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Use matters: an alternative history of
architecture
From participatory architecture to interaction design, the question of
how design accommodates use is driving inquiry in many creative
fields. Expanding utility to embrace people’s everyday experience
brings new promises for the social role of design. But this is nothing
new. As the essays assembled in this collection show, interest in
the elusive realm of the user was an essential part of architecture
and design throughout the twentieth century. Use Matters is the
first to assemble this alternative history, from the bathroom to the
city, from ergonomics to cybernetics, and from Algeria to East
Germany. It argues that the user is not a universal but a historically
constructed category of twentieth-century modernity that continues
to inform architectural practice and thinking in often
unacknowledged ways.
Kenny Cupers is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Use matters: an alternative
history of architecture
Edited by Kenny Cupers

First published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 selection and editorial material, Kenny Cupers; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors
for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Use matters : an alternative history of architecture / edited by Kenny Cupers. -- First edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
1. Architecture and society--History. 2. Functionalism (Architecture) I. Cupers, Kenny, editor
of compilation.
NA2543.S6U84 2014
724’.6--dc23
2013015537
ISBN: 978-0-415-63732-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-63734-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-88414-1 (ebk)
Book design by Nienke Terpsma, typeset in Neue Helvetica and Letter Gothic Std.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Kenny Cupers
I SUBJECTIVITY AND KNOWLEDGE
Chapter 1
ISOTYPE and modern architecture in Red Vienna
Eve Blau
Chapter 2
Architectural handbooks and the user experience
Paul Emmons and Andreea Mihalache
Chapter 3
Laboratory modules and the subjectivity of the knowledge
worker
William J. Rankin
Chapter 4
Architects, users, and the social sciences in postwar America
Avigail Sachs
Chapter 5
Spatial experience and the instruments of architectural theory
Brian Lonsway
II COLLECTIVITY, WELFARE, CONSUMPTION
Chapter 6
The shantytown in Algiers and the colonization of everyday life
Sheila Crane

Chapter 7
New Swedes in the New town
Jennifer S. Mack
Chapter 8
Henri Lefebvre: for and against the “user”
Łukasz Stanek
Chapter 9
Designed-in safety: ergonomics in the bathroom
Barbara Penner
Chapter 10
Intelligentsia design and the postmodern
Plattenbau Max Hirsh
Chapter 11
WiMBY!’s new collectives
Michelle Provoost
III PARTICIPATION
Chapter 12
Landscape and participation in 1960s New York
Mariana Mogilevich
Chapter 13
Ergonomics of democracy
Javier Lezaun
Chapter 14
Counter-projects and the postmodern user
Isabelle Doucet

Chapter 15
The paradox of social architectures
Tatjana Schneider
Notes on contributors
Index

Acknowledgements
The origin of this book lies in the April 2011 conference “Before and
Beyond: Architecture and the User,” organized at the School of
Architecture and Planning of the State University of New York at
Buffalo as part of my tenure as the Reyner Banham Fellow. Many
thanks go to the speakers and contributors who made that event a
success. I would also like to thank the School—and Omar Khan
and Robert Shibley in particular—for their support, financial and
otherwise. Adam Levin’s editorial assistance has been crucial to the
publication of this book, as was the critical feedback of Hadas
Steiner, Curt Gambetta, Mariana Mogilevich, Gerard Forde, and
many others. Gratitude also goes to the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign for its financial support of the publication and to
Nienke Terspma for her graphic design work.

Introduction
This collection of essays examines how architecture has dealt with
the question of use and how use, in turn, has shaped architectural
thinking and practice over the past century. Utility is central to what
architects do in practice as they deal with clients, norms, and
building regulations. It is also a category of architectural theory, too
often glossed over as that one part of the Vitruvian triad
distinguishing architecture most clearly from art. Whether through
the register of type, function, program, experience, event, or
performance, the production of architecture relies on both concrete
knowledge and latent imagination of how it is used. But utility also
governs an unknowable universe of everyday experience that
remains outside of the designer’s direct control. If a lot of
architecture’s meaning is made not on the drafting board but in the
complex lifeworld of how it is inhabited, consumed, used, lived or
neglected, that world is at once central and peculiarly under-
explored.
In recent years, this blind spot of architecture has become
particularly pertinent to practitioners. From the resurgence of
activism and social engagement in architecture to the development
of new spaces of interaction using the latest technologies, the
interest in the agency of the user across many creative disciplines
today delivers new promises for the social role of design.1 Against
the view—still widely held—that such an agenda undermines

architecture’s autonomy or its formal potentials, this volume
explores instead how use has been a critical motor of architectural
invention. Accepted wisdom has it that the extent to which
architecture takes into account those who use it is a matter of the
designer’s personal ethics, dividing the discipline into a formalist
and a user-friendly camp. No matter how clear this front line may
seem to contemporary observers, it is hardly an unchanging fact
that transcends shared preconceptions or historical change. As this
collection of essays shows, the user is neither a timeless humanist
category nor a simple externality of design. It has a history of its
own, both within and beyond architecture.
What does it mean to talk about users rather than subjects,
people, clients, inhabitants, consumers, or citizens? How do we
situate “the user” vis-à-vis the realms of domesticity, the market, or
government? How do those we identify as using, experiencing, or
inhabiting it actually use, experience, or inhabit architecture? And
how does knowledge of this trickle back into the conception and
production of architecture? If use cannot be understood as a simple
consequence of planning or design, it is far from clear in what ways
it constitutes architecture—as a practice, a discipline, and as built
space.
Collectively, the chapters in this volume argue that the user is not
a universal, but a historically constructed category of twentieth-
century modernity that continues to inform architectural practice
and thinking in often unacknowledged ways. Over the course of the
past century, architecture has laid claims to the organization of life
through unprecedented experimentation with new technologies,
mass production, consumption, and planned urbanization. The
category of the user became central to these claims because it
allowed architects to address both what informs and what follows
the controllable process of design. Functionalism was but one of
the manifestations of architecture’s social ambitions, albeit a

particularly successful one in ideological and discursive terms. Over
subsequent decades, the notion of the user transformed to give
rise to a number of emerging paradigms—from programming and
participatory planning to architectural populism and interaction
design. Its emergence and transformation was not just the result of
a single discipline, but of changing market forces, government
interventions, new technologies, different fields of knowledge and
expertise, and unexpected social or cultural dynamics. The user is
not the product of architecture alone; nor does it transparently
denote the actual or imaginary people that populate it. The user is
both a historical construct and an agent of change, too often
relegated to the margins of architectural history.
The chapters in this collection thus explore the changing stakes
for architecture presented by the user across the modern, the
postmodern, and the contemporary condition. In doing so, they
make up an alternative history of architecture. Against the dominant
periodization of twentieth-century architecture based on authorship,
form, or discourse, the contributors provide a more relational
history of architecture that connects the accounts of architects,
projects, and ideas with a larger social, spatial, and material history.
Their primary geographies are European and American—speaking
perhaps less of the state of scholarly knowledge than the dynamics
out of which the user emerged as a particular register of discourse
and intervention.
What is known and cultivated as architectural invention shows
clear bias towards a relatively small set of authored works—often
by a self-proclaimed avant-garde. When use was addressed in this
rarified discursive context, its complexity tended to be both reduced
and romanticized. From Rudofsky’s “architecture without architects”
2 to Jencks’ and Silver’s “adhocism,” architects have tended to
interpret architectural phenomena located outside their professional
purview as nothing but anonymous improvisation—a simple

reversal of the cherished distinctions of authorship and intention.3 A
more lucid view was offered from the outside. In How Buildings
Learn, Stewart Brand provided a rare and brilliant reading of the
history of buildings through their changing uses over time, but its
influence in architectural discourse remained limited.4 Another
much-needed study came from the architect Jonathan Hill, whose
theoretical examination was more successful in linking architects’
intentions with users’ creativity but relied heavily on linguistic
analogy, following in the footsteps of postmodern architectural
theory.5
A history of the relationship between architecture and use
requires paying attention to a more diverse set of actions and
actors and to the many determinants of both marginal and
mainstream architectural production. Covering a wide range of
practices, the contributors to this volume thus explore how various
fields of knowledge and design have worked to define and shape
specific uses and users, from the smallest room in the house to the
problems of urban life at large. They examine the ways in which
architectural knowledge has developed in relationship to other
disciplines, from social science and ergonomics to industrial design,
landscape architecture, and urban planning. They explore
reciprocities and contradictions between intention and practice. And
they reverse the dominant view that places architecture and
everyday use in opposing realms of reality, experience, and action.
Finally, the combination of contributions by both scholars and
contemporary practitioners brings historical arguments into dialogue
with contemporary debates in architecture.
At least four different disciplinary lenses can be trained on the
notions of use and the user. Anthropological approaches to material
culture have long focused on the relationship of objects to their
makers and their users, but its transposition to architecture can
imply reading environments as objects.6 Phenomenological

approaches in architecture have approached use in as much as
they replaced function with sensory experience, but did so by
reducing it to a transhistorical intention of architecture.7 The work of
Henri Lefebvre and the generation of Anglo-American studies
following in its wake undoubtedly provide the most robust
theoretical framework for approaching use in architecture. Their
shift in focus from architectural concepts and experiences to the
production of space has inspired both architectural history and
contemporary discourse.8 And last, more recent developments in
social studies of science and technology, in which the notion of the
user has become a growing domain of inquiry, promise a fresh,
more pragmatic look at architecture.9 some of their theoretical
arguments, which revolve around the mutual shaping of design and
use and emphasize the active role of users, remain limited,
however, by the reduction of architecture to a social technology.
While this collection selectively takes up some of these lenses, its
overall contribution lies not in bringing them together but in
historicizing some of the concepts and categories they are based
on. If history is the analysis of the forces from the past that
together make up the present, this book traces three such
genealogies. The first part begins with the construction of the
modern subject in the first decades of the twentieth century, the
second with the changing role of the state and the market at mid-
century, and the third with the advent of participation in the 1960s
and 1970s. These constitute the three major historical forces
without which today’s discussion of the user in architecture cannot
be understood. The parts are chronologically organized and run up
to the present, ending with a contribution by a contemporary
practitioner or theorist who takes up a more explicit position with
regards to the theme of each part.

