The Interior of Modernism: Catherine Bauer and the American Housing Movement

11

The interior of modernism: Catherine Bauer

and the American housing movement

Cynthia Imogen Hammond

Many have forgo en – or never knew – that modern architecture was once primarily concerned with social and civic improvement (Bauer, 1965, p. 50).

Introduction

The disavowal of ornament in high modernist architectural discourse is so well known that it is sometimes forgo en that modernism took its early energy from mentors whose work was highly ornamented, and for whom the handcra ed object was of great social significance. The desire for a revolutionary change in subjectivity that would take place with the reduction of ornament in modern architectural space was, while a rejection of the material and political culture of the nineteenth-‐‑century bourgeoisie, nonetheless an embrace of the philanthropic, socialist utopian thinkers who were the intellectual basis for the life work of American housing activist and urban planner, Catherine Bauer (1905–64) (Fig. 11.1).The genealogy of humanist thought in architecture between 1850 and 1950

reveals the pervasive belief that space has a vital and shaping effect on its users. The presence or absence of ornament, in architectural discourse and actual buildings alike, must be read with this belief in mind. When Adolf Loos argued in his infamous essay of 1908 that ‘we have outgrown ornament, we have struggled through to a state without ornament’, he did so as a social and architectural radical (Loos, 2002, p. 30). Yet even the politically conservative of the previous generation, such as hospital reformer Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), had much earlier insisted upon the reduction of ornament in buildings whose purpose was to house or shelter the ‘masses’. In her etiological defence of the pavilion-‐‑plan hospital in 1863, Nightingale abolished

, , 1855–2005170

‘unnecessary’ ornament from interior surfaces of medical buildings on the basis that the moral and physical health of patients – working-‐‑class subjects – was one entity. Health, she believed, could only be achieved in a space of pristine simplicity, which was easy to clean and where it was difficult to hide

11.1 Catherine Bauer, c. 1940. Courtesy of the Bancro Library, University of California, Berkeley

Cynthia Imogen Hammond 171

anything (Hammond, 2005). Indeed, it was largely through the creation of philanthropic, paternalistic, institutional architecture that architects began to practise the reduction of ornament in the name of social progress at the end of the nineteenth century.In their search for the greater good, twentieth-‐‑century architectural heirs

to philanthropic and socialist utopian legacies believed that the reduction of ornament was the necessary corollary to the potential of machine aesthetics. In a logical, progressive evolution, expensive ornament, it was thought, would give way to modern methods, much as it was hoped that capitalism would give way to socialism. Seen in this way, the modernist housing project, stripped of individualism, is a trace of the utopian desire for the creation of a healthy, democratic and participatory citizenry, freed of cultural baggage and united in global fraternity. Enfolded within the housing project’s failure to incorporate human differences is a tight-‐‑lipped monument to the perceived power of ornament. As Elizabeth Cumming argues in her essay in this volume, the much-‐‑repeated story of a rupture between nineteenth-‐‑ and twentieth-‐‑century architectural practices is an incomplete and misleading story. To elaborate upon and complicate this narrative, the present essay meditates upon the work of a key individual in the fight for and the struggle to understand the failure of the post-‐‑World War II housing movement. Catherine Bauer worked energetically within this discursive framework during her 30-‐‑year career. Her many lectures and published texts articulate the mutual disavowal of modern architecture: the rejection of ornament and the forge ing of the individual, or the user, of modern housing.The question that occupied Bauer for the entirety of her professional

career was, ‘how do people really want to live?’1 Bauer was one of a group of influential teachers, activists and public intellectuals in the areas of American housing and city planning.2 For Bauer, the needs and desires of the democratic citizen – the ‘ultimate consumer’ of domestic architecture – were crucial to the struggle for broad access to housing, and in the eventual support or rejection of one kind of housing in favour of another (Bauer, 1955). She was a lifelong advocate of the ‘full use of modern technology and its honest expression in design, and a scientific approach to human needs and uses, in programming, planning and design’ (Bauer, 1965, p. 48). Bauer promoted modern architecture, from its machine aesthetics to its broad potential for urban planning, as the means to house America. Prior to and during her academic career in the departments of architecture and urban planning at Harvard and UC Berkeley, Bauer called upon architects, urban planners and politicians to redefine architecture, to meet the urban challenge of the twentieth century: to house the poor, the homeless and the displaced, as well as unionised workers and working women.This conviction played a pivotal part in the passing of the Wagner-‐‑Steagall/

Housing Act of 1937, which Bauer helped to write. Within her lifetime,

, , 1855–2005172

however, modern architecture underwent an ideological shi towards architects’ ‘personal aesthetic expression’ (Bauer, 1965, p. 52). The infamous consequences of this shi to monumental formalism as manifest in the post-‐‑World War II era ‘projects’ – to which Bauer was profoundly opposed – are well known (Bristol, 1991). More obscure are the underpinnings of this default move to a particular kind of aesthetics and of the myths of architectural greatness that marked the decades following the Second World War.Bauer’s work on modern housing points to a vital moment in twentieth-‐‑

century cultural and political history when ‘outsiders’ prompted architecture to radically rethink its subject(s). In a remarkable lobby for broad reform, Bauer and her collaborators pushed architecture to draw inspiration, knowledge and the basis for action from those traditionally outside its realm of concern – the poor and the homeless – in order to create a new architecture for a democratic society. The refined minimalism of this architecture was to be entirely determined by users’ needs and desires, such as could be met within the constraints of standardisation and mass production. By making these outsiders architecture’s core concern, Bauer helped to bring the discourse and practice of architecture to an unprecedented point of internal reckoning. By drawing the outside in, Bauer hoped to transform architecture from the inside out.

