The housing shortage, the urban proletariat,
and the liberation of woman

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Housing in the Industrial Revolution

Workers’ Housing in the 19th Century

Modernist architecture — Positive Bases

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Read the full-text PDF version of
Ross Wolfe’s “The Graveyard of Utopia:
Soviet Urbanism and the Fate of
the International Avant-Garde”

By industrializing the process of building houses and other structures, the avant-garde believed that it could help to solve many of the profound problems that had emerged out of industrial society. The housing question, about which Engels and many others wrote, as well as the divide between town and country, along with the intense overcrowding of the cities and the alienation that came with it — all these confronted the modernists as problems in need of solutions.  For Engels, the problem of housing shortages was more or less perennial.  The peculiarity of the modern crisis consisted mostly in the spectacular rate of its urbanization, the magnitude of the population it affected, and by the fact that it was felt not only by the lower classes but by members of the petit-bourgeoisie as well.[1]  While he correctly rejected the base analogy of the tenant-landlord relationship with the worker-capitalist relationship as Proudhonism,[2] Engels was emphatic that the housing question posed by industrial society could only be overcome by overthrowing capitalism as a whole.  Drawing upon an early theme he had developed in collaboration with Marx, this also meant resolving the “antithesis between town and country.”[3]  Although Engels insisted upon the dissolution of capitalist society, he wisely refrained from offering too much in the way of specifics as to what a postcapitalist solution would entail: “To speculate on how a future society might organize the distribution of food and dwellings leads directly to utopia.  The utmost we can do is to state…that with the downfall of the capitalist mode of production certain forms of appropriation which existed in society hitherto will become impossible.”[4]

The Working Poor in Substandard Housing, 19th Century

Workers’ Housing near Ebbw Vale steelworks in Wales, 19th Century

Engels was not the only one to notice the acute urban housing shortage as well as the widening divide between town and country that was taking place under heavy industrial production.  He himself was reacting polemically to treatments of the problem offered by “Proudhonist” Arthur Mülberger and “bourgeois” Emil Sax.  The problem was recognized by more moderate writers like Alfred Smith, who in his own work on The Housing Question in 1900 wrote that “the grim irony of the situation could not go further — the laboring population, who daily contribute to the wealth and comfort of the city, are for the most part driven on to congested areas and into overcrowded rooms.”[5]  A Christian socialist by the unlikely name of Moritz Kaufmann, who accused Marx of utopianism[6] and later briefly corresponded with him,[7] authored a text in 1907 on The Housing of the Working Classes and of the Poor.  In this work, Kaufmann wrote of the evils of “slumlords,” of rural depopulation, and of the different manifestations of the housing crisis in Germany, France, and Belgium.[8]  Ultimately, Kaufmann’s prescriptions for action in dealing with these matters were not far from what Social-Democratic architects like Ernst May would later put forth.  This mostly amounted to more government oversight in the provision of public programs and the bureaucratic deployment of specialists.[9]  The housing question was exacerbated by the Great War, at least in the estimation of Edgar Lauer and Victor House, members of the New York judicial system, who wrote a treatise on The Tenant and His Landlord in 1921.  “Recent housing difficulties are not a local phenomenon,” they wrote.  “Insufficiency and inadequacy of living accommodation appear to be part of the worldwide aftermaths of the Great War.”[10]

J.J.P. Oud, Industrialized Housing in Rotterdam

J.J.P. Oud’s Housing in Rotterdam (1918-1920)

Like most of the modernists, Mies van der Rohe saw the answer to these problems as residing in the industrialization of architectural construction: “I view the industrialization of the building trade as the key problem of building in our time.  If we achieve this industrialization, then the social, economic, technical, and even artistic questions can be resolved easily.”[11]  Gropius, his colleague at the Bauhaus and fellow student of Peter Behrens, also saw “the industrial mass production problem of our living requirements” as the paramount concern of architecture in the modern age.  Proposing a method of dry assembly to be used in housing construction, Gropius argued that “it becomes possible to assemble…prefabricated component parts of houses at the building site just like machines.”[12]  A decade later, Gropius would make the claim that this industrialization of building was largely on the road to being accomplished.[13]  Perhaps echoing Weber’s notion of modernity, Gropius saw this as all part of a greater process of rationalization that was occurring throughout society at the time.  He thus proudly announced: “We are approaching a state of technical proficiency when it will become possible to rationalize buildings and mass-produce them in factories by resolving their structure into component parts.”[14]  For Le Corbusier, this industrial rationalization would remove much of the confusion that prevailed in older building practices.  “Urban and suburban sites will be vast and orthogonal and no longer horribly misshapen,” he explained.  “[T]hey will allow for the use of mass-produced parts and the industrialization of the construction site.”[15]  Hannes Meyer, Gropius’ successor as director of the Bauhaus (he would later be replaced by Mies van der Rohe), confirmed the industrial character of new housing construction and reiterated Le Corbusier’s point in his programmatic 1928 piece, “building”: “the new house is a prefabricated unit for site assembly and, as such, an industrial product.”[16]  As Teige pointed out clearly, however, this development was only made possible by the prior development of industry and technologies of production carried out by capitalism.  A serially mass-produced house would have been unimaginable in preindustrial times.[17]

