The history of modern interwar architecture has been told many times, first by a generation of critics committed to ensuring that this experiment endured and next by scholars, many of whom were also passionate defenders of what had once been highly experimental forms. The first satisfied itself with the analysis of the physical object (form, plan, construction), supported by the theories of its architects; the second has excavated the archival record, using drawings and letters, but also journal and sometimes even newspaper articles, to reconstruct the design process as well as client demands.

Neither Sabine Hake, professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Texas, nor the late Paul Overy, who taught the history and theory of modernism at Middlesex University, fit neatly into either group. Their books under review here, Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin and Light, Air and Openness: Modern Architecture between the Wars, are based largely on published sources and existing scholarship. Although these include primary sources, neither seems to have consulted an archive. Both authors, however, appear to have read absolutely everything relevant to their arguments, which in turn derive much of their freshness from their distance from conventional historical scholarship. Hake and Overy develop two quite different perspectives on subjects that they view from a perspective far broader than that taken by scholars absorbed in uncovering basic information.

Interpretation matters now that the facts appear to be largely established. Since the 1920s, supporters and scholars of modern architecture (the two groups have always overlapped) have oscillated between normalizing its new, abstract forms as inherently middle class and proposing instead that they support as radical a social and political as an aesthetic and technological break with the past. Since the rediscovery of Expressionist architecture in the 1970s, modernism’s defenders have generally described it as not only emancipatory but revolutionary, or at the least socialist.

The two books under review highlight diverse aspects of this progressive character but detach it from revolutionary politics. Hake focuses on environments for the masses, which she describes as composed of white-collar rather than factory workers; Overy includes industrial architecture in his study, but focuses above all on sanitoria for tuberculosis patients. Her scope is limited to a single city; his extends to all of Europe. Although the example with which he opens was erected by a union, and he includes a salient discussion of industrial architecture, many of the buildings on which he focuses were explicitly intended for an upper-middle-class clientele. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, progressive liberal policies, rather than democratic socialism, are now deemed sufficient agents for radical changes not only in architecture but also in daily life.

Hake participates in the spatial turn within literary scholarship. She excels at discussing specific places in Berlin in terms of the way in which they were depicted in film, literature, and cultural criticism during the Weimar Republic. She is at her best in a masterful discussion of Erich Mendelsohn’s addition to Mossehaus, the headquarters of a Berlin newspaper firm, and of published photographs of it, as well as in a similarly inspired analysis of Walter Ruttmann’s famous film Berlin, die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin, Symphony of a Metropolis (1927)). Other chapters address the New Building, as Germans called what is better known in English as the International Style; the writings of flaneurs Franz Hessel and Siegfried Kracauer; and Alexanderplatz, the setting of Alfred Döblin’s eponymous novel. For Hake, as for an increasing number of scholars from outside urban and architectural history, specific places matter enormously. She thus chases down information about the locations depicted in films and works of literature and attempts to show how they were being changed by the rising importance of white-collar workers:

I read the textual productivity surrounding specific buildings, streets, and squares as a class specific (i.e. bourgeois) reaction to the erosion of traditional class distinctions and cultural hierarchies and the emergence of a simultaneously more heterogeneous and homogeneous urban culture spearheaded by white-collar workers. Expressed through, and projected on, the most innovative architectural styles available at the time, these spatial fantasies of Weimar Berlin not only shed light on the crisis of bourgeois subjectivity and the perceived threat of deindividualization, but also grant access to the new forms of collectivity, community, and public life that are an essential, though often overlooked or disregarded, part of the making of the modern masses and the power of the classical metropolis. (2–3)

For the most part, Hake is in impressive command of the wide variety of media that together enable her to draw a nuanced portrait of Weimar-era Berlin. Occasionally she falls prey to the hazards of interdisciplinary scholarship, however, as when she attributes the notorious slogan “architecture or revolution” to the Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri rather than to the architect Le Corbusier.

That there was a social dimension to this story has long been acknowledged, although scholars have debated the exact ways in which the shift in the audience and clientele for architecture to include the working and middle classes inspired changes in the surfaces, spaces, and spectacle surrounding architecture during the Weimar Republic. Hake argues that the driving force in these changes was the emergence of a mass society, which she defines as consisting above all of white-collar workers rather than factory labor—somewhat surprisingly, considering that Berlin was unusual among the political capitals of the period in being an industrial city. She is undoubtedly partly right, but her claim would be stronger if she were more explicit in her challenge to the Marxist model she is implicitly seeking to replace and more self-conscious about the degree to which her argument projects the stability of the current Berlin republic back onto its Weimar predecessor.

