like Berlin. See Katharina Borsi, ‘Drawing the region: Hermann Jansen’s vision of Greater Berlin in 1910’, The Journal of Architecture, 20:1 (2015), 47–​ 72; Christa Kamleithner, ‘Concrete abstractions: Berlin’s statistical bureau and the concept of zoning, 1862–​1910’, in Anna Kockelkorn and Nina Zschocke (eds), Productive universals –​specific situations: Critical engagements in art, architecture, and urbanism (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019); Anna Vallye, ‘ “Balance-​sheet” city: Martin Wagner and the visualization of statistical data’, Journal of Urban History, 46:2 (2020), 334–​63. For an overview of German planning theory, see Georgio Piccinato, Städtebau in Deutschland 1871–​1914: Genese einer wissenschaftlichen Disziplin (Basel: Birkhäuser, [1977] 2014). 5 Theodor Fritsch, Die Stadt der Zukunft (Leipzig: Theod. Fritsch, 1896); Ebenezer Howard, Garden cities of to-​morrow (London: Sonnenschein, 1898). On the history of the German garden city movement, see Teresa Harris, ‘The German garden city movement: Architecture, politics, and urban tranformation, 1902–​1931’, DPhil thesis, Columbia University, 2012. 6 Karl Scheffler, Die Architektur der Großstadt (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1913), p. 53. 7 Le Corbusier, The city of tomorrow and its planning (London: The Architectural Press [1924] 1971), p. 11. 8 For an overview of Cerdà’s role in modern planning theory, see Françoise Choay, The rule and the model: On the theory of architecture and urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1980] 1997). 9 Ildefonso Cerdá, Cerdá: The five bases of the general theory of urbanization (Madrid: Electa [1867] 1999), p. 82. 10 Ibid., p. 84. 11 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen (Leipzig: Fues, 1887), published in English as Community and society, trans. Charles P. Loomis (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 12 Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1918), published in English as The decline of the West, trans. Charles Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1957). 13 Gustav Schmoller, ‘Ein Mahnruf in der Wohnungsfrage’, Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich, 11 (1887), 425–​48. 14 Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 30. 15 Ibid., p. 55.

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16 Ibid., p. 43. 17 Ibid., p. 64. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. Emphasis mine. 20 For an overview of the political context of this edited volume, see Woodruff D. Smith, Politics and the sciences of culture in Germany, 1840–​1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 212–​18. 21 Friedrich Ratzel, Sketches of urban and cultural life in North America (Chicago, IL: Rutgers University Press, [1876] 1989), pp. 3–​4. 22 Ratzel, Sketches, p. 15. 23 Friedrich Ratzel, ‘Die geographische Lage der großen Städte’, in Karl Bücher, Friedrich Ratzel, Georg von Mayr, Waentig Heinrich, Georg Simmel, Theodor Petermann, and Dietrich Schäfer (eds), Die Großstadt: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung (Dresden: Zahn & Jaensch, 1903), p. 38. 24 Karl Bücher, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft: Sechs Vorträge (Tübingen: Laupp’schen, 1893), p. 13. Published in English as Industrial evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1904). 25 Karl Bücher, ‘Die Großstädte in Gegenwart und Vergangenheit’, in Karl Bücher, Friedrich Ratzel, Georg von Mayr, Waentig Heinrich, Georg Simmel, Theodor Petermann, and Dietrich Schäfer (eds), Die Großstadt: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung (Dresden: Zahn & Jaensch 1903), 28. 26 Bücher, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, p. 77. 27 Bücher, ‘Die Großstädte’, pp. 20–​1. 28 See Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and nihilism: On the philosophy of modern architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 29 Georg Simmel, ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’, in Karl Bücher, Friedrich Ratzel, Georg von Mayr, Waentig Heinrich, Georg Simmel, Theodor Petermann, and Dietrich Schäfer (eds), Die Großstadt: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung (Dresden: Zahn & Jaensch 1903), 187–​206. Published in English as ‘The metropolis and mental life’, in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds), The blackwell city reader (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2002). 30 Georg Simmel, ‘The Berlin trade exhibition’, Theory, Culture & Society, 8:3 ([1896] 1991), 119–​23. 31 See David Frisby, Fragments of modernity: Theories of modernity in the work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press 1985) and Smith, Politics and the sciences of culture in Germany, pp. 214–​16. 32 Iain Borden, ‘Space beyond: Spatiality and the city in the writings of Georg Simmel’, The Journal of Architecture, 2:4 (1997), 313–​35. 33 Albert Südekum, Großstädtisches Wohnungselend, vol. 45 of the Großstadt-​ Dokumente (Berlin: Hermann Seeman, 1908), p. 5. 34 Harald Hagemann, ‘The Verein für Sozialpolitik from its foundation (1872) until World War I’, in Massimo Augello and Marco Guidi (eds), The spread of political economy and the professionalisation of economists: Economic societies in Europe, America and Japan in the nineteenth century (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 152–​75. 35 Lutfi Sunar, ‘The Weberian city, civil society, and Turkish social thought’, in Edith Hanke, Lawrence Scaff, and Sam Whimster (eds), The Oxford handbook of Max Weber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 207–​23. Weber’s research on the origins of cities was likely penned between 1911 and 1913, before it was posthumously published in his magnum opus Economy and society in 1924. See Max Weber, The city, ed. and trans. Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (New York: Free Press, 1958). 36 Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1902), p. 139.

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The architecture of social reform 37 Werner Sombart, ‘Der Begriff der Stadt und das Wesen der Städtebildung’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 25: (1907), 6. 38 Ibid., p. 8. 39 Ibid., p. 9. 40 For an extended discussion of Sombart’s urban theory, see Redensek, ‘Manufacturing Gemeinschaft’, pp. 106–​15. 41 Karl Lamprecht, Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter, 3 vols (Leipzig: Alphons Dürr, 1885–​ 6); Karl Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte, 12 vols (Berlin: Gärtner, 1891–​1909). 42 Henri Pirenne, Medieval cities: Their origins and the revival of trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1925). 43 Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel: Schweighauser’schen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1860). Published in English as The civilization of the Renaissance in italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (Vienna: Phaidon, 1937). 44 A central text on urban housing of the Middle Ages was Georg von Below, Das ältere deutsche Städtewesen und Bürgertum (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1898). 45 This research was largely done in the context of the homeland protection (Heimatschutz) movement that sought to preserve local regional heritage. Rudolf Struck, Das alte bürgerliche Wohnhaus in Lübeck (Lübeck: Lübcke & Nöhring, 1908); Albert E. Brinckmann, Deutsche Stadtbaukunst in der Vergangenheit (Frankfurt: Heinrich Keller, 1911). 46 Redensek, ‘Manufacturing Gemeinschaft’, p. 72. 47 See Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and politics in the cholera years 1830–​1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 48 Johann Peter Willebrand, Grundriß einer schönen Stadt (Hamburg: Bohn, 1775), p. 1. 49 Cited in Mascha Bisping, ‘Johann Peter Willebrand’s “glückselige Städte”: A conception of urban happiness in the German Enlightenment’, in Arnold Bartetzky and Marc Schalenberg (eds), Urban planning and the pursuit of happiness: European variations on a universal theme (18th–​21st Centuries) (Berlin: Jovis 2009), p. 27. 50 Bisping, ‘Johann Peter Willebrand’s “glückselige Städte” ’, p. 29. 51 Thomas C. Horsfall, The improvement of the dwellings and surroundings of the people: The example of Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1905); William R. F. Phillips, ‘The “German example” and the professionalization of American and British city planning at the turn of the century’, Planning Perspectives, 11:2 (1996), 167–​83. 52 Tilo Amhoff, ‘The agency of the paper plan: The building plans of late nineteenth-​century and early twentieth-​century Berlin’, Journal of Urban History, 46:2 (2020), 275. 53 Ernst Bruch, ‘Berlin’s bauliche Zukunft und der Bebauungsplan’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 4:9–​25 (1870), 69–​71, 77–​80, 93–​5, 121–​2, 151–​4, 167–​8, 183–​6, 191–​3, 199–​201. 54 Verband deutscher Architekten und Ingenieur-​ Vereine, ‘Bericht über die Verhandlungen der General-​Versammlung des Verbandes zu Berlin vom 23. bis 25. September 1874’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 8:85 (1874), 337–​9. 55 Katrin Albrecht and Lukas Zurfluh, ‘Between decoding and recoding: Raymond Unwin’s “Town planning in practice” and Rudolf Eberstadt’s “Handbook des Wohnungswesens” as means of reflection and regulation’, in Britta Stühlinger and Harald R. Hentschel (eds), Recoding the city: thinking, planning, and building the city of the nineteenth century (Berlin: Jovis, 2019), p. 127. 56 Rudolf Eberstadt, ‘Berliner Communalreform’, Preussische Jahrbücher, 70 (1892), 577. 57 Bücher, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, p. 74. Eberstadt would draw frequently from Bücher’s work. 58 Albrecht and Zurfluh, ‘Between decoding and recoding’, p. 127.

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Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

59 Theodor Goecke, ‘Verkehrsstraße und Wohnstraße’, Preussische Jahrbücher, 71:1 (1893), 85–​104. For a partial translation of this text, see Theodor Goecke, ‘Traffic thoroughfares and residential streets’, in Iain Boyd Whyte and David Frisby (eds), Metropolis Berlin 1880–​1940 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 52–​5. 60 See Otto March, ‘Stand und Ziele der Städtebaukunst’, Der Städtebau, 10:4 (1913), 30; and [Albert] H[ofmann], ‘Theodor Goecke †’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 53:51 (1919), 286. 61 Goecke, ‘Verkehrsstraße und Wohnstraße’, p. 100. 62 Ibid., pp. 100–​1. 63 Theodor Goecke, Sociale Aufgaben der Architektur (Darmstadt: Arnold Bergsträsser, 1895). 64 Theodor Goecke, ‘The working-​class tenement block in Berlin’, in Iain Boyd Whyte and David Frisby (eds), Metropolis Berlin 1880–​1940 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), p. 138. Originally published as Theodor Goecke, ‘Das Berliner Arbeiter-​ Mietshaus: Eine bautechnisch-​ soziale Studie’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 24:83 (1890), 501–​2, 507–​10, 522–​3. 65 René Kuczynski and Walter Lehwess, ‘Zweifamilienhäuser für Großstädte’, Der Städtebau, 7:6 (1910), 67–​72. 66 Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen: Ein Beitrag zur Lösung modernster Fragen der Architektur und monumentalen Plastik unter besonderer Beziehung auf Wien (Vienna: Carl Graeser, 1889), translated into English in Camillo Sitte, George R. Collins, and Christiane C. Collins, Camillo Sitte: The birth of modern city planning (Mineola, NY: Dover, [1986] 2006). 67 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-​de-​siècle Vienna: Politics and culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), pp. 24–​32. 68 For Sitte’s professional background, see ­chapter 1 of Sitte et al., Camillo Sitte: The birth of modern city planning. 69 Ibid., p. 15. 70 See Ruth Hanisch (with Wolfgang Sonne), ‘Camillo Sitte as “Semperian” ’, in Charles C. Bohl and Jean-​François Lejeune (eds), Sitte, Hegemann and the metropolis: Modern civic art and international exchanges (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 39–​51. 71 Vittorio M. Lampugnani, ‘Vienna fin-​ de-​ siècle: Between artistic city planning and unlimited metropolis’, in Charles C. Bohl and Jean-​François Lejeune (eds), Sitte, Hegemann and the metropolis: Modern civic art and international exchanges (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 25–​37. 72 Sitte, Collins, and Collins, City planning, p. 154. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., p. 250. 75 Brian Ladd, ‘Urban aesthetics and the discovery of the urban fabric in turn-​of-​ the-​century Germany’, Planning Perspectives, 2:3 (1987), 270–​86. For a detailed examination of Stübben’s career and oeuvre, see Oliver Karnau, Hermann Josef Stübben: Städtebau 1876–​1930 (Braunschweig-​Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1996). 76 Stübben, Der Städtebau. 77 Josef Stübben, ‘Über die Anlage öffentliche Plätze’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 11:80 (1877), 405. 78 Ibid. 79 Stübben, Der Städtebau, p. 35. 80 Josef Stübben, ‘ “Kleinwohnungsstraßen.” Ein Vorschlag zur Prüfung’, Zeitschrift für Wohnungswesen, 5:14 (1907), 185–​7. 81 Karl Henrici, ‘Gedanken über das moderne Städte-​Bausystem’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 25:15 (1891), 59. 82 Josef Stübben, ‘Ueber einige Fragen der Städtebaukunst’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 25:21 (1891), 128.

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The architecture of social reform 83 Gerhard Fehl, Kleinstadt, Steildach, Volksgemeinschaft: Zum ‘reaktionären Modernismus’ in Bau-​und Stadtbaukunst (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 2014), p. 100. 84 Henrici, ‘Gedanken über das moderne Städte-​Bausystem’, pp. 90–​1. 85 Karl Henrici, ‘Der Individualismus im Städtebau’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 25:49–​53 (1891), 302. 86 For an overview of Henrici’s oeuvre and writing, see Fehl, Kleinstadt, Steildach, Volksgemeinschaft. 87 Albert H[ofmann], ‘Theodor Goecke †’, p. 286. 88 Goecke, ‘Verkehrsstraße und Wohnstraße’, p. 104. 89 See Cornelius Gurlitt, City planning in Germany (Boston, MA: Metropolitan Improvements Commission, 1905), p. 29. Originally published as Cornelius Gurlitt, ‘Der deutsche Städtebau’, in Robert Wuttke (ed.), Die deutschen Städte: Geschildert nach den Ergebnissen der ersten deutschen Städteausstellung zu Dresden 1903 (Leipzig: Friedrich Brandstetter, 1904), pp. 23–​45. 90 Theodor Goecke and Camillo Sitte, ‘An unsere Leser’, Der Städtebau, 1:1 (1904), 1. 91 Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Der Städtebau (Munich: Callwey, 1906); Fritz Schumacher, Streifzüge eines Architekten: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Jena: Diederichs, 1907), pp. 134–​ 66; Joseph A. Lux, Der Städtebau und die Grundpfeiler der heimischen Bauweise (Dresden: Kühtmann, 1908). 92 See, for example, Albert Gessner, ‘Das Miethaus, ein Stiefkind der Architektur!’, Architektonische Rundschau, 22 (1906), 27–​30. 93 Karl Henrici, ‘Stadt-​und Straßenbild im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit’, Der Kunstwart, 16:22 (1903), 436. 94 Wolfgang Sonne, ‘Political connotations of the picturesque’, in Charles C. Bohl and Jean-​François Lejeune (eds), Sitte, Hegemann and the metropolis: Modern civic art and international exchanges (London: Routledge, 2009), 123–​38. 95 Julius Zeitler, ‘Über künstlerischen Städtebau’, Kunstgewerbeblatt, 17:4 (1906), 72. These distinctions between Germanic and Roman planning were often reasserted in city planning literature. See, for example, Walter Mackowsky, ‘Die geschichtliche Entwicklung des Stadtplanes’, Der Städtebau, 5:3–​6 (1908), 29–​30, 45–​7, 73–​7. 96 Zeitler, ‘Über künstlerischen Städtebau’, p. 72. 97 Ibid., p. 78. 98 See Mitchell W. Schwarzer, ‘The emergence of architectural space: August Schmarsow’s theory of “Raumgestaltung” ’, Assemblage, 15 (August 1991), 49–​61. 99 For an overview of developing principles of spatial planning, see Laura Cassani, Riccarco Rossi, Rainer Schützeichel, and Bettina Zangerl, ‘ “Überall Wandung, Überall Schluss!” Der Raumbegriff in der deutschsprachigen Städtebautheorie um 1900’, in Vittorio M. Lampugnani and Rainer Schützeichel (eds), Die Stadt als Raumentwurf: Theorien und Projekte im Städtebau seit dem Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2017), pp. 9–​57. 100 Karl Henrici, ‘Städtebauliches’, Der Kunstwart, 11:6 (1897), 194–​7. 101 Henrici, ‘Stadt-​und Straßenbild im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit’. 102 Rudolf Eberstadt, Rheinische Wohnverhältnisse und ihre Bedeutung für das Wohnungswesen in Deutschland (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1903), p. 102. 103 Rudolf Eberstadt, Handbuch des Wohnungswesens und der Wohnungsfrage, 2nd edn (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1910), p. 203. 104 Henrici, ‘Stadt-​und Straßenbild im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit’, p. 437. 105 Ibid., p. 440. 106 Ibid. 107 Carl Hochender, ‘Altes Torhaus und moderner Baublock’, Der Städtebau, 5:8 (1908), 99–​104.

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Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

108 Albert E. Brinckmann, Platz und Monument: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Stadtbaukunst in neuerer Zeit (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1908), pp. 169–​70. 109 Ibid., p. 168. 110 Ghenoiu, ‘ “Tradition” as modernism’, p. 259. 111 Theodor Goecke, ‘Neue Bücher und Schriften’, Der Städtebau, 6:5 (1909), 68. See also Theodor Goecke, ‘Krumme und gerade Strassen’, Der Städtebau, 6:12 (1909), 164–​5. 112 Evonne Levy, Baroque and the political language of formalism (1845–​ 1945): Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Brinckmann, Sedlmayr (Basel: Schwabe, 2015), p. 14. 113 Georg Simmel, ‘Sociological aesthetics’, in Austin Harrington (ed.), Georg Simmel: Essays on art and aesthetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2020), p. 102. Originally published as Georg Simmel, ‘Soziologische Ästhetik’, Die Zukunft, 17 (1896), 95–​107. 114 For an analysis of Brinckmann’s politics, see the chapter on Brinckmann in Levy, Baroque and the political language of formalism. 115 Robert Breuer, ‘Der Städtebau als architektonisches Problem’, Kunstgewerbeblatt, 22:11 (1911), 202. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid., p. 208. 118 Ibid., p. 205. 119 Ibid., p. 210. 120 On turn-​ of-​ the-​ century reflections on Berlin’s history, see Reinhard Rurüp, ‘ “Parvenu polis” and “human workshop”: Reflections on the history of the city of Berlin’, German History, 6:3 (1988), 233–​49. 121 Andreas Zeising, ‘Studien zu Karl Schefflers Kunstkritik und Kunstbegriff: Mit einer annotierten Bibliographie seiner Veröffentlichungen’, DPhil thesis, Ruhr-​ Universität Bochum, 2001, 33. 122 Julius Posener described his urbanism as proto-​fascist. Julius Posener, Berlin auf dem Weg zu einer neuen Architektur: Das Zeitalter Wilhelms II (Munich: Prestel, 1979), p. 252. 123 Scheffler, Die Architektur der Großstadt, pp. 6–​7. 124 Ibid., p. 7. 125 Behrendt claimed his dissertation topic was developed at the behest of Goecke. Walter C. Behrendt, Die einheitliche Blockfront als Raumelement im Stadtbau: Ein Beitrag zur Stadtbaukunst der Gegenwart (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1911), p. 9. 126 Ibid., p. 71. Behrendt conducted his dissertation under the supervision of Cornelius Gurlitt. On the principle of uniformity in city planning, see Wolfgang Sonne, ‘The entire city shall be planned as a work of art: Städtebau als Kunst im frühen modernen Urbanismus 1890–​1920’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 66:2 (2003), 207–​36. 127 Behrendt, Die einheitliche Blockfront. 128 Karl Scheffler, ‘Ein Weg zum Stil’, Berliner Architekturwelt, 5 (1903), 295. 129 Ibid., p. 295. 130 Scheffler, Die Architektur der Großstadt, p. 129. 131 Ibid., p. 22. 132 Ibid., p. 17. 133 Ibid., p. 20. 134 Ibid., p. 19. 135 Paul Voigt, Grundrente und Wohnungsfrage in Berlin und seinen Vororten, vol. 1 (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1901). 136 Rudolf Eberstadt, Die Spekulation im neuzeitlichen Städtebau (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1907).

