ABSTRACT
The development of modern technology has been a central factor in shaping domestic architecture. M. J. Daunton in Chapter 5 shows the impact of gas heating and lighting on interior spaces; advances in prefabrication and factory forms of production are suggested by the Sears houses illustrated in Chapter 7, and discussed for Levittown by Curtis Miner in Chapter 9. It was in Germany just after the First World War, however, during a period of political revolution and severe housing shortages, that new technologies began to be the focus of widespread hopes for a new and modernist style. Walter Gropius’s brief proposal of 1910 for new kinds of production methods for mass housing introduces that story; architect Gilbert Herbert then traces the progress of such hopes through the 1920s (Fig. 42). Architectural historian Susan Henderson focuses on the new housing in Frankfurt am Main, where the effort to evolve a “minimal dwelling” combined with factory modes of production and technological innovations such as the Frankfurt kitchen to produce huge new settlements in the modern style (Fig. 43). Henderson argues that despite the stated support of German modernists for gender equality, the Frankfurt kitchen involved the “redomestication” of women, so that the new household technology was at best an ambiguous benefit to women. Barbara Miller Lane, on the other hand, emphasizes the utopianism of German architects’ attitudes to technology during the early Weimar Republic and the ways in which these attitudes permitted the embrace of revolutionary social and political ideals (Figs. 44, 45 and 46).