‘I am not an architecture …’ (Bauer, 1950)

In her 2001 book, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Real and Virtual Space, theorist Elizabeth Grosz explores questions of power via discursive and built space. Grosz challenges the ways in which architecture – its practices, practitioners, and products – frequently fail to take account of

… the place of the destitute, the homeless, the sick and the dying, the place of social and cultural outsiders – including women and minorities of all kinds – [these] must also be the concern of the architectural and the urban ... (Grosz, 2001, p. xvii).

In her articulation of the importance of architecture’s excluded others, Grosz provides a lens for understanding Bauer’s approach to housing. She asks us to consider how notions of inside(r) and outside(r) might bring a greater criticality to bear on architecture.Grosz observes how, in nature, ‘the relations between organism and its

environment are blurred and confused [the] environment is not an external feature … but is constitutive of its “identity”’ (Grosz, 2001, p. 37). Likewise, early ‘housers’, or pre-‐‑World War II housing activists, believed in the mutual relationship between the quality of a given architectural environment and the life of its resident. Yet the considerable challenge facing such architects,


intellectuals and politicians was the prevailing sense that having a home was a privilege, not a right. As Alexander von Hoffman writes, ‘during the first three decades of the twentieth century, the idea [of public housing] was so outlandish as to be unthinkable’ (van Hoffman, 2005, p. 223). Thus ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are not just synonyms for architectural exterior and interior, or even shorthand for who enjoys shelter and who does not. Rather, the ‘outside’ is, for Grosz, the as-‐‑yet unthought-‐‑of architecture. In the case of Depression-‐‑era housing, the unthought-‐‑of architecture was the emerging argument that shelter should be a basic human right. The ‘outside’ to architecture (and in general) is, Grosz writes, ‘thought itself, or perhaps even life itself’ (Grosz, 2001, p. 69).Grosz draws from a Deleuzian understanding of the ‘centre’ as a kno ed

network of power, knowledge and subjectification. Within this configuration, thought appends and escapes the strictures and expectations of power and knowledge, radically, but never completely. Just as there is no outside to discourse (ibid.), there is no complete escape from the conditions within which thought emerges. Thinking the unthought can be pictured as billowing, out and away from the knowledge/power /subjectification network. Thinking is then inevitably caught, pulled back, ‘pinned’ as Grosz says, and thus retained but never entirely contained by the network.Grosz’s image of folding, billowing movement that is both radical escape

and inevitable return registers the ‘outside’ that is thinking, in its potential and its inevitable limits. Her image also invokes the ‘outside’ that housers hoped would make architecture rethink its fundamental values and objectives, namely, the users of public housing: an unruly, unpredictable and differentiated constituency. In asking ‘how do people really want to live?’ Catherine Bauer challenged her peers to draw from knowledge gained ‘outside’ the disciplines of architecture and urban planning. Further, she wanted architects and urban planners to recreate their disciplines in relation to this constituency, to learn from the people who would live in their buildings and communities.This understanding of the users of public architecture as architecture’s

‘outside’ is important to understanding Bauer’s lifelong project, and how she pressed against what Grosz sees as the limits of architecture. In its canonical, Western history, the architecture has lamented and desired aesthetic unity, social transformation, and even political coherence. But what, in its creation of the built environment, does architecture exclude, ignore or, as Grosz puts it, forget (Grosz, 2001, p. 66)? Fundamentally, the outside of architecture is that which architecture abandons, particularly in its monumental, heroic quests. Bauer’s life’s work, as evident in her published and unpublished writing, traces both this abandonment and the recovery of architecture’s disavowed. By examining Bauer’s oeuvre, it is possible to discern one of modernism’s larger historical complications: folded within the valiant, pre-‐‑World War II modernist project to house ‘the masses’ was a fundamental and

, , 1855–2005174

ironic abeyance; namely, the forge ing of the end-‐‑users in the planning and construction of mass housing projects. This amnesia is largely paralleled by high modernism’s extraction of ornament, and cra , from its objects. In her passionate defence of the former, and her eventual return to the la er, Bauer’s career is a map of the brief period in twentieth-‐‑century architectural history when architecture was radically rethought, when architecture’s powerful ‘outside’ – its users – became the constitutive ‘interior’ of modernism.