Anton Brenner’s Municipal Housing in Vienna (1928)

Mart Stam’s Housing in Frankfurt-am-Main (1928-1929)

All of these architects and theorists stressed the benefit such industrialization could bring to society, but Meyer highlighted this social aspect especially well.  “the new house is a social enterprise,” he asserted.  Architecture could reshape social life itself: “building is the deliberate organization of the processes of life.”[18]  Even more explicitly, in his article on “bauhaus and society” that appeared the following year, Meyer maintained that “building and design are for us one and the same, and they are a social process,” and stressed architecture’s social obligation: “our activities are determined by society, and the scope of our tasks is set by society.”[19]  Behrendt, writing his Victory of the New Building Style just as Meyer was beginning his term as director, made this same point exactly.  “The industrialization of the building industry will certainly find acceptance on an ever-larger scale and at an accelerating pace,” speculated Behrendt, “at least within the field of housing, which provides for the needs of the masses.”  He therefore held the view that the implementation of industrial techniques in architectural construction was “an economic necessity.”[20]  Ginzburg largely shared this sentiment of architecture’s social duty.  This is probably what led him to assert in late 1927 that the preeminent task of the architect was to create “the social condensers of his epoch.”  These would serve, Ginzburg argued, as “spatial repositories for the forms of the new life.”[21]  This became a central concept for the Soviet Constructivists, developed through subsequent issues of their journal, Modern Architecture.[22]  Though the first experimental dwellings OSA designed for mass production would ultimately prove disappointing, Ginzburg still upheld the importance of industrializing construction to à la Gropius in order to solve society’s housing crisis.  In an otherwise apologetic 1929 article on “Problems in the Typification of Housing in the RSFSR,” Ginzburg maintained:

The constructive working-out [prorabotka] of housing must be built on the principle of the maximum standardization of all elements, and must also strive for the industrialization of building production.  The light weight of the elements, the ability to manufacture them by assembly line [fabrichnym putem] during the winter period, and their on-site assemblage by lightly-skilled [malokvalifitsirovannoi] manpower.[23]

Moisei Ginzburg’s & Ignatii Milinis’ Narkomfin Workers’ Collective (1928-1931)

Moisei Ginzburg’s & Ignatii Milinis’ Narkomfin Workers’ Collective for the People’s Commissariat of Finance (1928-1931)

Others also commented on the potential of a universal restructuring of architecture’s ability to transform society, along with Meyer and Ginzburg.  Inspired by the former’s social advocacy, Ernő Kállai thus affirmed: “It is not enough to force industrial mass production…Architecture must strive resolutely to accomplish ‘social, technological, economic, and psychological organization’ (Hannes Meyer).”[24]  Teige, an admirer of the latter’s work, called for “an architecture that will provide the blueprint for a new life, one that builds structures that will become the ‘condensers’ of their epoch (as succinctly put by M.Ia. Ginzburg).”[25]

Promotional Poster for “The Dwelling” Exhibit by the Deutscher Werkbund (1927)

This general feeling of architecture’s social mission, captured most poignantly in such passages, eventually became the basis for a two landmark events for the avant-garde: the modernist projects of the Weißenhof estate that were built in Stuttgart, Germany in 1927, and the program for the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) group, founded in 1928 as the brainchild of Le Corbusier and Hannes Meyer.  While the broader social issues arising from housing shortages, overcrowding, and the urban-rural divide could only be addressed at the level of city planning, this had only been dealt with by the English garden city movement and a few isolated modernists before the general turn towards urbanism post-1925.  These issues, which center around the problem of the urban metropolis, will be discussed in the following section.  The Weißenhof Exhibition and the first three CIAM conferences, which merely attempted to tackle the problem of the individual structure, will be dealt with presently.  Insofar as they touch upon the same themes, they deserve to be mentioned in the same breath, given their common focus on “the dwelling” (die Wohnung) and their internationalist emphasis.[26]