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The architecture of social reform 137 Eberstadt, Handbuch des Wohnungswesens, p. 199. 138 See Francois Claessens, ‘Rudolf Eberstadt, a pioneer of German typo-​morphological research’, in Francois Claessens and Leen van Duin (eds), The European city: Architectural interventions and transformations (Delft: Delft University Press, 2004), pp. 360–​9. 139 See ­chapters 1 and 2 of Eberstadt, Handbuch des Wohnungswesens. 140 See, for example, Hermann Muthesius, Kleinhaus und Kleinsiedlung (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1918); and Paul Wolf, ‘Die Kleinwohnung –​eine Forderung künftiger deutscher Baukultur’, Der Cicerone, 11 (1919), 174–​81. 141 Behrendt, Die einheitliche Blockfront, p. 28. 142 Eberstadt, Handbuch des Wohnungswesens, p. 41. 143 Original title ‘Der Stadtplan als Grundriß der Gesellschaft’, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Kulturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1859), pp. 270–​84. 144 Ibid., p. 278. 145 Ibid. 146 Mark Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing wealth and honor in Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012), p. 2. 147 Ibid., p. 2. 148 Josef Weidenbacher, ‘Die Fuggerei in Augsburg’, Der Städtebau, 15:1 (1918), 3. 149 Ibid., 7. 150 Ibid., 5. 151 Emphasis mine. Josef Weidenbacher, Die Fuggerei in Augsburg: Die erste deutsche Kleinhaus-​Stiftung. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Kleinhauses (Augsburg: self-​published, 1926). 152 For more detailed description of all entries, see Wolfgang Sonne, Representing the state: Capital city planning in the early twentieth century (Munich: Prestel, 2003). 153 Werner Hegemann, Der Städtebau nach den Ergebnissen der Allgemeinen Städtebauausstellung in Berlin, vol. 1 (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1911); Christiane C. Collins, Werner Hegemann and the search for universal urbanism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Caroline Flick, Werner Hegemann (1881–​1936): Stadtplanung, Architektur, Politik –​ Ein Arbeitsleben in Europa und den USA (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2005). 154 Borsi, ‘Drawing the region’, p. 56. 155 Eberstadt, Handbuch des Wohnungswesens, p. 203. 156 Rudolf Eberstadt, Bruno Möhring, and Richard Peterson, Groß-​Berlin: Ein Programm für die Planung der neuzeitlichen Großstadt (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1910), p. 12. 157 Sonne, Representing the state, pp. 101–​48. 158 Theodor Goecke, ‘Neue Bücher und Schriften’, Der Städtebau, 7:5 (1910), 58.

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The culture of the visible

Picture an office in a good German middle-​class home in suburban Berlin, c. 1908 (resembling something like the one in Figure 4.1). Having wandered through the dining and living rooms filled with dark parquet floors, black-​ trimmed walls, mahogany furniture, and richly coloured tapestry from the firm Morris & Co., this room offers a distinctly lighter impression. Upon entering, one is immediately compelled to descend the steps into the secluded office space. The walls and fitted furniture are painted white, but the space is animated with a few vividly patterned ‘Oriental’ carpets and a day bed is tucked underneath the room divider. The desk is dark-​stained mahogany. In a house of this size, the owner could easily have afforded a few gilded pseudo-​ Rococo showpieces for this room, as one might find in a stately apartment on Kurfürstendamm. Instead, the furniture is more understated, if somewhat mismatched, giving the impression that these pieces once belonged to a grandfather or great grandfather. Bookshelves occupy most of the wall space. Unlike the few carefully staged rows of leather-​bound volumes that one might find displayed on a new Jugendstil bookshelf featuring in the popular magazine Innen-​Dekoration, this library appears well-​stocked and well-​used. The glazed shelves feature the more beautifully bound books, which are colour-​ coded in green, red, and yellow to pick up the floral patterns of the cretonne curtains and day-​bed cushions. The other brochures, files, and magazines, less appealing to the eye, are concealed behind cupboard doors. Scanning the titles of this library, one might find copies of architect Hermann Muthesius’ books The English house (1903–​4) and Country house and garden (1907), which educated their readers on all matters of domestic design through introduction to the English Arts and Crafts movement and the names of William Morris, Philip Webb, and Richard Norman Shaw. Any educated middle-​class citizen in Germany would have been aware of the efforts of its author who, as the founder of the newly established Deutscher Werkbund, was making headway in reversing the negative associations attached to the label ‘Made in Germany’. Priced at just 3.50 to 4

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The architecture of social reform

Figure 4.1  Gentleman’s office.

marks each, one would most certainly find some volumes of architect and writer Paul Schultze-​Naumburg’s photographic collection Cultural works (1901–​7), which taught metropolitan dwellers how to read old German rural architecture. For 20 marks, the owner of this library might make space for local Berlin architect Paul Mebes’ new book Around 1800 [Um 1800] (1908), which called for a return to the architectural sobriety characteristic of the era of Mebes’ great-​grandfathers. Together, these books alone contained thousands of photographic images. While the library in Figure 4.1 clearly belongs to a thoroughly cultivated individual (it is, in fact, Muthesius’ own library in his house in Nikolassee, Berlin), by 1908 publishing in Germany had become so cheap that lower-​middle-​class citizens could furnish a shelf or two with these and similar titles. In doing so, they would receive an exhaustive architectural education and in turn gain the means to enrich their own domestic world. Although the contents of this library are hypothetical, the details of the office space were gleaned from Muthesius’ own description of his house, which featured in the popular magazine Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration.1 This article provided a glimpse into the kind of intellectually cultivated domestic lifestyle Muthesius believed every middle-​class citizen should attain. The books of Schultze-​ Naumburg, Mebes, and Muthesius were considered by their contemporaries to be exemplary didactic texts. They

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The culture of the visible

were as resoundingly modern as they were unabashedly traditionalist in their admiration for the middle-​class spirit that dominated the architecture of the Germanic lands in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through careful photographic documentation of local and regional house building cultures, they sought to excavate, from the estate-​ like social worlds of burghers, artisans, and peasants, a hitherto dormant set of type-​ based visual principles that could help form an intellectual bridge between traditionalism and modernism and promote a truly national architectural idiom. The most important visual principle to emerge from their studies was ‘objectivity’ (Sachlichkeit). Sachlichkeit in architecture encapsulated a host of similar middle-​class (bürgerlich) qualities, including sobriety, straightforwardness, simplicity, and self-​restraint.2 While the term today conjures a metaphysical approach associated with the modernist embrace of scientific rationality, tectonic clarity and the machine, the quest for Sachlichkeit in pre-​war Germany had roots in a more pragmatic social reform project, which had its eyes firmly turned to the past. In the published work of Schultze-​Naumburg, Mebes, and Muthesius, the visual politics of Sachlichkeit emerged in concert with a growing recognition of the didactic function of photographic architectural books. In the minds of its advocates, Sachlichkeit was not something invested into an artwork by way of some metaphysical force. It could not be defined through traditional categories in philosophical aesthetics. Sachlichkeit was bound to social tradition and middle-​class convention. As such, it was visible everywhere in the German landscape. The eye only needed to be trained to recognise a genuinely objective (sachlich) piece of art or architecture among the ornamental kitsch now engulfing German cities. The perceived objectivity of photographic representation allowed it to become an ideal moral corollary to the sachlich building. It is no coincidence that the principle of Sachlichkeit that came to underpin the ethic of German modernism arrived at the same time as the widespread introduction of photography into illustrated books in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The shared ethical task of photography and architecture to capture objectivity in both art and society ‘allowed each to function as mythmaking sign’.3 Architectural photography as a didactic medium eschewed established academic rules of compositional precision and formal imitation. Photography became the morally superior form of architectural representation because it captured, in simple black-​and-​white images, what was already there. While the professional and ideological interests of Schultze-​Naumburg, Mebes, and Muthesius varied, their photographic books all attempted to reform (albeit in different terms) what Schultze-​Naumburg described as the ‘culture of the visible’ (Kultur des Sichtbaren). The ‘culture of the visible’ referred to the world of appearances, to the external form of all natural and man-​made things. The culture of the visible included ‘not only houses, monuments, bridges and streets, but clothing and forms of

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The architecture of social reform sociability, forests and livestock farming, machines and national defence’.4 Schultze-​Naumburg was a racial nationalist. While his early oeuvre was coloured by chauvinism and a popularist spirit, his post-​ war writings exposed deep-​seated fears over the racial ‘degeneracy’ of modern art and architecture, and he became an architectural spokesman for exclusionary Nazi racial ideology. Muthesius and Mebes’ oeuvres were entirely more sophisticated and were more conventionally addressed to members of the educated elite. Nonetheless, like Schultze-​Naumburg’s writings, their writings engendered an exclusionary visual culture of citizenship through the normalising principle of Sachlichkeit.5 All three authors believed that an authentic culture of the visible had reached greatest unity in humble, honest, sachlich construction during the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, and they all mourned the ‘fall from paradise’ that occurred around 1850 with the rise of eclectic historicism, which threatened to wipe out this unified building tradition completely.6 When read in one sitting it becomes clear that these books all aspired towards the same task: to circumvent the threat of social revolution by crafting a new architectural language of reform based on appearances. Traditionalist architects’ preoccupations with visual appearances might appear at odds with the old reformist adage of ‘building from the inside out’, which sought to reject the superficialities of surface and facade in favour of an architecture that was inhabited. Yet for architects like Schultze-​ Naumburg, a truly sachlich building was one that bore its social content on its surface. A well-​trained eye ought to be able to distinguish a genuinely sachlich object from pure adornment (Schmuck). Despite its closeness to vision and the intellect, Sachlichkeit during the first decade of the twentieth century had everything to do with the applied arts (Kunstgewerbe; Gewerbe meaning trade –​literally ‘art of trades’). As Alina Payne has shown, the functionalist rhetoric of Sachlichkeit characteristic of the Werkbund and the Bauhaus arose out the gradual disciplinary relocation of architecture from the fine arts to the material world of everyday objects.7 For reformists like Schultze-​Naumburg, bringing architecture into a holistic ‘visible culture’ (rather than relying upon traditional aesthetics, archaeology, or art history) would have a democratising function. Architecture should not just be a language belonging to the artistic elite. Like a vase or a lady’s dress, he believed a building ought to be legible to everyone. Beginning with the rise in popularity of interior design in the 1870s, professional and lay interest in the applied arts grew towards the end of the nineteenth century. Exhibitions, magazines, trade shows, and public lectures all helped disseminate knowledge about domestic design.8 When Muthesius founded the Werkbund in 1907, he sought to bring architecture back into this ‘expanded field of activity’, famously declaring that the Werkbund would seek to reform everything from the ‘sofa cushion to city planning’.9 The Werkbund became Germany’s leading applied arts

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The culture of the visible

association, forming a constellation of architects, artists, critics, designers, and industrialists who shared the objective of fusing advanced manufacturing with good German taste in order to improve the nation’s competitive export market. As the typical approach of Beaux-​Arts-​trained academic architects, eclectic historicism had long remained the primary scapegoat for traditionalist architects’ criticisms of contemporary architecture. By 1907, many members of the Werkbund, including Muthesius, found themselves battling on another front. The rise of the Jugendstil (the German variant of the Art Nouveau) among the artistic avant-​gardes was viewed by traditionalist critics as promoting unfettered creative freedom, individualism, bad cosmopolitanism, and stylistic decadence that rang false with middle-​class Germans and their values of simplicity, sobriety, and Sachlichkeit. This style might have been artistically adventurous but for its critics it lacked the tools to be socially progressive. Indeed, Jugendstil motifs were already making their way into the repertoire of ornamental forms available to the academic architect (Figure 4.2). Muthesius saw the Werkbund as the heir of the English Arts and Crafts movement (led by Morris and John Ruskin), which had successfully targeted a world market with products that maintained a sense of national vernacular distinction. The Werkbund took this project a step further by embracing modern manufacturing over simple handiwork, the latter remaining at the heart of the English movement. The German term Kunstgewerbe stood etymologically closer to industry and thus easily facilitated a full-​scale embrace of the machine. What was a countercultural project in England became a national call to arms through the Werkbund. This was not simply a matter of copying English taste –​the international success of the English Arts and Crafts movement provided an impetus for Germany to discover its own national idiom, albeit one based on the cultural pluralism of Heimat.10 The socially conservative Hamburg museum director Alfred Lichtwark took a leading role in promoting more democratic forms of aesthetic education in German museums and schools. He eschewed over-​intellectualised modes of aesthetic appreciation based on art-​historical classification and encouraged more instinctual responses to art, which he believed could bridge social difference and provide a unified national identity.11 The widespread uptake of Heimat-​inspired applied arts reform during the 1890s and 1900s owed itself to the pervasiveness of the life reform (Lebensreform) movement in Germany more generally. This movement called for reform in just about every aspect of German culture, including diet, clothing, medicine, environmental and building conservation, art, and architecture. It encouraged new pastimes and habits like hiking, nudism, and vegetarianism.12 Its designation as a movement is somewhat misleading, for while it spun off more radical countercultures across the ideological spectrum, life reform was very much an ethos that penetrated

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Figure 4.2  ‘Example of the transformation of form with changes in prevailing taste’.

mainstream middle-​ class Protestant society. Scholar Matthew Jefferies even suggested that the ‘Wilhelmine era’, a term which conjures the imperialist pomp of Wilhelm II’s reign (1890–​1918), could more accurately be called the era of life reform. Life reform promised a ‘third way’ between

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The culture of the visible

capitalism and Marxism, which could be achieved not through political reform but though the aestheticisation of life.13 Advocates of reformist aesthetics united against a set of common threats: the philistine tastes of the business elite, the decadence of the European Art Nouveau, and the pomp of Wilhelminism –​all of which were suffocating the German spirit like a tight-​fitting corset. While assimilating much of the anti-​capitalist sentiment characteristic of the English Arts and Crafts movement, German applied arts reformists exchanged Morris and Ruskin’s Marxist commitments for the cultural holism of thinkers like Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Julius Langbehn, Rudolf Eucken, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The culture of the visible as a catchphrase represented the collapse of art into life and of social politics into aesthetic reform. Middle-​class politics became synonymous with reformist aesthetics. All aesthetic progress symbolised political progress. Mark Jarzombek acutely observed how the aesthetic theory that accompanied the Werkbund continually hid its morally dubious intellectual tracks by mingling theory, critique, and jargon. For Jarzombek, the ideology of the ‘culture of the visible’ signified for architecture nothing less than the ‘aestheticisation of theory itself’.14 Continually cited among Werkbund reformists, Langbehn’s conservative and anti-​ Semitic book Rembrandt as educator (1890) perfectly illustrates the hiding of tracks at work in new aesthetic theory.15 For Langbehn, all that was good and noble in German art, culture, and politics was captured in the work and philosophy of seventeenth-​ century Dutch artist Rembrandt (who we are told is, in fact, quintessentially German). A cross-​section of the book’s sub-​headings (in order) best illustrates the book’s contents: ‘The cultivated people of today’, ‘Love of life’, ‘Refinement’, ‘Jewry’, ‘Shading’, ‘Zola’, ‘Religious art’, ‘Aristocratic culture’, and ‘Venice’ –​and so it continued over 200 headings. Anyone reading the book expecting to be enlightened on the precise relationships between these topics was bound to be disappointed. The book is rambling and at times nonsensical. Yet the prose has a powerfully hypnotic effect. After reading a few dozen pages, subjects in art, lifestyle, culture, ethics, politics, and racial biology begin to interact and blend. By the end of the book, old aesthetic distinctions between elite and popular taste, high and low culture, and the fine arts and the applied arts have become obsolete. German middle-​class artistic values of simplicity, honesty, and piety are measured against academicism, philistinism, dilettantism, Jewishness, and cosmopolitanism.16 Langbehn’s book provided some much-​needed spiritual respite from the increasing professionalisation and over-​specialisation of architectural research and practice, as exemplified in the monumental Handbook of architecture (1880–​ 1943), edited by the polytechnic-​ trained architects Josef Durm, Hermann Ende, Eduard Schmitt, and Heinrich Wagner. The

