DIE NEUE WOHNUNG
DIE FRAU ALS SCHOPFERIN

Bruno Taut

5.5 x 8 hardcover book with 106 pages and 65 monochrome illustrations, and 6 pages of advertisements. Like Russel and Mary Wright's GUIDE TO EASIER LIVING, Tautıs volume was dedicated to women and on how to make their lives easier via the modern idiom in pre-war Germany.

DIE NEUE WOHNUNG ('dedicated to women'As the flyleaf announced) drew together the conclusions of a campaign for the reform of the interior, which had been carried out in newspapers and journals since the war by Taut, Adolf Behne and others. "Women must sweep away domestic nostalgia and make a new beginning." Taut compared the bourgeois home unfavourably with better examples in the Renaissance, seventeenth-century Holland and vernacular architecture. In particular, he pointed to the Japanese house as a model for the organization of space. Next, he reviewed the impact of the avant-garde designers (De Stijl, Bauhaus, as well as his own designs) before applying the aesthetic lessons to some "before and after" comparisons. Underneath photographs of two cluttered dining rooms (one the house of an antique dealer and the other a working-class dwelling) he drew make-over versions that retained the necessary furniture while eliminating the inessential. These were real worked examples, in which the taste of the owner resisted too-extreme changes, and the text insists that the new reforms should be a gradual process.

The struggle for a new aesthetic was a struggle for the hearts and minds of housewives. Taut went on to appeal to their practical sense, by referring to the theories of the American writer Christine Frederick, whose study of efficiency in the home was based on the industrial time-and-motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taut was prescient in identifying this source and illustrating Frederickıs Taylorist diagrams of inefficient and efficient kitchens, since her book was not yet translated into German. Frederickıs work would stimulate a whole literature in Europe. Taut applied similar principles to the apartment plans, sweeping away loose furniture and the underused parlor to create a larger L-shaped living room that communicated directly with the kitchen. In a financial table he claimed that 13 per cent in building and furnishing costs could be achieved by such methods, while affording more usable space.

The German architect Bruno Taut (1880-1938) gained recognition as a leader of the 'New Objective' architecture. His best-known single building is the Glass Pavilion at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition (1914). He served as city architect in Magdeburg, designed several successful large residential developments in Berlin, and headed GEHAG (a private housing concern, which still exists). Tautıs left-leaning politics often caused him problems‹limiting his opportunities before WWI and forcing him flee to Switzerland and Japan (he wrote three influential books on Japanese culture and architecture). His politics, the influence of the garden movement, and the Deutscher Werkbund resulted in a belief that architecture is a universal art, not for the elite only.

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