Description: The architecture of social reform explores the fascinating intellectual origins of modern architecture's obsession with domesticity. Copiously illustrated, Rousset's revealing analysis demonstrates how questions over aesthetics, style, urbanization, and technology that gripped the modernist imagination were deeply ingrained in a larger concern to reform society through housing. The increasing demand for new housing in Germany's rapidly growing cities fostered critical exchanges between a heterogeneous group of actors, including architects, urban theorists, planners, and social scientists, who called for society to be freed from class antagonism through the provision of good, modest, traditionally-minded domestic design. Offering a compelling account of architecture's ability to act socially, the book provocatively argues that architectural theory underwent its most critical epistemological transformation in relation to the dynamics of modern class politics long before the arrival of the avant-garde.
Review Quotes:
'Isabel Rousset provides a valuable introduction to the debates prompted by the challenges of housing the German middle classes, the Mittelstand, in the sixty or so years before the first world war, as towns and cities were transformed by unprecedented urbanisation. In four broadly chronological chapters, she explores the influence of various interpretations of tradition, rooted so often in the local and regional, a set of associations captured in the untranslatable word Heimat. Her account thus represents a break with earlier studies of German modernism that emphasised the unbridgeable differences between the ideas of an emerging modernist avant-garde and an approach to architecture and urbanism at home with the past and traditional German culture.'
Nicholas Bullock, Architectural History