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The architecture of social reform Handbook was encyclopaedic in its coverage of a range of modern building processes, including heating and cooling, security against burglaries, and designing for the unique workflows and operational standards of new kinds of buildings, from department stores to slaughterhouses to disinfection and laundering facilities.17 Other volumes written by the lead editor Durm were dedicated to architectural history. Durm was the classic polytechnic-​ trained building archaeologist (Bauforscher). He travelled extensively and gained hands-​on knowledge of historical building construction, altogether producing around 30,000 drawings which formed the basis of his volumes in the Handbook on ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and Renaissance Italy.18 Only one volume in the Handbook, on Formal instruction in ornament, was dedicated to purely aesthetic concerns.19 As research on the technical and scientific performance of buildings became increasingly disengaged from artistic considerations, it is not difficult to understand the appeal of the kind of cultural holism espoused in Werkbund aesthetic theory. Applied arts reform provided a path for architects to become carriers of German culture once again and, in Langbehn’s words, to lead a ‘noble intellectual life’.20 A boom in the publishing industry at the turn of the century led to a flurry of books on arts reform, which sought to counter the increasing overspecialisation of the architectural discipline. The conservative publisher Eugen Diederichs led the way in this publishing boom. An admirer of English Arts and Crafts, he was responsible for publishing the first German translations of Ruskin’s books, and he shared Morris’ deep appreciation for the handicraft of bookmaking (although he did not share the English pioneer’s socialist politics). Diederichs was the first publisher to gain membership to the Werkbund, and he published the works of likeminded traditionalist thinkers, including Schultze-​ Naumburg, Muthesius, Peter 21 Behrens, and Fritz Schumacher. Under Langbehn’s influence, more populist books blending art and life reform appeared at the start of the twentieth century, most notably Schultze-​ Naumburg’s 1900 Domestic appreciation of art and the odd 1907 collection Modern culture: A handbook of life education and good taste, which contained contributions by Eduard Heyck, Marie Diers, and Karl Scheffler.22 By this stage, however, the genre of the reformist tract espousing platitudes about good German taste had largely exhausted itself, as reformists began to harness the didactic potential of photographic books. Of course, architectural photography had long been in existence. Photographic processes continued to be refined in France and England in the early nineteenth century. The large-​scale documentation of monumental buildings, local and afar, aided the European project of nation-​ building and imperialist expansion.23 It was not until the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, that photography began to be incorporated successfully alongside text through the invention of halftone printing

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techniques. During the 1890s, a number of English illustrated applied arts publications appeared that employed these new methods to much commercial success. The photographic reproduction of art objects in books and magazines was seen to have a democratising effect for the simplified way it presented images to the masses.24 The London-​based magazine The Studio began introducing photomechanical methods to cheaply reproduce arts and crafts for a broad audience.25 The photographic medium became a democratising force for both its producers and its end users. Unlike other established representational methods in art (such as lithographs, watercolours, and etchings), photography required a less specialised skill base and could be taken up by amateurs (particularly through the popularisation of the Kodak). Its ability to represent visual ideas in an objective manner made it more inclusive. Seeing this potential, German reformists including Lichtwark, Schultze-​ Naumburg, and the Austrian Joseph August Lux all wrote articles on the value of collective efforts by amateur photographers to rediscover and document their Heimat through the new medium.26

Hermann Muthesius: The suburban country house Muthesius was in many ways far removed from the romantic discourse on Heimat. As an ardent promoter of industry, he remained suspicious of the rural nostalgia promoted by applied arts reform organisations. Although often chauvinistic, his cultural criticism possessed a sophistication that put him in closer dialogue with Adolf Loos than with conservatives like Lichtwark, Schultze-​Naumburg, and Lux. While he accepted the realities of metropolitan business life, his image of future domestic culture was fundamentally suburban and middle-​class. He spent much of his professional life discussing English architectural developments in order to hold a mirror up to German society. For this reason, he became a crucial figure in the reform of Germany’s visible culture. Born in 1861 in the Thuringian village of Gross-​Neuhausen, Muthesius grew up in a typical Mittelstand milieu as the son of a mason. He trained in masonry before beginning studies in art history and philosophy at Humboldt University from 1882 to 1883. He then studied architecture at the Technical University of Berlin, from which he graduated in 1887. After a period of travel in Japan and Italy, he began serving as a technical and cultural attaché at the German Embassy in London in 1896, before returning to Germany in 1904. Muthesius quickly published a string of books that cemented his reputation as a leading voice in cultural reform, including the photographic folio Contemporary English architecture (1900), the polemical Style-​architecture and building-​art (1903), the comprehensive three-​volume The English house (1904–​5), and the photographic collection Country house and garden (1907).27 In later years, he wrote books on the problem of

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The architecture of social reform small house construction, including How do I build my house? (1917), Small house and small settlement (1918), and the post-​war Can I still build my house? (1920).28 By the time of his death in 1927, he had written over 300 articles on a range of topics, including English architecture, German domestic life, interior design, applied arts, industrial design, construction engineering, city planning, and monument conservation.29 Muthesius’ professional success quickly saw him rapidly ascend his Mittelstand origins to join the ranks of the educated elite (Bildungsbürgertum). While valuing the ideal of personal self-​cultivation (Bildung) so cherished by this social milieu, Muthesius spent his career railing against the traditional site of Bildung –​the elite German humanistic schools and universities producing classically trained academic architects who were ill-​equipped to design for modern needs. In addition to his leading institutional role in reforming Prussian applied arts policy and education as director of the Werkbund, Muthesius ran a thriving private practice in architecture, mostly in suburban house construction for an elite Berlin clientele.30 Arguably Muthesius’ most important book, The English house was primed for a favourable reception among German audiences when its first volume hit the shelves in 1904. From the 1870s onwards, many art critics and reformists emphasised the Germanic underpinnings of English dwelling culture. The English love of domestic life long represented what German critics described as the ‘internalisation of life’ –​the process of seeking out happiness and good health in the comfort and privacy of the familial home. Writers like Robert Dohme exposed German audiences to the diverse efforts of new English architects to improve house floor plans for greater convenience, privacy, and comfort. Muthesius’ dense analysis and comprehensive use of illustrated material united these hitherto scattered observations into a single compelling historical record of recent English architecture. In his introduction, he outlined all the qualities he deeply admired in English dwelling culture (and which resonated with the German educated elite): love of comfort and privacy, individuality and closed family life, isolation from the city, appreciation for the beauty of nature, and the cultivation of activities necessary for a thriving national culture, including the ‘sedulous reading of books’ and fine literature, religious observance, and the proper raising of children.31 The first volume of The English house was dedicated to documenting the historical development of the book’s namesake, beginning with Anglo-​ Saxon settlement in Britain and the rise of the great hall (the English equivalent of the German Diele) in the Middle Ages. The hall housed the central fireplace and was used for feasts and festive occasions. For Muthesius, it was symbolic of a growing national conscience in architecture that would later shape Gothic church construction. After a period of intense confusion following the Industrial Revolution, Muthesius saw the spirit of national tradition appear once again in the work of the

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Pre-​Raphaelites and the literature of Ruskin, which ‘went straight to the heart of what we may describe as the Germanic view of art in contrast to the classical as embodied in academic art’.32 The first examples of ‘free English architecture’ that developed outside of the academy appeared in the work of architects Webb, Eden Nesfield, and Shaw during the 1850s. The next generation of ‘free architects’, Charles Francis Annesley Voysey and Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, built on their legacy while absorbing the lessons of the Arts and Crafts movement by designing not only the shell of the house but its furniture, carpets, and wallpaper, which for Muthesius represented the full synthesis of the ‘house and its contents’.33 In the second volume, Muthesius distilled from this building activity a set of factors and principles that characterised the ideal modern English house, paying attention to conditions of land tenure, typical household expenditure, construction, site configuration, garden design, and interior layout. He spared no detail when describing how the layout of the English house moulded itself around the routines of daily life. Unlike the houses churned out by academic architects, which emphasised spaces for festivities and wealth display, the modern English house of the ‘free architecture’ movement emphasised asymmetrical plans with passages leading to spaces for quiet concentration, intimate conviviality, and individual privacy. For Muthesius, German architects were in dire need of these lessons. He described how the layout of the English house ideally served family rituals, and even took his readers through the rules of good hospitality and the individual duties of servants. The third volume of The English house was dedicated to interior design. Muthesius advised his readers on decorating walls, ceilings, floors, window and doors, and fireplaces, and described in detail the kinds of furniture, fabrics, and wallpapers suitable for the social function of individual rooms. Altogether, the English house both inside and out was to be taken as a lesson in ‘simplicity, objectivity [Sachlichen], plainness and unobtrusive comfort’.34 After reading 700 or so pages that deal variously with the geographical, cultural, historical, technical, and socio-​economic factors shaping it, the English house emerges as an ideal type. Muthesius’ programme for The English house rested upon the presence of ideal types, or archetypes, which act as markers of evolutionary progress in middle-​class architecture. This notion of type should not be confused with the scientific standardisation of mass-​produced industrial objects that emerged later in Werkbund discourse. Muthesius’ identification of the English house as an object of gradual evolutionary perfection according to its unique socio-​geographic conditions and origins in the farmhouse recalled the poetical archetypes much loved by Semper and Riehl. In its unadorned simplicity, the English house ‘clings to the primitive and the vernacular and in this it closely follows the type of the traditional country house’.35 The English free architects were to be admired because, like pre-​modern craftsmen, they understood their

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The architecture of social reform job as one of adapting a type to local conditions. They had thus managed to circumvent the architectural ‘fall from paradise’ –​the fall into perpetual imitation of form that tainted the work of modern academic architects and developers. Perfected by two generations of architects, the simplicity and sincerity of the English house was an outcome of the sophisticated refinement of its type according to modern middle-​class requirements, tempered by convention and restraint. It was the outcome of a certain freedom on the part of architects and clients to individualise the house according to singular needs –​a freedom always mitigated by an overriding love of domestic tradition. Through its ability to evolve according to the needs of the genuine middle classes, the English house remained for Muthesius the most powerful antidote to the eclecticism and rule-​bound historicism that defined upper-​class domestic architecture across Europe. Much like urban theorist Karl Scheffler’s biologistic understanding of urban types, Muthesius saw the floor plan as the supreme generator of the English house type –​an organism that adapted to evolving conventions of social use. Given his conviction in the primacy of interior layout, it may seem odd to consider Muthesius as a reformer of visible culture. The beauty of the traditional German landscape, which promoters of Heimat sought to protect against the unsightliness of the industrialised landscape, was of comparatively little concern to the Prussian architect. For Muthesius, the external appearance of domestic buildings was of secondary importance. Yet the lowered status he granted to external appearance served as an escape from the constraints of academic historicism. If the process of generating the floor plan was akin to organic adaptation, the process of generating external form was likened more to the mundane task of dressing. Muthesius’ understanding of modern architecture was cloaked in theories of dressing and fashion.36 While he did not develop these theories explicitly in The English house, it is clear that the social politics of Sachlichkeit was based on a myth of a quintessentially middle-​class ethic that Muthesius identified in the emergence of the English house, which exchanged the showiness of outer representation for the rich individuality of inner domestic life. Such an exchange necessitated a certain standardisation of all external appearances (much like the Englishman’s suit). The external form of old English vernacular country houses, such as the one in Figure 4.3, conveyed this dressed-​down sachlich attitude: unassuming, solid, cheerful, and plain. While Muthesius did not give extensive consideration to exteriors in The English house, a pattern emerges in his description of what constitutes the good sachlich exterior: walls of rough and unarticulated white plaster, modest tile-​hung gables that cite regional motifs, a chimney marking the presence of a central hall, and the abandonment of all ornamental frills. Many of these principles were captured in the unified architecture of Bedford Park, a suburban project for small houses outside London that Muthesius held in high regard.

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Figure 4.3  ‘Old farmhouse with brick cladding in Tenterden, Kent’.

Muthesius relied mostly upon commissioned professional photographs for his illustrations of building exteriors. Although emphasising that The English house was not intended to be a ‘picture book like the pattern books that currently dominate the book trade’, and was before all else ‘intended to be read’, the stylish realism of the photographs accompanying the text modconveyed a distinctly sachlich attitude that reinforced the proto-​ ernism of the buildings they depicted.37 In Muthesius’ oeuvre, Sachlichkeit forged a new dialogue between photography and architecture, becoming a guiding ethic that was able to mediate between new techniques and

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The architecture of social reform received conditions; between rationalisation and appreciation for the social status quo; and between modernism and tradition. The competing ethics of the ‘new’ versus the ‘old’ was replaced by all that was sachlich. While Muthesius remained cautious about using illustrative material in ways that might encourage senseless formal imitation, the rhetorical presence of photography remained critical for establishing Sachlichkeit as an all-​embracing design ethic. Muthesius wrote about the English house in this sense later in Country house and garden. In the following passage, the exterior becomes the privileged standpoint for grasping the sachlich building. No one is more attached to the old than [the English architect] and yet his natural sense prevents him from imitating it. He strives to build neither in the ‘old tradition’ nor in the ‘modern’, but limits himself to being sachlich; that is, to accommodate modern demands in an unprejudiced way. But this makes his built achievements modern in the best sense of the word. They do not hang out their modernity like a signboard, but every observer is convinced that here is a modern organism in a sachlich and hence in a modern sense.38

If the point of Muthesius’ vast study was to show ‘how closely all the external forms of the English house meet the natural conditions’, it was now the task of German reformers to discover the ‘German house’ in a similar fashion.39 No doubt, this project was aided by Muthesius’ frequent reassurances that the two nations shared a common ‘northern, Germanic view of art’ that contrasted with the ‘Italian, classical view’.40 Sachlichkeit was a quality that both nations could access easily due to the middle-​class awakening and subsequent building boom that occurred in both England and Germany in the eighteenth century. Muthesius’ short book Style-​architecture and building-​art can be understood as a polemical companion piece to The English house in that it sought to understand why the German middle classes did not develop a strong domestic building tradition similar to the English ‘free architecture’ movement. The story went that during the eighteenth century, an emerging middle class consisting of the likes of industrious burghers, scholars, civil servants, and businessmen emerged in separation from the aristocracy and ‘drew an art for its own needs –​simple, matter-​of-​fact [sachlich], and reasonable’.41 Taking a stroll through any German town, one is likely to still find numerous examples of the ‘admirable architecture of the burghers of the eighteenth century, which still could serve as a model for our contemporary conditions. Unfortunately, they have not yet been sufficiently taken into consideration. In their simplicity, they impress us too little and appear too self-​effacing in relation to aristocratic art.’42 With the rise of building archaeology and ‘architectural schools of style-​making academicism’ in the mid-​nineteenth century, however, ‘mankind was for the first time expelled from this artistic paradise, having plucked from the tree of historical knowledge’.43 The chief clientele for the

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lamentable ‘style architecture’ emanating from academic schools was a new class of parvenus who, rather than build upon the common-​sense burgher art, sought to imitate the pomp of aristocratic art. The worst of these developments in parvenus taste included the common trend of styling each room in the dwelling according to different civilisational epochs as a way to assert false aristocratic pretensions.44 For Muthesius, the visual economy of the parvenu was characterised by heightened emotions, frequent mood swings, fairy-​tale pastiche, the culture of the display window, masquerade, and hallucinations of acanthus tendrils.45 If today’s clothing had become more or less the same to suit all classes of society, Muthesius maintained, so too must architecture’s external form assume a sobering middle-​class quality. [I]‌nstead of developing purely external ornament that stands in no immediate relation to the essence of the thing, we now strive decidedly towards functional design. Yet we also seek to present this form –​more symbolically than practically –​with a handsome elegance and a certain conciseness of form.46

For Muthesius, it was not just the academic schools but a whole style of looking at the objects of modern culture that needed to be fundamentally reformed and made to conform to traditional middle-​class taste. The German suburbs became the new front where the battle between the ‘style architecture’ of the parvenus and the genuine ‘art of building’ (Baukunst) of the traditional Protestant middle classes played out.47 While economically denied to most Germans, Muthesius found it incomprehensible that those more well-​off would prefer to ‘stunt themselves’ in urban apartments rather than occupy and cultivate their own house and garden in the suburbs.48 For him, the future of Germany’s ‘artistic culture’ depended on the flowering of traditional domestic culture in suburban single-​family houses. While critical of what he felt was the self-​imposed tenement lifestyle of Germany’s middle classes, Muthesius could not express more contempt for the ostentatious building pursuits of a parvenu class who were quickly taking up residence in the speculatively built suburban estates that arose in Berlin’s west in the 1870s. Muthesius’ criticism of the ‘sham culture’ of the parvenus seized on mounting popular resentment of the business elite who had ridden the wave of economic success during the years of economic boom (the Gründerzeit) before fleeing to the suburbs. One critic from the popular Berliner Tageblatt described the typical occupants of the villa suburb of Lichterfelde, who: built miniaturised palazzos with open halls that did not correspond to our climate and, at most, could be used as summerhouses. They copied Florentine roofs or Veronese window arches. Greek models with porticos were utilised, which stood like mini temples between green bushes and a front garden that sloped downward so that the expensive flower beds could be seen and would testify to the prosperity of their owner.49

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Figure 4.4  Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott two-​family country house.

The miniaturised Italianate villa came to represent the impulse underlying modern sham culture to ‘show off as much as possible, to impress our neighbours, and to shine outwardly through ostentatious expenditure’.50 Muthesius’ polemical Style-​architecture and building-​art called for nothing less than a ‘fundamental public education in appreciation of quality’, which would be just as much an education in sociability as it would be an education in artistic quality. Once the veneer of class posturing had been stripped from all objects (including houses) in the name of good quality, German citizens would once again find their genuine social needs easily satisfied in the familial comforts of home.51 In contrast to the untranslatable ‘villa’, the modern country house (Landhaus) became Muthesius’ byword for ‘good quality’ in the field of suburban housing. The country house signified a conscious return to the domestic culture of those regions where the ‘country mason had followed local traditions in his practice’ and where the ‘Italian-​cultured architect had not ventured’.52 While it had its origins in the peasantry, the modern country house was thoroughly upscaled. Much like Muthesius’ own public persona, the country house stood for a locally inflected cosmopolitanism. Containing some 500 images, his 1907 photographic book Country house and garden: Examples of modern country houses with plans, interiors and gardens provided the service of educating the German public on the new transnational movement of country house architecture developing not just in England, but across Europe and North America. At an ‘unprecedented

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Figure 4.5  William Dunn and Robert Watson, country house in Surrey.

low price’ of 5 marks, professional and lay readers could familiarise themselves with the recent domestic work of English architect Baillie Scott, Dutch architect Heinrich Petrus Berlage, Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, and American architect Myron Hunt (Figures 4.4–​6). Local architects in Germany (most with ties to the Werkbund) were strongly represented, including the respected Berlin architects Albert Gessner and Alfred Messel as well as Jugendstil artists and budding Expressionists including Richard Riemerschmid, Henry Van de Velde, and Hans Poelzig. The book also featured the work of German architects spearheading a new traditionalism in domestic design, including Fritz Schumacher, Mebes, Schultze-​ Naumburg, Paul Korff, and Muthesius himself (Figures 4.7–​8). The country houses by the committed traditionalists all exhibit a common set of visual principles in their exteriors: regional groundedness, orderliness, solid materiality, craftsmanship, and, above all, Sachlichkeit. As exercises in middle-​class self-​restraint, they emanate a sense of anonymity, as if they were designed by local master masons sometime in the early nineteenth century. From workers’ cottages to lower-​middle-​ class duplexes to sizable single-​family houses, the buildings reproduced in the book evidenced a new pragmatic sensibility penetrating the architecture of those nations where a strong, authentic middle-​class art existed (unsurprisingly, the ‘bourgeois’ French and Italian architects were poorly represented). Sleekly photographed, Country house and garden neatly encapsulated Muthesius’ brand of traditionalism in bringing into visual

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Figure 4.6  Myron Hunt, Jenks House in San Francisco.

dialogue a cosmopolitan milieu of architects working to discover their own national country house idiom. Muthesius’ publishing programme was ultimately driven by didactic goals –​ones that supported his conservative social view that the political destiny of the German nation rested upon the maintenance of traditional

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Figure 4.7  Paul Korff, workers’ houses and farm buildings in Wendorf.