Mies van der Rohe’s Quadriplex at Weißenhof in Stuttgart (1927)

The plan to arrange an exhibition at the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart was the idea of Mies van der Rohe, who was then the vice-president of the Deutscher Werkbund, itself founded some twenty years earlier by Muthesius.  According to the foreword to the official catalog of the newly opened Weißenhof estate, written by Mies, he had simply “invited leading representatives of the modern movement to make their contributions to the problem of the modern dwelling.”[27]  The list of contributors to the exhibit included J.J.P. Oud, Mies van der Rohe, Victor Bourgeois, Le Corbusier, Gropius, A. G. Schneck, Hans Scharoun, Peter Behrens, Mart Stam, Josef Frank, Adolf Rading, L. Hilbersheimer, Max Taut, Bruno Taut, Richard Döcker, and Hans Poelzig[28] — a fairly international selection.  Indeed, as the Werkbund member Wilhelm Lotz noted, part of the aim of the Weißenhof project was to better “draw attention to the generation of architects who in every country are standing up openly and sincerely in support of the new architecture.”[29]  Beyond featuring outstanding international architectural talent, the exhibition received global coverage in the various avant-garde presses of the world.  Remarking upon the thirty-three dwellings erected at Weißenhof, the Soviet architect Gurevich, a member of SA’s editorial staff, wrote in an article on “The Modern Dwelling”: “Modern life, the fast pace of development of modern existence [bytiia], the colossal growth of population compared with the growth of dwellings, have, to begin with, put forward one of the major problems of production — THE ECONOMY OF TIME.”[30]   This is, of course, consonant with the Taylorization of architecture mentioned earlier.  Teige, for his part, was quite impressed with the exhibition’s results, both in terms of its international basis and its commitment to industrialized building:

The 1927 Stuttgart Werkbund Exhibition Die Wohnung and its associated experimental housing colony, the Weißenhof Siedlung, was the most important large exposition of modern architecture dedicated to the reform of housing of the last decade, perhaps even of our own century.  It was organized on an international basis by its director, Mies van der Rohe, and has become an event of international significance for the entire modern world: at a time when modern architecture much too often depended on theoretical, speculative, and hypothetical efforts, it provided a much-needed opportunity to review some of its individual proposals and provide a forum for a critical comparison. The exhibition accomplished that comparison by including modern architectural designs from all civilized countries and by recognizing the reform of housing as a fundamental problem of the new architecture and making it the primary focus of its attention.  It succeeded in shedding a new light on many facets of this problem most effectively: it combined a large exhibition of construction samples in the Gewerbehalle (which displayed the most modern achievements in the areas of construction materials, furniture, lighting, technical and hygienic installations, etc.), with the centerpiece of the enterprise, the Weißenhof model housing colony, where seventeen architects were commissioned to build thirty-three houses, all constructed with modern materials and all relying as much as possible on industrialized methods of construction.[31]

Peter Behrens’ Houses at Weißenhof in Stuttgart (1927)

According to Werner Gräff, one of Doesburg’s disciples and an important commentator on the Weißenhof estate, the social exigency that the exhibition intended to address was palpable.  “[T]he customary dwelling which has served us for centuries seems unbearably ill-suited to the new generation,” wrote Gräff.  For this reason, “the new architecture is striving towards a new way of living, and towards a more rational use of new materials and new constructional methods.”[32]  Mart Stam, whose houses at the site were praised exceptionally, reaffirmed Gräff’s point regarding modern architecture’s cultivation of and adaptation to the new way of life.[33]  Finally, Giedion wrote an occasional piece honoring the opening of the Weißenhofsiedlung, taking note of both the technical innovations it included as well as its potential social aspect: “The Weißenhof Housing Settlement gives evidence of two great changes: the change from handicraft methods of construction to industrialization, and the premonition of a new way of life.”[34]

“Bau und Wohnung” Catalog published by the Deutscher Werkbund, 1927 for the Stuttgart Exhibition

Hans Scharoun’s House at the Weißenhof Stuttgart Exhibit, 1927

And indeed, not only were the houses constructed using prefabricated parts assembled on-site, not only did they promise to create a new spatial environment — they expressed an overall aesthetic.  Most of them formed serial design patterns, painted entirely white and featuring flat-terraced roofs.  Though Doesburg believed “[a] solution for the modern dwelling which is satisfactory in all respects has as yet not been found,…the architects Mies van der Rohe, Scharoun, Stam, and also Gropius…are closest to such a solution.”[35]  In either case, the new houses at Weißenhof inspired a number of similar exhibitions throughout Europe: at Vienna in Austria, two in Zurich in Switzerland,[36] at Brno in Czechoslovakia,[37] and again in Germany at Breslau[38] and Dammerstock.[39] Doesburg, who visited the exhibition at Brno, immediately noted the connection between Stuttgart and its eastern successor.[40]  According to his sources, similar projects were being scheduled to take place in Barcelona, in Rome (organized by Marinetti), in Berlin, Cologne, and then finally Moscow and Warsaw.[41]  In addition to all this, the social mission embodied by the houses at Stuttgart provided a touchstone for the foundation of CIAM the following year.

