ABSTRACT
This chapter re-examines the scope and iconography of the original Parker Morris report arguing that, it expresses a modernist approach to space, one that presupposed equally specific modernist economic conditions and geographies. Notions of time and space conflate regularly in the report not least in its official title, Homes for Today and Tomorrow, where the idea of domestic space is projected to the future. Parker Morris was set up by the Ministry of Local Government and Housing as a spatial corrective to these material investigations, one that purported to give centrality to the inhabitant and their activities and advocated a notion of flexibility. By the time the Parker Morris report was commissioned in 1959, Walter Gropiuss dream of the mass-produced house had, to some extent, been realised in Britain. In the search for new housing standards, Parker Morris represented both a continuation of and reaction to a tradition of scientific enquiry.
