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Introduction

The period 1900-1930 was the one in which the architecture, housing and politics of the modern world were formed. A time traveller from the twenty-first century arriving in 1900 Europe would find themselves in a foreign land: no political consensus over the state's responsibility for welfare; no widespread provision of social housing by the state; no 'modern architecture' in the form that we know today and no concept of housing as a major part of architecture. Wind the clock forward by 30 years and the landscape would be familiar: widespread state involvement in the provision of housing for the working class; social democracy established as one of (if not the) dominant political formations; a theory and practice of modern architecture that, in its essentials, is still with us today, with housing seen as a major component of the discipline of architecture.

Nor, of course, was it a coincidence that politics, housing and architecture alike were transformed in this period; on the contrary, the three were closely entwined. Housing was one of the main planks of social democratic politics (which in Britain meant Labour) and, in response, one of the areas in which anti-Labour political parties also wanted to make a mark. Architects saw in the advent of social democracy, with its state-funded programmes, both the opportunity and the necessity for a new kind of architecture, both as symbol and midwife of the new society emerging from the old. And it was through their claim to expertise in the design of housing for the working class - never before seen as a major area of architectural endeavour - that architects staked their claim to a leading role in the social democratic pageant.

Nor, equally, did the changes to our triad take place in isolation from the other changes - economic, technological, cultural - that were transforming the developed world at this time. The 'factory system', first identified as a phenomenon in Britain in the early nineteenth century, had matured and spread across the globe, generating not just the organised labour movement that was to provide the basis for social democratic politics but also the intense commercial competition between industrialised countries, notably Britain and its latter-day economic rival, Germany, that was to culminate in the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. But the kind of things that were being made, and the way that they were being made in factories, were also changing. Thanks to its growing affluence, the working class was increasingly recognised as a consuming class; and fortunes were to be made on both sides of the Atlantic by those who, like Ford in America or Cadbury in Britain, perfected the methods of producing commodities for this new market, whether cars or chocolate. With these advances, many coming from the USA, there also arose new approaches to the organisation of production - scientific management, Taylorism, standardisation - which, at least until the USA lost its allure with the Wall Street crash in 1929, seemed to hold the key to improving efficiency and quality, and reducing costs. Nowhere was the appeal of this new approach greater than in relation to construction, with its hopelessly pre-scientific, 'rule of thumb' procedures and its chronic inability to deliver a decent home that the working class could afford. For architects this suggested that the aesthetic ideal might lie not in the past (which to many now appeared quaint and outdated) but in the technology and organisational sophistication of the modern age. And, while the example of Henry Ford attracted attention worldwide, nowhere was it more potent than in a Germany re-equipping itself for modern life with the aid of American capital after the destruction of the German currency in the early 1920s. If Henry Ford could do it for cars (as it seemed he had, with the Model-T after 1912), why couldn't the same be done for housing?