I
The first part, “Subjectivity and Knowledge,” explores how attention
to the user emerged in architectural modernism during the interwar
period and spawned new types of knowledge to support the
production of architecture up to the present. The chapters depart
from dominant accounts of architecture’s role in the construction of
modern subjectivity by shifting the focus of analysis from avant-
garde representations of subjectivity to its actual production through
architectural and spatial practice. The import and popularity of
literary criticism in architecture over past decades allowed scholars
to speak of architecture as constructing a subject in the same way
a text could construct a reader.10 In the worst case, that meant that
it sufficed to describe the formal attributes of a single architectural
object to present sweeping claims about modern or postmodern
subjectivity. The chapters in this part analyze how such discursively
and formally constructed representations of subjectivity are both
shaped by and affect the realities of architectural production and
experience. In doing so, they reveal how knowledge has shaped the
relationship between architecture and use, from the emergence of
new types of architectural knowledge in the interwar period, to their
transformation in the research economies of the postwar decades,
and their role in the contemporary developer-led production of
architecture.
The figure of the user is directly tied to the historical emergence
of the mass subject in late industrial capitalism. While the origins of
this type of subjectivity can be traced well into the nineteenth
century, its repercussions were most directly interrogated by the
modernist avant-garde. Mass production, rapid urbanization, the
development of mass culture, and the proliferation of new
technologies in everyday life exacerbated interest in the
unknowable universe of architecture’s consumption and use.

Scholars have located the construction of a new, modernist
subjectivity in the artistic import of such regimes of production and
experience. Its architectural exemplars include Hannes Meyer’s
Coop-Zimmer—a stage set for a new, modernist, and anti-
bourgeois subject—and Grete Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen—in
which Taylorist analyses of bodily movement were mobilized to
construct the modern kitchen and with it, the new housewife.11
Here, the notion of use in architectural modernism appears to be
interchangeable with that of function and is predominantly carried
by the application of scientific management principles to
architecture. Yet, if the metaphor of the human subject as machine
is indeed located at the basis of the idea of the user in architecture,
its contemporary legacy lies not so much in the way it inspired
architectural form but in the underlying systemization of
architectural knowledge.12 Not Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, or Le
Corbusier, but much less heroic figures like Ernst Neufert helped
shape that legacy. His Architects’ Data, first published as
Bauentwurfslehre in 1936, has become a universal reference and
can be found on almost every architect’s desk across the globe. It
bases architectural design directly on norms and standards of
human inhabitation and use.
The standardization of use may have been at the basis of
architectural modernism, but its goals and methods were
fundamentally contested. Departing from the dominant narrative of
functionalism, in Chapter 1 Eve Blau examines architectural
approaches based on radically different concepts of use and thus
alternative constructions of the modern subject in architecture.
Shifting the focus from Germany to Austria, Blau demonstrates how
Josef Frank and Otto Neurath, in their engagement with municipal
socialism in Red Vienna, advanced a modern project that served
rather than dictated use and informed new strategies for the
circulation of knowledge among citizens.

In mainstream practice, however, such strategies would often
take a different turn. Through their examination of the modern
architectural handbooks appearing during the 1930s, Paul Emmons
and Andreea Mihalache argue in Chapter 2 that representations of
the user as universal and the human body as constant fostered not
only standardization in architectural practice and design but also a
particular register of experience. They demonstrate how
architectural handbooks like American Graphic Standards were
fundamentally inspired by scientific management and by the social
ambition to create an enlightened technocracy for the common
good. Once this particular notion of the user was disseminated in
architectural practice it fostered a normalization of architectural
experience.
Until well into the 1960s, the standardization of use promoted in
various strands of architectural modernism was not generally
perceived as limiting the freedom of the individual subject. On the
contrary, standardization and freedom were often seen as part of
the same coin. In Chapter 3, William J. Rankin focuses on this
conjunction in his analysis of the corporate laboratory and its role in
mid-twentieth-century knowledge capitalism. Architects and science
administrators rendered modularity a logical part of both liberal
capitalism and scientific knowledge production. The modern
laboratory, as it facilitated the corporate management of science,
blurred the distinctions between control and freedom of the user.
Architecture, as a discipline and a profession, also participated
enthusiastically in the emerging economies of scientific research
during the postwar decades in the United States. In Chapter 4,
Avigail Sachs demonstrates how user-oriented research and design
emerged as part of this process. By subjecting the uses of space to
social scientific inquiry under the labels of environment–behavior
research, human factors research, or environmental design
research, professionals and experts brought the user to the center

of their field during the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing on the
development of architectural expertise, Sachs reveals the politics of
knowledge involved in such attempts to bring users into the realm
of design.
Since then, the backlash of postmodernist architects against
what they dismissed as crudely positivistic and obstructive to artistic
freedom has divorced such research from architectural discourse.
Meanwhile user-oriented research has been selectively but
enthusiastically adopted in the production of commercial and
developer architecture, as Brian Lonsway shows in Chapter 5.
Placing the notion of the user in the context of the contemporary
“experience economy,” he shows how salient concepts from
architectural discourse—from Kevin Lynch’s cognitive mapping to
Christian Norberg-Schulz’s architectural phenomenology—have
been harnessed by a range of professionals in the production of
commercial environments. Treating users as first and foremost
consumers, large-scale real estate development has successfully
scientized and then commercialized architectural experience.
Rather than shying away from it, critical architects would do well to
address such applications as an essential part of their field today,
he concludes.
II
The second part, “Collectivity, Welfare, Consumption,” explores the
relationship between architecture and use in definitions of
collectivity, welfare regimes, and the realms of collective and
private consumption. Its argument is that the notion of the user in
architecture is contingent upon the ambiguity between citizenship
and consumerism—a condition that became especially
paradigmatic in the economies of the postwar decades in Europe
and North America. In this context, the rise of the user as a central,

often bureaucratic concern was triggered by the development of
large-scale programs of mass housing and public services. Despite
accepted wisdom that such building production was a direct
expression of interwar modernist dogma, the collected chapters
argue that they were in fact shaped by a complex encounter
between architectural, economic, and social principles in postwar
capitalism. From mass-produced housing and urban renewal
programs to the construction of New Towns, architects, planners,
scientists, developers, and policy makers were now more than ever
engaged in the large-scale re-organization of everyday life. The
upshift was not just quantitative; it also had qualitative
consequences. Initially, the problem of use could be reduced to a
matter of norms, standards, and statistics. But in the context of
growing economic prosperity, the notion of users tended to shift
from standard, passive beneficiaries of services to active
participants with diversified consumer lifestyles.13 While the notion
of the user initially emerged in the context of industrialized
production, mass consumption, and large-scale government
intervention, it evolved to contest exactly those basic qualities of
mass, scale, and uniformity.
Scholars have explored how architectural approaches to use
changed as a result of the development of capitalism from Fordism
to post-Fordism during the postwar decades. On the one hand, this
seemed to imply the demise of the notion of function—based on
ideas of standardization, homogeneity, and productivity—and the
emergence of new architectural strategies such as flexibility,
programming, and polyvalence.14 Their premise was to diversify
architecture by giving more autonomy to use. On the other hand,
they also appear to remain in line with some basic principles of
interwar modernism. While architectural flexibility was hailed as a
way to redeem functionalism from the physical rigidity in which it
often resulted, Adrian Forty has shown that proponents of flexibility

still shared similar convictions about architecture’s functional
determination.15 An unstated assumption was that the arrival of
architectural postmodernism and its embrace of architectural
meaning constituted the real break in attitudes towards the user.
The chapters in this part examine how these architectural
approaches to the user were in fact fundamentally shaped by larger
forces of political economy, colonialism, migration, consumerism,
and the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. If the conditions of use
are caught somewhere in between citizenship and consumption, the
chapters examine the divergent politics of that uncertain position.
They look at the history of architecture’s relationship with the user
through the tension between state and market, public and private,
universality and individuality, standardization and uniqueness.
While the turn to the user may appear in some ways to be an
effect of the welfare state, its development was fundamentally
shaped by the politics of colonialism. In Chapter 6, Sheila Crane
focuses on the analysis of everyday dwelling practices in the
shantytown in Algiers to demonstrate how the notion of the user
was defined less by internal critiques in the architectural modernism
of the postwar CIAM (International Congresses of Modern
Architecture) than by the policies of the French colonial regime. The
interest of architects and sociologists in the everyday cultures of
Algerian dwelling then appears as a colonization of use more than
an attempt to emancipate inhabitants.
Even at the heart of the postwar European welfare state, political
and architectural intentions rarely matched their consequences.
Jennifer S. Mack, in Chapter 7, focuses on how middle-eastern
immigrants transformed one of Sweden’s well-known New Towns
over decades of residential mobility and incremental appropriation.
As with New Towns elsewhere in Europe, its design was meant to
foster a sense of collectivity through national belonging, defined as
membership in the welfare state. Mack shows how the immigrants