Founding Members of CIAM at La Sarraz in 1928

Le Corbusier with other Members of CIAM, 1928

Convening at the Château de la Sarraz in the summer of 1928, the group of architects who would come to found CIAM laid down, in broad strokes, the most basic principles of modern architecture.  From the very beginning, CIAM stressed architects’ “professional obligations towards society.”[42]  It could, moreover, count among its members many the major modernist architects of the West.[43]  The La Sarraz Declaration, announcing the group’s existence and program, outlined many of the major positive and negative bases of modern architecture that we have covered so far: the impact of the machine on modern society,[44] the need for standardization and rationalization in building,[45] the stultifying influence of the academies,[46] and a commitment to solving the housing problem.[47]  This final point of CIAM’s statement of purpose culminated in its quest to determine “the minimum dwelling,” which was an ongoing topic of discussion from 1929 to 1931.[48]  This topic, along with the group’s subsequent interest in urbanism and “the Functional City” (covered in the next section), will be our primary concern regarding CIAM.

Promotional Poster for the CIAM-2 Conference in Frankfurt

Ernst May & Emil Kaufmann: Experimental Housing in “New Frankfurt” (1926-1929)

The organization’s second international conference, CIAM-2, explicitly took up the question of the Existenzminimum.  Fittingly, it was held in Frankfurt in 1929, in the midst of one of the most impressive housing experiments taking place at the time, Ernst May’s celebrated Social-Democratic Neue Frankfurt.[49]  May’s experimental settlement, built according to modernist stylistic conventions, would figure prominently into the debates.  Le Corbusier, Gropius, May, and Stam (all participants in the Weißenhof project) were the prime contributors to the Frankfurt summit.  As Teige later noted, in his magisterial 1931 study on The Minimum Dwelling, CIAM here continued the work begun at Stuttgart and expanded its scope to address the wider housing shortage of Russia, Europe, and America.  “The International Congresses of Modern Architecture [CIAMs] have placed the question of theminimum dwelling on its agenda as a top priority,” recorded Teige, “and declared it the most urgent task to be undertaken by the architectural avant-garde in all its practical work and theoretical deliberations, to be coordinated by its members in international cooperation in order to clarify and study the subject in all its complexity and ramifications.”[50]  In terms of its social mission, it was the first modernist effort focused directly on providing housing to low-income families, the working poor and pauperized intellectuals.[51]  As Stam observed, even the houses at Weißenhof had been designed for the middle-class.[52]  At Frankfurt, by contrast, the need to produce standardized models to house the oppressed classes of society was explicit.[53]  In the article that Stam later submitted to Das Neue Frankfurt during the 1929 CIAM conference, he clearly stated his conviction that “the minimum requirements in housing and the standard of living of many thousands of the working population remain unsatisfied.”[54] “[W]e need enough flats of sufficient quality to meet the needs of the poor and homeless,” asserted May, in the article he wrote for the conference.  “We need flats for subsistence living.”[55]

Karel Teige’s masterpiece on “The Minimum Dwelling” (Nejmenší byt), 1931

Le Corbusier’s & Pierre Jeanneret’s Flats for a Subsistence Minimum (1928)

Ernst May’s “Kleinstwohnung”: Propaganda Video of Neue Frankfurt for the CIAM-2 Conference (1928)

