Winner of the 1999 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural
Historians.

During the early 1900s, Amsterdam developed an international reputation as an urban mecca when invigorating reforms gave rise to new residential neighborhoods encircling the city's dispirited nineteenth-century districts. This new housing, built primarily with government subsidy, not only was affordable but also met rigorous standards of urban planning and architectural design. Nancy Stieber explores the social and political developments that fostered this innovation in public housing.

Drawing on government records, professional journals, and polemical writings, Stieber examines how government supported large-scale housing projects, how architects like Berlage redefined their role as architects in service to society, and how the housing occupants were affected by public debates about working-class life, the cultural value of housing, and the role of art in society.

Stieber emphasizes the tensions involved in making architectural design a social practice while she demonstrates the success of this collective enterprise in bringing about effective social policy and aesthetic progress.

In the summer of 1927, in a suburb of Stuttgart, an exhibition housing settlement built by sixteen of the leading architects of the Modern Movement opended to the public. Greeted as a major event by advocates and opponents of the new architecture, the Weissenhof Siedling continues to excite strong interest. This unusally cohesive yet varied group of apartment buildings, row houses, and single-family houses—hailed by Philip Johnson as "the most important group of buildings in modern architecture"—remains a critical project in the history of twentieth-century architecture. Richard Pommer and Christian F. Otto offer a comprehensive account of Weissenhof in relation to the emergence and reception of modern architecture in the 1920s.

Recipient of the Award for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing