From Outer Space:
Architectural Theory beyond the Discipline

Since the publication of Ferdinand Lundberg’ s influential study America’s 60 families,[1] American social scientists and historians who have explored social and cultural philanthropy have repeatedly discussed the question of how much power philanthropists and social reformers receive from their engagement in the “betterment of society.”[2] Although Lundberg’s thesis that America’s wealthiest families successfully employed philanthropy to gain dominance over society has been refuted by many historians, it cannot be doubted that philanthropic engagement accords its instigators some influence and power.[3] The cultural historian Neil Harris, for instance suggested that museums were an element of social policy.[4] Museum makers, curators, donors and organizers of exhibitions decided which art and artifacts were put on display. They were, for instance, in a position to make public their wish for which artistic tradition was supposed to be revered by an audience. Museums, from their inception, shared the social mission of schools, libraries, and universities, but as Harris reminds us, the later ones “were, in a sense, far less authoritarian.”[5] While one could argue in a class room if one disagreed with the professor’s opinion and while one was free in the selection of books to choose from the library, “the ordinary museum-goer was hostage, in a sense, to the taste, standards, and goals of the specialists organizing the display.”[6] Based on their extensive studies of Boston and Chicago’s philanthropic traditions, Robert Dalzell and Kathleen McCarthy noted that philanthropy offered an alternative way of exercising power. While Dalzell carefully suggests that control over philanthropic institutions gave the upper classes “the power to set standards,”[7] McCarthy goes even further and argues with regards to female involvement in philanthropy that museum and charity boards represented a counter-government that empowered women long before they received the right to vote.[8] The distance of the state on the local and regional level in nineteenth-century German, Canadian, and American society allowed philanthropists – male and female – to occupy important places in the public sphere of urban societies and to define these spaces according to their own views. Philanthropists decided which museums to build, and what would be put on display in these museums. They, further, decided the architectural structures of social housing projects and, thus, had their hands in the definition of what constituted family.
While museums and art galleries allowed philanthropists to impose their artistic taste on larger segments of the urban populations, social housing enterprises accorded philanthropists even greater power. They found themselves in a position to define social structures such as the family.[9] Guided by the belief that the family is at the very heart of society and that a stabilization of society cannot succeed without a stabilization of its very basis – the family – German and North American philanthropists who engaged in social housing projects alone or in the company of fellow philanthropists dedicated much time to the planning of apartment buildings. The idea of a closed and separate tenement dominated the nineteenth-century discourse on social housing on both sides of the Atlantic. In these debates, philanthropists advocated the creation of a self-contained apartment that included a kitchen, several bedrooms and a hallway. Only washrooms and lavatories were, because of hygienic standards and architectural-technical difficulties, in some cases removed from the apartment and placed in communally used staircases or hallways. Max Pommer, the architect of the Meyersche Foundation in Leipzig, one of Germany’s largest social housing trusts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, further demanded that not more than two apartments should have access from the staircase at the same floor, thus further isolating the families living inside these apartments.[10]
Social reformers and philanthropists invested much time and money in the planning and construction of such apartment buildings because they believed that intermixing of different neighbors in an apartment building caused a breakdown of social rules and standards and was to blame for the outbreak of infectious diseases. These philanthropists considered the open structure of families and flats as a threat to the state. “We have learned by experience,” stated the Third Annual Report of the Boston Co-operative Building Company, “that such tenements as this which has common corridors, common water rooms, and, above all, common privies, are a disgrace to modern civilization, and public nuisances, inasmuch as they encroach upon the family relations, tend to make them impure, and thereby sap the very foundations of the State.”[11] For urban middle-class observers in London, the intermixing of family members with neighbors and friends led inevitably to the corruption of the city youth. Living in overcrowded tenements, young women and men were early in their life exposed to sexual promiscuity and subsequently succumbed to crime and poverty.[12] For contemporary housing reformers and philanthropists, there were basically only two ways to intervene: (1) social supervision and control or (2) separation of the families in independent apartment units. The decision to build apartment buildings with isolated units resulted from the recognition that social control of working-class families in houses with communal facilities proved to be ineffective.[13] Therefore, philanthropists, guided by the concept of the nuclear family, began in the second half of the nineteenth century to produce apartment buildings with clearly defined private and public spaces. The apartment was to be closed with a locked entrance door. Only those individuals who possessed a key handed out by the housing authorities were allowed to enter the apartment. The hallway prevented the outside visitor, who would knock on the entrance door from looking directly into any of the rooms. Entrance and hallway, thus, provided a much higher degree of often “unwanted” privacy.[14]
The attempts at housing reform as well as the discussion about the appropriate family size and structure were not limited to the national level but had clearly a transnational and even transatlantic dimension. The transatlantic discourse on apartment and family structure is reflected in the annual reports of various social housing companies in German and American cities during the nineteenth century as well as in scholarly works as for instance Elgin R. L. influential treatment The Housing of the Working People (1895), which presented his American audience with an exhaustive study of social housing in European and American cities.[15] Gould’s study, which was based mostly on his own observations of social housing enterprises in Europe, was soon regarded as the American standard work on the subject of housing reform.[16] Inspired by the desire that this investigation would “stimulate undertakings in the direction of improving the dwellings of the people,”[17] Gould dedicated two chapters (roughly two thirds of the book) to an in-depth analysis of housing companies in the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Sweden, Belgium and Denmark. Chapter nine of this investigation was dedicated to model block buildings in Great Britain (60 pages), the United States (37 pages), Germany (30 pages), France (9 pages), Sweden (3 pages) and the Netherlands (2 pages).