Figure 4.8  Hermann Muthesius, Seefeld country house, Zehlendorf, Berlin.

middle-​class family values. As the new ‘spiritual aristocracy’, the middle classes provided a third way between the capitalistic individualism of real estate developers, ‘style architects’, and parvenus on the one side, and socialist revolutionaries on the other. Artistic leadership would emerge in concert with the growing political leadership that the German middle classes were destined to provide. The Prussian architect saw his job as not one of inventing a new middle-​ class style, but of imbuing a new

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The architecture of social reform self-​ consciousness into the middle classes through the use of simple didactic images. This project was closely tied to the ideal of self-​cultivation that had characterised the German middle-​class ethic since the time of Goethe in the late eighteenth century. The problem for Muthesius was not that the middle classes had become uneducated –​they were, in fact, burdened by too much historical knowledge. The architectural schools of the nineteenth century that sought to test the ‘limits of aesthetics and archaeology’ were largely to blame for this public miseducation. While more architects were turning to the new pragmatic ethic of Sachlichkeit, the educated elite still took pride in their ability to ‘recognise the styles’ as proof of their knowledge of all architectural matters.53 As the life reform movement took hold at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the ideal of self-​cultivation became closely linked to other ideals of poverty, asceticism, and, as Didem Ekici put it, the superiority of Geist over Geld (spirit over money). Cultivating intellectual strength went hand in hand with exercising material restraint in the home. As an embodiment of the spirit of self-​cultivation, Sachlichkeit rejected the visual economy of static wealth display representative of a bygone era of feudalist blood ties to instead embrace a new formal language of self-​restraint. In the foreword to Style-​architecture and building-​art, Muthesius argued that the term ‘architecture’, representative of a domain of highly professionalised work and narrow specialisation (as epitomised by the Handbook of architecture), had had a repelling effect on the public that was ‘akin to a jet of cold water’.54 Ironically, it was precisely the sensation of a cold shower that the post-​war modernists of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) wished to evoke in the middle classes as they sought to replace the old myth of a private dwelling culture with new myths of the house as a transparent membrane and machine for living. Even after the First World War, Muthesius remained committed to the ideal of a genuine building art, which entailed a necessary exchange of outer wealth for the warmth of close family life and the spiritual enrichment of private learning.

Paul Schultze-​Naumburg: The German house The only architectural reformer to match Muthesius in terms of popular success was Schultze-​Naumburg. Langbehn’s famous book Rembrandt as educator is estimated to have sold some 29,000 copies in its first year and around 1,000 copies every year thereafter across forty-​five editions. Schultze-​Naumburg’s nine-​volume Cultural works [Kulturarbeiten] (1901–​ 17) is estimated to have sold up to 67,000 copies.55 Despite wielding much influence among both professional circles and popular audiences, little has been written about the energetic writer and architect who led the traditionalist movement in Germany. Images played a central didactic –​indeed propagandistic –​role in promoting traditionalism as a viable and sophisticated

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architectural (and ethical) response to the conditions of industrial capitalism. Architectural historian Julius Posener (born in 1904) remembered the frequency of finding Cultural works ‘on the bookcases of the educated middle classes’. Growing up in the thoroughly middle-​class suburb of Lichterfelde-​West in Berlin, Posener reminisced: ‘As a young boy of fourteen I vividly remember my excitement upon receiving one of the volumes. I remember the love with which I read and viewed it repeatedly, and the sense of security it lent as I cultivated my taste.’56 While Posener’s essay on Schultze-​Naumburg began with this warm memory, it ended with dismissal of the writer and architect’s feeble reformism. This judgement is not surprising; two years after Posener received this cherished volume as a teenager, Schultze-​Naumburg joined the Nazi Party. Born Paul Eduard Schultze in 1869, Schultze-​ Naumburg grew up close to the small town of Naumburg, once an important medieval trading city and home to a notable cathedral with a rich collection of medieval sculpture. Schultze-​Naumburg presumably changed his name later out of affinity with his Heimat. In 1886 he began studying landscape painting before moving to Munich in 1893 where he ran a private painting school. In 1901, he established the Saalecker Werkstätten near Naumburg, which produced furniture, architecture, and garden designs. By 1910 the firm had expanded to Berlin, Cologne, and Essen, and employed over seventy staff (including the notable architect Heinrich Tessenow). Without any formal training as an architect, Schultze-​Naumburg designed many country houses and palaces for the upper-​middle classes, most notably the Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam.57 While his background as an autodidact architect suited the anti-​university establishment attitude held by other traditionalists like Muthesius, his buildings infamously lacked finesse, resembling more the villas of the ‘style architects’. His notable House Schuster in Markneukirchen, which featured in Country house and garden, was a bulky neo-​Biedermeier mansion that stood out among the more refined dwellings in the volume (Figure 4.9). While his paintings and architectural design work remained unremarkable, Schultze-​Naumburg soon became a central protagonist in leading reformist organisations, including the Werkbund, the Dürerbund (an association for aesthetic education named after Albrecht Dürer), the German Garden City Association, and the Association for Homeland Protection (Bund Heimatschutz), becoming chairman of the latter upon its founding in 1904. All these organisations sought to preserve traditional middle-​ class culture through aesthetic education. The Association for Homeland Protection set out to guard Germany’s regional natural and built environments against the deleterious visual effects of industrialisation. While many of its members also belonged to the Werkbund, the Association for Homeland Protection was more conservative and anti-​industrial. It was nevertheless a thriving organisation, with membership standing at 15,000

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Figure 4.9  Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, Schuster country house.

in 1911. With twenty-​nine branches, its reach extended across Germany.58 As well as promoting the protection of existing buildings, it advocated for the construction of new architecture and small urban settlements that responded to regional identity. The new ‘Heimat style’ would respond to the genius loci. Under the intellectual leadership of Schultze-​ Naumburg, the Association for Homeland Protection was strongly committed to protecting and promoting the architectural style characteristic of the classical era of Goethe (1749–​1832) and the Biedermeier era (1815–​48). As the Central European equivalent of the French Empire style and the English Georgian style, the simplicity of the Biedermeier style reflected the modest domestic tastes and lifestyles of the flourishing middle classes who left a strong mark on the German landscape. The word itself emerged among the middle classes in the late nineteenth century in a more self-​deprecating sense, bieder being an adjective to describe someone who is ‘honest’, ‘simple’, ‘straightforward’, and Meier being an old name for a farm tenant or steward. The classic image of the Biedermeier family was an apolitical family who revelled in the simple aesthetic pleasures of the home.59 While Muthesius rarely mentioned ‘Biedermeier’, Schultze-​Naumburg brought the term to common parlance in applied arts circles, and he soon became the chief representative of the neo-​Biedermeier style. Why this fascination with the Biedermeier period at the beginning of the twentieth century? The late-​ nineteenth-​ century admiration for

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The culture of the visible

the Biedermeier architecture of Schinkel’s era was closely linked to the legendary rise of the educated elite in Germany. The cultivated middle-​ class individual was materially modest (like the honest farmer) but intellectually noble. The Biedermeier world was ‘neither pastoral nor proletarian: it was bürgerlich’.60 The lifestyle of the educated middle classes during the Biedermeier era played a crucial role in crafting modern German national identity. Among the handful of romanticised buildings upon which Schultze-​Naumburg and other advocates of the period 1749–​1848 consistently drew, a special place was reserved for Goethe’s country residence and Weimar city residence, as well as Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s domestic residences for Berlin’s burgeoning educated middle classes in the early nineteenth century.61 These buildings represented typical sachlich buildings, possessing the character of anonymity and visual sobriety attuned to the modest needs of their inhabitants. Resuscitating the architecture of the Biedermeier in order to counter the follies of historicism might seem paradoxical. Yet the discourse on the Biedermeier was more about finding terms of historical continuity rather than resurrection. Edited by Dürerbund founder Ferdinand Avenerius, the magazine Der Kunstwart led the way in formulating these terms. In an article providing advice on home decoration, Avenerius identified three different notions of style: historical style (the art-​historical designation of the art of a civilisational epoch), a sense of personal style, and what he labelled ‘objective style’ (Sach-​Stil), the ‘identification of material and purpose through form and colour’.62 Avenerius’ goal was to separate the emergent pragmatism towards materials and craftsmanship that many readers associated with the poverty of their great-​grandparents from the search for style in typical art-​historical terms. Any historical style could also be sachlich if its materials and decorative programme communicated fuss-​free practicality, economy, utility, and comfort. This was an evolving programme rather than a dead style. In recommending Sach-​Stil, Avenerius assured his readers that stripping one’s apartment of all historicist conceits would not make it ‘unstylish’.63 Efforts to elevate the artistic worth of the Biedermeier continued. In his 1905 article ‘Biedermeier style?’, Schultze-​Naumburg attempted to defend his own reputation as the ‘man who wants to reintroduce the Biedermeier style’ by rejecting the question of style altogether.64 He complained that every new house built with a clear floor plan and with simple construction techniques and materials seemed to be labelled ‘Biedermeier style’. The emergence of the new ‘spiritualised middle classes’ (Bürgertum) in the late eighteenth century demanded a new level of restraint in architecture. They demanded tradition for tradition’s sake. For Schultze-​Naumburg, a truly middle-​class contemporary architecture needed to remain tethered to tradition rather than obsess over stylistic questions that encouraged a technologically deterministic style of theorising.

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Today we do not wait to see whether a new requirement calls for a change in the traditional forms of construction, but rather, we rack out brains: where in the world could I change something now to come up with a new style, and secondly (an even stranger question) what in the world is it that I actually want to express with this new style?

The logic of the Biedermeier precisely resisted questions of style as well as formal imitation. Its material modesty resisted reduction to easily copied stylistic motifs. It necessitated a critical reflection over the lost ties between aesthetics and social ethics. The anonymous, sobering, honest craftsmanship of the old builders of the Biedermeier stood in contrast to the pattern-​book practices of the ‘style architect’, or what Schultze-​ Naumburg described as the ‘aesthetic schoolmaster’. He lamented: When the German aesthetic schoolmaster shattered the tradition of our era, he gifted us a textbook of historical styles, or to be more precise, of forms of adornment […] Thanks to these templates, one can now request anything from the simplest master bricklayer in the province: Gothic, Roman, German Imperial –​or ‘Secession style’ –​the corresponding ornament is then glued on to the cubic interior divisions, and the higher or lower price determines the number of ‘motifs’ used. Should in older buildings there be an oriel window here or a cupola generated from a little stair tower there to form picturesque enrichments of the exterior appearance, villa suburbs today form illustrated catalogues of patterns of misunderstood old forms.65

For Schultze-​Naumburg, the older buildings of the period from 1749 to 1848 did not belong to a buried past but represented an evolving tradition that was able to break the cycle of self-​referentiality that characterised eclectic historicism. Tradition was not antithetical to modernism –​ architecture’s capacity as a social art meant that the source of its progress would always be found in inherited social networks. The modern world was the middle-​class world. While the tradition of simplicity, sobriety, and Sachlichkeit that characterised middle-​class architecture may have been marked by slow evolution rather than revolution, the overspecialisation and self-​referentiality that characterised the development of textbook historicism was, in Schultze-​Naumburg’s view, completely stunted. Up until the culmination of the Biedermeier style, everything followed its logical, normal path of healthy development. Until that point, aesthetic sensibility was in harmony with the demands and technical state of the times. The strange confusion generated by the dawning of a new era also generated stylistic chaos […] This period of deliberate historical hunting for styles finally had to be recognised as a lamentable aberration. First in England, and then everywhere, the realisation dawned that we had sinned gravely in the cause of human creativity […] However, one can only begin at the point where the development was interrupted, and therefore our most modern art should in the first instance be reminiscent of the early nineteenth century and attempt to transfer this style on to our changed circumstances, on to the results of our tremendous scientific progress.66

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The culture of the visible

For Schultze-​Naumburg, the possibility of socially progressive aesthetics relied upon digging up the true historical source of middle-​class values. To understand contemporary circumstances, architects must go back to understand the origins of sachlich aesthetics –​to understand when architecture first served a class of people who abandoned the political sphere in favour of an aesthetic life. Domestic interior design was the starting point for rediscovering and reforming modern middle-​ class taste. Schultze-​ Naumburg wrote much on this topic and directed his advice towards a Mittelstand audience of ‘civil servants, teachers, educated traders, etc.’,67 whom he believed were the modern harbingers of Biedermeier sobriety. They were the classic cultivated but materially poor middle classes. They earned too little to slip into decadence but enough to make their homes comfortable and suitably stylish with the right guidance. Schultze-​Naumburg wrote a piece ‘On the cultivation of art among the Mittelstand’ (1897–​8), which featured in Der Kunstwart. It was later republished by Diederichs as Domestic cultivation of art in 1903. Across 150 pages, Schultze-​Naumburg gave advice to his readers on how to cultivate a ‘fundamental sense of Sachlichkeit, functionality, and comfort’ in all aspects of their domestic setting, including their walls, floors, doors and windows, curtains, carpets, furniture, paintings, framing, clocks, table settings, cutlery, lighting, objets d’art, collections, book bindings, plants, flowers, and even house pets (from the Spitz to the ‘ornamental beauty of the Borzoi’).68 Schultze-​Naumburg did not intend for his instructions to be prescriptive. The sachlich interior could not be designed by the architect as a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). It needed to be intuited by the inhabitant, for a home should look as though ‘those who live there have understood how to use and cultivate their eyes’.69 Domestic cultivation of art was composed completely of text. After receiving a Kodak from Diederichs, however, Schultze-​Naumburg began to consider the powerful didactic possibilities of photography and started accumulating photographic images for his Cultural works. In a 1900 essay for Der Kunstwart, he wrote enthusiastically on the artistic potential of the new medium.70 He found nothing paradoxical about using new industrial inventions as aids for aesthetic observation of the German landscape. In a 1909 article on the benefits of the car, he rebuked common accusations against his car use (‘What? You, chairman of the Association for Homeland Protection, are a motorist?’) to argue that motoring had become the modern cultural equivalent of hiking.71 Where the folklorist Riehl had set off to document the German landscape on foot, Schultze-​Naumburg took the car (albeit with his chauffeur). While train travel disrupted views, the car allowed one to gain freedom and a childlike sense of adventure that was once possessed by the hiker. The car had become the supreme way of ‘travelling, looking, observing, and collecting’.72 Local car travel was

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The architecture of social reform the new Grand Tour. Renouncing the tradition of sending off academically trained building archaeologists to Italy or Syria to excavate and sketch archaeological treasures, Schultze-​Naumburg’s modern aesthetic observer in possession of a car and a camera need not be a specialist. Modern architectural education would deal not with the buried but with the easily visible. Therein lay the powerful democratising function that Schultze-​Naumburg saw in modern technological aids like photography. Photography made architectural appreciation not just available to ‘schoolmaster’ architects but to the broader population, who needed not possess detailed historical knowledge or drawing skill but merely the power to observe and document all that was simple, functional, and sachlich in the German landscape. Much of Schultze-​Naumburg’s text for Cultural works was serialised in Der Kunstwart in 1900 before the first volume was published by Georg Callwey in 1901. The first volume focused on house construction (1901), the second on gardens (1902), the third on farmhouses, villages, and workers’ colonies (1904), the fourth on city planning (1906), the fifth on small house construction (1907), the sixth on palaces (1910), and the seventh to ninth on the German landscape more generally. The seventh volume covered paths, streets, and plant life (1916), the eighth covered geology and water management (1916), and the ninth covered industry (1917).73 Most photographs were taken by Schultze-​ Naumburg himself. The coverage of topics was eclectic, yet the term ‘cultural works’ (referring not to the volumes themselves but the buildings and objects photographed) allowed this diffuse world of appearances to be brought into a common frame of reference. Palaces and farmhouses, bridges and forests, palatial gardens and mills were all ‘cultural works’ that denied socially static distinctions between artwork and object, high and low, natural and manmade. Cultural works were not detached artworks but objects made with working hands. Cultural works captured society not as a set of classifications but as a constantly evolving organism. To be sure, Schultze-​ Naumburg’s ideas about aesthetics, society, and ethics were not particularly pioneering, nor were they particularly sophisticated. His views conformed to the conventional rhetoric of aesthetic reform emanating from the applied arts associations of which he was a member. These books were, in Kai Gutschow’s words, ‘mass media with some populist shock value’.74 The architect’s skill lay in turning this rhetoric into seductive images that could educate wide audiences. The sheer scale of photographic work contained in Cultural works formed a new pedagogy of visual bombardment. As Kirsten Weiss put it, he ‘understood, maybe more so than scholarly sociologists, the need to provide simple images of society in order to construct and strengthen nationalist heritage and culture’.75 The visual politics of the photographic book fulfilled the reformist role hitherto played by sociology. In the foreword to



