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

(Hardback)

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The architecture of social reform explores the fascinating intellectual origins of modern architectures obsession with domesticity. Copiously illustrated, Roussets 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 Germanys 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 architectures 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.

Author Bio

Isabel Rousset teaches architectural history at Curtin University