built a new community within the original confines of the town
center, thereby unexpectedly reaffirming the designers’ intention to
create a community space for all Swedish citizens.
State bureaucracies and the architects they employed were
neither unaware of the consequences nor unwilling to rethink the
premises of their interventions. In France, social critiques of state-
sanctioned modernist urbanism were continually recuperated by the
same state bureaucracy responsible for those developments. In
Chapter 8, Łukasz Stanek focuses on the urban sociology and
theoretical concepts of Henri Lefebvre to assess the pitfalls and
potentials of this kind of institutionalization of critique. Because it
was a process to which he himself was a witness, Lefebvre
approached the notion of the user ambivalently, seeing it as both
an instrument of control and as a vehicle for the creation of a
revolutionary, political form of collectivity.
Not only in the realm of public welfare or collective consumption,
but also in the most private domains of consumption did the politics
of design and use surface at this time. Focusing on Alexander
Kira’s attempts to radically redesign the bathroom, Barbara Penner
in Chapter 9 reveals how his ergonomic design philosophy, akin to
Ralph Nader’s advocacy for safety design in the automotive
industry, was meant to accommodate for a greater variety of
bathroom uses and users’ bodily differences. The call for
government to regulate industry where it concerned matters of
safety in private use and consumption, however, was not easily
transposed to bathroom design, and certainly not to architecture
more generally.
In both Western and Eastern Europe, architectural approaches to
the user intersected with political ideologies in often unexpected
ways. Max Hirsh explores this encounter in the postmodern
experiments of late-socialist urbanism in Chapter 10. Focusing on a
series of mixed-use redevelopment projects during the 1980s, he

demonstrates how the identification of a distinct category of users
triggered architectural experiments combining heavy prefabrication
with postmodern form. Such an architecture was explicitly meant to
attract skilled professionals in a political system whose official
ideology of social equality ruled out catering for their specialized
needs.
Even with the reigning mythology of individualistic consumption in
global capitalism today, such questions of collectivity have not
disappeared. As governments now face the physical remnants of a
past welfare regime—an often neglected stock of mass housing
and public infrastructure—architecture could play an active role in
efforts to forge new forms of collectivity. That is what Michelle
Provoost of Crimson Architectural Historians argues in Chapter 11
in her account of an almost decade-long engagement with the
renewal of Hoogvliet, a Dutch postwar New Town. Working with an
extraordinary diversity of users over the past decade has led the
architects to develop a diverse set of architectural projects that
reinvigorate some of the town’s initial ambitions of openness,
community, and emancipation.
III
The third part, “Participation,” explores architectural experiments
aimed at user participation. Its argument is that such projects do
not in any way entail a straightforward course of empowerment for
those involved, but instead operate in the tension between control
and freedom. That tension has been constitutive of the emergence
of participation as a discursive and operational paradigm during the
1960s and in contemporary design.
To contemporary advocates in architecture and urban design,
participation generally appears as part of a social or political project
of empowering the disenfranchised. More than the notion of

function or program, use in this sense marks architecture’s external
relevance and tends to position the architect in an ethical realm of
action, in direct relation to society at large. In their excavations of
the utopian and participatory projects by architects and artists in the
1960s and 1970s—from Yona Friedman’s “spatial urbanism” to Ant
Farm’s anti-architectural inflatables—scholars and critics have
tended to reinforce this interpretation.16 Consequently,
contemporary observers tend to take the protagonists’ rhetoric at
face value, avoiding the murky politics that only appear when such
practices are examined in a larger social and political context.
Focusing on cultural products rather than social processes helps
sustain the dominant perception that participation was ever only a
resolutely radical and fundamentally progressive project in
architecture.
At the same time, just as the term “user” can easily be faulted for
its monolithic nature and negation of difference, so is “participation”
today increasingly criticized for its depoliticizing effects and its
tyranny of political consensus. The employment of the word “users”
instead of simply “people” can be a legitimation of expertise rather
than a threat to it. Users and experts are in many ways
codependent constructs. Most importantly, the very notion of the
user tends to assume a system. It can therefore entail a shift away
from conceiving of people as independent human subjects and
towards treating them as mere elements of the complex
technological and social systems of which they have become a
part. The chapters in this part explore how architectural
experiments with participation are shaped by such historically
constructed qualities. That requires taking into account not only the
calls for direct democracy and the impact of civil rights and social
movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but also the structures of
governance and the influence of novel forms of expertise—both
architectural and social.

The tension between control and emancipation was often
immediately clear to those faced with the political complexity of
urban intervention at this time. In Chapter 12, Mariana Mogilevich
examines how landscape architects in New York City during the late
1960s and early 1970s used open space to foster a participatory
citizenry. In the context of this multicultural city in economic decline,
forging new relationships between citizens and the city was at the
heart of participatory design. While they served in no way as a
direct tool for the empowerment of citizens, these new design
approaches fostered creative agency and group identification in
ways that have since been abandoned.
The work floor too, saw its share of experimentation. In Chapter
13, in his analysis of a radical experiment in participatory
democracy aboard a merchant vessel during the 1970s, Javier
Lezaun reveals the politics of designing democracy into the physical
layout of a space. What he calls a “sociotechnical experiment” was
successful in bringing designers and social scientists together but
failed as a miniaturized demonstration for a more democratic
organization of labor and production.
In the following decade, experiments in participation did not
disappear but transformed to become conveniently aligned with
architectural postmodernism. In Chapter 14, Isabelle Doucet
focuses on the role of the counter-project in the emergence of
Brussels’ postmodern urbanism, in order to examine the multiple
situations in which users were enrolled in the practices and
processes of design. Her analysis demonstrates that the multiplicity
of the user as a discursive and practical agent was in fact at the
very heart of architecture’s blending of politics and aesthetics
during the heyday of postmodernism, and has been ever since.
In Chapter 15, Tatjana Schneider explores the contemporary
relevance of user participation in architecture. Invested in, but also
critical of, the recent embrace of social engagement in

contemporary architectural discourse, she argues that what many
such practices often lack is immersion and a real engagement with
the complexities of use. To avoid reducing architecture to “just
doing good,” she contends, architects need to develop strategies
for a veritably collective production of space.
In its entirety, this collection of chapters attests to the necessity for
any such recommendations to be confronted with the historical
forces that continue to shape them. It should not leave us
powerless to those forces, but rather help avoid the dual impasse
of naivety and apathy to which much of contemporary architectural
practice continues to be delivered. As many architects and creative
practitioners today seek to transcend conventional disciplinary
concerns and to more directly address the problems of our
contemporary built environment, we need not only new strategies
but also new histories. These should enable the architectural
imagination by expanding the disciplinary lens to a world in which
not only objects are built but also where people live. If the chapters
collected in this volume make us realize that the notion of the user
in architecture is anything but a neutral or universal given, they
should have succeeded in providing a perspective for positive
change. Ultimately, the awareness that something is constructed a
certain way is a prerequisite to any endeavors that seek alternative
means of seeing and making. It is our hope that the alternative
architectural history proposed in this volume may contribute, if only
modestly, to such intellectual work.
1 For instance Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other
Ways of Doing Architecture (London: Routledge, 2011); Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford,
Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (New York: Metropolis Books, 2008); Andres
Lepik, Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement (Basel:
Birkhäuser, 2010); Michael Fox and Miles Kemp, Interactive Architecture (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).
2 Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-
pedigreed Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965).

3 Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation (Garden
City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973).
4 Stewart Brand. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York:
Viking, 1994).
5 Jonathan Hill, Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users (London:
Routledge, 2003).
6 For instance Dell Upton, “Form and User: Style, Mode, Fashion and the Artifact,” in
Living in a Material World: Canadian and American Approaches to Material Culture (St.
John’s Nfld: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1991).
7 Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the
Postmodern (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
8 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). For its influence
on contemporary discourse in architecture and urbanism, see Everyday Urbanism, eds.
John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Chalks (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999).
For its influence in architectural history, see, for instance, Iain Borden, Skateboarding,
Space, and the City: Architecture and the Body (New York: Berg Publishers, 2001); Eve
Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999).
9 Harald Rohracher, The Mutual Shaping of Design and Use: Innovations for Sustainable
Buildings as a Process of Social Learning (München: Profil Verlag, 2006); Thomas
Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” Theory and Society 31 (2002): 35–74; Monica Mulcahy,
“Designing the User/Using the Design,” Social Studies of Science 28, no. 1 (1998): 5–37;
Steve Woolgar, “Configuring the User: The Case of Usability Trials,” in A Sociology of
Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination (London: Routledge, 1991).
10 See, for instance, Johanna Drucker, “Architecture and the Concept of the
Subject,” in Architects’ People, eds. Russell Ellis and Dana Cuff (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989).
11 See Susan Henderson, “A Revolution in the Woman’s Sphere: Grete Lihotzky and
the Frankfurt Kitchen,” in Architecture and Feminism (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1996); K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Post-humanist Subject:
The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1992).
12 The notion of systemization of architectural knowledge is borrowed from a
forthcoming book by Gernot Weckherlin about Ernst Neufert. See Walter Prigge and
Wolfgang Voigt, eds., Ernst Neufert: Normierte Baukultur im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am
Main: Campus Verlag, 1999).
13 The consequences of this evolution are analyzed in my forthcoming book The
Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press,
forthcoming 2014).
14 See Jonathan Hill, Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users (London:
Routledge, 2003).
15 Adrian Forty, “Flexibility,” in Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern

Architecture (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
16 See, for instance, Peter Blunder Jones, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till,
Architecture and Participation (London: Spon Press, 2005); Felicity Scott, Architecture or
Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007).