For Gould, the apartment structure and the relations between the families living in these apartment buildings were a major point of interest. His chapter on urban multi-storey apartment-building complexes (see table below) included a description of Germany’s oldest social housing trust, the Berlin Mutual Building Company, which had been founded by Victor Huber in 1849; Frankfurt’s Tenement Dwellings Company, which played a pioneering role in the use of the Erbpacht; and a short introduction to the Hanover Savings and Building Society, which was to revolutionize the production of social housing by employing the cooperative model.[18] Gould was interested in the economic, architectural, and city-planning aspects of these enterprises as well as the social structure of renters and the consequences of the architectural design for the formation and definition of family.
 

Looking at these various housing enterprises, Gould judged their quality by their architectural “protection of the family.” Although Gould lauded the economic set up of the Aktienbaugesellschaft für kleine Wohnungen in Frankfurt am Main, he did not appreciate the architectural design of their apartment buildings since there were “no special arrangements to prevent promiscuous mingling of occupants upon stairways and landings, except to prohibit it in a general regulation.”[19] This architectural design was not, to Gould regret, unique to this Frankfurt’s housing company. When he visited Hanover, he found a very similar architecture in the buildings of the Bau- und Sparverein. As in Frankfurt, Gould remarked, “there are no special regulations with a view of preventing the promiscuous mingling of occupants in hallways or corridors.”[20] However, in the buildings of both companies, the Aktienbaugesellschaft für kleine Wohnungen in Frankfurt am Main and the Bau- und Sparverein in Hanover, apartments were closed to the staircase and contained a private hallway within the tenement. This private hallway preserved, according to Gould, the “independence and isolation of the individual family.”[21] In the case of the apartment buildings in Frankfurt, Gould even observed that the “tenements are self-contained in every aspect, the water-closets being reached by another private hallway at the rear, which opens to the bedroom and to the kitchen.”[22]
While Gould voiced some criticism towards the apartment building structure of the Frankfurt and Hanover companies, he admired the social housing projects of Leipzig (Meyer’s model tenements and Salomon Fund) and Dresden (Cooperative Building Association) since they seemed to offer, at least in their architectural design, the perfect solution to the housing problem of the working classes. Meyer’s model tenements occupy an eminent place in Gould’s investigation of German social housing companies. Herrmann Julius Meyer (1826-1909), the owner of one of Germany’s most important publishing houses, the Bibliographisches Institut,[23] decided in 1886 to engage in social reform. With the help of the Leipzig architect Max Pommer,[24] Meyer bought land in Lindenau, a suburb to the west of Leipzig, with the goal of erecting apartment buildings for working-class families. Two years later, the construction of the first buildings began under the supervision of Pommer, who became the leading architect of the Meyersche Stiftung and a member of the board of this housing foundation. Between 1888 and 1937, Meyer’s housing trust built four large settlement projects in various parts of Leipzig at a total cost of 18,837,294 marks.[25] Meyer’s contribution to this amount between 1888 and his death in 1909 has been estimated at about seven million marks.[26]
 

In 1888 Meyer had founded the Verein zur Erbauung billiger Wohnungen (Association for the Construction of Affordable Apartments) as the legal owner of these housing projects, which was transformed into a housing trust named the Stiftung für Erbauung billiger Wohnungen in Leipzig (Foundation for the Construction of Affordable Apartments in Leipzig) in 1900.
