Negotiating Domesticity. Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture

Extract

The domestic realm is of tremendous topical significance. It comprises the bulk of our built environment, is the primary daily realm of both men and women and mirrors our social and gender relations and the terrain of our private lives. Still, the published literature offers us mostly cursory overviews of its historical development, while narrowly focused interpretative essays proliferate. Negotiating Domesticity, growing outof a symposium panel, reflects this circumstance, offering us a wide array of subjects and ranging from the historical study to autobiographical interpretation.

Several essays focus on the early modern period when domesticity came in for great professional, largely male, scrutiny. Two essays address seminal debates about gender and freedom in Weimar Germany. Karina Van Herck sets out what public intellectuals such as Benjamin and Taut thought the ‘cold’ and scientific aesthetic of Weimar modernism and the attack on ‘coziness’ might achieve, principally a kind of radical egalitarianism and emancipation from bourgeois individualism. Despina Stratigakos addresses an equally powerful though counter motive of the modernist period: a generalized fear of the single woman, the lesbian and the professional woman. Her discussion centres on Johanna Böhm's 1930 novel, The House for Single Women. Set in a modernist housing block built by and for single women, Böhm's novel portrays a decadent and self-destructive world. The real examples of housing for single women were frequently attacked for their “unnatural” arrangements and, like Böhm's novel, reflected a persistent fear of the New and otherwise uncontained, Woman. On the other hand, Elizabeth Darling's close study of Kensal House in the London of the 1930s reveals a prevalent and more genial reform ideal. Here modern domestic design proffered a moral good by nurturing the nuclear family and creating the possibility for a new ‘citizen-housewife’, who, freed from drudgery, could turn to building a better society. Conservative family values are also at the centre of Fredie Floré's essay on post-Second-World-War housing in Belgium. Her study of the Catholic-sponsored Christian Workers’ Movement for housing underscores how religious authorities shaped the well-meaning but banal and paternalistic agendas of many such programmes.