PART I SUBJECTIVITY AND KNOWLEDGE

Chapter 1
ISOTYPE and Modern
Architecture in Red Vienna
Eve Blau
Between 1924 and 1926 philosopher of science and political
economist Otto Neurath and architect Josef Frank collaborated on
the design and organization of a new institution in Vienna: the
Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum of Society and
Economy).1 The Museum was dedicated to disseminating
information about worker housing and the many other social and
cultural institutions that were part of Red Vienna’s radical project to
reshape the capital of the new Austrian republic along socialist
lines. The centerpiece of that project, the construction of 400
communal housing blocks, known as Gemeindebauten (city council
buildings) in which workers’ dwellings were incorporated with a vast
new infrastructure of social and cultural institutions, had been
launched in September 1923. Distributed throughout the city, the
new buildings would (by the time the program and Red Vienna itself
came to an end in 1934) provide Vienna with both a large amount
of new living spaces—64,000 units in which 200,000 people or one-
tenth of the city’s population would be rehoused, as well as
kindergartens, libraries, medical and dental clinics, laundries,
workshops, theaters, cooperative stores, parks, sports facilities,
and a wide range of other public facilities.2 Conceived as the

principal site for intense socialist activity in Red Vienna, the
Gemeindebauten were the nexus of Red Vienna’s institutions and
the spatial embodiment of the party’s communitarian and pedagogic
ideals. They also had significant symbolic presence in the city,
providing physical evidence of the political power that the newly
enfranchised Viennese working class had acquired over the shape
and use of space in their city. At the same time, that presence was
highly contested, and although its political message was clear, the
broader social and cultural purposes of the Social Democrats’
programs were not always clear to the people they were intended
to serve, the party’s core constituents. That was the task of the
new museum: to make the buildings’ forms and spaces, their
various uses and relationships to the larger objectives, social policy,
and cultural programs of Red Vienna clear and meaningful to a
politically organized, but multiethnic, multilingual, and semiliterate
working-class population.
But the interaction between philosopher and architect was both
more significant and far-reaching than their collaboration on the
Museum. That project was only one instance of many intersections
between the contemporary modernizing projects of Otto Neurath
and Josef Frank—between the didactic International Picture
Language developed by Neurath3 and the critico-architectural
practice of Frank. Neurath and Frank’s collaboration on the
Museum sheds light on the common sociopolitical agendas of the
two projects: to shape a dense information transfer (whether in
architectonic or graphic form) about the social world in a way that
provides enormous scope for agency and decision in the everyday
life of the individual. It also sheds light more broadly on the ideology
of the Modern Movement and the institutional structures with which
Neurath and Frank were briefly associated in the 1920s, but with
which they also had profound ideological differences: the Dessau
Bauhaus, the Deutscher Werkbund, and the Congrès

Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM); and through which
the Movement itself operated in the 1920s and early 1930s.
It seems likely that Neurath and Frank met in the context of the
logical positivist movement in Vienna.4 Frank participated in some
of the meetings of the Vienna Circle (to which Neurath and Frank’s
brother, Philipp, a theoretical physicist, belonged) both before and
after the First World War. He also collaborated with Neurath on
various projects related to the social and cultural programs of Red
Vienna.5 In general, Neurath had enormous confidence in the
efficacy of architecture as an instrument of social transformation. In
Neurath’s view, architecture and mass housing could perform
important political as well as material functions; the design and
construction of new forms of collective dwelling spaces that not only
provided shelter, but also fostered new forms of socialized urban
living, could be an important factor in the gradual socialization of
the economy as a whole.6
Neurath was drawn to the technical, socially driven agenda of the
neues Bauen and especially to the Dessau Bauhaus, whose
director, Walter Gropius, was determined to make the school a
centre for research into the industrial production of housing. The
Bauhaus commitment to principles of “functional” design and
“scientific,” technically grounded processes of production was
reinforced when Hannes Meyer became director in 1927 and
sought to align the school with his own commitments to
technocratic Marxism, rationalism, and internationalism. During
Meyer’s tenure as director between 1927 and 1930, Neurath and
Frank were invited to lecture in Dessau; they also forged
connections with other institutions of the modernist avant-garde in
Germany during these years.7
In 1927, Frank was invited to participate in the Deutscher
Werkbund’s Weissenhofsiedlung Exhibition in Stuttgart. Organized
by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Weissenhof was a building exhibition

intended to showcase the new architecture and demonstrate its
international reach. Frank was the only Austrian invited to
participate. The following year he was a founding member of CIAM,
a new international organization of architects concerned with the
city and with realizing the social potential of modern architecture;
Neurath became the only non-architect member of the Congrès in
1933.8

Figure 1.1 (top). Gesellschafts- und Wirtschafts-museum (GWM) installation in
Volkshalle, Neues Rathaus, Vienna, c. 1926. (Otto and Marie Neurath ISOTYPE
Collection @ The University of Reading.); (bottom) Display techniques employed at
the GWM, Vienna. From Otto Neurath, International Picture Language (1936), picture
24.
But both Frank and Neurath soon fell out with these
organizations. At Weissenhof, Frank ran into direct conflict with the
exhibition organizers. The contention, ostensibly over design,
involved a fundamental disagreement over the interpretation of
Sachlichkeit (objectivity), one of the foundational concepts of
German modernism. Similar issues led Frank to resign from CIAM
after the organization’s second meeting in 1929. Neurath’s own
brief association with CIAM in 1933 ended acrimoniously after one
unsuccessful attempt at collaborating on the development of
graphic techniques for visualizing the “Functional City.” 9
Figure 1.2 Gemeindebauten built in “Red Vienna,” 1923–1934; (bottom centre) Karl-
Marx-Hof by Karl Ehn, 1927–1930. Photograph c. 1930. Wiener Stadt- und

Landesarchiv, Vienna.
Frank and Neurath also became disillusioned with the Bauhaus,
especially after Hannes Meyer was forced to resign in 1930 by
reactionary elements both inside and outside the school.
The significance of Frank’s and Neurath’s conflicts and
disagreements with the Bauhaus, the Deutscher Werkbund, and
CIAM—and the profound ideological differences to which they point
—have received little scrutiny by historians of architecture, while
historians of science who have concerned themselves with
interactions between modern architecture, the philosophy of
science, and social and design theory during the interwar decades,
have tended to misread the terms of the architectural Sachlichkeit
discourse. Peter Galison, for example, misses the subtle but all-
important distinction Neurath draws between the Alte Sachlichkeit
(which he associates with Frank’s designs for the Gesellschafts-
und Wirtschaftsmuseum: see Figures 1.1 and 1.2) and the Neue
Sachlichkeit of the Bauhaus, and consequently fails to recognize
the fundamental differences between Frank’s conceptions of
rationalism, objectivity, and Sachlichkeit and those of the central
protagonists of the neues Bauen.10
Those differences are key to understanding the modernist
projects of Neurath and Frank and their relation to the mainstream
Modern Movement. If we examine them more closely, it will
become clear that the Viennese not only disagreed fundamentally
with the Bauhaus and neues Bauen on the issue of Sachlichkeit,
but that their opposition to this cornerstone of Modern Movement
doctrine constituted both a well-developed critique of German
modernism, and a conception of the modernist architectural project
that—politically and architecturally—was radically at odds with those
of the Bauhaus, the neues Bauen, Deutscher Werkbund, and CIAM
in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Old Sachlichkeit, vs. New Sachlichkeit
In German art and architectural discourses, the term Sachlichkeit
had a different meaning in the prewar period from that which it
acquired in the 1920s. In the early 1900s, as Stanford Anderson
has shown, Sachlichkeit designated a concern for “realism” in
architecture, a “straightforward attention to needs as well as to
materials and processes,” that was “rooted in problems of function,
commodity, health and production but not bounded by a narrow
functionalism.” Prewar Sachlichkeit contained within it “an impetus
to understand and to use our received condition as much as to
criticize and change it.”11 In the Viennese context, this position was
most cogently formulated by Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos in the
decades around 1900. Wagner, in his apodictic manual of practice,
Moderne Architektur (Modern Architecture, 1896), stated that it was
the architect’s task to elevate the facts of modern life, “the
conditions of life of our time,” to art—to give shape to time itself by
creatively interpreting the purpose, necessity, means, and
characteristics of the historical moment.12 For Loos Sachlichkeit
also had broad cultural implications. “The primary problem should
be to express the three-dimensional character of architecture
clearly, in such a way that the inhabitants of a building should be
able to live the cultural life of their generation.”13
In the 1920s the term Neue Sachlichkeit was used to designate
changes in both the economic and cultural sphere: mass production
and mechanization of labour processes, and a new visual
complexity and ambiguity, as well as new rhythms, forms, and
mechanics that followed from the changes in the economy. The
Neue Sachlichkeit in the visual arts was also mimetic and “realist” in
the sense that its focus was on the surface appearance of the “new
world.” Its mode of perception was, to borrow Fritz Schmalenbach’s
words, “a deliberately cultivated unsentimentality.”14 Neue

