The architecture of social reform

<i>The architecture of social reform</i> explores the fascinating intellectual origins of modern architecture's obsession with domesticity. Copiously illustrated Rousset's revealing analysis demonstrates how questions over aesthetics style urbanization and technology that gripped the modernist imagination were deeply ingrained in a larger concern to reform society through housing. The increasing demand for new housing in Germany's rapidly growing cities fostered critical exchanges between a heterogeneous group of actors including architects urban theorists planners and social scientists who called for society to be freed from class antagonism through the provision of good modest traditionally-minded domestic design. Offering a compelling account of architecture's ability to act socially the book provocatively argues that architectural theory underwent its most critical epistemological transformation in relation to the dynamics of modern class politics long before the arrival of the avant-garde.