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Socialist Constructions: Modern Urban Housing and Social Practice By Socialist Constructions: Modern Urban Housing and Social Practice By Natallia Barykina A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Geography University of Toronto © Copyright by Natallia Barykina 2015 ii Socialist Constructions: Modern Urban Housing and Social Practice Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Natallia Barykina Department of Geography University of Toronto Abstract 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 iii 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. iv Acknowledgments For her guidance, insight, and patience, I would like to thank my Supervisor, Sue Ruddick. Let me acknowledge as well the great support and critical advice I have received from all members of my committee, Matt Farish, Kanishka Goonewardena, Mark Hunter, and Thomas Lahusen. Thanks to my parents and my sister Olga as well. For friendship and insightful feedback I thank Margaret Haderer, Iris Mendel, Nora Ruck, Regina Sidel, and Christine Decker. I am immensely grateful to the librarians and archivists who helped me with this project. I am most grateful to my husband, Art Redding, who read many drafts of this dissertation, for his constant support, encouragement and confidence. This work is dedicated to a dear friend, Antje Lachmann. You are greatly missed. v Table of Contents INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………….….1 Theoretical Influences……………………………………………………………………...….6 Archives: Putting the Story Together. Overview of Chapters…………………………………………………………………………...………...…19 CHAPTER 1. The Reform of Public Housing in Weimar Berlin during the late 1920’s…….25 Federal Legal and Financial Mechanisms and Local Municipal Housing Programmes……....27 Mechanisms of Government Involvement: GEHAG. Role of Hufeisensiedlung for SPD….....35 Housing Reform as Urban Spatial Reorganization…………………………………….……...42 Hufeisensiedlung as New Suburban Form of Settlement………………………………….….51 CHAPTER 2. “The Dissolution of Cities”: Mass Housing in Weimar Germany, from “The Largest Tenement City in the World” to Suburban Settlements……………………….…..…56 Weimar Housing Reformers’ Critique of Mietskaserne : Siedlung as a Solution to the Housing Crisis……………………………………………………………………..………………..…..57 Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner: Efficient and Communal Living………………………..…..67 CHAPTER 3. The Reform of Domestic Space and the Rationalization of Everyday Life: “Wohnung für Existenzminimum”……………………………………………..…………..….81 Theorizing the Rationalization of Home…...…………………………………………………………………………….....….…85 The Rationalization of Home: the Second International Congress of Modern Architecture, Frankfurt am Main………………………………………………………………………...….90 The Frankfurt Kitchen…………………………………………………………………….….108 Hufeisensiedlung : Rationalization as a “Cultural Model”………………………………....…121 CHAPTER 4. Modernity and "Uneven Development": German Modernist Architects and Planners in the USSR………………………………………………………………………….142 Foreign Architects’ Work in Soviet Industrial Cities: Context………………………………..144 “Western” Architects’ Expectations and Practices within an Emergent Doctrine of Socialist Realism…………….……………………………………………………………………….…..152 vi Working Conditions: Industrialization and Forced Labour in the “New Cities”……………….162 CONCLUSION. Preserving and Discarding the Architectural Modernist Legacy in Contemporary Germany and Russia………………………………….……………………...…188 NOTES………………………………………………………………………………………….201 APPENDIX: ILLUSTRATIONS……………………………………………………………….228 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………….….……..235 vii Table of Illustrations Illustration 1: from Bruno Taut, Bauen der neue Wohnbau . Leipzig und Berlin, 1927, 65. Illustrations 2 and 3: Falkenberg, architect Bruno Taut, 1913-1916. Photographs by author. Illustrations 4 and 5: colours in Hufeisensiedlung. Photographs by author. Illustration 6: from “Reichswohnungsbauprogramm” in Wohnungswirtschaft 3/17 (1926) Illustration 7: “Die Auflösung der Städte,” 1920. From Junghanns, Kurt. Bruno Taut, 1880- 1938 . Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1970. Abbildung 70 and 71. Illustration 8: Frankfurt kitchen installation, Museum der Dinge , Berlin, December 2010. Photograph by author. Illustrations 9 and 10: from Erna Meyer, “Verbesserte Arbeitsmethoden.” Baugilde 14 (25 Aug 1932): 783-784. Illustration 11: from “Die Küche Der Klein- und Mittelwohnung.” Reichsforschungsgesellschaft für Wirtschaftlichkeit im Bau- und Wohnungswesen. Gruppe II 6, nr. 2 (Juni 1928). Illustration 12: cover of Taut, Bruno. Die Neue Wohnung: Die Frau als Schöpferin . 5th ed. Leipzig: Verlag Klinkhardt and Bierman, 1928. Illustration 13: from Taut, Bruno. Die Neue Wohnung: Die Frau als Schöpferin, 57. Illustration 14: from “Kleinstwohnungsgrundrisse.” EINFA Nachrichtenblatt 1/4 (1930): 4. Illustration 15: from Hans Leistikow, “Deutsche Bauen in der UdSSR.” Das Neue Frankfurt 9, 1930. Englert und Schlosser: Frankfurt am Main. Illustration 16: from Novokuznetsk. Ed. A. Vypov. Moskva: Sovetskaia Rossia, 1983, 58. Illustration 17: from Mart Stam folder, Planungschema der Stadt Orsk . Sotsgorod Orsk. 003- 422-008. Archiv des Deutschen Architekturmuseums, Frankfurt am Main. viii Note on Sources The research for this dissertation was made possible by German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Research Scholarship (2010-2011) and Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (2010-2012). In Berlin, I consulted the magazines and architectural periodicals held at the Staatsbibliothek, Bauhaus- archiv, Archiv der Akademie der Künste and Werkbundarchiv-Museum der Dinge . In Vienna, I consulted Margarete Schütte-Lihotsky archive at Universität für angewandte Kunst and in Frankfurt am Main I consulted the Mart Stam and Hannes Meyer collections at the Deutsches Arkhitekturmuseum . I accessed the Archives of the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet State Microfilm Collection located at the State Archives of the Russian Federation ( Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii , GARF) at the Lamont library at Harvard University, where some materials of the collections are on microfilm. The complete original archives are in Moscow. These Russian archival documents are cited according to the collection (fond), inventory (opis’), file (delo) and folio (list, l in singular, ll in the plural). All archival sources along with secondary sources are cited in the Bibliography in alphabetical order. 1 INTRODUCTION Pondering the interdependency of social transformation and everyday living space, Henri Lefebvre points out in The Production of Space that there is no easy or quick answer to the question of ‘socialism’s’ space; much careful thought is called for here. It may be that the revolutionary period, the period of intense change, merely establishes the preconditions for a new space, and that the realization of that space calls for a rather longer period-for a period of calm. The prodigious creative ferment in Soviet Russia between 1920 and 1930 was halted even more dramatically in the fields of architecture and urbanism than it was in other areas; and those fertile years were followed by the years of sterility. What is the significance of this sterile outcome? Where can an architectural production be found today that might be described as ‘socialist’—or even as new when contrasted with the corresponding efforts of capitalist planning? 1 In
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