Hake celebrates aesthetic changes in the cityscape for the literary and cultural innovation they helped to prompt, rather than exploring them as the result of tensions that architecture alone can never hope to resolve. There is little hint here of the utopian exultation out of which this aesthetic was originally forced in the expressionist experiments that followed quickly from the November Revolution. Nor does Hake explore condemnations of the progeny of these experiments by many, including white-collar workers, for symbolizing the destabilization of society. Hake seldom alludes to the precariousness of the Republic and of the lives of the many Jewish architects, architectural clients, and intellectuals who fill her pages. (Mendelsohn’s emigration and exile, for instance, appear in a footnote, in which the places to which he moved after Berlin are all incorrect.) The dynamism of Weimar commercial architecture only partially filled the void left by the state’s inability to represent itself effectively. Moreover, it rendered the new architecture vulnerable to criticism from both the left and the right for its association with capitalism.

Overy, too, presents an account of the modern movement that is extremely compelling within its narrow boundaries. Sections entitled “Health,” “Home,” “Sun,” “Water,” and “Factory” focus on the ways in which an aesthetic of industrial cleanliness transformed the design of hospitals, kitchens, bathrooms, schools, swimming pools, and factories across Europe during the interwar years. The relationship between modern architecture and health, particularly the fight to eradicate tuberculosis, has featured in almost all accounts of the style. Nothing is new about the general argument, but the range of details and the quality of the discussion will surprise even the most expert scholar. Although Overy’s limited focus can never fully explain the breadth of this movement, it does renew its original appeal, not least to those who had the political and economic wherewithal to make decisions about the environments in which they lived, worked, and sought treatment.

These included the working as well as the middle classes. The book opens with a moving account of one of the canonical sanitaria of the interwar years, Jan Duiker and Bernard Bijvoet’s recently renovated Zonnestraal in Hilversum, erected by the Diamond Workers’ Union to combat the respiratory problems endemic to their trade. In ruins when Overy first visits it, its glazed concrete frame has outlived its original purpose and been left to deteriorate. Nonetheless, Overy, who returns over and over again to the tuberculosis sanitoria in the Swiss resort of Davos, focuses, like Hake, above all on the middle classes. “Light and openness,” to quote one of Overy’s sub-headings, promised better health and a more spiritual existence to those who feared being stultified, or even emotionally and physically crippled, by bourgeois materialism and formality.

Modern architecture certainly had multiple origins, but those fleshed out in new detail by Overy remain among its most appealing. While social control pervaded efforts to reform the working classes, it is doubtful that many descendents of either the reformers or their targets would like now to turn their back on flush toilets, hot and cold running water, or showers—or to don the corsets that once encased bodies as well as minds—regardless of how they may feel about ornament on furniture or the relative size of kitchens versus parlors. Refreshingly, Overy never romanticizes his subject. In a discussion of changes in kitchen design, for instance, he notes that “the real agenda was ideological, as much a question of social as physical hygiene. By separating the living room from the kitchen people were forced to use the spaces provided for them in new and unfamiliar ways . . . . This was an undisguised attack on traditional working-class and lower middle-class domestic customs” (95).

Overy’s book is studded with fascinating details and insightful observations presented in clear, lively prose. The author’s suggestion that, “The chrome-plated piping of tubular-steel furniture was like a symbolic representation of the plumbing systems that serviced the modern house and kept it clean and hygienic,” is even more convincing when he explains that, “Because designers such as Stam and Rietveld did not have access to pipe-bending equipment, the early prototypes of their tubular-steel furniture were made from water or gas piping, using plumber’s ‘elbow joints’ to join straight lengths of pipe” (183). Nor does Overy gloss over the limitations of modern infrastructure, noting finally that the “smooth glinting sophistication [of tubular-steel furniture] was a metaphoric substitute for the plumbing that so often failed to function satisfactorily in the modernist house” (183).

Following World War II, modernism took on new guises even as it spread to new locales. New York’s Park Avenue lacked the illuminated advertising that had enlivened Berlin’s cityscape during the 1920s, while the hygiene obsession motivating sanitarium construction waned when drugs replaced fresh air and sunlight as a cure for tuberculosis. By the 1930s, even, the early phase of modernism analyzed by Overy and Hake had ended, at least in Central European. The commercial spectacle of contemporary neo-modernism has much more in common with Hake’s subject than with Overy’s, but perhaps that is only because we now take the latter for granted—at least in the context of bathrooms and kitchens.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about reading these two accounts back to back is how little relationship their respective slices through the subject have to one another, even as neither author feels much call to consider whether her or his subject is representative of modern urbanism or architecture as a whole. That two knowledgeable scholars could write such engaging accounts of similar topics without even tangential connections between them exposes how much remains to be said about modernism, to whose continued vitality these accounts bear eloquent witness. While Overy offers the more familiar and convincing argument, Hake’s analyses are often even more erudite, even if her ambitious attempt to redefine the masses smoothes away the tensions that gave Berlin during the 1920s so much of its bite.