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A Women’s Berlin Building the Modern City Despina Stratigakos PRESS |
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$75.00 cloth |
Winner of the DAAD Book Prize of the German Studies Association and the Milka Bliznakov Prize The modern city as the birthplace of the modern woman. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, women began to claim Berlin as their own, expressing a vision of the German capital that embraced their feminine modernity, both culturally and architecturally. Women located their lives and made their presence felt in the streets and institutions of this dynamic metropolis. From residences to restaurants, schools to exhibition halls, a visible network of women’s spaces arose to accommodate changing patterns of life and work. A Women’s Berlin retraces this largely forgotten city, which came into being in the years between German unification in 1871 and the demise of the monarchy in 1918 and laid the foundation for a novel experience of urban modernity. Although the phenomenon of women taking control of urban space was widespread in this period, Despina Stratigakos shows how Berlin’s concentration of women’s building projects produced a more fully realized vision of an alternative metropolis. Female clients called on female design professionals to help them define and articulate their architectural needs. Many of the projects analyzed in A Women’s Berlin represent a collaborative effort uniting female patrons, architects, and designers to explore the nature of female aesthetics and spaces. At the same time that women were transforming the built environment, they were remaking Berlin in words and images. Female journalists, artists, political activists, and social reformers portrayed women as influential actors on the urban scene and encouraged female audiences to view their relationship to the city in a radically different light. Stratigakos reveals how women’s remapping of Berlin connected the imaginary to the physical, merged dreams and asphalt, and inextricably linked the creation of the modern woman with that of the modern city. “Stratigakos adds colour and distinction to a crucial period in Berlin's history. The interest of her study goes well beyond that of gender and architecture and contributes to a better understanding of the daily life of imperial Berlin. 'Women and architecture' is a topic that deserves more attention in general, and A Women's Berlin is an excellent example of how it can be done and of the illustrative quality such a study can have. This account of a 'largely forgotten city, a site of both dreams and real spaces' will fill a gap in any library on Berlin.” —The Times Higher Education “A Women’s Berlin deserves to be read by anyone interested in the complex interaction between social change and the built environment.” —European Architectural History Network Despina Stratigakos is assistant professor of architecture at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. 256 pages | 77 b&w photos | 7 x 10 | 2008
Acknowledgments Introduction: A Forgotten Metropolis 1. Remapping Berlin: A Modern Woman’s Guidebook to the City 2. From Piccadilly to Potsdamer Strasse: The Politics of Clubhouse Architecture 3. A Home of Our Own: Single Women and the New Domestic Architecture 4. Exhibiting the New Woman: The Phenomenal Success of Die Frau in Haus und Beruf 5. The Architecture of Social Work: Workers’ Clubs, Social Welfare Institutions, and the Debate over Female Housing Inspectors Epilogue: What a Woman Must Know about Berlin, Twenty Years Later Notes |
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$24.95 paper