Single People and Mass Housing in Germany, 1850–1930: (No)Home Away from Home
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Overview
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.
The first complete study of single-person mass housing in Germany and the pivotal role this class- and gender- specific building type has played for over eighty years.
Contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations concerning the central relationship of prewar German design reform efforts to: German nationalism and identity politics; transnational social reform networks in the Progressive Era; postwar developments in Weimar Germany, including mass housing experiments and the Bauhaus; the development of modern architecture and urban planning more broadly
Compliments and complicates a growing body of scholarship on sexuality, gender, and architecture
Challenges the centrality of the family unit in the discourses of modernism and modernity
Introduction: The Unmarried Individual and the “Lodger Problem”
1. Adolph Kolping’s Revolution: Popular Catholicism and Housing “Wild” Youth
2. Beyond the Company Town: Industrialists House the “Roving Male”
3. Making the Municipality a Home: Appropriate Luxury for All
4. Homes for Women: Between the Domestic Realm and the Public Sphere
Extended Conclusion: Weimar Twilight and Continued Relevance of the Ledigenheim Building Type
This insightful study is a must-read for everyone interested in creative approaches to one of the major social crises of the modern age-providing decent, affordable housing for single people living on their own in industrialized cities.
German architecture rewritten from the perspective of the single men and women living in mass housing. Meticulously researched, Erin Eckhold Sassin’s book is a major contribution to the histories of modernization and urbanization and their highly gendered designs for living.
- Title: Single People and Mass Housing in Germany, 1850–1930: (No)Home Away from Home
- Author: Erin Eckhold Sassin
- Series: Visual Cultures and German Contexts
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 312
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781501342738, 9781350282780, 1350282782, 1501342738
- Resource ID: LLS:9781501342738
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T15:34:18Z
Erin Eckhold Sassin is Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at Middlebury College, USA. Her research focuses on modern architecture and urban culture in Germany and the United States, with a particular interest in how class, gender, and ethnicity inform the built environment. Her most recent work deals with the everyday tragedy of the First World War and the production of architecture within the state of emergency, as well as the intersection of Acoustic Ecology and Architectural History.