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the first volume of Cultural works, Schultze-​Naumburg emphasised that the volumes were: not directed exclusively to those we call ‘educated’. My wish is to attract the people –​the lower-​middle classes, the peasants, the workers –​those who are active in the ongoing transformation of the appearance of our land. Some will say to me: those people do not read books. I reply: we must seek to bring books to the people that they can read. The statistics of our public libraries speak for us. What better possible means to affect the broad masses than with cheap books and illustrations? Naturally, the movement can only be swept along with [building] activity that leads to imitation. But that is not within my power and so I must be content to persuade through words and images.76

This pedagogical programme was deeply ethical. For Schultze-​Naumburg, aesthetic manipulation of the natural world by humankind always constituted an ethical act. The value scales of the ‘beautiful and the ugly’, the ‘practical and the useless’, and the ‘morally good and bad’ were all deeply interrelated.77 In the tradition of Ruskin, Augustus Pugin, and Eugène Viollet-​le-​Duc, Schultze-​Naumburg’s Cultural works sought to strip away the conceits of academicised architectural conventions and establish a new ethics of architecture based on truth and honesty. Unlike Ruskin’s Christian socialism, Pugin’s deep religiosity, or Viollet-​le-​Duc’s rationalism, Schultze-​Naumburg’s ethics was rooted in the social life of the German nation, the artistic culture to which the architect felt he had special access. Like Muthesius, Schultze-​Naumburg believed that the ideal sachlich middle-​ class home had its archetype in the farmhouse –​an object of ultra-​slow adaptation to social needs based on proven solutions by rural master masons, which resisted the fluctuations of courtly style (or at least was slow to integrate them into its own ‘objective style’, to borrow Avenerius’ term). Underneath stylistic innovation existed a substructure of slow typological evolution that lay deep in the roots of the German nation. ‘Next to the Renaissance house, the Baroque house, the Rococo house, and the Empire house’, Schultze-​Naumburg explained in Cultural works, ‘there is yet another house. The primaeval house [Ur-​haus], so to speak. A house that does not change quickly year to year, but barely changes over one hundred years.’78 The ‘fall from paradise’ for Schultze-​Naumburg occurred when the roots of the ‘tree of the aesthetic culture of the visible’ became corrupted and typological confusion abounded, causing ‘proletarian houses to look like palaces, palaces like Swiss houses, farmhouses like penitentiaries, penitentiaries like churches, and churches like train stations’.79 He argued that if local building traditions were allowed to continue to adapt, ‘we would have today what the Englishman has: the national house. And we too: the German house.’80 In the first volume, on House construction, Schultze-​Naumburg established a presentation style very similar to Pugin’s 1836 book Contrasts,

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Figure 4.10  Guest house in Neuflemmingen.

with an example of a ‘good’ house on the recto pages (Figure 4.10) and a poor historicist equivalent on the verso pages (Figure 4.11). He kept the textual commentary conversational, asking his readers not to attempt to read the facade of the house for textbook patterns, but rather to try to feel the interior function and sense of purpose emanating from its appearance. Is it showing an honest face or is it being deceptive? ‘Take a look at a house like [Figure 4.10] entirely without prejudice and allow yourself to take it in’, he instructed his readers. ‘Isn’t everything here speaking in earnest about an outlook on life that combines serenity, noble dignity, propriety, measuredness, and reverie?’ By contrast, in the pseudo-​regionalist house of Figure 4.11, ‘symmetry becomes more important than Sachlichkeit’. Dressed up in costume with trimmings glued to the gable, the house is a ‘Swiss fantasy of a man who has certainly never been to Switzerland’.81 Schultze-​Naumburg’s selection of good examples showed his predisposition for solid white stuccoed walls, inviting entries, gable or mansard roofs that wrap around cosy attic spaces, and unassuming windows that appear like drooping eyelids (Figure 4.12). He also much admired the Goethe-​ era houses that exuded classic Doric simplicity (Figure 4.13).

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The culture of the visible

Figure 4.11  ‘Counterexample’.

These houses might possess many foreign Italianate or Nordic influences, but for Schultze-​Naumburg their adaptation to the social needs of the German household were much more honest than pseudo-​Germanic or pseudo-​Gothic exteriors that held no correspondence to their contents, such as ‘battlements where there are no battlements, stair turrets where there are no stairs, gables that cover nothing, and spires where nothing needs to soar up to the heavens!’82 The fifth volume of Cultural works was dedicated to small houses for the lower-​middle classes and dispensed with counterexamples altogether. This volume contained an eclectic mixture of dwellings, ranging from rural to urban houses to community centres, that all radiated the sobriety of 1749–​1849 but also betrayed Schultze-​Naumburg’s nostalgia for the rustic (Figures 4.14–​16). At times he appears to celebrate the purely archaic, equating the old with the good and the new with the bad. It is difficult to find many things worth imitating in the examples of old multi-​storey housing featured in the volume (Figure 4.17), which aside from their commitment to sobriety did not look much more comfortable or artistically dignified than most modern tenement housing. His romanticised

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Figure 4.12  House in Torgau.

portrait of these old ramshackle abodes betrays a patronising gaze on the underclasses. The images and text of Cultural works were not structured according to any rigorous analytical framework. Most notable was Schultze-​Naumburg’s tendency to anthropomorphise his buildings. Like the interior world of animated objects, from the spoon to the sofa to the Spitz, the sachlich house expressed its own personality in the German landscape. His readers

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The culture of the visible

Figure 4.13  Shooters’ association clubhouse.

were told that the good sachlich house has the countenance of a ‘friendly old farmer’ while the bad Gründerzeit house has the countenance of the ‘decked-​out parvenu’.83 The text rarely went beyond this level of aesthetic scrutiny. Rejecting artistic intellectualism as prejudiced, Schultze-​ Naumburg placed a premium on moral feeling when distinguishing a building that is functional and beautiful from one that is deceptive and ugly. He rarely provided construction dates or historical context for the buildings he reproduced. In the text, good examples were simply described as ‘old’ or were presumed to be from the Goethe or Biedermeier eras. By his own admission, most photographs of counterexamples were taken within a ten-​minute walk of Schultze-​Naumburg’s house. Most first editions of the volumes in Cultural works contained captions detailing building type and location. These captions were omitted entirely in many of the later editions. Aside from Schultze-​Naumburg’s clear typographical preference for white space, details of date and location that might aid the reader in identifying the local specificity of building traditions were perhaps considered too distracting when identifying genuinely traditional buildings from the deceptively historical ones. He chose anonymous buildings that were precisely excluded from catalogues of art history. In parts of Cultural works, Schultze-​Naumburg expressed hostility to any historical reading his work might evoke.84

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Figure 4.14  Community house in Saalfeld.

These photographic volumes played an essential role in expanding the kind of cultural research work available to architects who were hitherto limited to doing archaeological work or style-​based historical analysis. Yet the anti-​intellectualism that ran through each volume brought forth new paradoxes that exposed the dangers of ‘visible culture’ as an ideology of aesthetic reform that circumvented genuine political engagement. Accepting Schultze-​Naumburg’s claim that Cultural works was not intended as a documentary catalogue or reference work but as a ‘stimulus for reflection and observation’, it becomes difficult to envisage just how the architect’s strident traditionalism could have translated into a programme for action.85 He emphasised that the volumes were not intended to supply a textbook of forms for architects to imitate. Every good house must consider ‘climate, location, tribal peculiarities of inhabitants, building purpose, building site and cardinal directions, available materials, forms specific to the handicraft of the region, and customs of construction’.86 Indeed, the revival of local traditions in building was central to the activities successfully carried out by the Association for Homeland Protection. The coherence of Cultural works, however, relied upon the more essentialising construct of the ideal national type: the simple ‘German house’. From the ramshackle abode to the country house to the castle, the archetypal

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Figure 4.15  Urban houses in Minden in Westfalen.

remnants of the German house were present everywhere in the national landscape. Schultze-​Naumburg’s photographic collection sought to make visible these hidden threads of a shared culture –​overcoming modern class divisions and uniting society in a shared aesthetic vision of an authentic pre-​capitalist past. It is not surprising that Cultural works was very favourably reviewed by Muthesius, despite the latter’s suspicions of the anti-​industrial ideology of the Heimat movement.87 Both architects based their projects for architectural reform on a belief in the primacy of estate-​based society and a faith in the role of the traditional middle classes in providing national cultural leadership (although Schultze-​Naumburg’s vision was much more populist). While Schultze-​Naumburg did not profess to be able to ‘solve the social question’, he nonetheless voiced his surprise that ‘those who held the workers’ movement close to their hearts completely overlook the effect that exterior forms exert on the inner character of the people’.88 These words take on a more insidious form when read in the context of Schultze-​Naumburg’s post-​war career. While many of the architectural values espoused in Cultural works would come to underpin the ethics of International Style modernism, Schultze-​Naumburg himself reacted strongly against these internationalising trends with racist and anti-​Semitic ramblings, as in his 1928 book Art and

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Figure 4.16  Small houses on the old city wall in Hirschhorn am Neckar.

race, in which he sought to illustrate parallels between avant-​garde artworks and signs of physical and mental ‘degeneracy’ in photographs of human bodies.89 In Schultze-​Naumburg’s post-​war writings, the culture of the visible became pure fascist propaganda.

Paul Mebes: The sachlich house As the decorative craze of the Jugendstil began to wane in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century, Muthesius and Schultze-​Naumburg’s design fundamentals of Sachlichkeit, traditionalism, and anti-​ individualism assumed a position of authority in modern architectural discourse

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The culture of the visible

Figure 4.17  Corner house in Nuremberg.

and practice. A generation of architects began integrating the essence of neo-​classical and Biedermeier domestic architecture into their practice with more sophistication than Schultze-​Naumburg’s own practice. One of those architects was Paul Mebes. Born in 1872 in Magdeburg, Mebes trained as a carpenter under his father before studying architecture at the Technical University of Berlin.90 In 1899 he gained the position of Regierungsbaumeister (government architect) in Berlin. He quickly became one of the most influential architects working on public-​benefit housing before the First World War. As a member of the Werkbund, he was a dedicated reformist. His innovative and humanising solutions to affordable urban apartment design won him favour in city planning circles. In 1911, he began a successful architectural firm with his brother-​in-​law Paul Emmerich. From 1919, he was employed as a teacher at the Technical

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The architecture of social reform University of Berlin. Mebes became best known, however, for his 1908 photographic book Around 1800, which became a vital resource for young architects to reconnect with traditional ways of building. Among the many architects and critics seeking to reform visible culture in Germany, Mebes is notable not because he was an exceptionally innovative thinker, but because he exemplified everything that had come to represent the ‘middle path’ taken by modern traditionalists. He believed that social reform started with the provision of good, comfortable single-​ family housing; he sought a vernacular language that rejected kitschy folk in favour of a more sophisticated and urbane image of German culture; and he pursued a decorative programme for his exteriors that was familiar and homely, yet committed to the modern sachlich project of austerity, anonymity, and, above all, good craftsmanship. Along with Alfred Messel, Paul Jatzow, and Albert Gessner, Mebes was one of a handful of architects bringing new sophistication to the design of urban apartment facades in Germany.91 Gessner’s work was most overt in its ruralism. His book The German apartment house: A contribution to contemporary urban culture (1909) outlined an approach to facade design that could counter the monotony of the five-​storey apartment building facade without resorting to the decorative pomp that characterised most tenement housing in Berlin. His highly original exterior designs consisted of interlaced rural motifs that articulated the block facade as a series of ‘stacked’ country houses. Gessner’s facades, such as one at Grolmannstraße 4/​5 in Charlottenburg, Berlin (1906/​7), conveys an equal degree of rusticity and opulence in keeping with its surroundings in the upper-​class Charlottenburg (Figure 4.18). In contrast, Mebes stuck to a more restrained, tried-​and-​ tested classicism typical of the era of 1749–​1849. Between 1906 and 1914 he designed eight apartment housing projects in Berlin for lower-​and middle-​ income households that developed his formal language. These projects served not the urban elite, but rather a fast-​rising class of office workers and civil servants (the ‘new Mittelstand’). Most of the projects were carried out through the Berlin Civil Servant Housing Association (Beamten-​ Wohnungsverein zu Berlin), a large-​scale non-​profit association that built small and medium-​sized houses for lower-​paid civil servants. Mebes’ most notable project for the Association was a housing block in Steglitz, Berlin (1907–​8) (Figures 4.19–20), which featured two elongated apartment buildings sloping around a residential path. The use of red brick indigenous to Prussian local industry grounded the facades in their environment. Hitherto considered a lowly and outdated material, Mebes’ skilful use of brick helped revive the building traditions of local craftsmen and lent both monumental and humanising form to urban living for the lower-​ middle classes. He soon came to be considered the most important architect working with this material.92 The rhythmic use of red brick throughout

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Figure 4.18  Albert Gessner, courtyard apartment facade.

anticipates Walter Curt Behrendt’s notion of the continuous facade, while the interjecting temple-​like gabled fronts displaying more sophisticated sculptural features stand as testimony to the new cultural authority of the middle classes housed behind them.93

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Figure 4.19  Paul Mebes, housing for civil servants in Steglitz, Berlin.

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The culture of the visible

Figure 4.20  Sculptural detail of housing in Steglitz.

Another important housing project built in partnership with the Association was Zehlendorf Garden City (1912) (Figure 4.21) in Berlin. Mebes was able to finish ninety-​two houses in Zehlendorf before building was interrupted by the First World War. Five-​ storey construction was forsaken in this project for more traditional middle-​class single-​ family terraced houses with large back gardens. The modest facades reverted strongly to the classicism of 1749–​1849. Like the Stieglitz project, these houses succeeded in combining modesty with sophistication through the sparing use of decorative sculpture on each door that counterbalanced the otherwise austere facades. Perhaps offering concessions to the individuality of their owners, each uniquely designed door marked a symbolic entry into the independent and closed-​off life of the family. Whether working with a dense urban block or a garden suburb, Mebes’ projects were highly praised for balancing cheap cost with high health standards and fine craftsmanship. The work he did in partnership with the Association represented an ideal marriage between the social task of good housing provision and the aesthetic task of representing the new middle classes as the bearers of a progressive urban culture. The Zehlendorf project, in particular, came to encapsulate a movement that by 1912 was inseparable from Mebes’ book: a return to the architecture from ‘around 1800’ (um 1800). Of course, the era naturally demanded

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Figure 4.21  Paul Mebes, housing in Zehlendorf Garden City.

attention for producing Germany’s most famous architect, Schinkel, whose work represented the perfect melding of utilitarianism and pure classical beauty. Schinkel’s facades resonated with modern architects like Peter Behrens and Heinrich Tessenow, for whom the reform of visible culture was closely linked to the classical tenets of order, fitness for purpose, and tectonic clarity. Yet in the discourse on the architecture of ‘around 1800’ Schinkel began to be appreciated anew, not for his cosmopolitan sensibility but for his ability to adapt his work to local craft industries and to the emerging middle-​class domestic requirement for good style at a low cost. What was so significant about Mebes’ new catchphrase was that it denied the typical emphasis on formal style and individual ingenuity associated with terms like neo-​classicism, Biedermeier, and the ‘era of Schinkel’. ‘Around 1800’ was not about individual architects and epochal styles, but rather about understanding how architecture came to meet evolving socio-​ economic demands at a particular moment. This ethos resonated not just within architectural circles but within the discipline of art history, which began to appreciate Biedermeier furniture and decoration on its own terms and sought to raise it from its previously lowly artistic status. Art historian Hans Mackowsky’s 1910 article on Schinkel’s Feilner House in Berlin (1829) was typical of these efforts. The



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unassuming brick facade made from Feilner’s own locally manufactured burnt clay (Figure 4.22) served to mythologise the newfound pragmatism in apartment exterior design that occurred ‘around 1800’. According to Mackowsky, Schinkel’s turn away from universal neo-​classical notions of beauty (evident in the Guard House of 1818) towards more functionalist and materially modest forms of construction (evident in the red-​brick

Figure 4.22  Feilner House, facade.

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The architecture of social reform exterior of the Bauakademie of 1832–​6) was due to a fundamental shift in the Prussian architect’s design philosophy when he met the modest craftsman Feilner. ‘Until now, Schinkel had too easily sacrificed the beauty in his buildings, and the solidity of the materials, to abstract formal notions of beauty’, Mackowsky claimed. ‘Now he wondered if the great, short-​ lasting plaster surfaces could not be replaced with more authentic and durable materials.’ Schinkel’s ingenuity owed itself to a realisation that the mission to establish a true art of building lay in bringing it into closer connection with craft practice.94 Subtitled Architecture and craft in the last hundred years of its traditional development, Mebes’ Around 1800 [Um 1800] honed the familiar narrative of middle-​class progress, which held that the period of 1748–​ 1849 saw the gradual separation of middle-​class art from aristocratic art, the former reaching a high point in Schinkel’s work before the rise of style-​ making academic schools sent architectural education into a downward spiral of senseless imitation.95 Like Muthesius and Schultze-​Naumburg, Mebes viewed this era as the last period in which architecture aligned harmoniously with local manufacturing and middle-​class cultural production. Containing some 800 photographic images (many amassed from colleagues), the first volume of Around 1800 was dedicated to capturing ‘street scenes, public and residential buildings, churches and chapels, public stairs, front doors, and iron railings, and monuments’, while the second volume covered ‘palaces and urban houses for burghers, country, manor, and summer houses, gates, bridges, interior decoration, and household furniture’. The selection of these ‘cultural works’ was mostly urban. The books featured illustrations from over 100 cities, offering a large window into traditional architecture across the states of the German confederation as well as from their neighbours in Central Europe and the Baltic region. For some photographs, Mebes offered exact construction dates. Others were simply described as being from ‘around 1750’ or ‘around 1800’. Most captions omitted dates altogether. The criteria that guided the best architecture of this period were familiar. In his introduction, Mebes asked his readers to look in the book’s photographs for unassumingness, uniformity, decorative restraint befitting of buildings of limited means and humble materials, and a ‘healthy sense of Sachlichkeit’ (Figures 4.23–​24).96 The guiding ethos for Mebes was anonymity. While the first volume of Around 1800 opened with textual references to Schinkel, the ensuing visual collection omitted references to individual architects. The book can be read as an attempt to inhabit Schinkel’s gaze through the photographic lens –​to capture the modest world of the anonymous urban craftsmen and burgher clients that Schinkel had grown to understand so well. Mebes did not intend to provide a catalogue of historically valuable works, or a pattern book of forms for imitation, but rather intended to recreate a lost world of unified artistic production that

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Figure 4.23  Dwelling in Krefeld.

his readers could momentarily occupy. In his introduction, he encouraged young architects to ‘look up’ at the remaining buildings from around 1800 that the public too often passed by without a thought, and which contemporary architects shrugged off as too ‘sober or even poor’.97 While influenced by Cultural works, Mebes’ Around 1800 contained nothing of the patronising tone underpinning the former’s ‘example’ and ‘counterexample’ style of presentation and accompanying commentary.