With this last point, May highlighted the dual nature of the problem posed by the minimum dwelling.  For the issue was not simply that of the raw shortage of housing, put in terms of numbers.  It was also that much of the housing that did exist was deemed by the modernists to be unlivable.  “[T]he abode of the proletariat and the poor in tenements or workers’ barracks is not a dwelling in the true sense of the word, but merely a shelter,” wrote Teige.  “It is not a home, but merely a lodging.”[56]  Such conditions were, for the architectural avant-garde, simply unacceptable.  Le Corbusier therefore felt it necessary to clarify: “By ‘the crisis in housing,’ we mean not only a quantitative crisis but a qualitative one as well.”[57]  For architects like Le Corbusier, May, and Gropius, the question of determining minimum requirements for human habitation was thus (following Meyer) both a biological[58] and sociological matter.[59]  Gropius wrote: “The problem of the minimum dwelling is that of establishing the elementary minimum of space, air, light and heat required by man in order that he be able to fully develop his life functions without experiencing restrictions due to his dwelling, i.e., a minimum modus vivendi in place of a modus non moriendi.”[60]  Above all, this would mean a development of the dwelling’s interior, as well as those elements (doors, windows, walls) through which it was related to its exterior.[61]  According to Le Corbusier and his cousin Jeanneret, “our studies…result in a revision of the dwelling’s functions, with this short, concise (and so very revolutionary) phrase as a slogan: ‘breathe, hear, see’ or again: ‘air, sound, light’ or again: ‘ventilation and isothermics (even temperature), acoustics, radiation of light,’ etc.”[62]  In a similar vein, Gropius ecstatically proclaimed: “Maximum light, sun, and air for all dwellings!”[63]  All these basic hygienic functions would contribute to the overall health and livability of the minimum dwelling.

“Shell making, Edinburgh,” by Sir John Lavery (1918), depicting women working in industrial jobs

The Further Dissolution of the Traditional Family Structure: Child Labor in the 19th Century

Beyond merely serving the physiological needs of its inhabitants, the modern house or apartment had to satisfy certain social and psychological requirements that had arisen historically.  Most of the authors who wrote on the problem of minimum dwelling for the CIAM-2 Frankfurt conference were communists (Teige, Stam, Schmidt) or at the least Social-Democrats (May, Victor Bourgeois, Schütte-Lihotzky), and so they expressed a common sense of solidarity with the urban proletariat — sometimes bordering on facile workerism.[64]  Anachronistic tendencies had been carried over from the traditions of rural populations into the contemporary setting of the metropolis.[65]  Moreover, the articulation and elaboration of bourgeois individualism under the conditions of modernity began to undermine the traditional economic unit of the family.  As modern subjectivity asserted itself more within the household, women increasingly felt a sense of independence from their traditional domestic duties.  Teige derived his views from the theories of Marx and Engels (particularly the latter’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State);[66] Gropius appealed to the writings of a German sociologist, Franz-Karl Müller-Lyer.[67]  The sociological authorities relied upon by the different modernist architects varied, but their conclusions were largely the same.

The nineteenth-century working-class family

Frauentag (Women’s Day) Demonstration, Vienna 1930

All these authors agreed with the premise that the traditional roles assumed by men and women had been destabilized by modern conditions.  Not that any of them were sad to see the perennial institutions of marriage and the family disintegrate.  Quite early in his career, Marx made it clear that the division of labor within the family condemned women to “domestic slavery.”[68]  Engels, when he took up the subject thirty years later, did not mince words when it came to the power dynamics involved in monogamous marriage: “Monogamous marriage comes on the scene as the subjugation of the one sex by the other.”[69]  Müller-Lyer, in his History of Social Development, similarly described the historic formalization of marital relations in society as tantamount to the enslavement of women.[70]  As Engels explained, the division of labor entailed by the marriage relation and the relegation of woman’s activities to the domestic sphere implied her exclusion from the possession of private property within the family.[71]  Only with the expansion of large-scale industrial capitalism and the participation of women in factory production did the possibility of emancipating women emerge.  “[T]o emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor,” wrote Engels. “The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time.”[72]  Müller-Lyer argued that “the professional woman and marriage are antithetic and inimical,”[73] and anticipated the modernists’ argument that women could be liberated from the drudgery of household chores by the implementation of labor-saving devices.  He even suggested measures of socializing domestic labor that would later be advocated by the Soviet avant-garde: collective laundries, kitchens, cafeterias.[74]  But according to Müller-Lyer’s analysis, the process of women’s social emancipation was already underway.  “High capitalism,” he wrote, “helped to break up the family and drove many women out of the home into business.”  This in turn gave rise to the modern women’s movement.[75]

Down with Kitchen Slavery! Bring Forth the New Life! (1931)

Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria: Women’s Demonstration, Vienna (1930)

