International Women’s Day: Myra Warhaftig – a feminist contribution to residential architecture

In celebration of International Women’s Day, Head of School, Professor Gerald Adler has written a fascinating piece about German-Israeli Architect, Myra Warhaftig.

By Professor Gerald Adler

I met Myra Warhaftig in 2008, on a field trip to Berlin with Stage Two and Three students. As a person, she was a great force, and her apartment intrigued and delighted me. I was shocked when I learned of her death from a heart attack, just a few months later (I hadn’t realised how old she was). In the years that followed I began researching her work, and gave a paper on her at the AHRA ‘Feminisms’ conference in Stockholm in 2016. The paper was published as a chapter of the book edited by Katia Frey and Eliana Perotti, Women Look on the City (Frauen blicken auf die Stadt).

 

The architect Myra Warhaftig (1930-2008) was significant in German architectural-feminist debates. Her writings concerning children’s realms but increasingly the meaning of the kitchen would appear at first sight to echo the concerns of her precursor in the German-speaking world, the Viennese Grete Lihotzky with her famous Frankfurt kitchen. A generation on, though, with the apartments she designed in what became the centre of a re-united Berlin, Warhaftig questioned the nature of all domestic spaces in a far more critical manner.

Warhaftig grew up in Haifa in the British Mandate of Palestine and studied architecture at the Technion. After her studies she worked with Candilis Josic Woods in Paris, before moving to West Berlin in the 1960s, in order to work on their competition-winning design for the Free University of Berlin. She studied for her doctorate at the Technical University Berlin, and her dissertation on the restrictions placed upon women’s emancipation by the layout of apartments was published in 1982. This shows her indebtedness to one of her teachers at the Technion, Alexander Klein, whose “corridor-free” apartment was a fundamental precedent for progressive housing. Warhaftig adapted her teacher’s planning stringency and applied a radical variant, relevant to the changed social condions of the late twentieth century.

Warhaftig was able to realise her feminist ideals in the apartment building she designed – against the odds – in Berlin, a stone’s throw from Potsdamer Platz. The story goes back to the early 1980s, when the recently founded FOPA (Feminist Organisation of Planners and Architects) had successfully lobbied the West Berlin IBA (International Building Exhibition) to engage seriously with women’s concerns in architecture and urbanism. The result was the commissioning of three architects, Christina Jachmann, Zaha Hadid and Warhaftig to build next to each other. Hadid’s is famous for being the first housing commission of her fledgling practice and is the scheme which visiting architects and students point to, excitedly, when they are in the Dessauer Strasse. Warhaftig’s, on the other hand, is reticent externally, having more in common with Josef Paul Kleihues’s Neo-Rationalist architecture than the extravagant form-making of Hadid. Step inside, though, and Warhaftig’s deft re-imagining of the Berliner Zimmer and the fin-de-siècle apartment with its centralised plan and private rooms radiating out from the parlour marks a truly feminist contribution to housing design, with the living-kitchen taking the place of the bourgeois gute Stube (“best room”, or parlour.

Berlin apartments of the latter half of the nineteenth century were generally paired and handed either side of the building entrance to the street and communal staircase. Street frontages were too narrow to accommodate the entire apartment which therefore assumed an L-shaped plan, with the ‘best’ rooms of salon and sitting room to the street and bedrooms and sundry service spaces ranged along the party wall and giving onto the rear courtyard. The “knuckle” of the front and courtyard wings was formed by the Berliner Zimmer; it functioned as the circulation space connecting the entrance hallway and rear bedroom and service corridor and was generally lit by a small window in a narrow, chamfered wall set at an angle to the courtyard. It sometimes functioned as the dining room since it connected to both the “grand” entrance hallway, into which guests were received, and to the rear service corridor, off which were located the kitchen, scullery and maid’s room. The Berliner Zimmer was an ingenious invention that served the needs and proprieties of the Berlin bourgeoisie, while squeezing the apartments into the town-planning pattern of the urban block. It was the flat’s largest room which would usually indicate its top ranking in the hierarchy of spaces. Yet its status was ambiguous because, unlike the reception rooms fronting the street which were served by a corridor the Berliner Zimmer was also the only passageway between the front and rear sections of the apartment. The functioning of the dining room was thus compromised by having to serve also as a corridor, and, because the room spanned the full width of the side wing, it fragmented the circulation pattern, cutting off the hallways in the front portion of the home from those in the private, rear section. The very ambiguity of this space would serve Warhaftig well, a century later, in her re-thinking of the Berlin apartment.

Warhaftig’s apartment plan is a radical rethink of the standard flat of the postwar period. This saw the Modernist, CIAM (Congrės Internationaux de l’Architecture Moderne) idea of functional urban zoning writ small, so that sleeping, ‘living’, and food preparation took place in quite separate domains. Indeed, the kitchen was so conceived as if domestic servants were still silently present, toiling away in a pokey space somewhere out of sight, whereas in reality it tended to be the woman of the household who would be consigned here. Warhaftig sought to transform this situation spatially, while conceding that it might indeed be the wife fulfilling the essential domestic roles of cook, childcarer and chief bottle-washer. On entering her flat you proceed almost immediately to a central ‘living-kitchen-eating’ space, with private bedrooms located diagonally off this, looking out over the rear garden courtyard. A small external terrace separates them, balanced by another such terrace on the street front. The final major space, adjacent to the living-kitchen-eating space is located on the street front. Its designation is indeterminate; it could function as an additional bedroom, or as a workspace, or as a living space, depending on the composition of the household and its needs.

At a stroke, Warhaftig achieved two goals, one an early Modernist striving to eliminate excess space, the other a later coming-to-terms with changing demographics and an upsurge in feminist spatiality.  She devised a plan that afforded both individual privacy for individuals, be they adults or children, and convivial community, in an apartment where cooking and child supervision, usually but not necessarily the job of women, is located at the heart of the flat. In this way, her apartment plan introduces a layout that is both old (reminding locals of their Berliner Zimmer tradition) and new (questioning stereotypes of who does what in the household).

Photo contributed by Orly Fatal Warhaftig.