The interior of modernism

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window (Brian Massumi).3

The modern housing that Bauer and her colleagues supported was indebted to the work of a previous generation of utopian, socialist and humanist thinkers such as Robert Owen, Charles Fournier, Octavia Hill, John Ruskin, Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes. As Bauer outlined in her book, Modern Housing (1934), these forerunners to the modern movement anticipated the question of how to humanely house large numbers of poor and working-‐‑class people, to ensure their access to light, air and basic urban amenities. What these individuals did not have at their disposal, Bauer believed, and what marked her own historical moment, was a new architectural idea. In the 1920s the new approach to design, programme, ornament and construction was the concept that broke and remade Western architecture. Bauer wrote in 1932 that, for her, modern architecture was ‘the most valid and beautiful community equipment evolved since the Middle Ages’ (p. 74). In its capacity for mass reproduction, for humane and thoughtful standards, modernism held particular promise.Bauer was among those intellectuals and activists who believed modernism

heralded new political and social possibilities.4 In Frankfurt in 1931, Bauer

... spent three days looking at the modern concrete developments that have rehoused 60,000 citizens ... Shining rows of concrete, glass and gardens; freely planned groups centering around their own shops, schools, community centers – almost every one with its own cooperative central laundry, heating plant and kindergarten; each group separated from the others and from the city proper by municipally owned meadow and rentable agricultural areas; all the rents within easy reach of the ordinary laborer (Bauer, 1931c, p. 154).

More than shelter, modern housing seemed to Bauer to be ‘a knot in a network of utilities, aesthetically dependent on its neighbours, socially incomplete without a close and convenient relationship to schools, shops, clubs, recreation fields, transportation lines, work-‐‑places’ (Bauer, 1934, pp. 156–7). But as Bauer impressed upon her students and peers, housing was, further, fundamentally political; its presence, or absence in American legislation as a fundamental


human right spoke volumes about the very nature of democracy, the worth of the majority (Bauer, 1931c, p. 153; Bauer, 1944).In the quotes above, Bauer draws upon the collective investment in

architecture as a mark of permanent cultural capital. But this investment was not obliged to resemble the architecture that hitherto had signified creative greatness or individual genius. On the contrary, as it moved into its new role as the concretisation of a nation’s democratic aspirations, architecture would have to shed these older expectations. Who would determine the appearance of the modern, democratic world? Bauer encouraged architects and planners to look not only to the shining examples within their own disciplines, but to the individuals and communities who would live in the experiments of a new era (Birch, 1983; Aronovici, 1934).During her travels during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Bauer witnessed

first hand the work of Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, André Lurçat and, more importantly, Ernst May’s city planning and public housing initiatives in Frankfurt.5 From these experiences Bauer gained fundamental tenets that she retained throughout her career. One such idea was that the objects of architectural concern – interior detailing and proportion, exterior aesthetics, site and city planning – could never be separate from each other, nor from their historical moment, nor yet from the individuals who would live with such decisions from day to day (Bauer, 1952; Bauer, 1961, p. 39). While she personally admired the ideal of ‘Existenzminimum’, in which all ‘bibulous betasselment’ would be banished from the domestic architectural interior (Bauer, 1931b, p. 46), and applauded the possibilities of rational, built-‐‑in cupboards and unconventional ribbon windows, Bauer cautioned architects as early as 1928 that

… those of us who are forced to be cogs in a machine all day are but too conscious of our egos to be perfect Robots … we do not want an impersonal atmosphere. We must have our Things … Our pride in possessions, our sentimental desire for a home that is at once a hobby and a retreat, are qualities that preclude any general enthusiasm for a ‘house-‐‑machine’ (Bauer, 1928, p. 10).

An architect alone could never successfully design a truly functional room. For Bauer, the architect was only one player in a conglomerate of agents who would bring about the revolution, in housing and architecture.Union-‐‑based work was essential to Bauer’s philosophy, rooted as it was

in mass action and the power of legislation to transform ordinary people’s living conditions.6 People, particularly those in unions representing the building trades, she believed, had to become actively involved in the creation of optimal survival conditions during the Depression. During the early 1930s, Bauer realised that these trades, as those most affected by the economic downturn, were those who had the most to gain from a publicly instituted policy of government-‐‑subsidised home building. By 1935, with the failure of

, , 1855–2005176

one housing bill prompting her, the need for union involvement had become crucial in Bauer’s mind.7 Eugenie Birch notes that, in addition to her extensive lobbying of labour in the early and mid-‐‑thirties, Bauer ‘worked … to round up others – civic groups, women’s clubs, and government officials [and] grass-‐‑roots support among tenement dwellers, particularly the women who struggled to raise families in slums’ (Birch, 1983, p. 168). Although the planning historian von Hoffman sees these efforts as essentially ‘smoke and mirrors’, the culminating pressure from these non-‐‑professional groups, particularly of the unions, led to the passing of the Wagner-‐‑Steagall/Housing Act of 1937 (van Hoffman, 2005, p. 222).