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Figure 4.24  Middle-​class townhouse.

Aside from the short introductory text, he largely let the photographs speak for themselves. Proper to his high official status, Mebes sought a less populist audience than Schultze-​Naumburg, pitching the book at young architects and an educated public who perhaps already had copies of Muthesius and Schultze-​Naumburg’s books and had assimilated the doctrine of Sachlichkeit. His explicit aim was to create ‘new study material’ for the next generation of architecture students to reconnect their practice to the traditional crafts.98 Like Muthesius, he complained of the ‘superficial education [Bildung] and lack of sensitivity’ among the modern style architects, who in their anxiousness to create something new and avoid all signs of familiarity had led the discipline into confusion.99 Like Camillo Sitte, he was unabashedly traditionalist in his pedagogical philosophy, ensuring his readers that ‘our buildings and household furniture will be dear to us if they remind us in a natural and clever way of the work of our fathers’.100 While Around 1800 represented a more urbane cross-​ section of works than Schultze-​ Naumburg’s decidedly rustic collection, Mebes nonetheless couched his work in familiar cautionary words over moral and cultural decline that had underpinned much of the popular conservative draw of the period of around 1800. If style architects had wreaked most havoc in the sphere of domestic art, it was also this sphere that would serve as a basis for reform by investing a new modesty into the spiritual lives of the middle classes. In the introduction to his second



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volume, Mebes whimsically expressed his hopes that modern architects would once again return to building houses ‘with the Sachlichkeit, love, and sensitivity of our ancestors’ and that ‘we will once again see beautiful streets and express healthy family life in our dwellings’.101 For Mebes, a unified German visual culture would have a democratising social function. Only from that day on, when every last architect, supported by a capable, independent class of craftsmen, has fully mastered a single artistic language easily accessible by the public, will our work, as in earlier centuries, once again be certain of gaining the lively interest of all social classes. Only when the whole nation has once more been permeated by an understanding for modest, truly homely [häuslich] art […] will a fertile soil once again have been created from which the highest and most wonderful masterpieces will flourish.102

By calling for artistic unity, Mebes was not encouraging a return to the static world of Biedermeier production but was rather seeking to re-​engage the terms of evolution of a genuine ‘bürgerlich art of building’ in order to progress it further according to modern requirements.103 Of course, this position was nothing new. It was, by 1908, a well-​ rehearsed one among a milieu of modern traditionalists in architecture and city planning to which Mebes belonged. After the First World War, Mebes’ liberal-​conservative politics and his artistic position as a ‘moderate modernist’ became increasingly marginal in a cultural climate that pitted the socialist techno-​utopianism of the avant-​gardists against the increasingly racist conservatism of figures like Schultze-​Naumburg. Nonetheless, in his 1918 foreword to the third edition of Around 1800, critic Walter Curt Behrendt noted how much Mebes’ traditionalist ethos continued to resonate in a post-​war atmosphere of sobriety and thriftiness. The world of 1800 that Mebes uncovered continued to offer lessons for making a ‘virtue out of need without letting our eyes starve’.104 Even after the Biedermeier craze fell away, Mebes’ myth of the self-​disciplining eye of the modern architect remained central to the spirit of conservative progress in architectural circles.

Notes 1 Hermann Muthesius, ‘Mein Haus in Nikolassee’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 23 (1908), 1–​21. 2 Didem Ekici, ‘In praise of poverty: The middle-​class dwelling and asceticism in early twentieth-​century Germany’, The Journal of Architecture, 18:3 (2013), 364–​80. On the intellectual roots of the term Sachlichkeit in German architectural theory, see Stanford Anderson, ‘Sachlichkeit and modernity, or realist architecture’, in Henry F. Mallgrave (ed.), Otto Wagner: Reflections on the raiment of modernity (Santa Monica, CA: Getty, 1993), 323–​60. 3 Claire Zimmerman, Photographic architecture in the twentieth century (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 3. 4 From unpaginated foreword in Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Hausbau, 2nd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904).

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The architecture of social reform 5 I borrow this term from Ilia Roubanis, ‘Folk culture and nation-​building in the less than developed world: A study on the visual culture of citizenship’, in Timothy Baycroft and David Hopkin (eds), Folklore and nationalism in Europe during the long nineteenth century (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 49–​68. 6 On the history of the perceived ‘fall from paradise’ in late-​nineteenth-​century historiography, see Stefan Muthesius, ‘Periodisation according to authenticity, or creating vigorous borderlines in nineteenth-​century architectural history’, National Identities, 8:3 (2006), 277–​86. 7 Alina Payne, From ornament to object: Genealogies of architectural modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). For a concise overview of modern applied arts theory in Germany, see Mitchell Schwarzer, German architectural theory and the search for modern identity (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 8 On the history of applied arts publications, see Stefan Muthesius, ‘Communications between traders, users and artists: The growth of German language serial publications on domestic interior decoration in the later nineteenth century’, Journal of Design History, 18:1 (2005), 7–​20. 9 Hermann Muthesius, ‘Wo stehen wir?’, in Die Durchgeistigung der deutschen Arbeit: Wege und Ziele in Zusammenhang von Industrie, Handwerk und Kunst (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1912), p. 16. On the history of the Werkbund, see Joan Campbell, The German Werkbund: The politics of reform in the applied arts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). The best recent histories of the Werkbund are Matthew Jefferies, Politics and culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The case of industrial architecture (Oxford: Berg, 1995); Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design theory and mass culture before the First World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); and John V. Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus: Architec­ ture, politics, and the German state, 1890–​1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 10 Ironically, a lot of the theorising around the English Arts and Crafts movement as proto-​modern took place in the German-​speaking world. On the classical history of the origins of German modernism in the English Arts and Crafts movement, see Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the modern movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Faber & Faber, 1936). On the German perception of English Arts and Crafts, see Stefan Muthesius, Das englische Vorbild: Eine Studie zu den Reformbewegungen in Architektur, Wohnbau und Kunstgewerbe im spateren 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Prestel, 1974). 11 Karin Priem and Christine Mayer, ‘Learning how to see and feel: Alfred Lichtwark and his concept of artistic and aesthetic education’, Paedagogica Historica, 53:3 (2017), 199–​213. 12 See John A. Williams, Turning to nature in Germany: Hiking, nudism, and conservation, 1900–​1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 13 Matthew Jeffries offers an excellent summary of the life reform movement. See Matthew Jefferies, ‘Lebensreform: A middle-​class antidote to Wilhelminism’, in Geoff Eley and James Retallack (eds), Wilhelminism and its legacies: German modernities, imperialism, and the meaning of reform, 1890–​1930 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003). 14 Mark Jarzombek, ‘The “Kunstgewerbe”, the “Werkbund”, and the aesthetics of culture in the Wilhelmine period’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 53:1 (1994), 19. 15 Julius Langbehn, Rembrandt as educator (London: Wermod & Wermod, 2017), originally published anonymously as Von einem deutschen [Julius Langbehn], Rembrandt als Erzieher (Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1890). 16 For analysis of Langbehn’s influence in the context of ethnic (völkisch) thought, see Fritz Stern, The politics of cultural despair: A study in the rise of the Germanic ideology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961).

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17 See Susanne Jany, ‘Operative Räume: Prozessarchitekturen im späten 19. Jahrhundert’, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 12:1 (2015), 33–​43. 18 Uta Hassler and Elena Pliego, ‘Josef Durm and Auguste Choisy: A working relationship’, in Francisco Javier Girón Sierra and Santiago Huerta Fernández (eds), Auguste Choisy (1841–​1909): L’architecture et l’art de bâtir (Madrid: Instituto Juan de Herrera, 2009), p. 269. See Josef Durm, Die Baukunst der Griechen (Darmstadt: Diehl, 1881); Josef Durm, Die Baukunst der Etrusker, die Baukunst der Römer (Darmstadt: Diehl, 1885); Josef Durm, Die Baukunst der Renaissance in Italien (Stuttgart: Arnold Bergsträsser, 1903). 19 Hermann Pfeifer, Die Formenlehre des Ornaments (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1906). 20 Langbehn, Rembrandt as educator, p. 109. 21 William M. Mahoney, ‘The publisher as Zeitkritiker: Eugen Diederichs and the frustrated response to German culture, 1896–​ 1930’, DPhil thesis, University of Connecticut, 1989. See also Gary D. Stark, Entrepreneurs of ideology: Neoconservative publishers in Germany, 1890–​1933 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). 22 Eduard Heyck (ed.), Moderne Kultur: Ein Handbuch der Lebensbildung und des guten Geschmacks, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-​Anstalt, 1907). 23 James S. Ackerman, ‘On the origins of architectural photography’, in Kester Rattenbury (ed.), This is not architecture: Media constructions (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 26–​36. 24 See ­chapter 1 of Jasmine Benyamin, ‘Towards a (new) objectivity: Photography in German architectural discourse 1900–​1914’, DPhil thesis, Princeton University, 2018. 25 Gerry Beegan, ‘The Studio: Photomechanical reproduction and the changing status of design’, Design Issues, 23:4 (2007), 46–​61. 26 Alfred Lichtwark, Die Bedeutung der Amateur-​Photographie (Halle: Knapp, 1894); Joseph A. Lux, Die Kunst des Amateurphotographen (Stuttgart: Strecker & Schröder 1910). For an English translation, see Joseph A. Lux and Mark Jarzombek, ‘Artistic secrets of the Kodak’, Thresholds, 22 (2001), 60–​ 3; Paul Schultze-​ Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Dörfer und Kolonien (Munich: Callwey, 1904), p. 193. 27 Hermann Muthesius, Die englische Baukunst der Gegenwart: Beispiele neuer englischer Profanbauten (Leipzig: Cosmos, 1900); Hermann Muthesius, Stilarchitektur und Baukunst: Wandlungen der Architektur im XIX Jahrhundert und ihr heutiger Standpunkt (Mülheim-​Ruhr: K. Schimmelpfeng, 1902), published in English as Style-​ architecture and building-​art: Transformations of architecture in the nineteenth century and its present condition, trans. Stanford Anderson (Santa Monica, CA: Getty, 1994); Hermann Muthesius, Das englische Haus (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1904–​5), published in English as The English house, ed. Dennis Sharp and Janet Seligman (London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1979); Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten: Beispiele neuzeitlicher Landhäuser nebst Grundrissen, Innenräumen und Gärten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907); Hermann Muthesius, Das moderne Landhaus und seine innere Ausstattung (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1905). 28 Hermann Muthesius, Wie baue ich mein Haus (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1917); Hermann Muthesius, Kleinhaus und Kleinsiedlung (Munich F. Bruckmann, 1918); Hermann Muthesius, Kann ich jetzt noch mein Haus bauen? (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1920). 29 For a comprehensive bibliography of Muthesius’ published work, see Muthesius, Style-​architecture. 30 For a history of Muthesius’ contribution to the Werkbund and his private architectural practice, see Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus. For a history of his contribution to architectural theory and domestic culture, see Fedor Roth, Hermann Muthesius und die Idee der Harmonischen Kultur (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 2001); and Laurent Stalder, Hermann Muthesius, 1861–​1927: Das Landhaus als kulturgeschichtlicher Entwurf (Zürich: gta Verlag, 2008).

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The architecture of social reform 31 Muthesius, The English house, p. 10. All quotes from The English house are taken from the English translation in consultation with the original text. 32 Ibid., p. 13. 33 Ibid., p. 41. 34 Ibid., p. 10. 35 Ibid., p. 63. 36 See Mark Wigley, White walls, designer dresses: The fashioning of modern architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 37 Muthesius, The English house, p. 3. On Muthesius’ use of photography in The English house, see Jasmine Benyamin, ‘Towards a (new) objectivity: Hermann Muthesius, photography and the English house’, The Journal of Architecture, 20:4 (2015), 579–​95. 38 Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten, p. xvi. 39 Muthesius, The English house, p. 11. 40 Ibid., p. 37. 41 Muthesius, Style-​architecture, p. 53. 42 Ibid., p. 53. 43 Ibid., pp. 59, 78. 44 Ekici, ‘In praise of poverty’, 366. 45 Muthesius, Style-​architecture, pp. 81–​2, 88–​90, 94–​5. 46 Ibid., p. 80. 47 On Berlin’s suburban development, see Jürgen Spohn and Julius Posener, Villen und Landhäuser in Berlin (Berlin: Nicolai, 1989); Harald Bodenschatz, Platz frei für das neue Berlin (Berlin: Transit Berlin, 1987); and Wolfgang Brönner, Die bürgerliche Villa in Deutschland, 1830–​1900 (Worms: Werner, 1994). 48 Muthesius, Style-​architecture, p. 96. 49 ‘Berliner Vorortvillen’, Berliner Tageblatt, Wohnungsanzeiger, 5 February 1911, 66. 50 Muthesius, Style-​architecture, p. 97. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., p. 96. 53 Ibid., p. 78. 54 Ibid., unpaginated foreword. 55 Lara E. Day, ‘Paul Schultze-​Naumburg: An intellectual biography’, DPhil thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2014, 9, 80. 56 Posener, Berlin auf dem Weg zu einer neuen Architektur, p. 191. 57 On Schultze-​Naumburg’s life and work, see Posener, Berlin auf dem Weg zu einer neuen Architektur, pp. 191–​7; Kai Gutschow, ‘The anti-​Mediterranean in the literature of modern architecture: Paul Schultze-​Naumburg’s Kulturarbeiten’, in Jean-​ François Lejeune and Michelangelo Sabatino (eds), Modern architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular dialogues and contested identities (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 149–​72; and Day, ‘Paul Schultze-​Naumburg’. 58 Christian F. Otto, ‘Modern environment and historical continuity: The Heimatschutz discourse in Germany’, Art Journal, 43:2 (1983), 149. On the history of the homeland protection movement, see also William H. Rollins, A greener vision of home: Cultural politics and environmental reform in the German Heimatschutz movement, 1904–​ 1918 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997); and Matthew Jefferies, ‘Back to the future? The “Heimatschutz” movement in Wilhelmine Germany’, History, 77:251 (1992), 411–​20. 59 David Blackbourn, The long nineteenth century: A history of Germany, 1780–​1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 118. 60 Mack Walker, German home towns: Community, state, and general state, 1648–​1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, [1971] 1998), p. 307. 61 For the broader influence of the Biedermeier era on other key modernists, see Stanford Anderson, ‘The legacy of German neoclassicism and Biedermeier: Behrens, Tessenow, Loos, and Mies’, Assemblage, 15 (August 1991), 63–​87.

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62 Ferdinand Avenarius, ‘Zehn Gebote zur Wohnungseinrichtung’, Der Kunstwart, 13:9 (1900), 344. 63 Ibid. 64 Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, ‘Biedermeierstil?’, Der Kunstwart, 19:3 (1905), 130–​7. 65 Schultze-​Naumburg, Hausbau, 2nd edn, p. 19. 66 Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, Häusliche Kunstpflege (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1903), pp. 2–​3. A partial English translation of this title is available via the German History in Documents and Images collection (www.germanhistorydocs.ghi-​dc.org). 67 Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Häusliche Kunstpflege, p. 9. 68 Ibid., p. 122. 69 Ibid., p. 14. 70 Paul Schultze-​ Naumburg, ‘Künstlerische Photographien’, Der Kunstwart, 13:18 (1900), 201–​3. 71 Paul Schultze-​ Naumburg, ‘Etwas vom Automobilfahren’, Der Kunstwart, 22:12 (1909), 317. 72 Ibid., p. 320. 73 The first-​ edition volumes of Cultural Works are as follows: Hausbau (Munich: Callwey, 1901); Gärten (Munich: Callwey, 1902); Kleinbürgerhäuser (Munich: Callwey, 1907); Dörfer und Kolonien (Munich: Callwey, 1904); Städtebau (Munich: Callwey, 1906); Das Schloß (Munich: Callwey, 1910); Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch den Menschen, vol. 1 (Munich: Callwey, 1915); and Die Gestaltung der Landschaft durch den Menschen, vol. 2 (Munich: Callwey, 1916). 74 Gutschow, ‘The anti-​Mediterranean’, p. 168. 75 Kirsten Weiss, ‘The face of the German house: Modernization and cultural anxiety in twentieth-​century architectural photographs’, DPhil thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008, 40. 76 Schultze-​Naumburg, Hausbau, 2nd edn, unpaginated foreword. 77 Ibid. 78 Schultze-​Naumburg, Dörfer und Kolonien, pp. 1–​2. 79 Ibid., p. 136. 80 Schultze-​Naumburg, Hausbau, 2nd edn, pp. 109–​10. 81 Ibid., p. 34. 82 Ibid., p., 40. 83 Ibid., p. 116. 84 Ibid., p. 102. 85 Schultze-​Naumburg, Kleinbürgerhäuser, p. 4. 86 Ibid., p. 2. 87 On the professional and personal correspondence between Schultze-​Naumburg and Muthesius, see Day, ‘Paul Schultze-​Naumburg’, pp. 142–​50. 88 Schultze-​Naumburg, Dörfer und Kolonien, pp. 137, 147. 89 Paul Schultze-​Naumburg, Kunst und Rasse (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1928). 90 Annemarie Jaeggi, ‘Traditionell und modern zugleich: Das Werk des Berliner Architekten Paul Mebes (1872–​1938) als Fallbeispiel für eine “andere Moderne” ’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 26 (1999), 228. 91 For an overview of Mebes’ work in the larger context of urban block reform, see Wolfgang Sonne, ‘Dwelling in the metropolis: Reformed urban blocks 1890–​1940 as a model for the sustainable compact city’, Progress in Planning, 72:2 (2009), 53–​149. See also the chapter ‘Das Miethaus wandelt sich’ in Posener, Berlin auf dem Weg zu einer neuen Architektur. 92 Hermann Jansen, ‘Neubauten des Beamten-​ Wohnungs-​ Verein zu Berlin’, Der Baumeister, 7:5 (1909), 49–​54; L[udwig]. Deubner, “The Studio” year book of decorative art (London: The Studio, 1910), p. 164; Robert Breuer, ‘Zu einigen Bauten von Paul Mebes’, Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, 2 (1915–​16), 110–​13. 93 Walter Curt Behrendt, Die einheitliche Blockfront als Raumelement im Stadtbau: Ein Beitrag zur Stadtbaukunst der Gegenwart (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1911).