Concerning the structure of the gens itself, Marx and Engels argued that it had been organized in such a manner so as to ensure the patrilineal passage of property from one generation to the next through partible male inheritance, primogeniture, or (more rarely) postremogeniture.[76]  Families also functioned as the most basic unit of socioeconomic organization.[77]  They remained fairly vague as to the specifics of what would replace the family in a postcapitalist society, but generally suggested that the form of the family would be abolished.[78]  Luckily for those architects inspired by political Marxism (like Meyer, Nikolai Miliutin, and Teige), later theorists belonging to the movement made further contributions to the critique of the family and the inequality of the sexes.  This critique was deepened by radical authors like August Bebel,[79] Clara Zetkin,[80] Rosa Luxemburg,[81] Vladimir Lenin, and Aleksandra Kollontai.  “Millions upon millions of women in…families live (or, rather, exist),” wrote Lenin, “as ‘domestic slaves,’ striving to feed and clothe their family on pennies, at the cost of desperate daily effort and ‘saving’ on everything — except their own labor.”[82]  For Kollontai, the most important aspects of the “woman question” in the modern age were the dissolution of the traditional family structure[83] and the achievement of economic independence.[84]  Ultimately, she concluded that “women can become truly free and equal only in a world organized along new social and productive lines.”[85]

Frauentag (International Women’s Day) 1930: Against Militarism, Against Social and Political Reaction

The New, Hermaphroditic Humanity: El Lissitzky’s Poster for the Russian Exhibit in Zurich (1929)

The social theories developed by Marx, Engels, and their followers, as well as by non-Marxists like Müller-Lyer and others, were invoked by the avant-garde architects in their proposed reforms of the dwelling.  Notions of women’s rights and the changing role of the family influenced their designs.  Gropius, paraphrasing Müller-Lyer’s arguments, thus wrote:

As the family era was ushered in by the rise of man, so the individual era is characterized by the awakening and progressive emancipation of woman.  Woman’s duty of obedience to man vanishes, and the laws of society gradually grant her rights equal to those of men.  As the family transfers numerous domestic chores to the machinery of socialized production, woman’s sphere of domestic activity shrinks and she looks beyond the family for an outlet for her natural need for occupation: she enters the world of business and industry.  In turn industry, rejuvenated on basically new foundations by the machine, shows woman the impractical nature of her domestic hand labor.[86]

KPD (Communist Party of Germany) Journal for Working Women, 1929

Kitchen factory, 1928: Designed so as to eliminate degrading, tedious domestic labor for women

Indeed, many of the efforts to Taylorize the dwelling space were inspired by elements of the feminist movement which were part of the greater social mission of the avant-garde.  True sexual equality could only be achieved, the modernists felt, through the liberation of women from frivolous domestic obligations and their more general subservience to men.  One of the major design concerns of the minimum dwelling at the Frankfurt conference thus centered around the ergonomic arrangement of the kitchen.  Indeed, two new major design proposals for the standard kitchen had been introduced in the year leading up to CIAM-2.  The Stuttgart Weißenhof estate featured a new kitchen layout, and Schütte-Lihotzky’s groundbreaking Frankfurt kitchen (a Taylorist design patterned after railway kitchens)[87] had been unveiled just months prior to the conference.  Both of these models differed from the statistically-average kitchen in terms of their dimensions and the variety of appliances they included.[88]  May commissioned an instructive video showcasing the Frankfurt kitchen to be viewed by the CIAM representatives.  As Teige pointed out, the kitchen was a natural site for the employment of industrial techniques.  “The kitchen is the nerve center of the apartment-household,” Teige maintained.  “It is the best designed and most rationalized room of the modern house, simply because as a place of production, a workshop, or a miniature factory, it was the most obvious place to apply the organizational experiences of modern factory production methods — in this case, to the processes of food preparation.”[89]  The Soviet modernist Nikolai Miliutin, though not in attendance at CIAM-2 in Frankfurt, proposed the following year the “collectivization” of petty household chores through the institution of public kitchens, day-cares, cafeterias, and laundries.[90]  “[C]ollectivization of the life services of the population provides…the freedom of woman from domestic slavery,” wrote Miliutin.[91]  Across the avant-garde, new dwellings were being designed to transform the conditions of family life and work toward achieving the equality of the sexes.[92]

Moisei Ginzburg, blueprint for a “Type K” apartment in his Narkomfin complex

Moisei Ginzburg, bedroom interior of a “Type K” Apartment in the Narkomfin complex (1928)

A Room of One’s Own: Gropius’ Private Bedroom at Bauhaus Dessau, with built-in cabinets (1926)