‘One of the great architectural opportunities of our time …’

Mary Susan Cole writes, ‘throughout the legislative campaign [Bauer] kept reminding her colleagues that the labor people knew a lot about subjects which housers only had book-‐‑learning of, and that the housers needed them …’ (Cole, 1975, p. 677). Bauer held to this position throughout her career. In A Citizen’s Guide to Public Housing (1940), Bauer explained the basic requirements of a good home through the lens not of an architect or planner, but of the person she believed was most likely to use domestic space, and therefore, to have invaluable knowledge of a house or dwelling: a woman.

If one asked any average housewife what the prime requirements of a decent dwelling would be, she would almost certainly say … ‘It must be solid, and provide shelter against the weather and intruders. It must have water, toilet and a bathtub, particularly if it’s in a town. It must have electricity or gas. And it must have enough space and enough rooms so that members of the family can have reasonable privacy.’ She would probably add other things: sun, ventilation, play space, and a ‘good neighborhood’ (Bauer, 1940, p. 15).

For Bauer, this ‘average woman’ was the ultimate source of information and a dependable, intelligent collaborator in the fight to legislate minimum housing standards, which, it was hoped, would protect the homeless and poor working families from the vagaries of the housing market and the legendary iniquities of the American slum. Bauer accompanied the text of the Guide with illustrations of the 1940 San Francisco Housing Authority project – Holly Courts, San Francisco (Fig. 11.2). Holly Courts, still in use as housing today, is a series of simple, low-‐‑rise buildings surrounding a central courtyard, built in 1940 to accommodate 118 families. Characteristic of the modernist solutions to low-‐‑income housing that Bauer championed in the first half of her career, Holly Court was modest, inexpensive and purpose-‐‑built. As Fig. 11.2 shows, the court was intended as a garden space that residents could cultivate, use as an area for community activities, or as a safe play space. Through a


combination of plans for one-‐‑, two-‐‑ and three-‐‑bedroom units, Holly Courts offered flexible, family-‐‑oriented housing (Fig. 11.3). No more than two rooms deep, the layout of the units allowed for private, well-‐‑lit and ventilated spaces. The smooth, white façades of the buildings are notably free of ‘unnecessary’ ornamentation, but do have the user-‐‑friendly detail of a sheltered, stepped

11.2 Promotional material for Holly Courts, San Francisco, 1940. Reproduced in Catherine Bauer (1940), A Citizen’s Guide to Housing, Poughkeepsie NY: Vassar College, p. 44

, , 1855–2005178

front stoop.8 The windows, equipped with blinds to block sunlight and regulate interior temperatures, are true to modernist principles of design and organisation in their lack of eaves or overhangs. The cornice is absolutely bare, a key characteristic of the ‘International Style’ promoted by Henry-‐‑Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932. Likewise, the unadorned doorframe (Fig. 11.4) reflects a taste for architecture that was as ‘efficient and handsome as intelligent standardization and the elimination of all unessentials’ (Bauer, 1931a, p. 101).Through carefully considered details, the simple sketches of Holly Courts

invoke the then-‐‑current discourse of democratic architecture.9 A child bathes in what would have been luxury for most slum dwellers of the 1930s: a full-‐‑sized bathtub. A group of young children hover at the threshold of a home; through the doorway we see not the smoke and traffic of a city street, but the suggestion of a foliated landscape. Another group of children play in sand, overlooked by a woman holding a baby. A second woman cooks on modern kitchen equipment in the light of a large window. These small images speak volumes about the aesthetic and sanitary vision of housing for families


, , 1855–2005180

whose only other option would have been slums, whose horrors motivated architects as diverse as Le Corbusier (1971) and Frank Lloyd Wright (1958) to propose entirely new cities. While the images of the Guide indicate a more modest proposal, they do communicate the brief but powerful reorganization of architectural priorities in this decade. They reiterated to readers that such housing, while ‘it does not look exactly the way we have come to expect a home to look’, presents nonetheless ‘one of the great architectural opportunities of our time … to create the first sound and creative architectural vernacular we have seen in a hundred and fi y years’ (Bauer, 1940. pp. 60, 62).In inviting her readers to participate in the creation of an emergent

‘vernacular’, Bauer strategically promoted widespread acceptance of the community possibilities and facilities engendered by modern architecture and planning, but in terms that invoked a clear association with the handcra ed, the quotidian and the accessible. The word ‘vernacular’ itself has long had a binary signification within architectural discourse, as the handmade, anonymous, artisan-‐‑based (as opposed to genius-‐‑driven) ‘other’ to what Dell Upton calls ‘architecture with a capital A’ (2002, p. 707). He writes:

The word anonymous is critical, for it evokes another time-‐‑honored Architectural dichotomy, between name-‐‑brand Architecture as the expression of discrete creative minds and the rote processes of unnamed vernacular or traditional builders guided as well as constrained by communal rather than individual values (Upton, 1998, p. 711).

