Socialist Constructions: Modern Urban Housing and Social Practice

My dissertation, “Socialist Constructions: Modern Urban Housing and Social Practice,” investigates the modernist production of living space by focusing on housing reform in Weimar Germany’s Berlin and Frankfurt am Main as well as on the subsequent projects of German modernist architects working in the USSR in the early 1930s. Broadly, my work addresses questions of urban politics (primarily in Germany and Soviet Union), ownership, modernist urban visions, and everyday living practices. I take as a starting point the claim that home was central to the production of modern subjectivity, and, more specifically, that suburban public housing was instrumental in the production of Weimar modernity. By surveying a range of constitutive material and discursive elements for these new forms of settlement (including new technologies and construction methods, state and civic managerial bureaucracies, struggles over finance policies, discursive, aesthetic, and propagandistic legitimizing strategies, etc.), I look at how suburban, large scale, and publicly funded housing estates (Großsiedlung) were organized, constructed, and inhabited. Informed by a conceptual model of “coproduction,” I aim to articulate how domesticity and public housing figured in the production of modern subjects and sensibilities and to re-connect discussions of policies to understandings of the sphere of the home as a site of everyday life, paying close attention to spaces that shape and produce—and are produced by—complex networks of social practices in the modern city. I investigate the ways in which different actors (Social Democratic government, city planners, municipal authorities, housewife associations, residents) involved themselves in the construction, legitimation and provision of emerging modern organizations of space. My case studies target specific and resonant sites of coproduction of the modern home: Martin Wagner’s and Bruno Taut’s housing estate Hufeisensiedlung in Berlin; the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) in Frankfurt, which introduced the notion of “minimal dwelling”; such minimalist innovations as Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt kitchen; and the new industrial cities of the USSR, where German architects worked to adapt concepts of “minimal living” into a different cultural context.

Department dc:contributor.department

Geography

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Barykina, Natallia

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ruddick, Susan

• housing
• "minimal living"
• modernist architecture
• Soviet Union
• Weimar Germany

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/75610

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/75610