Sachlichkeit, conceived in this way, was arguably an ideology of
compliance with the increasingly rationalized social and economic
order.15
To Josef Frank the ideology of Neue Sachlichkeit was both
compliant and complicit in objectifying the needs and desires of the
working-class subject. He found the “cultivated unsentimentality” of
its detached point of view particularly pernicious. “[E]very human
being has a certain measure of sentimentality which he has to
satisfy,” Frank wrote. The industrial worker, who “lives altogether
solemnly” requires “sentimental surroundings” because rest
“presupposes a superfluous, perfunctory activity that extends
beyond the necessary,” one that engages the mind as well as the
body and therefore provides distraction from the sobriety of the
industrial workplace. “The demand for bareness,” he charges, “is
made particularly by those who think continuously, or who at least
need to be able to do so, and who can obtain comfort and rest by
other means. Their entertainment is of a higher intellectual order;
they have books and pictures … in this case playful embellishment
is unnecessary.” 16
In his principal theoretical work, Architektur als Symbol: Elemente
deutschen neuen Bauens (Architecture as Symbol: Elements of
New German Building, 1931), Frank challenges the functionalist
claims of German modernism and argues in favour of a non-
doctrinal, empathetic modern architecture. Modern German
architecture may be sachlich, practical, in principle correct, often
even charming, he suggests, but it remains lifeless because it has
so little to say about modern human experience, the multiplicity of
our world, about human feelings and desires that are a fundamental
part of modern life and its symbol: modern architecture.17
Frank’s attacks on the new German architecture were
reciprocated by his German colleagues. His contributions to the
Werkbund’s Weissenhofsiedlung—two houses that he had

furnished according to his principle of assemblage with an
assortment of tables and chairs, patterned carpets, and brightly
coloured fabrics—were attacked by the Werkbund’s own chief of
press relations, who judged the interiors to be “femininely
appointed,” “middle-class,” and “provocatively conservative.” 18
(See Figure 1.3.) Frank retaliated by attacking the functionalist
claims of the new German architecture, charging that they actually
undermined the very relationship between design and industrial
production that the Modern Movement purported to promote.
“Today we pretend to search for the thing as such; the chair as
such, the carpet as such, the lamp as such, things that already
exist to some extent. As a matter of fact, we are actually looking for
the occupational possibilities which arise from them.” 19
As an example, Frank illustrates a series of Bauhaus-designed
handles, comparing them with readily available, commercially
produced, evolved, rather than invented, designs (Figure 1.4). The
Bauhaus handles “all consist of basic geometric shapes. They are
therefore very ‘simple,’ but are less suitable for use by the hand.
Handles for the same functions, as they look normally, and as they
are produced by industry … fulfil a function, but who would call
them ‘functionalist’?” 20 The point Frank is making here is that the
Bauhaus designs derive less from a consideration of function,
simplicity, or ease of use than from an aesthetic preference for
certain classically derived forms, geometric solids, and a machined
“look.” Much of the functionalist rhetoric regarding machine-made
forms, Frank charged, is likewise merely a smokescreen for
aesthetic preferences.

Figure 1.3 Josef Frank, Weissenhofsiedlung Exhibition, Stuttgart, double house
interior, 1927. From InnenDekoration 38 (1927): 456.
Neurath framed a similar argument in “Rationalismus,
Arbeiterschaft und Baugestaltung” (Rationalism, the Working
Classes and Building Form), published in Der Aufbau in 1926. He
begins by declaring that the need to regard the building as a kind of
machine is self-evident and yet it happens very rarely. The reason,
he suggests, is a fundamental misconception of the relationship
between the machine and the building. That relationship is not a
matter of appearance but rather about the appropriateness of its
component parts to the tasks that the architectural object (like the
machine) is designed to perform. One can only judge if a machine
is well-designed, Neurath asserts, if one understands its inner
workings.21 The same holds true for architecture.
Neurath deplored the emphasis in German Modernism on
external appearances, which he saw as a bourgeois phenomenon
fostered by high art, particularly the constructivist machine-art of
even socially engaged artists like Fernand Léger (Figure 1.5). The

problem, as Neurath wrote in reference to Léger’s “Scaffold”
(recently exhibited in Vienna), is the assumption made by modern
artists and architects that the rationalization, known to the worker
through his familiarity with machines and with political, union, and
collective organizations, is given form in paintings filled with
disembodied machine parts, and that these images evoke the
visual sensation of stepping onto the shop floor of a modern
factory. But this play of external appearances has little to do with
either the substance of the machine or its significance for modern
society. The idea that the worker will see himself and his role in
society represented in the mechanistic imagery of modern
constructivist painting is a grave misconception. Constructivism,
Neurath asserts, seems satisfied to make a spectacle of rationalism
rather than to strive for a deeper engagement with its principle; it is
a form of romanticism that evades reality.22

Figure 1.4 (left column) “Bauhaus Handles”; (right column) “Handles industrially
produced,” by Josef Frank. From Form 30 (1934): 223.

Figure 1.5 Fernand Léger, “Das Gerüst” (Scaffold) and “Bohrmaschine” (Drill).
Figures 7 and 8 from Otto Neurath, “Rationalismus, Arbeiterschaft und
Baugestaltung,” Der Aufbau (May 1926): 52.
This, according to Frank, is also one of the principal reasons why
the “new architecture” has so little appeal for the working classes.
The worker resists the forms of the new architecture, not because
they are incomprehensible to him, but because they are in fact
illogical. For example, today “the whole world is endeavouring in
every respect to organize life as pleasantly as possible, and
therefore railway carriages and ships are made like houses, as far
as is feasible, while German architecture is determined to operate
the other way round and model homes on sleeping cars in which
one can sleep for a night if absolutely necessary.” 23
In order to develop a real understanding of Wohntechnik (the
technicalities of housing design) the worker must be given adequate
visual information by which to judge the effectiveness of design.
Usefulness or functionality and the expression of function are by no
means the same thing, Neurath points out. A functional building
does not necessarily appear to be so, nor is a building that looks
functional necessarily actually functional. Form is not an indicator of
performance. Furthermore, neither the fact nor the appearance of
usefulness has anything directly to do with an absence of applied
ornament. Prewar worker tenements were objectionable, but not
because they were decorated with columns and pilasters that
supported nothing (although useless, these features did not affect
the way in which the buildings functioned), but because their plans
did not fulfil the material purposes of dwelling. Pure functional form
(Zweckform), Neurath insists, is only an idea; its material realization
in built form can never be merely functional. Functionalism in
architecture is a principle, not a quality of form. Furthermore, there
is no correspondence between formal innovation (or architectural
radicalism) and social radicalism, which actually shapes the life of

the masses in a new way.24
How to educate a politically organized, but semiliterate and multi-
ethnic urban proletariat towards such high levels of awareness?
That was the problem and the challenge Neurath set himself in the
Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (GWM) and the goal
towards which his collaboration with Frank was directed. It was not
just a matter of developing in the working class an appreciation for
unornamented simple forms and efficiently planned spaces. Rather
the task was to develop discrimination of a very high order: the
ability to distinguish between appearance and substance at every
level of the work.
From the foregoing, it seems clear that Neurath’s description of
Frank’s designs for the spaces of the Gesellschafts- und
Wirschaftsmuseum as “overflow[ing] with the old Sachlichkeit”
purposefully situated Frank’s work and the museum itself in the
conceptual world of the old Sachlichkeit and (implicitly) outside that
of the new Sachlichkeit and the contemporary neues Bauen
informed by it.25 It also provides insight into the didactic
pictographic language of type forms developed by Neurath at the
GWM.
Type
One of the fundamental concepts on which the theoretical
conceptions of the “old” and “new” Sachlichkeit were themselves
founded was the notion of “type.” The concept of type that underlay
the ideology of the Neue Sachlichkeit (as Neurath himself noted)
was that of “prototype” or industrial “type model,” conceived in
relation to the rationalization of the building process—from the
design of the individual spatial unit and architectural object, to the
organization of its construction and the planned reorganization of
the city. The process was based on rational analysis of the efficient

and cost-effective organization of space and production.
Theoretically, the role of the architect, in the words of Hannes
Meyer, was no longer that of the “artist” but rather that of a
“specialist in organization,” since “building is only organization:
social, technical, economic, mental organization.” 26
A well-known example of such analysis, Alexander Klein’s
experimental graphic method for evaluating floor plans of small
dwellings, deployed Taylorist methods of time–motion analysis.27
(See Figure 1.6.) Space in Klein’s Taylorized living environment, is
shaped by movement and the execution of prescribed tasks in
highly differentiated “specialized” operational zones. It is not (as in
the “bad” example illustrated by Klein), shaped by conventional
notions of public and private, front and back, served and service
spaces. Instead, the Taylorized plan rejects type (conceived in
terms of historically evolved building forms associated with custom
and use) in favour of function.
By contrast, the concept of type on which the “old” prewar
Sachlichkeit was founded—particularly as it was conceived by the
protagonists of turn-of-the-century Viennese modernism, Otto
Wagner and Adolf Loos—was part of a fundamental re-examination
of the relationship between design and society; it was an
investigation directed towards the development of a modern
architecture adequate to the social, psychological, and economic
demands of modern urban life in the new century. In this context,
rationalization of the building process was just one part of a larger
analysis of developing technologies, social practices, habits and
customs, needs and purposes of twentieth-century urban living. In
Vienna and Central Europe generally, the theoretical roots of this
concept of type were grounded in Gottfried Semper’s
Bekleidungstheorie.
The theory of Bekleidung (dressing or cladding), to which Semper
referred throughout his theoretical work, but developed most fully in

Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder
Praktische Ästhetik (Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts or
Practical Aesthetics, 1860–1863), posited the origins of architecture
in craft work, particularly in the textile arts. Cladding and structure,
though separate systems (representing the spiritual and material
demands of the architectural object), evolve together in Semper’s
theory to shape standard building types that are themselves in
constant evolution.28 The implications of this idea for practice are
twofold. First, typological form in architecture evolves out of use
and is therefore bound to the social and technical practices of the
time and place in which it is produced. Second, the concept of
Bekleidung identifies the facade as an expressive field for
architecture, a covering that has an all-important communicative
function with respect to the building and the city: to convey the
specific (as opposed to the typological) meaning of the building and
to mediate between it and the world. This idea of modernism as a
dialectic between type and individuality, convention and innovation,
provided a foundation for semantic and typological research in
Wagner’s pedagogy and practice, as it did in Loos’s criticism and
architectural design.29

Figure 1.6 Alexander Klein, “Experimental graphic method for evaluating floor plans
of small dwellings” Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst und Städtebau 11 (1927):
298.

Figure 1.7 Josef Frank, Siedlung Hoffingergasse, 1921. Courtesy of Johannes Spalt.
Site plan, Das Neue Wien, ed. Gemeinde Wien, 4 vols (Vienna, 1926–1928), I, 274.
Frank, who was in many ways the intellectual heir to Wagner and
Loos, carried the Viennese investigation into type and language
forward in the 1920s. He also redirected it, away from the critique
of bourgeois cultural values in which it had been embedded in
prewar architectural debates, towards the development of an
architectural program that could engage and mitigate the enormous
political, economic, and social dislocations within Austrian society
after the First World War and the dissolution of the Habsburg
Empire.
With regard to typification, Frank saw the Taylorized planning
efforts of Klein and the Reichsforschungsgesellschaft für
Wirtschaftlichkeit im Bau- und Wohnungswesen (Rfg, German
housing research organization) as a pointless functional
differentiation of space that replaced the traditional proletarian
dwelling typology with a schematic spatial organization that evinced
little knowledge of (or interest in) working-class Wohnkultur. The
rationalized domestic plan was, in Frank’s view, just another

manifestation of the reductive codes of the Neue Sachlichkeit that
sought to free architecture from the cultural baggage of the past by
substituting machine imagery for traditional building forms.
Tradition, Frank maintained, is an essential part of cognition; the
means by which we know our world. Frank conceived his own
architecture in relation to a complex notion of tradition in terms of a
dialectic of type and idea.30 His cooperative Gartensiedlung
Hoffingergasse (1920–1921), for example, differed from the other
Gartensiedlungen designed under the auspices of the ÖVSK
(Austrian Settlement and Allotment Garden Union), which tended
(with the exception of those designed by Adolf Loos) toward
vernacular village imagery and picturesque site planning. By
contrast, Frank’s site plan is purposefully anti-picturesque; the rows
of uniform houses are rationally aligned with the interlocking grids of
the existing streets and the new paths and lanes inserted between
the long narrow allotment gardens in the interior of the blocks,
which (after all) were the raison d’être of the garden settlement
itself (Figure 1.7). The street fronts of the houses are undecorated,
faced with rendered cement in earth tones and overlaid with wall
trellises for climbing roses and other plants. For Frank, the unity of
the whole and uniformity of the parts were as important for the
conception of the Gartensiedlung as was the connection between
house and allotment garden. They expressed the democratic
principle and equal status of all members of the cooperative.31
In the large Gemeindebauten that Frank subsequently designed
for the municipality of Red Vienna, he followed his own dictum that
it was not enough for modern architecture to be sachlich; buildings
needed also to say something larger about the human condition
and modern experience.32 Consequently, Frank engaged the
Gemeindebau typology as both a syntactical and sociospatial
problem (Figure 1.8). Frank’s buildings are uncompromisingly
modern—with flat roofs, smooth stucco-faced walls devoid of

applied ornament, rational plans, simple cubic massing, and elegant
proportions—but they are also responsive to custom and place
(filled with small-scale adjustments to established patterns of use
and circulation) and highly individualistic in terms of colour and
detailing; the walls of the Wiedenhofer-Hof (1924) for example, are
orange-red, the window surrounds are painted white, the metal
balcony railings are green; the walls of Sebastian-Kelch-Gasse, 1–3
(1928) are alternately sky blue, sandstone red, and grey-green;
lettering on the facades is dark blue; and the balconies, with railings
made of industrial wire mesh, were originally painted brick-red.
Figure 1.8 Josef Frank, Sebastian-Kelchgasse, 1–3, 1928. Photograph c. 1930. Wiener
Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Vienna.
These buildings embody Frank’s notion of a non-doctrinal,
empathetic modern architecture that is alive to the variability of
human desire and experience, and that serves rather than dictates
use. Frank’s concept of simple, straightforward building has little in
common with the rich allusions and Grossförmigkeit (largeness of

scale and conception) of buildings like the Karl-Marx-Hof and other
Wagner School Gemeindebauten. But the careful attention to the
particularities of site, and the manifold ways in which the buildings
accommodate individuality and differences are also far removed
from the deracinated and “deliberately cultivated unsentimentality”
of German neues Bauen.33 Spare and empathetic, typical and
idiosyncratic, Frank’s contradiction-filled modernism resists the
narrowly defined functionalism of the Neue Sachlichkeit. In
opposition to its reductive codes, Frank advocated “a new
architecture born of the whole bad taste of our period, of its
intricacy, its motleyness, and sentimentality, a product of all that is
alive and experienced at first hand: at last, an art of the people
instead of art for the people.” 34
From Type to ISOTYPE: “The Vienna Method”
Frank’s dialectical conception of type in architecture—as the
intersection of social and spatial practices—has much in common
with the concept of “customs” that informed Neurath’s pictorial
language of ISOTYPE. Neurath conceived customs broadly, as
encompassing a wide spectrum of social attitudes, practices, and
habits of mind, and as forms of established learning and stabilized
behaviour that expand and change over time and through history.
According to Karl Müller, they established for Neurath the
“praxeological foundations of the social world.”35 In Neurath’s
sociology, habits and stable routines of behaviour expand in all
possible directions through processes of “extrapolation” (the
processes by which knowledge, learned through experience in a
particular context, is applied to other contexts) and/or by means of
“coherences” (by the drawing of synchronous connections between
customs in a given social-spatial domain). ISOTYPEs function in
this way—by induction or analogy formation (to represent

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intimated that for the rest no sport was true sport save the sport of
ski-running. He allowed it to be understood that luges were for
infants. He had brought his skis, and these instruments of
locomotion, some six feet in length, made a sensation among the
inexperienced. For when he had strapped them to his feet the
Captain, while stating candidly that his skill was as nothing to that of
the Swedish professionals at St. Moritz, could assuredly slide over
snow in a manner prodigious and beautiful. And he was exquisitely
clothed for the part. His knickerbockers, in the elegance of their
lines, were the delight of beholders. Ski-ing became the rage. Even
Nellie insisted on hiring a pair. And the pronunciation of the word
"ski" aroused long discussions and was never definitely settled by
anybody. The Captain said "skee," but he did not object to "shee,"
which was said to be the more strictly correct by a lady who knew
some one who had been to Norway. People with no shame and no
feeling for correctness said, brazenly, "sky." Denry, whom nothing
could induce to desert his luge, said that obviously "s-k-i" could only
spell "planks." And thanks to his inspiration this version was adopted
by the majority.
On the second day of Nellie's struggle with her skis she had
more success than she either anticipated or desired. She had been
making experiments at the summit of the track, slithering about,
falling and being restored to uprightness by as many persons as
happened to be near. Skis seemed to her to be the most
ungovernable and least practical means of travel that the madness
of man had ever concocted. Skates were well-behaved old horses
compared to these long, untamed fiends, and a luge was like a
tricycle. Then suddenly a friendly starting push drove her a yard or

two, and she glided past the level on to the first imperceptible slope
of the track. By some hazard her two planks were exactly parallel, as
they ought to be, and she glided forward miraculously. And people
heard her say:
"How lovely!"
And then people heard her say:
"Oh! ... Oh!"
For her pace was increasing. And she dared not strike her pole
into the ground. She had, in fact, no control whatever over those
two planks to which her feet were strapped. She might have been
Mazeppa and they, mustangs. She could not even fall. So she fled
down the preliminary straight of the track, and ecstatic spectators
cried: "Look how well Mrs. Machin is doing!"
Mrs. Machin would have given all her furs to be anywhere off
those planks. On the adjacent fields of glittering snow the Captain
had been giving his adored Countess a lesson in the use of skis; and
they stood together, the Countess somewhat insecure, by the side of
the track at its first curve.
Nellie, dumb with excitement and amazement, swept towards
them.
"Look out!" cried the Captain.
In vain! He himself might perhaps have escaped, but he could
not abandon his Countess in the moment of peril, and the Countess
could only move after much thought and many efforts, being scarce
more advanced than Nellie. Nellie's wilful planks quite ignored the
curve, and, as it were afloat on them, she charged off the track, and
into the Captain and the Countess. The impact was tremendous. Six
skis waved like semaphores in the air. Then all was still. Then, as the