By invoking her readers’ participation, Bauer a empted to summon communal values and, further, subtly proposed that this new architecture would not even be the product of architects but rather of the community itself, realised in a language of form that was not as foreign to the community as they might have supposed. As suggested by the line-‐‑drawn illustrations, the comforts of basic standards were simple in nature and, as Bauer presented them, a rational and a ractive alternative to previous ‘solutions’ to the question of decent housing (solutions such as the Se lement House, sanitation, utopian and Garden City movements) (Bauer 1949; Hayden, 1981).In the same year that Bauer published the Guide, she co-‐‑wrote with Jacob

Crane a short article explaining the potential worth of the Housing Act of 1937. The authors triumphantly describe this bill as having established

... a minimum of decent, safe and sanitary housing without extravagance in the year 1940. We say in the year 1940 because it must never be forgo en that America is on the make, that standards are constantly changing … This is good; it represents the very intent of democracy (Bauer and Crane, 1940, p. 64).

Thus Bauer explained to her readers – potential inhabitants – that such details as the smooth and unarticulated arched doorway, the functional ceramic fi ings of the bathroom, the green and social spaces afforded to view by the generous


provision of light-‐‑admi ing windows, were the carefully cra ed hallmarks of this new vernacular. This vernacular and the life it was to support were essential components in a comprehensive design philosophy, one that located users – inhabitants, not owners – as the vital essence of architecture’s modern mission (ibid., p. 56). As part of the basic human right that Bauer and others had identified as ‘minimum standard’ housing, such apparently minor details as doorframes and play spaces were in fact cornerstones in the larger ba le to improve the lot of the poor or working person during times of considerable economic hardship, to give them a central place in modern, urban, democratic life. Thus the absence of ornament was not only the liberation of the individual, but a homecoming of the community.

‘A world within a world’ (Bauer, 1934, p. 136)

Nearly two decades later, Bauer’s commitment to a democratic architecture had not faded, nor had her belief in the housers’ motivations of the 1930s. What had changed, however, was that America had entered an unforeseen era of economic ascendancy and suburban expansion. Furthermore, early hopes for an experimental, grass-‐‑roots architecture had condensed into the ‘rationalist’ ghe oisation of the poor that urban critic Jane Jacobs would later famously critique (1958, 1961). Americans’ housing expectations had likewise grown exponentially, corresponding to the post-‐‑war building boom. Ten years a er publishing the Guide, Bauer had become a firm critic of public housing as it had been put into practice in post-‐‑war America, as she had been a proponent in Depression-‐‑era America. She found particularly troubling the way that architecture had reverted to its status as a discipline isolated, intellectually, from the residents of such housing. Modern architecture, she asserted, had not risen to meet the complex economic, design and planning challenges that public housing presented. Replaced by ‘skyscrapomania’, the modest modern housing envisaged by Bauer and others had been eclipsed by a rigid, monumental formalism that fla ered the privileged and ghe oised the poor (Bauer, 1952, p. 61).Taking particular issue with the post-‐‑war work of Le Corbusier, Gropius

and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and with architectural education in general (Bauer, 1950, p. 4), Bauer critiqued how architects, ignoring profound changes in the post-‐‑war economy, had returned to a fundamentalist, ‘doctrinaire stylism’ in public housing (Bauer, 1957, p. 51). ‘The success of the three International Stylists and their disciples’, she wrote, was ‘a particular success, ironically, in building monuments to an affluent society’ (Bauer, 1965, p. 52).Architects had failed to resist formalist dogma; moreover, they had failed

to take up the lesson in critical, creative interdisciplinarity and heterogeneity offered by pre-‐‑war European initiatives. Worse, architects and planners failed

, , 1855–2005182

to realise the discrepancy between their ‘slick technocratic solutions’ and what Bauer understood to be a new era of appreciation for that which was made by hand rather than the machine: ‘Now we are rich enough to buy cra work, too, and we like it just because it is not standardized’ (Bauer, 1952, p. 62; Bauer, 1957, p. 51). By 1950, Bauer could no longer promise her readers, as she had ten years prior, that ‘loving care’ would be taken to ensure that row houses would be laid out in careful relation to ‘topography, sun, prevailing breezes, outlook and neighborhood amenity’ (Bauer, 1940, p. 60). As her disillusionment with American low-‐‑cost housing increased, her interest turned more and more to countries such as India whose history of ornament in architecture and handcra were newly threatened by modernism’s false promises.

‘Our unsatisfactory vernacular’

During the 1950s Bauer spoke bluntly to her profession. While ‘everybody who had any choice was moving into a one-‐‑story home, the housing authorities were’, she observed, ‘busily erecting high-‐‑density high-‐‑rise apartments, with no private outdoor space’ (Bauer, 1957, p. 141). High rises, the post-‐‑war era’s answer to the conundrum of public housing, were unacceptable to Bauer, for in their monolithism they engendered a new ghe oisation of the same populace their designers purportedly sought to help.10

Visually [high rises] may be no more monotonous than a typical suburban tract, but their density makes them seem much more institutional, like veterans’ hospitals or old-‐‑fashioned orphan asylums … Any charity stigma that a aches to subsidized housing is thus reinforced. Each project proclaims, visually, that it serves the ‘lowest income group’ (Bauer, 1957, pp. 141–2).