Gould very much liked the architectural design of Meyer’s first settlement complex in Lindenau. Writing about this complex,[27] Gould praised Meyer since he subscribed to the concept of closed apartments, which provided individual families with apartments (including, kitchen, living room and hallway) that were separated from each other. “Each of the tenements … has a private hallway adjoining the main corridor and staircase. One door from a tenement opens directly to the corridor and stairway. Corridors are too small to allow promiscuous mingling. The private hallway of each tenement is considered another means of preserving the independence and isolation of the individual family.”[28] The second largest housing trust in Leipzig, the Salomon Fund, also attracted Gould’s attention. [29] Founded by Hedwig von Holstein, this housing trust was built between 1891 and 1900 in Reudnitz, a suburb to the east of Leipzig. Leipzig’s famous architect Arved Rossbach was in charge of building five buildings (three apartment buildings, one chapel, and one laundry building) around an open green space in the center of the settlement that was to give a focal point to the foundation. Each building was to be built five storeys high and contain four apartments on each level. The apartments consisted of one hallway, one kitchen and two rooms.[30] Full of admiration for the construction principle, Gould provided his American readers with a very detailed description of its housing structure: “One door from every family lodging opens directly to the stairway or hallway. There are no special regulations designed to prevent promiscuous mingling of occupants in the corridors and on the landings. It must be remembered that each family has its own private hallway, one door of which opens to the staircase, one to the kitchen, and one to the other rooms. Every room communicates directly, either by doors or windows, with the open air.”[31]
This discussion of architectural ways to reach a self-contained family unit and thus the stabilization and isolation of the nuclear family was part of a larger public transatlantic discourse among housing reformers who considered the nuclear family the basic element of society.[32] For them housing reform was more than just the provision of affordable housing; it was the attempt to create, following bourgeois standards, “domesticity, or the family’s awareness of itself as a precious emotional unit that must be protected with privacy and isolation from outside intrusion,…”[33] These bourgeois reformers hoped to transform working-class families according to moral standards of the bourgeoisie. By creating apartment buildings, which limited the contact between its inhabitants by providing that only a small number of apartments shared a common staircase and inside plumbing facilities as well as the concept of separate and closed-off hallways for each apartment, architects and social reformers basically constructed a shell for the nuclear family.[34] This apartment space offered sufficient room for parents and their children only. In addition, friendly female rent collectors (Octavia Hill’s house management concept) offered advice in social behavior and had the power to remove renters from their apartments in case they did not follow such advice.[35] The intention of social reformers and philanthropists was not to encourage inhabitants of their housing projects to form deep social bonds, but to accept the separation of their familial spaces. The apartment structure, thus, helped to seal off families from their “traditional interaction with the surrounding world.”[36] Fathers and mothers were to spend more time at home and to create a culture of domesticity and solidarity with the other members of the family. Fathers, mothers, sons and daughters were expected to develop a higher degree of mutual understanding and companionship for each other than for members of their own age and sex peer groups.[37] By providing a building structure that allowed for the isolation of nuclear families from each other and the outside world, nineteenth-century architects and housing reformers believed that they had achieved a healthy social basis for society. Housing reform thus became societal reform.
By making decisions about the architectural structure of apartment buildings, philanthropists and their architects were in a position to define the concept of “family.” Social housing enterprises offered apartments with a specific number of rooms, thus determining how many members a family occupying such an apartment was allowed to have. Herrmann Julius Meyer, for instance, insisted that his housing foundation should provide apartments only for families with three to five members.[38] Therese Rossbach, a fellow Leipzig housing reformer, was certainly the exception among nineteenth-century philanthropists, for allowing families with up to ten children in the apartment buildings of the Verein Ostheim.[39] As a rule, nineteenth-century philanthropists sought to encourage families to produce not more than two to three children. By providing a certain architectural structure, these philanthropists hoped to influence the social relations between their tenants. Separate apartments, so it was hoped, would infuse families with a heightened sense of privacy and isolation from their neighbors. By limiting the number of adjacent apartments on one floor to two or three, the possibilities of meeting other people during the evening and over the weekend were already limited. To make sure that the tenants understood the expectations of their landlords, management systems such as Octavia Hill’s system of friendly visiting brought middle-class ladies into the apartments in order to supervise and instruct the tenants. Published regulations reminded the renters that they were not supposed to spend too much time in the hallways but that their place was at “home” in the circle of their family.[40] In the case of the Meyersche Foundation in Leipzig, women who were reported chatting extensively with neighbors outside their apartments were reprimanded and in rare cases even dismissed form the apartments.[41]
The architectural structure of apartment buildings built by social housing enterprises and housing trusts reveal the thinking of its creators with regards to their concepts of social organization. Compared to the influence and power philanthropists exercised in museums and art galleries, philanthropists who created social housing projects were much more effective. While museums, art galleries, and even libraries can suggest a certain artistic standard or a specific literary taste, social housing projects are the places where the museum-goers have to live after they return from the museum. Although it was still left to the individuals living in these apartments to change the structures according to their own intentions, walls and entrance doors set definitive limits. And even if entrance doors were left open social housing projects, such as the Peabody buildings in London and the Meyer’s model tenements in Leipzig were “gated communities” with walls and gates surrounding the settlements and thus keeping outsiders out.[42] Every night, at 11 pm the gas light would be turned off and the entrance gate to the building complex of the Peabody Trust closed. Tenants possessed their own house keys but they had to enter the building through one main entrance and thus were spotted, controlled and noted by the doorman. Showing up drunk after 11 pm during the week and even on weekends resulted in immediate cancellation of the rental contract.[43]
 

Vol. 10, No. 2
September 2006