Unsettling traditional understandings of housing reform as focused on
the nuclear family with dependent children, Single People and Mass
Housing in Germany, 1850-1930 is the first complete study of
single-person mass housing in Germany and the pivotal role this class-
and gender-specific building type played for over 80 years-in German
architectural culture and society, the transnational Progressive reform
movement, Feminist discourse, and International Modernism-and its
continued relevance.
Homes for unmarried men and women, or Ledigenheime, were built for
nearly every powerful interest group in Germany-progressive,
reactionary, and radical alike-from the mid-nineteenth century into the
1920s. Designed by both unknown craftsmen and renowned architects
ranging from Peter Behrens to Bruno Taut, these homes fought
unregimented lodging in overcrowded working-class dwellings while
functioning as apparatuses of moral and social control. A means to
societal reintegration, Ledigenheime effectively bridged the
public-private divide and rewrote the rules of who was deserving of
quality housing-pointing forward to the building programs of Weimar
Berlin and Red Vienna, experimental housing in Soviet Russia, Feminist
collectives, accommodations for postwar "guestworkers," and even housing
for the elderly today.