Bauer also criticised the high-‐‑rise housing project on a more fundamental basis, in which she herself was implicated: the ‘late prima donna machine-‐‑age esthetics’ of the 1920s and 1930s. These aesthetics were not, Bauer realised, sufficient to the complex needs of diverse residents in the post-‐‑war era (Bauer, 1961, p. 38). She now wrote:

[O]ur unsatisfactory vernacular goes back in part to the limitations of Bauhaus functionalism and la Cité Radieuse … [this] viewpoint was a fresh and healthy influence when the Beaux Arts was still entrenched. But the science applied to human needs in the name of functionalism was primitive, discarding most emotional and cultural values entirely (Bauer, 1961, p. 38).

Bauer recognised that, in post-‐‑war America, the creation of a public architectural culture had fallen into the hands of the ‘form-‐‑givers’ – architects whose names were a ached to grandiose gestures and signature styles – shaping cities and


large housing projects (Bauer, 1961, p. 39). Her frustration emerged during the National Housing Conference in 1954, when she asked:

Do I need to document the statement that 95 percent of American families with children would vote to live in ground level homes … no ma er how the question is put to them? … isn’t it undeniably true that low buildings, with lighter construction, are cheaper than high-‐‑rises (Bauer, 1954, p. 41)?

Bauer emphatically rejected skyscrapers, describing their ‘minimum standards’ as ‘hardly an adequate or satisfactory expression of the values associated with American home life’ (Bauer, 1957, p. 221). In the skyscraper, she continued, ‘there is no room in such schemes for individual deviation, for personal initiative and responsibility … Management domination is built in, a necessary corollary of architectural form’ (ibid., p. 221).11 Thus ornament had proven its power to destroy architecture, not from its presence, but from its lack, as refused by the ‘bleak symbols of productive efficiency’ (ibid.). To reflect upon Bauer’s career is to observe that it is no accident that the architectural form most conducive visually to an extreme absence of ornament – the skyscraper – was the most popular choice for architects wishing to make the statement of their career.During the same decade that some of America’s most iconic modern

architecture was built and promoted internationally,12 Bauer increasingly adopted an oppositional position. Why, when the social and economic costs of such projects could not justify their existence, did high-‐‑rise housing projects continue to be built for nearly two decades? Or how, as Grosz asks, can we understand space differently (Grosz, 2001, p. xix)? With the high rise, ‘form-‐‑givers’ could concretise their architectural aspirations while making a clear visual, spatial and urban distinction between those who ascended in the post-‐‑war economic climate and those who did not. As clear a statement of class difference as it was a representation of the heroic aims of architecture, the post-‐‑war, high-‐‑rise housing project sought to erase the complexity and differentiation of its users.As Bristol demonstrates, however, it is important to not overstate the

purported architectural ‘failure’ of the housing projects, as this only confers more prestige upon the architectural profession. This suggests that, had the profession had the right amount of civic and economic support, it could indeed have made change in areas surely beyond its boundaries: poverty, race relations, class struggles. Again, the notion that space, if carefully and purposefully designed, can alter subjectivity – even society – underpins the broader aims of architecture. The rejection of ornament in early twentieth-‐‑century architectural discourse created a rhetorical space in the lively, experimental climate of pre-‐‑war housing, a space into which, during the formalist excesses of post-‐‑war housing practices, the messy contingencies of the inhabitants of housing projects were placed, and deemed superfluous.

, , 1855–2005184

Conclusion

Despite a brief flowering of consensus in the late 1930s, minimum standards, which sought to protect those citizens who needed housing most desperately, became ghe os of the very stigma that they were supposed to replace. The smooth, simple sheet of modernism, the shining white rows of ‘concrete, glass and garden’ that Bauer witnessed at the Römerstadt, were caught in the rhetoric of superfluity and scarcity and pulled back into a preceding logic of ‘deserving’ citizens and limited entitlement, a logic that continues to inform housing debates today. The modern housing ventures of the pre-‐‑war era had held, not the answers, as Bauer herself recognised, but the promise of further experimentation, further collaboration with users. The debate, however, over the fundamental right to a social existence has long been at the core of housing and of American conceptions of democracy (Upton, 1998, p. 239). As long as modern housing remained tethered to the notion that ‘public housing should involve no excess expenditures or gratuitous physical amenities and that it should be disciplinary, instilling identity through enforcing desirable behaviour’ (ibid.), then the promise of modern architecture could never, for Bauer, be realised (McQuaid, 1991; Bauer, 1952, p. 62).The need to forget within architecture is strong. In the year that Bauer

