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

By Isabel Rousset

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526159670

Book preview

The architecture of social reform

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.

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.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

For my uncle, Jean-Marc Lenoir

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1Building from the inside out

2The interiorisation of life

3Streets for movement, streets for dwelling

4The culture of the visible

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

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.)

1.1Etching 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).)

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.)

1.3Frontispiece from Justus Möser, Osnabrückische Geschichte (Berlin: Nicolai, 1819.)

1.4Saxon farmhouse, elevation. (From Rudolf Henning, Das deutsche Haus in seiner historischen Entwickelung (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1882), p. 30.)

1.5Heinrich 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.)

1.6Heinrich 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.)

1.7Educational picture sheet depicting the story of Hansel and Gretel. Drawn by Theodor Hosemann, c. 1868. (Courtesy of the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig. Inventory number VoBi140.)

1.8A 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.)

1.9Farmhouses 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.)

1.10Farmhouses 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.)

2.1Educational picture sheet depicting ‘scenes from family life’. Etching by Johann Peter Wolff, c. 1746/55. (Courtesy of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg. Inventory number HB16442.)

2.2The ‘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.)

2.3The ‘nursery’. Engraving by Johann Michael Voltz, c. 1825. (Courtesy of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg. Inventory number HB25890.)

2.4Print of the ‘Hobrecht Plan’. (Ferdinand Boehm, Plan von Berlin und Umgegend bis Charlottenburg (Berlin: Keller, 1862).)

2.5Municipal planner Gustav Assmann’s plans for apartments. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), p. 101.)

2.6Plan of Meyers Hof. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), p. 100.)

2.7Illustration 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.)

2.8Jean-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.)

2.9Living 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).)

2.13Typical Parisian bourgeois apartment plan. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), plate 101.)

2.14Plan of typical Viennese rent-bearing house. (From Albert Geul, Die Anlage der Wohngebäude, vol. 2 (Leipzig: J. M. Gebhardt, 1885), plate 94.)

2.15Feilner house plan. (From Wilhelm Petrus Tuckermann, ‘Der Berliner Wohnungsgrundriss’, Der Bär, 6:37 (1880), 463.)

2.16Typical tenement plan. (From Wilhelm Petrus Tuckermann, ‘Der Berliner Wohnungsgrundriss’, Der Bär, 6:37 (1880), 463.)

3.1Brick 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.)

3.2Image of the medieval marketplace of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, taken from a section of an altarpiece and reproduced in Brinckmann’s Deutsche Stadtbaukunst. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.031.627.)

3.3Old map of Mannheim from 1758. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.096.581.)

3.4Typical tenement block resulting from the Hobrecht Plan. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.073.124.)

3.5Goecke’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.)

3.6René 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.)

3.7Piazza delle Erbe and Piazza dei Signori in Verona. (From Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (Vienna: Carl Graeser, 1889), p. 57.)

3.8Illustration 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.)

3.11Ludwigstraße, Munich, c. 1910. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.096.686.)

3.12Historicist facade of apartment/commercial house on Kurfürstendamm 234, Berlin. Constructed in 1901 by architects Zaar & Vahl. (From Architektonische Rundschau, 20 (1904), plate 54.)

3.13City plan of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.065.056.)

3.14Old passage through a church in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.019.283.)

3.15Rail line in Frankfurt. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.092.397.)

3.16Nuremberg marketplace. (From Robert Breuer, ‘Der Städtebau als architektonisches Problem’, Kunstgewerbeblatt, 22:11 (1911), 202.)

3.17Renaissance 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.)

3.18Example of uniform block front. (From Walter Curt Behrendt, Die einheitliche Blockfront als Raumelement im Stadtbau (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1911), plate 1.)

3.19Single-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.)

3.20Residential 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.)

3.21Main residential street in the Fuggerei. (From [Alexander] Former, ‘Städtebau und Denkmalpflege in Augsburg’, Der Städtebau, 12:7/8 (1915), plate 45.)

3.22An entry into the Fuggerei. (From Paul Wolf, ‘Die Kleinwohnung – eine Forderung künftiger deutscher Baukultur’, Der Cicerone, 11 (1919), 177.)

3.23Layout of the Fuggerei in Augsburg. (© Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 1.063.458.)

3.24Top (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.)

3.25Hermann Jansen, entry for the 1910 Greater Berlin Competition, development plan for Tempelhofer Feld. (Courtesy of Architekturmuseum der Technischen Universität Berlin. Inventory number 20563.)

3.26Aerial 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.)

3.27Ground plan of Wittenau superblock. (From Rudolf Eberstadt, Handbuch des Wohnungswesens und der Wohnungsfrage, 2nd edn (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1910), p. 202.)

4.1Gentleman’s office. (From Hermann Muthesius, ‘Mein Haus in Nikolassee’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 23 (1908), 16.)

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.)

4.4Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, two-family country house. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 174.)

4.5William Dunn and Robert Watson, country house in Surrey. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 170.)

4.6Myron Hunt, Jenks House in San Francisco. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 184.)

4.7Paul Korff, workers’ houses and farm buildings in Wendorf. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 38.)

4.8Hermann Muthesius, Seefeld country house, Zehlendorf, Berlin. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 31.)

4.9Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Schuster country house. (From Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1907), p. 58.)

4.10Guest 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.)

4.12House in Torgau. (From Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Hausbau, 3rd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), p. 62.)

4.13Shooters’ association clubhouse. (From Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Hausbau, 3rd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), p. 38.)

4.14Community house in Saalfeld. (From Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Kleinbürgerhäuser, 2nd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), plate 5.)

4.15Urban houses in Minden in Westfalen. (From Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Kleinbürgerhäuser, 2nd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), plate 41.)

4.16Small houses on the old city wall in Hirschhorn am Neckar. (From Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Kleinbürgerhäuser, 2nd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), plate 38.)

4.17Corner house in Nuremberg. (From Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten: Kleinbürgerhäuser, 2nd edn (Munich: Callwey, 1904), plate 49.)

4.18Albert Gessner, courtyard apartment facade. (From Albert Gessner, Das deutsche Miethaus (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1909), p. 51.)

4.19Paul Mebes, housing for civil servants in Steglitz, Berlin. (From Hermann Jansen, ‘Neubauten des Beamten-Wohnungs-Vereins zu Berlin’, Der Baumeister, 7:5 (1909), 49.)

4.20Sculptural detail of housing in Steglitz. (From Hermann Jansen, ‘Neubauten des Beamten-Wohnungs-Vereins zu Berlin’, Der Baumeister, 7:5 (1909), 54.)

4.21Paul 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.)

4.22Feilner House, facade. (From Hans Mackowsky, ‘Das Feilner Haus’, Kunst und Künstler, 8:1 (1910), 5.)

4.23Dwelling in Krefeld. (From Paul Mebes, Um 1800, vol. 1 (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1908), p. 14.)

4.24Middle-class townhouse. (From Paul Mebes, Um 1800, vol. 2 (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1908), p. 80.)

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.

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, 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 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 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 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