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The architecture of social reform 94 Hans Mackowsky, ‘Das Feilner-​ Haus: Zur Erinnerung an Schinkel und das Kunstleben im vormärzlichen Berlin’, Kunst und Künstler, 8:1 (1910), 8. 95 Paul Mebes, Um 1800: Architektur und Handwerk im letzten Jahrhundert ihrer traditionallen Entwicklung, vol. 1 (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1908), p. 9. 96 Paul Mebes, Um 1800: Architektur und Handwerk im letzten Jahrhundert ihrer traditionallen Entwicklung, vol. 2 (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1908), p. 22. 97 Mebes, Um 1800, vol. 1, p. 22. 98 Ibid., pp. 19–​20. 99 Ibid., p. 15. 100 Ibid. 101 Mebes, Um 1800, vol. 2, p. 15. 102 Mebes, Um 1800, vol. 1, pp. 17–​18. 103 Ibid., p. 17. 104 Walter Curt Behrendt, unpaginated foreword from Um 1800: Architektur und Handwerk im letzten Jahrhundert ihrer traditionallen Entwicklung, vol. 1, 3rd edn (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1918).

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Conclusion

In 1919, architect Walter Gropius published the manifesto of the new Bauhaus school on the back of a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger titled the ‘Cathedral of Socialism’, in which he impelled architects to shed their demiurge-​like status and create a ‘new guild of craftsmen without class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist!’1 With Gropius at the helm as director of the school until 1928, the Bauhaus played a major role in institutionalising a pre-​war Expressionist ethos in design that had largely been sidelined in Werkbund discourse.2 Uniting creative impulse with the growing social impetus for standardisation, the Bauhaus offered a clear path forward for progressive modernists. While Gropius’ words about re-​establishing a lost world of anonymous craft could easily have been spoken by any of the traditionalists discussed in this book, in reality, the formation of the Bauhaus signalled an end to that discourse. Avant-​gardism became the new modus operandi for the next generation of modernists. Written in the wake of the November Revolution, the manifesto appeared seized by the same chiliastic visions that once captured the French utopian socialists following the French Revolution. Gropius’ evocation of a new community of craftsmen rising from the ashes of the First World War symbolised a preparation for what cultural critic Walter Benjamin predicted as the coming of a new and liberating age of cultural poverty, which could liquidate all traces of the private bourgeois world of the domestic interior that characterised the pre-​war era.3 Fuelled by a severe shortage of affordable dwellings, housing reform efforts in Germany matured during the era of the Weimar Republic (1918–​ 33). During this era, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the liberal German Democratic Party (DDP) pushed for progressive social legislation. The SPD’s mantra was to provide decent housing for all workers, and the party’s cultural officials endorsed new avant-​garde

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The architecture of social reform artistic ideals.4 Coming to grips with the massive task ahead of them, German avant-​gardists began to shed prior Expressionistic traits of religiosity, subjective expression, and heightened emotions, and to settle into a new detached attitude that privileged neutral surfaces of cool white and transparent glass. This attitude came to be known as the ‘New Objectivity’ (Neue Sachlichkeit) and was not just limited to architecture and design circles but infiltrated public life in the 1920s, particularly in the fields of visual art, photography, and popular cinema. The visual economy of oriented thrift the Neue Sachlichkeit traded not with images of family-​ and sobriety that characterised the Mittelstand, but rather with images that negotiated the limited attention span of the new white-​collar worker (Angestellter). Constantly distracted by advertising, department store display culture, and an endless array of night-​time entertainments, the urban white-​collar worker became the Weimar-​era subject par excellence.5 In Simmelian terms, the coolness of the Neue Sachlichkeit functioned as a kind of protective organ for this new urban dweller to process the constant sensory overload of modern metropolitan life. Armed with the clean visual language of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the social myth of the ‘new man’, and a techno-​managerial ideal efficiently gifted to them by the world’s first mechanised war, the 1920s modernists launched into an ambitious series of building programmes that would house the new classless society. Gropius’ work in Dessau-​Törten (1926–​ 8), Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner’s work in Berlin (1925–​31), and Ernst May’s work in Frankfurt (1925–​30) and Silesia (1919–​25) all helped establish the architectural language of the Neue Sachlichkeit and cement its associations with a new lifestyle liberated from the burdens of tradition. With these projects came a raft of new expert literature on rationalising the ‘new dwelling’, much of which was accompanied by claims of liberating the German housewife from the laborious domestic duties to which she would have otherwise remained bound.6 The rapid ascent of the New Sachlichkeit to a place of high cultural authority in Weimar society provoked a wave of conservative public reaction, particularly among those who still associated with the old Mittelstand. The white walls and flat roofs of the new housing estates springing up across German cities and the countryside renewed old fears over the loss of a German Heimat style. The foreignness of the new style was read by the conservative public as a sign of cosmopolitanism, cultural bolshevism, Jewishness, and the proletarianisation of workers. The modernist Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart (1918) was famously mocked in the press as resembling an ‘Arab village’. This was a period of increasing ideological tension between left-​ wing modernists and right-​ wing nationalists. Riding the wave of conservative backlash against the Neue Sachlichkeit, traditionalists like Schultze-​Naumburg began to retreat further into polemics about a ‘national architecture’, which had strong racial

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Conclusion undertones. The radical conservative architectural group Der Block was established in 1928 to counter the influence of ‘degenerate’ cosmopolitan art and restore the cultural purity of the Volk. Increasingly seen as hostile to Nazi cultural ideology, the Bauhaus school was finally forced to close in 1933 amid political pressure.7 Criticisms of the New Sachlichkeit did not just come from political conservatives. The birth of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in 1918 formed a new milieu for Marxist critique in Germany, which exposed deeper flaws in the avant-​garde modernists’ socialist rhetoric. As I have shown in this book, architectural and sociological tools and concepts of reform were in close conversation throughout the mid-​to late nineteenth century, before sociological discourse collapsed into the visual politics of Sachlichkeit through the photographic image. Riehl’s goal of creating a harmonious society through a form of cultural policing reached its apex in the Werkbund’s ideal of a holistic culture of visible forms capable of uniting society once more. The Frankfurt School proved vital in re-​establishing Marx’s style of negative critique, which could once again expose the ideal of cultural authenticity as a thin veneer covering deeper fault lines in modern capitalist society. The work of Frankfurt School theorists like Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno took collective aim at the hypocrisy of the left-​wing cultural elite’s democratic idealism just as much as they did right-​wing conservatism in order to expose these fault lines.8 A group of Marxist architectural historians working in the 1970s known as the Venice School carried the torch of Frankfurt School critique in their assessments of the social legacy of German modernism. For Manfredo Tafuri, Massimo Cacciari, and Francesco Dal Co, the ideal of the new society liberated from convention through houses of steel and transparent glass signified nothing more than a continuation of the bourgeois quest for a new cultural holism.9 Maintaining this spirit of social critique remains central to understanding the role that housing plays in shaping architectural culture and, vice versa, the role that domestic design plays in shaping social politics. While traditionalist thinkers traded in images and concepts of German society that soon became exhausted, their impact on architectural theory clearly extends beyond the late ninteenth century and helps us understand the realtionship between architecture, housing, and politics today. Tracing the moment when social history began to be written into modern architectural culture, this book began its timeline in the mid-​nineteenth century, when old sources of sovereignty (that hitherto guided the architectural designs of houses for kings and deities) became redundant in the face of a new social order –​an order that rested on the sovereignty of the notion of society itself. If the source of all modern values came from society itself, how could buildings designed to house ordinary people become elevated to the noble status of architecture once again? Cultural tradition

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The architecture of social reform became the dominant concept that enabled architects to act socially while preserving architecture as a noble art form that could hold meaning and gravitas. The remaining chapters illustrated how utopian ideals for a more equitable society were frequently traded for naturalising myths of the inevitability of social progress for Germany’s middle classes. Architectural discourse played a vital role in shaping these myths, bringing forth new theories of urban design, typology, cultural governance, and functionalism, which frequently reasserted the social status quo. This book has illustrated how social tradition did not merely provide a default stance for nostalgic architects but provided many access routes to the past, which architects instrumentalised in their work for diverse ideological ends. Ironically, it was precisely through an intellectual tradition that called for the study of quaint, domestic, vernacular building traditions that architects came to the field of housing with a dynamic sense of their agency, which eventually allowed them to break away from historical precedent and craft practice to embrace the essential goodness of industry, the machine, and urbanisation. The need to acknowledge the progressive values of the social past disappeared once their imminence in the modern society seemed assured. All too often, the failures of twentieth-​ century modernist housing projects across the globe are attributed to a misguided avant-​ gardist impulse to design for a post-​ revolutionary socialist world that never arrived. But this narrative has become something of a straw man in the historiography of modern architecture. When a large number of modern architects turned to the task of housing and site planning, they abandoned avant-​garde technique and a revolutionary premise, shifting into a mode of thinking that valued deep scholarship and historical understanding of the kind long existing in housing literature. Indeed, it would be relatively simple to trace lines of continuity from Städtebau to CIAM, from Schultze-​ Naumburg to Le Corbusier. The fact that the 1920s modernists frequently expressed difficulty in grasping the politics of women’s liberation outside of redesigning the kitchen layout with scientific precision testifies to the kind of important intellectual work that housing design has done in carrying forth the project of reform over revolution in the modern era. The significance of the history covered in this book undoubtedly goes beyond the departments of history concerned with the fate of German modernism. This episode in architecture’s intellectual history marks the moment in which housing design became beholden to the task of social reform –​that is, to the task of identifying who can best care for whom and adjusting society to a complex web of traditional relations of care that have existed variously within individuals, families, companies, non-​ profits, unions, churches and related social organisations, and nation-​ states. Confusing this sociologistic premise with outmoded biologistic and theological arguments about the role of housing design can easily lead

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Conclusion us to believe that the ideas that drove past built environments to become exclusionary and unequal are ones that we have left firmly in the past. Coming to grips with this history is crucial in order to locate architecture’s current social capacity in ways that refuse the destructive politics that characterised the twentieth century. The field of housing has perhaps undergone its most profound epistemological shift at the beginning of the twenty-​ first century, which mirrors that of the late nineteenth century. The winding back of welfare-​ state services, as well as the increasing hegemony of global real estate, has rendered the future social role of architecture uncertain. Architectural theory and criticism has largely become a cultural endeavour, experiencing a divorce from housing as a socio-​political field. Given that there are, nonetheless, increasing calls to find architectural solutions to urban ills, including worldwide housing crises, it is all the more necessary, as has been the aim of this book, to reconsider the terms and tools that architecture once used to forge its most productive alliance with the field of social politics. This is a particularly urgent task, given that the nationalistic and highly gendered rhetoric it once engaged to do so is now largely defunct. In the late nineteenth century, tradition did not function as a purely reactionary response to modernity but complicated, and ultimately expanded, the cultural field in which capitalist modernity has operated effectively throughout the modern era. Properly accounting for these moments in the history of modern architecture can help us better understand how capitalist culture has come to pervade every facet of daily life within our present neoliberal society –​not just through the commodification of the home but equally through the mimicking of the comforts of home in science labs and tech company offices. As it did in the late nineteenth century, housing continues to play the role of negotiating a middle ground between opposing ideals of economic freedom and social welfare –​continually generating the very same crises it is called upon to solve. The promise offered through architecture of neutralising class antagonism and promoting social interdependence through the material benefits of good, modest, traditional housing –​that is, to craft a ‘third way’ –​remains unbroken.

Notes 1 Walter Gropius, ‘Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar’, in Programs and manifestoes on 20th-​century architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1919] 1971), p. 49. 2 Hermann Muthesius and Henry Van de Velde, ‘Muthesius/​Van de Velde: Werkbund theses and antitheses’, in Conrads (ed.), Programs and manifestoes, p. 30. 3 Walter Benjamin, The arcades project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999); Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and poverty’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

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The architecture of social reform 4 Barbara Miller Lane, ‘Modern architecture and politics in Germany, 1918–​1945’, in Housing and dwelling: Perspectives on modern domestic architecture, ed. Barbara Miller Lane (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 261. 5 Janet Ward, Weimar surfaces: Urban visual culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 6 Adelheid von Saldern, ‘Social rationalization of living and housework in Germany and the United States in the 1920s’, The History of the Family, 2:1 (1997), 73–​97; Leif Jerram, ‘Kitchen sink dramas: Women, modernity and space in Weimar Germany’, Cultural Geographies, 13:4 (2006), 538–​56. 7 For a history of the relationship between architecture and politics in this era, see Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and politics in Germany, 1918–​1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 8 See Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind spots: Critical theory and the history of art in twentieth-​ century Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 9 Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern architecture (New York: Abrams, 1979); Massimo Cacciari, Figures of architecture and thought: German architecture culture, 1880–​1920 (New York: Rizzoli, 1990).

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The architecture of social reform Schäfer (eds), Die Großstadt: Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung (Dresden: Zahn & Jaensch, 1903), pp. 187–​206. —​. ‘The Berlin trade exhibition’, Theory, Culture & Society, 8:3 ([1896] 1991), 119–​23. —​. ‘The metropolis and mental life’, in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds), The Blackwell city reader (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2002), pp. 11–​19. —​. ‘Sociological aesthetics’, in Austin Harrington (ed.), Georg Simmel: Essays on art and aesthetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020), pp. 95–​107. Singelmann, Joachim, and Peter Singelmann. ‘Lorenz von Stein and the paradigmatic bifurcation of social theory in the nineteenth century’, British Journal of Sociology, 37:3 (1986), 431–​52. Sitte, Camillo. Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen: Ein Beitrag zur Lösung modernster Fragen der Architektur und monumentalen Plastik unter besonderer Beziehung auf Wien (Vienna: Carl Graeser, 1889). Sitte, Camillo, George R. Collins, and Christiane C. Collins. Camillo Sitte: The birth of modern city planning (Mineola, NY: Dover, [1986] 2006). Smith, Woodruff D. Politics and the sciences of culture in Germany, 1840–​1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Sombart, Werner. ‘Der Begriff der Stadt und das Wesen der Städtebildung’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 25 (1907), 1–​9. —​. Der Moderne Kapitalismus, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1902). Sonne, Wolfgang. ‘The entire city shall be planned as a work of art: Städtebau als Kunst im frühen modernen Urbanismus 1890–​ 1920’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 66:2 (2003), 207–​36. —​. Representing the state: Capital city planning in the early twentieth century (Munich: Prestel, 2003). —​. ‘Dwelling in the metropolis: Reformed urban blocks 1890–​1940 as a model for the sustainable compact city’, Progress in Planning, 72:2 (2009), 53–​149. —​. ‘Political connotations of the picturesque’, in Charles C. Bohl and Jean-​François Lejeune (eds), Sitte, Hegemann and the metropolis: Modern civic art and international exchanges (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 123–​38. Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1918). —​. The decline of the West, trans. Charles Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1957). Spohn, Jürgen and Julius Posener. Villen und Landhäuser in Berlin (Berlin: Nicolai, 1989). Stalder, Laurent. Hermann Muthesius, 1861–​1927: Das Landhaus als kulturgeschichtlicher Entwurf (Zürich: gta Verlag, 2008). Stark, Gary D. Entrepreneurs of ideology: Neoconservative publishers in Germany, 1890–​1933 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). Stein, Lorenz von. Der Sozialismus und Communismus des heitigen Frankreich (Leipzig: Wigand, 1842). —​. The history of the social movement in France, 1789–​1850 (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press, 1964). Steinmetz, George. Regulating the social: The welfare state and local politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Stern, Fritz. The politics of cultural despair: A study in the rise of the Germanic ideology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1961). Struck, Rudolf. Das alte bürgerliche Wohnhaus in Lübeck (Lübeck: Lübcke & Nöhring, 1908).

