Machines for Living In

“By the time the rhetoric of modern architecture had been assembled into a modern ideology—let’s say by 1925—the form and the structure of the modern apartment, which was to replace the more traditional one-family dwelling as the preferred dwelling of socialist man, had become full of sociological meaning. Instead of man’s home being his castle, instead of the German idea of Gemutlichkeit as essential to the domestic sphere, Gropius saw his architecture in increasingly mechanistic terms. The apartment was to deliver a maximal amount of ‘light, sunshine, air, and warmth’. The home had become ‘a machine for living in’.” [E. Michael Jones, Living Machines (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), pp. 17-18].