Living inside the white box: commonplace interiors in the early modernist mass-housing developments of the May-Siedlungen in Frankfurt am Main

In contrast to the thorough documentation and critique of the architectural form and fabric of modernist public mass-housing initiatives in the inter-war years, contemporary life inside the white boxes, what I call the “commonplace” interiors, has gone unobserved. No context-appropriate methodologies have yet been developed nor historical studies of lived-in interiors carried out, primarily due to a lack of representations of real-life interiors in a time when camera ownership was very limited. This gap has been plugged by studies of the designs of interiors which showcase the skills of the designers but in doing so instantiate a gulf between ideal and lived-in interiors, imputing that the early residents were old-fashioned in their outlook, undiscerning and lacked taste. However, I was able to interview twenty-five residents, in twenty-three different types of house or apartment, in eight different developments in the late 1920s housing developments of the New Frankfurt project. These included eight first residents – children in these homes before World War II – together with families whose parents had been first residents and individuals who took over homes as restoration projects, leading to the discovery of some rare documentary materials. An analysis of the testimony of these residents indicates that, rather than the traditional categorisation of domestic interiors, in terms of period, style and the connoisseurial value of objects, these domestic interiors are better described in terms of their fixed spatial characteristics, the level of agency of the householders, the availability and affordability of furniture and fittings, the family and other social connections on which the residents could draw, and their personal handwork capabilities. This residents’ perspective not only balances the designers’ dominance of the discourse to date but exposes the tensions between the designers’ and the residents’ views in even the earliest modernist projects.