died, Emerson Goble, editor of Architectural Record, observed ‘how terrible it was for the housing authorities and their architects to forget those things that encompass humanity in public housing!’ (Goble, 1964. p. 9). Bauer had a long history of thinking about those ‘things that encompass humanity’ or, as she put it, housing that would satisfy ‘the infinite variety of family needs [and yet] please our visual taste’ (Bauer, 1954, p. 40). Bauer’s vision for the future of American cities remained one in which public housing could still creatively answer to and from an informed understanding of the complex needs and wants of its users. As she told her students at UC Berkeley,13 ‘above all … the pa ern of our environment tends to structure our lives’.14Bauer’s work presents a history of a crucial period in the hegemonic struggle

to define American architecture as both collective culture and democratic space. Her writing, teaching and activism demonstrate the opening up and folding back of housers’ utopian hopes and socialist experiments, the nature of their retreat into more conservative perspectives on the right to human shelter. As such, her work is essential to understanding how the very constituency that ‘modern housing’ had hoped to assist would become its unwanted ornament, its collateral damage in post-‐‑war America. But just as importantly, Bauer demonstrates how, briefly, the fields of architecture and urban planning unfurled in a remarkably hopeful fashion, in concert with the power of legislation, unions and so-‐‑called ‘ordinary’ people, temporarily creating an unprecedented, collaborative machine for social and urban change.


Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation for supporting this research. My thanks go also to Janice Helland, Annmarie Adams, Janice Anderson and Thomas Strickland for helpful editorial advice and counsel.

References

Bauer’s archive, henceforth referred to as ‘CBW Papers’, is held at the Bancro Library, University of California at Berkeley, under ‘Catherine Bauer Wurster’, which name she used intermi ently a er her marriage.

Aronovici, Carol (1934), ‘The Outlook for Low-‐‑Cost Housing in America’, in Carol Aronovici (ed.), America Can’t Have Housing, New York: Museum of Modern Art, pp. 69–74.

Bauer, C. (1928), ‘Machine-‐‑Age Mansions for Ultra-‐‑Moderns’, New York Times Magazine, April, 10.

(1931a), ‘Prize Essay: Art in Industry’, Fortune, 3, May, 94, 96, 98, 101–2, 104, 109–10.

(1931b), ‘Gout Américain, Demi-‐‑Sec’, New Republic, 69, 25 November, 45–6. (1931c), ‘The Americanization of Europe: Three Leaves From a Notebook’, New

Republic, 24 June, 153–4. (1932), ‘Are Good Houses UnAmerican?’, New Republic, 2 March, 74. (1934), Modern Housing, Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin. (1939), ‘European Housing: Post-‐‑War to Pre-‐‑War’, paper presented to

the United States Housing Authority, Ohio Housing Authorities Conference, Cinncinna i, Ohio, 10 November 1939, CBW Papers, 6pp.

(1940), A Citizen’s Guide to Housing, Poughkeepsie NY: Vassar College. (1943), ‘The Public Housers’ Responsibility for a Post-‐‑War Program’, paper

presented to the 12th Annual Meeting of the National Public Housing Conference, Pi sburgh, 19 February.

(1944), Address to the California Labour School, 2 August 1944, CBW Papers, 3pp.

(1949), ‘Housing and Health: The Provision of Good Housing’, American Journal of Public Health, 39 (4) April, 462–6.

(1950), Untitled lecture notes, CBW Papers, 6pp. (1952), ‘Clients for Housing: The Low-‐‑Income Tenant: Does He want

Supertenements?’, Progressive Architecture, May, 61–4. (1954), ‘Swing Low, Sweet Architect! The First Lady of Housing Discusses

Flaws in Public and Private Design’, Housing Yearbook 1954 (Proceedings of the National Housing Conference, 1954), pp. 39–41.

(1955), ’Housing and the Architect’, unpublished lecture notes, Arch. 5N, Harvard Design School, 5 December.

(1956), ‘Do Americans Hate Cities?’, lecture, University of California, 27 March, CBW Papers.

(1957), ‘The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing’, Architectural Forum, May, 140–142, 219, 221.

, , 1855–2005186

(1961), ‘Architecture and the Cityscape: Notes on the Primitive State of Urban Design in America’, Journal of the American Institute of Architects, March, 36–9.

(1964), ‘Can Cities Compete with Suburbia for Family Living?’, Architectural Record, 136, December, 149–56.

(1965), ‘The Social Front of Modern Architecture in the 1930s’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 24 (1), March, 48–52.

and Crane, Jacob (1940), ‘What Every Family Should Have’, Survey Graphic, 29 (2), 1 February, 64.

Birch, Eugenie Ladner (1983), ‘Woman-‐‑made America: The Case of Early Public Housing Policy’, in Donald A. Krueckeberg (ed.), The American Planner: Biographies and Recollections, New York and London: Methuen, pp. 149–75.

Bristol, Kathleen (1991), ‘The Prui -‐‑Igoe Myth’, Journal of Architectural Education, 44 (3), May, 163–71.

Cole, Mary Susan (1975), ‘Catherine Bauer and the Public Housing Movement, 1926–37’, unpublished PhD thesis, George Washington University.

Goble, Emerson (1964), ‘What’s Missing in Housing’, Architectural Record, 135, April, 9.

Grosz, Elizabeth (2001), Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Real and Virtual Space, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Hammond, Cynthia Imogen (2005), ‘Reforming Architecture, Defending Empire: Florence Nightingale and the Pavilion Hospital’, Studies in the Social Sciences: (Un)healthy Interiors: Contestations at the Intersection of Public Health and Private Space, July, pp. 1–24.

Hayden, Dolores (1981), The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Hitchcock, Henry Russell, and Johnson, Philip (1932), The International Style: Architecture since 1922, New York: W.W. Norton.

Irigaray, Luce (1999), The Forge ing of Air in Martin Heidegger, Austin TX: University of Texas Press.

Jacobs, Jane (1958), ‘Downtown is for People’, Fortune, April, 133. (1961), The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House.

Le Corbusier (1971), Looking at City Planning, trans. E. Levieux, New York: Grossman Publishers.

Loos, Adolf (2002), ‘Ornament and Crime’, in Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos, Toronto, Ontario: YYZ Books, pp. 29–36.

McQuaid, Matilda (1991), ‘Modern Architecture’s Unfulfilled Promise: Catherine Bauer and her Struggle for Modern Housing in America’, unpublished MArch thesis, University of Virginia.

Rikala, Taina Marja a (2002), ‘Catherine Bauer and the Six Riddles of Modernism’, Journal of Architecture, 7 (2), 1 June, 191–203.

Spain, Daphne (2005), Book review, Houser. Journal of Planning and Education Research, 19 (4). Available at <h p://www.acsp.org/JPER/19-‐‑4reviews.htm>, 15 December, 2pp.

Upton, Dell (2002), ‘Architecture in Everyday Life’, New Literary History, 33, Autumn, 707–23.

(1998), Architecture in the United States, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Von Hoffmann, Alexander (2005), ‘The End of the Dream: The Political Struggle of America’s Public Housers’, Journal of Planning History, 4 (3), August, 222–53.

Wright, Frank Lloyd (1958), The Living City, New York: Horizon Press.


Notes

1 Bauer included this favourite question in a course outline from 1947, Harvard Graduate School of Design, CBW Papers.

2 Birch (1983) discusses contemporary women planners such as Edith Elmer Wood. Susan R. Henderson (1996) explores the work of rationalist kitchen designer Grete Lihotzky in ‘A Revolution in the Woman’s Sphere: Grete Lihotzky and the Frankfurt Kitchen’, in D. Coleman et al. (eds.), Architecture and Feminism, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 221–53. Other important women in the housing movement included Mary Simkhovitch and Helen Alfred.

3 Quoted in Grosz, 2001, p. 186.

4 Bauer’s early writings, including Modern Housing, eloquently defend modern aesthetics, as well as caution the reader against universalising solutions (Bauer, 1965, p. 49). See also the history and work of Bauer’s peers, such as urban theorist Lewis Mumford, labour leader and housing expert John Edelman and architect Oscar Stonarov.

5 On May’s work, see Susan R. Henderson (1999), ‘Self-‐‑Help Housing in the Weimar Republic: The Work of Ernst May,’ Housing Studies, 14 (3), 1 May, 311–28.

6 From 1933 to 1937, Bauer worked with the Housing Division of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, the Labor Housing Conference (LHC) – a body addressed to union members, leaders and government officials – and the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

7 See Bauer, 1934, pp. 92–105; Bauer, 1940; Bauer, 1943, p. 11; and Birch, 1983, pp. 160–170.

8 Holly Courts is very similar, visually and in its layout, to the Römerstadt in Frankfurt (Ernst May, 1925), which Bauer admired and discussed in several other publications (Bauer, 1934; Bauer, 1931a).

9 Many architects and critics of this period were likewise concerned. Frank Lloyd Wright famously decreed that American democracy could only be had through the elimination of what he called ‘rent’, via single-‐‑family home ownership and government subsidy of the car (Wright, 1958, pp. 77–97). Le Corbusier’s architectural version of democracy, the ‘Radiant City’, was more in line with Bauer’s at this time, although they would profoundly differ over the ideal scale of public housing (Le Corbusier, 1971, pp. 11–25).

10 Von Hoffman notes that this problem was exacerbated by the housers’ rhetorical strategy, in the 1930s, of emphasising slum conditions. The Roosevelt government responded, unsurprisingly, with sweeping slum clearance legislation as well as housing reforms (von Hoffman, 2005, p. 245).

11 Bauer was not alone in her criticisms. Jane Jacobs, for example, published her first article assessing modern cities in 1958.

12 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe completed the luxury Lake Shore Drive Apartments in 1951, while the same decade saw the expansion of the Cabrini Green public housing project (1942–62).

13 Teaching notes, CBW Papers, n.d.

14 Teaching notes, CBW Papers, n.d.

The Interior of Modernism: Catherine Bauer and the American Housing Movement

Documents

Transcript of The Interior of Modernism: Catherine Bauer and the American Housing Movement