elize

Architecture is a cultural norm that produces structures that are meant to be followed-the streets of a city, the compositions of rooms inside a house-and therby controls the conditions that define, limit and influence a body. Housing plans set spaces and lay out how domestic life is meant to be lived. In western society the nuclear family is the propagated household from one generally aspires to. This is spatially represented in the housing plans of single-family houses. The plans reinforce the gendered division of labour, the kitchen traditionally being the domain of housewives, for example. The spatial representation of domestic labour had a direct and historical relation to industrial labour, to the cost-calculations and conditions it is performed under.

This essay aims to unpack some of the conditions under which the social housing complex De kiefhoek was built. To look at the history of a building offers an understanding of contemporary living conditions we so often accept as natural, guiding us to reflect on the kind of life we live in the paths laid by urban planning and architecture.

The houses and the surrounding public space are rationalized to enforce appropriate behavior and educate the working-class families towards what was deemed to be proper.

The subsequent economizations of the government disadvantaged the apartments by reducing the quality of material and the space available to the families. Rejected features of the initial plans include a bathroom or a shower (in the final houses only a toilet was present), a washstand on the first level with the bedrooms, a built-in ironing board, a service hatch connecting the kitchen to the living room and a letter box at the service hatch connecting the kitchen to the living room and a letter box at the entrance. In my opinion, some of these amenities would have provided more comfort, especially to the housewife laboring inside the home. Most weighty of the rejections is the decision to take away sanitary facilities, as it denied any improvement in domestic hygiene and thus health. Access to a proper bathing routine inside the home would have had a real impact on the people who were supposedly being educated by living in these new houses. While many of the architect’s decisions seem to derive from their assumptions about wat they called “the social weak”, both expressed concern about the municipality’s decision to exclude washing facilities from the houses.

The overcrowded, slum-like conditions of shared housing prevalent for many working-class people was a worry for legislators at the beginning of the twentieth century. The feminist designer collective Matrix points to the relation of architectural plans towards the oppression of woman, using the design of urban houses in Britain between the early nineteenth century and mid-twentieth century as an example.

This development aligns with the architectural plans as well as the intentions for modesty and education coming from the legislator and the architect for the new houses of De Kiefhoek. The houses were built to replace unacceptable living conditions but ‘a-social people couldn’t be authorized here, but one can find “social-weak” that thought thanks to the home inspection (of course a woman), develop in general quite nicely in the direction of decent inhabitants.’(de Jonge van Ellemeet, 1931, 106). It wasn’t just the municipality’s aim to provide poor people with decent living but also to “better them”, to educate them to standards of the time that were deemed proper and civilizes.

The main advocates for the rationalization of the domestic-the industry, bourgeois feminists and social democrat union leaders-promoted the simplifying and streamlining of domestic labour so that woman could serve their own family better. (Nolan, 2016) From there, they believed, woman could increase their participation and service for the public realm, too. Inside the house the kitchen became an isolated chamber, which worked to position it as the center of the housewife’s work. It was placed separately from other living functions and designed to be a small space to delineate the kitchen as a place of labour. Eating in the kitchen was seen as a working-class habit and something to be prevented by scaling them down: ‘a big kitchen is unwanted, because people will permanently live there’. (Oud, no date, no pagination) The kitchen of De Kiefhoek museum apartment is very small with little storage space.

Oud published an article called: Housewives and architecture. Oud urges architects to listen to the demands of housewives, as they are the ones who maintain the domestic sphere, and he compliments the housewives of Stuttgart, who remain nonetheless unnamed, for sharing guidelines for an architect to orientate to in relation to the planned housing estate Weissenhofsiedlung.

The old houses had a single coal hearth in the living room. Not only was it uses to cook on, it also served as the only heater in the home. While the kitchen had a gas socked, no stove was provided (and there really is no place to put it either.) it is the single warm stove that keeps the family together in one room only, whereas heating up all rooms would allow them to follow their own desires in different rooms.

What a working-class person does or does not teed was never asked. Rather, their needs were decided by the people governing them. The modernist housing project emphasized the education of working-class we can observe how the pre-given structures of builing sets bodies in position that co-determine the options and possibilities of living.

Family houses are still planned similarly to how they were set up at the beginning of the twentieth century, the greatest shift being how the scale of rooms had changed to accommodate contemporary needs and expectations. To me, what now seems of most influence to the conditions of living in the south of Rotterdam where De Kiefhoek is situated is the legislation of city planning.