“types” of models and the use of standardized materials.32
After World War I the development of housing accommodations for the working class focused on the urban environment, with the implementation of modern town planning and architecture. While unique developments can be identified in each European nation, there are striking similarities in five major factors that had an impact on working class housing between 1880 and 1930. The most critical one was the poverty of urban working class families. Low wages of European workers resulted in low rent housing and poor living conditions. The second factor was the fact that the building industry could not provide low cost units because of insufficient profit and unattractive investment. The third factor involved the increasing organization of the working class, as labor unions and the new social democratic political parties granted the working class electoral power. These new political entities put pressure on governments to develop state initiatives for housing solutions. The fourth factor was the ideology behind private property and the traditional family. The fifth element was the emergence of a permanent and growing government bureaucracy, which rapidly developed its own interests.33
Historically, at the beginning of the twentieth century elite groups acknowledged that the problem of working class housing could cause social instability. Given this fear, building regulations were established and tax incentives were offered to builders, but politicians hesitated to intervene with the private market, and there were few examples of working class housing constructed by municipalities and cooperative societies. The shortage of urban workers’ housing accelerated by the end World War I, and the demands for reform intensified, too. As a result, more government financed construction was executed, but the main supplier remained the private market.34
The implementation of working class housing between the wars in Europe followed the spread of the International Style. Working class housing projects were erected in many European countries and were designed by the most prominent architects of that era. In the 1920s Walter Gropius took part in Germany’s solution to the shortage of middle- and working-class dwellings. Gropius designed a large number of such apartments and housing colonies in Berlin, Dessau, Frankfort-on-Main, and Karlsruhe. The second congress of CIAM (The International Congress for Modern Architecture) in 1929 at Frankfort was initiated by Ernst May, head of the city’s Department of Housing, Planning and Building. In his office, May displayed drawings of low income housing. Among the architects who participated in this congress were Walter Gropius and Alvar Aalto. The plan for the extension of the city of Amsterdam in 1934 was designed by the Department of Public Works. One section of the plan was a residential area for workers employed around the dockyards and in the neighboring industrial plants. The general extension plan did not destroy the rural belt around the city. Land unsuitable for building was converted into wooded areas. The masses of houses were broken up by strips of greenery of various dimensions. The actual building of residential units was carried out by private enterprise or cooperative societies, though the city had full control over the ground plan, the façade, and the location of different types of housing.35
Gropius’s concern with the impact of industrialism upon architecture realized in Gropius’s work on mass housing, such as the workers’ housing at Toerten, Dessau (1926–1927); the proposal for high-rise flats at Wannsee (1931); or in the middle-class apartments at Siemensstadt (1929). Gropius proposed the use of prefabricated elements in buildings as early as 1909, when he drafted a proposal for advanced industrial techniques to produce standardized panels for housing projects.36
The topic of working class housing is discussed in two segments of this book. Architect Alexander Levy in his theoretical paper of 1920 designed a workers’ housing project for the city of Haifa, Israel. Levy’s plans for this proposed project were inspired directly by the German garden city movement before World War I regarding the distribution of the units, the choice of several “types” of units, and the use of standardized building materials. Another part of this book discusses cooperative housing implemented in the northern part of Tel Aviv during the 1930s. Most of these cooperative housing projects were designed by the architect Arieh Sharon, a graduate of the Bauhaus, and were initiated by the labor movement. Sharon’s design was influenced by European projects of grouping apartment buildings for the working class and the application of the International Style. They were similar to working class apartment complexes designed in Germany during the late 1920s and early 1930s by architects such as Walter Gropius and Hans Scharoun.
Notes
1.Christopher Crouch, Modernism in Art, Design and Architecture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999).
2.Nikolaus Pevsner, The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 7-8.
3.Ibid.
4.Ibid.
5.Ibid., 9.
6.Ibid., 179.
7.Ibid., 179-80.
8.Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 479.
9.Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. The International Style (New York: Norton, 1996).
10.Siegfried Giedion, Space, 486.
11.Ibid., 489.
12.Ibid., 496.
13.Pevsner, Sources, 192.
14.Ibid., 197.
15.Ebenezer Howard and Frederic James Osborn, Garden Cities of To-Morrow (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1965).
16.Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England (London: Longman, 1979).
17.Ibid.
18.Ibid.
19.Alan March, “Democratic Dilemmas, Planning and Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City,” Planning Perspectives 19 (October 2004): 409.
20.Peter