beholders hastened to the scene of the disaster, the Countess
laughed and Nellie laughed. The laugh of the Captain was not heard.
The sole casualty was a wound about a foot long in the hinterland of
the Captain's unique knickerbockers. And as threads of that beautiful
check pattern were afterwards found attached to the wheel of
Nellie's pole, the cause of the wound was indisputable. The Captain
departed home chiefly backwards, but with great rapidity.
In the afternoon Denry went down to Montreux and returned
with an opal bracelet, which Nellie wore at dinner.
"Oh! What a ripping bracelet!" said a girl.
"Yes," said Nellie. "My husband gave it me only to-day."
"I suppose it's your birthday or something," the inquisitive girl
ventured.
"No," said Nellie.
"How nice of him!" said the girl.
The next day Captain Deverax appeared in riding breeches.
They were not correct for ski-running, but they were the best he
could do. He visited a tailor's in Montreux.
V
The Countess Ruhl had a large sleigh of her own, also a horse; both
were hired from Montreux. In this vehicle, sometimes alone,
sometimes with a male servant, she would drive at Russian speed
over the undulating mountain roads; and for such expeditions she
always wore a large red cloak with a hood. Often she was thus seen,
in the afternoon; the scarlet made a bright moving patch on the vast

expanses of snow. Once, at some distance from the village, two tale-
tellers observed a man on skis careering in the neighbourhood of the
sleigh. It was Captain Deverax. The flirtation, therefore, was growing
warmer and warmer. The hotels hummed with the tidings of it. But
the Countess never said anything; nor could anything be extracted
from her by even the most experienced gossips. She was an
agreeable but a mysterious woman, as befitted a Russian Countess.
Again and again were she and the Captain seen together afar off in
the landscape. Certainly it was a novelty in flirtations. People
wondered what might happen between the two at the fancy-dress
ball which the Hotel Beau-Site was to give in return for the
hospitality of the Hotel Métropole. The ball was offered not in love,
but in emulation, almost in hate; for the jealousy displayed by the
Beau-Site against the increasing insolence and prosperity of the
Métropole had become acute. The airs of the Captain and his lieges,
the Clutterbuck party, had reached the limit of the Beau-Site's
endurance. The Métropole seemed to take it for granted that the
Captain would lead the cotillon at the Beau-Site's ball as he had led
it at the Métropole's.
And then, on the very afternoon of the ball, the Countess
received a telegram—it was said from St. Petersburg—which
necessitated her instant departure. And she went, in an hour, down
to Montreux by the funicular railway, and was lost to the Beau-Site.
This was a blow to the prestige of the Beau-Site. For the Countess
was its chief star, and moreover much loved by her fellow guests,
despite her curious weakness for the popinjay, and the mystery of
her outings with him.

In the stables Denry saw the Countess's hired sleigh and horse,
and in the sleigh her glowing red cloak. And he had one of his ideas,
which he executed, although snow was beginning to fall. In ten
minutes he and Nellie were driving forth, and Nellie in the red cloak
held the reins. Denry, in a coachman's furs, sat behind. They whirled
past the Hotel Métropole. And shortly afterwards, on the wild road
towards Attalens, Denry saw a pair of skis scudding as quickly as
skis can scud in their rear. It was astonishing how the sleigh, with all
the merry jingle of its bells, kept that pair of skis at a distance of
about a hundred yards. It seemed to invite the skis to overtake it,
and then to regret the invitation and flee further. Up the hills it
would crawl, for the skis climbed slowly. Down them it galloped, for
the skis slid on the slopes at a dizzy pace. Occasionally a shout came
from the skis. And the snow fell thicker and thicker. So for four or
five miles. Starlight commenced. Then the road made a huge
descending curve round a hollowed meadow, and the horse galloped
its best. But the skis, making a straight line down the snow, acquired
the speed of an express, and gained on the sleigh one yard in every
three. At the bottom, where the curve met the straight line, was a
farmhouse and out-buildings and a hedge and a stone wall and
other matters. The sleigh arrived at the point first, but only by a
trifle. "Mind your toes," Denry muttered to himself, meaning an
injunction to the skis, whose toes were three feet long. The skis,
through the eddying snow, yelled frantically to the sleigh to give
room. The skis shot up into the road, and in swerving aside swerved
into a snow-laden hedge, and clean over it into the farmyard, where
they stuck themselves up in the air, as skis will when the person to

whose feet they are attached is lying prone. The door of the
farmhouse opened and a woman appeared.
She saw the skis at her doorstep. She heard the sleigh-bells, but
the sleigh had already vanished into the dusk.
"Well, that was a bit of a lark, that was, Countess!" said Denry
to Nellie. "That will be something to talk about. We 'd better drive
home through Corsier, and quick too! It'll be quite dark soon."
"Supposing he's dead?" Nellie breathed, aghast, reining in the
horse.
"Not he!" said Denry. "I saw him beginning to sit up."
"But how will he get home?"
"It looks a very nice farmhouse," said Denry. "I should think he
'd be sorry to leave it."
VI
When Denry entered the dining-room of the Beau-Site, which had
been cleared for the ball, his costume drew attention not so much by
its splendour or ingenuity as by its peculiarity. He wore a short
Chinese-shaped jacket, which his wife had made out of blue linen,
and a flat Chinese hat to match, which they had constructed
together on a basis of cardboard. But his thighs were enclosed in a
pair of absurdly ample riding breeches of an impressive check and
cut to a comic exaggeration of the English pattern. He had bought
the cloth for these at the tailor's in Montreux. Below them were very
tight leggings, also English. In reply to a question as to what or
whom he supposed himself to represent he replied:

"A Captain of Chinese cavalry, of course."
And he put an eyeglass into his left eye and stared about.
Now it had been understood that Nellie was to appear as Lady
Jane Grey. But she appeared as Little Red Riding Hood, wearing over
her frock the forgotten cloak of the Countess Ruhl.
Instantly he saw her, Denry hurried towards her, with a
movement of the legs and a flourish of the eyeglass in his left hand
which powerfully suggested a figure familiar to every member of the
company. There was laughter. People saw that the idea was
immensely funny and clever, and the laughter ran about like fire. At
the same time some persons were not quite sure whether Denry had
not lapsed a little from the finest taste in this caricature. And all of
them were secretly afraid that the uncomfortable might happen
when Captain Deverax arrived.
However, Captain Deverax did not arrive. The party from the
Métropole came with the news that he had not been seen at the
hotel for dinner; it was assumed that he had been to Montreux and
missed the funicular back.
"Our two stars simultaneously eclipsed!" said Denry, as the
Clutterbucks (representing all the history of England) stared at him
curiously.
"Why?" exclaimed the Clutterbuck cousin. "Who 's the other?"
"The Countess," said Denry. "She went this afternoon—three
o'clock."
And all the Métropole party fell into grief.
"It's a world of coincidences," said Denry, with emphasis.
"You don't mean to insinuate," said Mrs. Clutterbuck, with a
nervous laugh, "that Captain Deverax has—er—gone after the

Countess?"
"Oh, no!" said Denry with unction. "Such a thought never
entered my head."
"I think you 're a very strange man, Mr. Machin," retorted Mrs.
Clutterbuck, hostile and not a bit reassured. "May one ask what that
costume is supposed to be?"
"A Captain of Chinese cavalry," said Denry, lifting his eyeglass.
Nevertheless, the dance was a remarkable success, and little by
little even the sternest adherents of absent Captain Deverax deigned
to be amused by Denry's Chinese gestures. Also, Denry led the
cotillon, and was thereafter greatly applauded by the Beau-Site. The
visitors agreed among themselves that, considering that his name
was not Deverax, Denry acquitted himself honourably. Later he went
to the bureau, and returning, whispered to his wife:
"It's all right. He's come back safe."
"How do you know?"
"I 've just telephoned to ask."
Denry's subsequent humour was wildly gay. And for some
reason which nobody could comprehend he put a sling round his left
arm. His efforts to insert the eyeglass into his left eye with his right
hand were insistently ludicrous and became a sure source of
laughter for all beholders. When the Métropole party were getting
into their sleighs to go home—it had ceased snowing—Denry was
still trying to insert his eyeglass into his left eye with his right hand,
to the universal joy.
VII

But the joy of the night was feeble in comparison with the violent joy
of the next morning. Denry was wandering, apparently aimless,
between the finish of the tobogganing track and the portals of the
Métropole. The snowfall had repaired the defects of the worn track,
but it needed to be flattened down by use, and a number of
conscientious "lugeurs" were flattening it by frequent descents,
which grew faster at each repetition. Other holiday makers were
idling about in the sunshine. A page-boy of the Métropole departed
in the direction of the Beau-Site with a note in his hand.
At length—the hour was nearing eleven—Captain Deverax,
languid, put his head out of the Métropole and sniffled the air.
Finding the air sufferable, he came forth on to the steps. His left arm
was in a sling. He was wearing the new knickerbockers which he had
ordered at Montreux, and which were of precisely the same vast
check as had ornamented Denry's legs on the previous night.
"Hullo!" said Denry sympathetically. "What's this?"
The Captain needed sympathy.
"Ski-ing yesterday afternoon," said he, with a little laugh. "Has
n't the Countess told any of you?"
"No," said Denry. "Not a word."
The Captain seemed to pause a moment.
"Yes," said he. "A trifling accident. I was ski-ing with the
Countess. That is, I was ski-ing and she was in her sleigh."
"Then this is why you did n't turn up at the dance?"
"Yes," said the Captain.
"Well," said Denry. "I hope it's not serious. I can tell you one
thing, the cotillon was a most fearful frost without you." The Captain
seemed grateful.