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Bibliography Stübben, Josef. ‘Über die Anlage öffentliche Plätze’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 11:80 (1877), 393–​5, 403–​6. —​. Der Städtebau (Darmstadt: Arnold Bergsträsser, 1890). —​ . ‘Ueber einige Fragen der Städtebaukunst’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 25:21 (1891), 122–​8. —​ . ‘  “Kleinwohnungsstraßen”. Ein Vorschlag zur Prüfung’, Zeitschrift für Wohnungswesen, 5:14 (1907), 185–​7. Südekum, Albert. Großstädtisches Wohnungselend, vol. 45 of the Großstadt-​ Dokument (Berlin: Hermann Seeman, 1908). Sunar, Lutfi. ‘The Weberian City, civil society, and Turkish social thought’, in Edith Hanke, Lawrence Scaff, and Sam Whimster (eds), The Oxford handbook of Max Weber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 207–​23. Sydow, Johanna von. Das Buch der Hausfrau: Mitgabe für Frauen und Jungfrauen zur Beglückung des Hauses sowie zur Sicherung häuslichen Wohlstandes und Komforts (Leipzig: Spanier, 1884). Tacitus. Agricola and Germany, ed. Anthony Richard Birley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Tafuri, Manfredo and Francesco Dal Co. Modern architecture (New York: Abrams, 1979). Teyssot, Georges. A topology of everyday constellations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Tönnies, Ferdinand. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen (Leipzig: Fues, 1887). —​. Community and society, trans. Charles P. Loomis (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). Tribe, Keith. Governing economy: The reformation of German economic discourse, 1750–​1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Tuckermann, Wilhelm P. ‘Der Berliner Wohnungsgrundriß nach seiner historischen Entwicklung in den letzten zwei Jahrhunterten’, Der Bär, 6:37 (1880), 449–​ 54, 61–​6. Umbach, Maiken. German cities and bourgeois modernism, 1890–​1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Umbach, Maiken and Bernd Hüppauf (eds). Vernacular modernism: Heimat, globalization, and the built environment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). Vallye, Anna. ‘ “Balance-​sheet” city: Martin Wagner and the visualization of statistical data’, Journal of Urban History, 46:2 (2020), 334–​63. Vedder, Ulrike. ‘The bachelor: A case of failed generativity in nineteenth-​century literature and science’, in Staffan Müller–​Wille and Christina Brandt (eds), Heredity explored: Between public domain and experimental science, 1850–​ 1930 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). Verband deutscher Architekten und Ingenieur-​ Vereine. ‘Bericht über die Verhandlungen der General-​Versammlung des Verbandes zu Berlin vom 23. bis 25. September 1874’, Deutsche Bauzeitung, 8:85 (1874), 337–​9. —​. Das Bauernhaus im Deutschen Reiche und seinen Grenzgebieten (Dresden: Kühtmann, 1906). Vidler, Anthony. ‘The theatre of production: Claude-​Nicolas Ledoux and the architecture of social reform’, AA Files, 1 (1981–​2), 54–​63. —​. Claude-​Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and social reform at the end of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

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Index

aerial drawing 132, 135 aesthetic theory 31–2, 63–4, 114, 145, 149, 162 affordable housing 37, 107, 193 anachronism 9 see also historicism anonymous architecture 28–31, 95, 103, 110, 159, 173, 184 anti-​intellectualism 147, 173, 174 anti-​Romani sentiment 15, 23–4 anti-​Semitism 15, 23–4, 55, 149, 175, 194 apartment vs detached house debate 48–50, 71–2, 79, 125 applied arts, handicrafts 61, 103–4, 111, 146–7, 150, 163, 182–5 see also home decor archetypal house, concept of 19, 61, 153, 169 architects, architectural profession education and practice 70, 124, 147, 150, 152, 158, 168, 174, 184, 186 social position 31 aristocratic art 156, 169, 184 artisans 95, 98, 103, 105 Arts and Crafts 3, 147, 150, 153 Assmann, Gustav 71, 76 Augsburg 127–8 avant-​gardism 1, 9, 147, 176, 196 Avenerius, Ferdinand 165 bachelors 25, 27 Baillie Scott, Mackay Hugh 153, 159

Baltic region 184 Baroque 54, 75, 96, 103, 117 Bauakademie 31, 70, 184 Bauforschung 150, 156, 162, 168 Bauhaus 146, 193 Baumeister, Reinhard 59, 105 bedrooms 26, 64, 65, 66 Behrendt, Walter Curt 85, 122–3, 187 Behrens, Peter 150, 182 Benjamin, Walter 193 Berg, Max 131 Berlage, Heinrich Petrus 159 Berlin 120, 122 in architectural historiography 74 urban development in 47–51, 59, 71, 98–100, 133, 178–81 Berlin Trade Exhibition (1896) 92, 107 Berliner gemeinnützige Baugesellschaft 37 Berliner Zimmer 75 Biedermeier 44, 74, 163, 164–7, 182–5 Bildung 47, 84, 152, 160–2, 186 Bismarck, Otto von 10, 60 boudoir 64, 107 Brentano, Lugo 60 Breuer, Robert 119–22 bricks, clay 19, 94, 178, 183, 184 Brinckmann, Albert E. 94, 114, 116–19 Bruch, Ernst 99 Bücher, Karl 60, 88, 91, 92, 122 building archaeology see Bauforschung building ordinances 50, 76

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Bund Heimatschutz 4, 163 Burckhardt, Jacob 94 Bürgerlichkeit 7, 35, 60, 79, 108, 114, 124, 145, 147, 148, 149, 156, 162, 165, 184 Burnham, Daniel 122 capitalism 10, 79, 91, 93–4, 124, 197 cars 107, 167 Cecilienhof 163 Cerdà, Ildefons 87, 95 Champs-​Élysées 112 Chicago School of Sociology 92 children, childhood 28, 44–5, 65 CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) 86, 196 city planning see Städtebau (discipline) cityscape 115, 127 class antagonism 8, 22, 60 educated elite 146, 152, 162 labour movements 15, 22, 54, 175 middle class, defined see Bürgerlichkeit Mittelstand 4, 35, 60–1, 62, 74–8, 126, 151, 167, 178 see also artisans parvenus 7, 70, 156–8 peasantry 18, 26–7 white-​collar workers 178, 194 working classes 101–2, 129 classicism, neoclassicism 75, 117, 153, 156, 157, 170, 178, 181, 182, 183 clothing 72, 147, 154 Cologne 106 comfort 70, 116 commerce, concept of 89, 90, 91, 100 community, ideal of 36, 88–9, 102, 109, 124, 135 conservatism (political) 8–9, 18, 119, 122, 124, 135, 150, 160, 194 cosiness 66, 73, 116 cosmopolitanism 147, 194 country house see farmhouse; Landhaus courtyards 35, 48, 129, 132 cultural crisis 88, 186 cultural unity, concept of 149, 187, 195 Cuvier, Georges 31

Dägen, Dismar 97 Darwinism 113 Deutsche Bauzeitung 99, 106, 108 Deutsche Gartenstadt-Gesellschaft 38, 90, 163 Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie 93 Deutscher Werkbund 4, 146–7, 149, 150, 159, 163, 177 Diderot, Denis 15 Diederichs, Eugen 150 Diele see hall Dohme, Robert 70, 152 domesticity, concept of 57, 72 Dresden 108, 109 Durand, Jean-​Nicolas-​Louis 63 Dürer, Albrecht 163 Dürerbund 163 Durm, Josef 149 dwelling as a commodity 66, 68 defined 62 methods of classification, typologies 56, 63, 64, 69, 75, 76, 125, 145 shapes the dweller 57, 61, 62, 72, 175 Eberstadt, Rudolf 85, 99–100, 109, 115, 122, 124–7, 131–3 economics classical 54 historical 54, 60, 88, 94 emotional practices alienation 72, 92 familial love, conviviality 47, 53, 72, 75, 153 individualism 91, 92, 147 industriousness 52, 96 rationalism 5, 35, 91, 93 self-​help 37 self-​interest 5, 53 self-​restraint 60, 62, 145, 159, 162 sittliches Gefühl (feeling of morality) 43–4, 72, 173 see also Bildung; comfort; cosiness; Heimat; privacy; vice Empire style 164 Encyclopédie 15 Engels, Friedrich 7, 8, 59

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Index 217 England as model in Germany 47, 58, 70, 147, 150, 151, 152–6 domestic life 66, 69, 71 English cottage 58 Germans travelling to 22, 53, 151 lodging houses, London 55 enlightened absolutism 96 Enlightenment 19, 21 environmentalism 147 Eucken, Rudolf 149 Europe, concept of 93 Falke, Jacob von 72 family 25, 53, 57, 122 family room 27, 75, 107 farmhouse 18, 26–7, 28, 32–4, 153, 169 Faucher, Julius 53–6, 58 Feilner House 75, 182 Fischer, Theodor 114 flâneurie 92, 108 folklore studies see Volkskunde folk psychology see Volkerpsychologie forest see rural life formalism 119 Foucault, Michel 10 Fourier, Charles 43–4 France 7 cultural influence on Germany 15–18, 25–6, 43–4, 108, 117 French domestic life 63–8, 71 French women 64 Franco-​Prussian War 63 Frankfurt School 6, 195 Franz Joseph I 103 Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia 97 Frisch, Theodor 86 Fuggerei 37, 127–31 functionalism 64, 72, 76, 171 furnishing see home decor gable roof 34, 35, 154, 170, 179 garden city 85, 124 gardens 52, 71, 125, 129, 135, 153, 163, 168 Gartenlaube, Die 51, 52, 58, 59 Genzmer, Felix 114 Georgian style 164 German Cities Exhibition (1903) 109 Gesamtkunstwerk 167

Gesellschaft (sociological concept) 88 Gessner, Albert 159, 178 Geul, Albert 63 Glagau, Otto 51 Goecke, Theodor 85, 100–2, 109 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 71, 95, 165 Gothic 94, 117, 152, 171 governmentality 10 Greater Berlin Competition (1910) 85, 131 grid (urban) 48, 98, 99 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 14 Gropius, Walter 193, 194 Großstadt-​Dokumente 92 Gründerzeit 2, 103, 157 Gurlitt, Cornelius 85, 109 Haeckel, Ernst 113 hall 152, 154 Hamburg 90, 96, 122 Handbuch der Architektur 149, 162 Hanseatic League 87 harems 28 Haussmannisation 47, 85, 103, 106, 109 health, hygiene 48, 52, 56, 96, 98, 105 hearth 52, 59, 61, 89 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 6 Hegemann, Werner 50, 132 Heimat 4, 23, 84, 135, 150, 163, 164, 187 Henrici, Karl 107–9, 114–16 heritage protection see Bund Heimatschutz Hildebrand, Adolf von 114 historical interpretations of dwelling forms 26, 32, 58, 73, 74, 75, 116 historicism 2, 3, 84, 103, 112, 146, 154, 166, 170 in architectural education 147, 156, 166 in parvenu culture 122, 156–8 Hobrecht Plan, Hobrecht, James 47–50, 55, 98 home decor 58, 62, 64, 73, 114, 122, 143, 146, 153, 165, 167 home ownership 36, 55 homeland see Heimat hospitality 5, 153

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house see dwelling household, notion of 4–5, 8, 14, 55, 62, 116 housing question 8, 48, 54, 59, 61, 124–5 housing shortage 52 Howard, Ebenezer 86, 90 Huber, Victor Aimé 37, 90 Hunt, Myron 159 immigrants 48, 53, 55 industrialisation 124, 129, 147, 154, 163 ingenuity (artistic) 182 interior, notion of 23, 47, 71, 89, 105, 107, 116, 125, 129, 133 International Style 175 Jansen, Hermann 132 Jatzow, Paul 178 Jugendstil 84, 143, 147, 159, 176 Kant, Immanuel 64 Karlsruhe 120 Kerr, Robert 70 kitchens 78, 196 kitsch art 28, 178 Kleinhaus 125–7 Klemm, Gustav 31 Knies, Karl 23, 92 Kongress Deutscher Volkswirte 53 Korff, Paul 159 Kunstgewerbe see applied arts, handicrafts Kunstwart, Der 165, 167, 168 Kürfurstendamm 112 Lamprecht, Karl 94 Landhaus 158–60 landscape 154, 163, 167, 168, 175 Langbehn, Julius 149–50, 162 Laspeyres, Ernst Louis Étienne 56–7, 72 Le Corbusier 86, 196 Le Play, Frédéric 24 Lebensraum 90 Lebensreform 147–9 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 17 liberalism (economic) 52–3, 54, 60, 62, 91, 99 Lichtwark, Alfred 147, 151

life reform see Lebensreform living room 35, 117 lodgers 74, 76 Lübeck 94, 123, 126 Lux, Joseph August 151 Mackowsky, Hans 182 Mannheim 96, 120 Marx, Karl 6, 22, 88, 91 Marxism 195 May, Ernst 194 Mebes, Paul 131, 159, 177–9 architectural practice 177–81 Um 1800 [Around 1800] (1908) 184–7 medievalism, Middle Ages 23, 86–7, 88, 91, 94–5, 100–1, 113–16, 125 Messel, Alfred 92, 102, 159, 178 methodologies for the study of dwellings art-​historical 172–3 as material culture 25, 58 intuition 147, 172–3 Meyers Hof 51 middle-​class way of life see Bürgerlichkeit mixed-​use 100 Möhring, Bruno 131 morality, concept of 56–7 Morris, William 3, 104, 143, 149, 150 Möser, Justus 18–21 Munich 73, 108, 163 Muthesius, Hermann 125 Das englische Haus (1903–​4) 152–6 Landhaus und Garten (1907) 158–60 professional background 151–2 Stilarchitektur und Baukunst (1902) 156–8 national differences in housing, notions of 54, 63–9, 73, 156 National Socialism 3, 90, 119, 163, 195 nationalism, national identity 4, 28, 32, 51, 55, 58, 61, 63, 68, 71, 108, 109, 113–14, 145, 147, 150, 153, 161, 165, 168, 169, 174 Naumburg 163 neighbourhood see community, ideal of Nesfield, Eden 153 Neue Sachlichkeit 162, 194

Index 219

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New York 90 Nietzsche, Friedrich 149 normality, concept of 36, 55–6, 70 North America 90 nostalgia, idealisations of the past 18, 28, 89, 95, 128, 165, 171, 175 Nuremberg 119 odours 26, 56 objectivity see Sachlichkeit organicism 19, 22, 23, 89, 90, 113, 122 orientalism 28 ornament, decoration 146, 150, 157 Osnabrück 18 Ottoman society 15, 27, 93 overcrowding 51, 53, 76 pandemic 96, 129 Paris, Parisian culture 47, 56, 63–8, 71, 107, 108 pastiche 157 pattern books 155, 166, 184 Peterson, Richard 131 Pevsner, Nicolas 3 photography 145, 150–1, 155–6, 167–8 picturesque 64, 105, 117, 123 Pirenne, Henri 94 place, concept of 159, 164, 174 Poelzig, Hans 159 populism, popular education 28–30, 44–5, 145, 147, 150, 151, 160–2, 168–9, 186 Posener, Julius 163 poverty, pauperism 51, 55 Pre-​Raphaelites 153 privacy 64, 70, 116, 152, 153 private and public space 5 proportion 64 prostitution 50, 51 Proudhon, Pierre-​Joseph 8 Prussia 22, 60, 70 public good, concept of 126 public space, publicness 54, 71 public square 105, 107, 117 publishing culture 150–1 Pugin, Augustus 169 racism, racial thinking 73, 95, 112–14, 119, 149, 175, 187, 194 Ratzel, Friedrich 90–1 real estate 48, 157, 161

reform, concept of 7, 18, 35, 147–9 religious thought, religiosity 5, 18, 25, 32, 44, 57, 74, 129, 152, 169 Rembrandt 149 Renaissance 114, 117, 150 renting 55 revolutions of 1848 6, 15, 22 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich 7, 14–39, 44, 72, 73, 89, 92, 94, 108, 149, 153 on Augsburg 127–8 on the family 25–8, 58 xenophobia in 23–4, 38 Riemerschmid, Richard 125, 159 romanticism 19, 31, 68 Roscher, Wilhelm 23, 92 Rothenburg ob der Tauber 94, 116, 119 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques 18, 22 Ruepprecht, Christian 72 rural life 17, 19, 90, 93, 178 Ruskin, John 3, 104, 149, 150, 153, 169 Saarinen, Eliel 159 Sachlichkeit 145, 153, 154–6, 165, 167, 184 salon 25, 26, 65, 107 Sax, Emil 59, 72 Schasler, Max 71 Scheffler, Karl 86, 122–4, 150, 154 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 75–6, 165, 182–4 Schmarsow, August 114 Schmoller, Gustav 60–3, 89, 92, 115, 126 Schultze-​Naumburg, Paul 146, 159 as Biedermeier promoter 165–7 Kulturarbeiten (1901–​17) 168–75 professional background 163–4 xenophobia in 175–6 Schumacher, Fritz 150, 159 self-​cultivation see Bildung Semper, Gottfried 31, 103, 153 separate spheres, concept of 53 see also women shanties 52 Shaw, Richard Norman 70, 153 Simmel, Georg 91–3, 194 Sitte, Camillo 85, 103–6, 109, 117–19 Smith, Adam 88, 91 Social Democratic Party 193 social mix 50, 55, 107

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220

The architecture of social reform socialism, socialist theory 59, 61, 79, 88, 91, 124, 149, 161 sociology 38 methodologies 92, 93 theories of art in 89 theories of the city in 87–94 Sombart, Werner 60, 88, 128 Sonderweg thesis 3 space, spatial theory (aesthetics) 89, 92, 114–17 speculation (financial) 48, 51–2, 59, 76, 120, 124 Spengler, Oswald 88 Städtebau (discipline) defined 84–5 methodologies 103, 105, 114 pedagogy 85 Städtebau, Der (journal) 109 standardisation 123, 126, 154 statistical research 24, 53, 99 Stein, Lorenz von 7, 22, 88 streets aesthetic considerations 25, 99, 105, 106, 108, 112, 120, 135 residential 99, 100, 101, 107, 109, 135 Stübben, Joseph 105, 106–9 style, concept of 165 suburbia 52, 59, 70, 71, 102, 154, 157 Südekum, Alfred 93 symmetry 119, 153 Tacitus 18, 61 Tafuri, Manfredo 195 taste (artistic) 147, 150, 157, 163, 167 Taut, Bruno 194 tenement apartment design, Berlin 48, 74, 132, 178 criticisms of 93 terraced housing 125 Tessenow, Heinrich 125, 163, 182 thrift 47, 52, 61, 72, 181, 187 Tönnies, Ferdinand 88–9 traditionalism, concept of 3, 9 traffic, theories of 89, 91, 99–100, 107 transitoriness 55, 73, 92 transnationalism 158 travelling 71, 105, 150, 151, 167 Tuckermann, Wilhelm Petrus 74–8

type 153–4, 169 see also archetypal house, concept of uniformity (aesthetic) 99, 122–4, 135 urban block, superblock 48, 100, 102, 122–3, 133 urban culture, urbanity moral criticisms of 56, 71, 108 theories of 54, 86, 91–2, 102, 107 utopian socialism 18, 43, 62, 193 Van de Velde, Henry 159 vernacular architecture see farmhouse; anonymous architecture Verein für Öffentliche Gesundheitspflege 52 Verein für Sozialpolitik 60, 88, 93 vice 55, 56, 59, 62, 92 Vienna 103 apartment culture, Zinshaus 66–8 Ringstrasse 103 social housing 116 Viollet-​le-​Duc, Eugène 169 Voigt, Paul 124 Volkerpsychologie 44, 53 Volkskunde 14–15, 24 Voysey, Charles Francis Annesley 153 Wagner, Adolph 60 Wagner, Martin 194 Wagner, Otto 103 Webb, Philip 153 Weber, Max 60, 88, 93 Weimar Republic 193–5 Weinbrenner, Friedrich 64 welfare, concept of 21–2, 114, 120, 128 Wilhelm II 148 Willebrand, Johann Peter 96 Wiss, Eduard 58 Wolf, Paul 125 Wöllflin, Heinrich 119 women child-​rearing 25 criticisms of modern women 66 household management 73–4, 77, 196 traditional gender roles 28, 74, 194 unmarried 25 zoning 59, 100

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