A concurrent social concern of the modernists when it came to the overall layout of the minimum dwelling was the need to cater to the psychological needs of the atomistic individual engendered by modern bourgeois society.  Privacy within the context of the dwelling was therefore a top priority in its avant-garde designers.  For most of the those who convened at the Frankfurt summit, this meant the provision of separate rooms for each individual living within a single housing unit.  “To allow for the increasing development of more pronounced individuality of life within the society,” wrote Gropius, “and the individual’s justified demand for occasional withdrawal from his surroundings, it is necessary, moreover, to establish the following ideal minimum requirement: every adult shall have his own room, small though it may be!”[93]  Following Müller-Lyer’s lead, Gropius stressed this minimum requirement despite the need for private individuals to develop a broader social consciousness.[94]  Likewise Teige, though a communist, was in favor of partitioned dwelling spaces for every adult individual.  He based this assertion on the breakup of the traditional family described by Marx and Engels as occurring under capitalism.  “The disintegration of the traditional family began with the entry of women in the workforce, along with the establishment of the principle of equality between men and women,” wrote Teige. “As a result, the family has become atomized into independent individuals, which in turn has made it necessary for individuals to maintain a certain psychological distance vis-à-vis each other even in marriage, and therefore at home as well.  For these reasons, any rational solution to the minimum dwelling must posit the following rule as its most basic requirement: each adult individual must have his or her own separate (living and sleeping) space.”[95]

Viacheslav Vladimirov’s Workers’ Club for the Compressor Factory (1927-1929)

Ad for Mercedes-Benz, 1927, outside Le Corbusier’s Weißenhof house

Moisei Ginzburg meeting with builders on site for the Narkomfin building (1928)

The methods employed to build these new dwellings were to reflect the industrialized approach that the architectural modernists had been advocating for years.  “We must find and apply new methods, clear methods,” Le Corbusier maintained in his paper for the Frankfurt CIAM, “allowing us to work out useful plans for the home, lending themselves naturally to standardization, industrialization, Taylorization (mass production).”[96]  With reference to the serialized housing he created under France’s Loucheur Laws in 1928, Le Corbusier boasted that “we actually produced the prefabricated house, and we did what the builders of cars and railway carriages do.”[97]  Lissitzky, who was at least an honorary member of CIAM (though visa problems prevented him from attending), proudly asserted in a book written simultaneously with the Frankfurt congress that “a system of easily assembled housing units…could be erected at various locations according to personal preference… — in other words, a prefabricated standard unit for individuals or families, easy to assemble.”[98]  Teige, finally, summarizing his conclusions on the problem of the minimum dwelling, connected the social aspect of providing housing for the masses with the modernist theme of industrialized building.  “Thus, too, the dwelling cell must be considered the primary and essential unit of space provided for every adult working individual,” wrote Teige.  “The living cell is a strictly standardized element: the common basic needs of dwelling and lodging for the masses are therefore served by a mass-produced, standardized abode.”[99]

Still from Hans Richter’s “The New Dwelling” (1930)

Still from Hans Richter’s “The New Dwelling” (1930)

Pierre Chanel’s Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (1930)

Reviewing the positive bases of modernist architecture, then, we can see that it rests on three main pillars: 1. the spatiotemporal properties elucidated by abstract art; 2. the quintessentially modern mode of industrialized production; and 3. a social commitment to the alleviation of the housing shortage and an identification with the politics of class struggle and the fight for sexual equality.  Two final (though not insignificant) points may be briefly noted before passing onto the next subsection.

Le Corbusier and other members of CIAM having some fun at the La Sarraz Conference (1928)

Le Corbusier with the Vesnins in the Soviet Union (1930)

Nikolai Kolli, Le Corbusier, and others in Russia (1930)

First of all, relating to the global/international quality of abstract space as manifested under capitalism — and reflecting the international basis of socialist and working-class politics in general — the modernist movement understood itself to be founded on a basis that transcended national boundaries and particularities.[100]  As early as 1921, at the point when Reyner Banham argued that De Stijl entered its “international phase,”[101] the avant-garde in the arts and architecture worked self-consciously toward a universal aesthetic language bound together by a common social mission.  Le Corbusier thus remarked in 1925: “There are now signs that [modern architecture] is emerging almost everywhere — in America, Russia, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Holland, France — there are houses free from decoration where the problems of proportion and structure are posed.”[102]  From the First International Congress of Progressive Artists that met in Düsseldorf in 1922,[103] all the way up through the founding of CIAM,[104] the modernists in both art and architecture expressed the international ideal.  Giving voice to the abstract spatiotemporal character of the avant-garde’s architectural ideology (and thereby its internationalism), Hannes Meyer thus wrote in his 1926 essay, “The New World”:

“Ford” and “Rolls Royce” have burst open the core of the town, obliterating distance and effacing the boundaries between town and country.  Aircraft slip through the air: “Fokker” and “Farman” widen our range of movement and the distance between us and the earth; they disregard national frontiers and bring nation closer to nation.  Illuminated signs twinkle, loud-speakers screech, posters advertise, display windows shine forth.  The simultaneity of events enormously extends our concept of “space and time,” it enriches our life.  We live faster and therefore longer…The precise division into hours of the time we spend working in office and factory and the split-minute timing of railway timetables make us live more consciously…Radio, marconigram, and phototelegraphy liberate us from our national seclusion and make us part of a world community.  The gramophone, microphone, orchestrion, and pianola accustom our ears to the sound of impersonal-mechanized rhythms…Large blocks of flats, sleeping cars, house yachts, and transatlantic liners undermine the local concept of the “homeland.”  The fatherland goes into decline.  We learn Esperanto.  We become cosmopolitan.[105]

“International Style” Exhibition organized at MoMA in New York by Philip Johnson & others (1932)

Participants at the international CIAM-4 conference in Athens (1933)

Though this sentiment was nearly unanimous amongst the architectural modernists, it is important to reemphasize this point in light of recent historical accounts which have underplayed the role of internationalism in the modernist movement.  William Curtis, author of the influential survey Modern Architecture Since 1900, wrote of avant-garde’s somewhat self-serving cosmopolitan representation of itself: “[B]y packing together things that happened to look like each other and by claiming that they were all part of a unified phenomenon, the proponents of an ‘International Style’ ran the risk of ignoring considerable differences of visual inflection, and great differences of intention and of belief.”[106]  To be sure, this is a welcome corrective to those architectural historians who all too easily run together vernacular differences in stylistic expression or ideological intention.  But no one was more aware of these differences and subtle variations than the modernists themselves.  Fierce, polemical disagreements abounded within modernist architectural discourse.[107]  Nevertheless, they remained committed to the creation of a universal, international language of form and the fulfillment of a common social mission.  This fact is in itself significant.  It is indicative of the abstract spatiality and temporality of capitalism, suggested by Meyer’s cosmopolitanism, his championing of simultaneity and synchronization, and his drive to annihilate the concrete spatial contradictions that exist between town and country and from nation to nation.

Antonio Sant’Elia, sketch of a building and roadway from La Citta Nuova (1914)

Geometric, Sunken Roadways between Columns of Buildings in Le Corbusier’s “Ville Radieuse” (1930)

Fiat Factory Rooftop Test-Track in Italy, 1921

The final way in which the abstract spatiality of capitalism is positively reflected in modernist architectural theory is in its demand for a tabula rasa on which to construct their proposed designs.  Rejecting the topographical unevenness and the peculiarity of geological formations found in empirical reality, the avant-garde called for the reshaping of the earth’s surface to facilitate their architectural visions.  Writing in his prophetic and unprecedented Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, Antonio Sant’Elia wrote in 1914 that “architecture must be more vital…, and we can best attain that…by blowing sky-high, for a start, all those monuments and monumental pavements, arcades and flights of steps, by digging out our streets and piazzas, by raising the level of the city, by reordering the earth’s crust and reducing it to be the servant of our every need and every fancy.”[108]  The terraforming fantasy of Sant’Elia was taken up by the avant-garde more generally.  It was as if they demanded an empty, Cartesian grid on which to build.  “WE MUST BUILD IN THE OPEN,” declared Le Corbusier.  “The layout must be of a purely geometrical kind …The city of today is a dying thing because it is not geometrical.  To build in the open would be to replace our present haphazard arrangements…by a uniform layout.  Unless we do this there is no salvation.”[109]  As Lissitzky also noted, most of the proposals for new buildings by the avant-garde were meant for flat, open spaces.[110]  Through the power of modern technology, the modernists felt that they could literally change the face of the planet.  This enthusiasm for the possibilities of industrial machinery was not limited to the architects, either.  Leon Trotskii, one of the most famous political revolutionaries of the era, himself shared this excitement for reshaping the globe by advanced technology.  “Socialist man will rule all nature by the machine, with its grouse and its sturgeons,” he wrote in 1924, in Literature and Revolution.  “He will point out places for mountains and for passes.  He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans.”[111]  Trotskii continued:

The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered final.  Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are neither few nor insignificant.  But they are mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming.  Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing “on faith,” is actually able to cut down mountains and move them.  Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan.  Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature.  In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste.[112]

Cartesian towers from Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (1930)

Colored sketch of Le Corbusier’s proposal for his Ville Radieuse (1930)

Geometrical overview of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (1930)

This demiurgic impulse, as outrageously utopian as it may seem today, gripped not only modernist architects of the 1920s and 1930s, but some of the most powerful politicians of the period.  In the following section, we will explore the aspirations of the Soviet avant-garde, as well as the international turn toward urbanism and the crossroads of modernism that took place in the USSR.

Notes