They strolled together towards the track.
The first group of people that caught sight of the Captain with
his checked legs and his arm in a sling began to smile. Observing
this smile, and fancying himself deceived, the Captain attempted to
put his eyeglass into his left eye with his right hand, and regularly
failed. His efforts towards this feat changed the smiles to enormous
laughter.
"I dare say it's awfully funny," said he. "But what can a fellow
do with one arm in a sling?"
The laughter was merely intensified. And the group, growing as
luge after luge arrived at the end of the track, seemed to give itself
up to mirth, to the exclusion of even a proper curiosity about the
nature of the Captain's damage. Each fresh attempt to put the
eyeglass to his eye was coal on the crackling fire. The Clutterbucks
alone seemed glum.
"What on earth is the joke?" Denry asked primly. "Captain
Deverax came to grief late yesterday afternoon, ski-ing with the
Countess Ruhl. That's why he did n't turn up last night. By the way,
where was it, Captain?"
"On the mountain, near Attalens," Deverax answered gloomily.
"Happily there was a farmhouse near—it was almost dark."
"With the Countess?" demanded a young impulsive schoolgirl.
"You did say the Countess, didn't you?" Denry asked.
"Why, certainly," said the Captain testily.
"Well," said the schoolgirl with the nonchalant thoughtless
cruelty of youth, "considering that we all saw the Countess off in the
funicular at three o'clock I don't see how you could have been ski-

ing with her when it was nearly dark." And the child turned up the
hill with her luge, leaving her elders to unknot the situation.
"Oh, yes!" said Denry. "I forgot to tell you that the Countess left
yesterday after lunch."
At the same moment the page-boy, reappearing, touched his
cap and placed a note in the Captain's only free hand.
"Could n't deliver it, Sir. The Comtesse left early yesterday
afternoon."
Convicted of imaginary adventure with noble ladies, the Captain
made his retreat, muttering, back to the hotel. At lunch Denry
related the exact circumstances to a delighted table, and the exact
circumstances soon reached the Clutterbuck faction at the
Métropole. On the following day the Clutterbuck faction and Captain
Deverax (now fully enlightened) left Mont Pridoux for some paradise
unknown. If murderous thoughts could kill, Denry would have lain
dead. But he survived to go with about half the Beau-Site guests to
the funicular station to wish the Clutterbucks a pleasant journey. The
Captain might have challenged him to a duel, but a haughty and icy
ceremoniousness was deemed the best treatment for Denry. "Never
show a wound" must have been the Captain's motto.
The Beau-Site had scored effectively. And, now that its rival had
lost eleven clients by one single train, it beat the Métropole even in
vulgar numbers.
Denry had an embryo of a conscience somewhere, and Nellie's
was fully developed.
"Well," said Denry, in reply to Nellie's conscience, "it serves him
right for making me look a fool over that Geneva business. And

besides, I can't stand uppishness, and I won't. I 'm from the Five
Towns, I am."
Upon which singular utterance the incident closed.
CHAPTER XII. THE SUPREME HONOUR
I
Denry was not as regular in his goings and comings as the generality
of business men in the Five Towns; no doubt because he was not by
nature a business man at all, but an adventurous spirit who
happened to be in a business which was much too good to leave. He
was continually, as they say there, "up to something" that caused
changes in daily habits. Moreover, the Universal Thrift Club (Limited)
was so automatic and self-winding that Denry ran no risks in leaving
it often to the care of his highly-drilled staff. Still, he did usually
come home to his tea about six o'clock of an evening, like the rest,
and like the rest he brought with him a copy of the Signal to glance
at during tea.
One afternoon in July he arrived thus upon his waiting wife at
Machin House, Bleakridge. And she could see that an idea was
fermenting in his head. Nellie understood him. One of the most
delightful and reassuring things about his married life was Nellie's
instinctive comprehension of him. His mother understood him
profoundly. But she understood him in a manner sardonic, slightly

malicious, and even hostile. Whereas Nellie understood him with her
absurd love. According to his mother's attitude, Denry was guilty till
he had proved himself innocent. According to Nellie's, he was always
right and always clever in what he did, until he himself said that he
had been wrong and stupid—and not always then. Nevertheless, his
mother was just as ridiculously proud of him as Nellie was; but she
would have perished on the scaffold rather than admit that Denry
differed in any detail from the common run of sons. Mrs. Machin had
departed from Machin House, without waiting to be asked. It was
characteristic of her that she had returned to Brougham Street and
rented there an out-of-date cottage without a single one of the
labour-saving contrivances that distinguished the residence which
her son had originally built for her.
It was still delicious for Denry to sit down to tea in the dining-
room, that miracle of conveniences, opposite the smile of his wife,
which told him (a) that he was wonderful, (b) that she was
enchanted to be alive, and (c) that he had deserved her particular
caressing attentions and would receive them. On the afternoon in
July the smile told him (d) that he was possessed by one of his
ideas.
"Extraordinary how she tumbles to things!" he reflected.
Nellie's new fox-terrier had come in from the garden through
the French window, and eaten part of a muffin, and Denry had eaten
a muffin and a half, before Nellie, straightening herself proudly and
putting her shoulders back (a gesture of hers), thought fit to
murmur:
"Well, anything thrilling happened to-day?"
Denry opened the green sheet and read:

"Sudden death of Alderman Bloor in London. What price that?"
"Oh!" exclaimed Nellie. "How shocked father will be! They were
always rather friendly. By the way, I had a letter from mother this
morning. It appears as if Toronto was a sort of paradise. But you can
see the old thing prefers Bursley. Father 's had a boil on his neck,
just at the edge of his collar. He says it's because he 's too well.
What did Mr. Bloor die of?"
"He was in the fashion," said Denry.
"How?"
"Appendicitis, of course. Operation—domino! All over in three
days."
"Poor man!" Nellie murmured, trying to feel sad for a change,
and not succeeding. "And he was to have been mayor in November,
was n't he? How disappointing for him!"
"I expect he 's got something else to think about," said Denry.
After a pause Nellie asked suddenly:
"Who'll be mayor—now?"
"Well," said Denry, "his Worship, Councillor Barlow, J. P., will be
extremely cross if he is n't."
"How horrid!" said Nellie frankly. "And he 's got nobody at all to
be mayoress."
"Mrs. Prettyman would be mayoress," said Denry. "When there's
no wife or daughter, it's always a sister if there is one."
"But can you imagine Mrs. Prettyman as mayoress? Why, they
say she scrubs her own doorstep—after dark. They ought to make
you mayor!"
"Do you fancy yourself as mayoress?" he inquired.
"I should be better than Mrs. Prettyman anyhow!"

"I believe you 'd make an A1 mayoress," said Denry.
"I should be frightfully nervous," she confidentially admitted.
"I doubt it," said he.
The fact was that since her return to Bursley from the
honeymoon Nellie was an altered woman. She had acquired, as it
were in a day, to an astonishing extent, what in the Five Towns is
called "a nerve."
"I should like to try it," said she.
"One day you 'll have to try it, whether you want to or not."
"When will that be?"
"Don't know. Might be next year but one. Old Barlow 's pretty
certain to be chosen for next November. It's looked on as his turn
next. I know there's been a good bit of talk about me for the year
after Barlow. Of course, Bloor's death will advance everything by a
year. But even if I come next after Barlow it 'll be too late."
"Too late? Too late for what?"
"I'll tell you," said Denry. "I wanted to be the youngest mayor
that Bursley 's ever had. It was only a kind of notion I had, a long
time ago. I 'd given it up, because I knew there was no chance,
unless I came before Bloor, which of course I could n't do. Now he 's
dead. If I could upset old Barlow's apple-cart I should just be the
youngest mayor by the skin of my teeth. Huskinson, the mayor in
1884, was aged thirty-four and six months. I 've looked it all up this
afternoon."
"How lovely if you could be the youngest mayor!"
"Yes. I'll tell you how I feel. I feel as though I didn't want to be
mayor at all if I can't be the youngest mayor ... you know."
She knew.

"Oh!" she cried. "Do upset Mr. Barlow's apple-cart. He's a horrid
old thing. Should I be the youngest mayoress?"
"Not by chalks!" said he. "Huskinson's sister was only sixteen."
"But that's only playing at being mayoress!" Nellie protested.
"Anyhow, I do think you might be youngest mayor. Who settles it?"
"The Council, of course."
"Nobody likes Councillor Barlow."
"He 'll be still less liked when he 's wound up the Bursley
Football Club."
"Well, urge him on to wind it up, then. But I don't see what
football has got to do with being mayor."
She endeavoured to look like a serious politician.
"You are nothing but a cuckoo," Denry pleasantly informed her.
"Football has got to do with everything. And it's been a disastrous
mistake in my career that I 've never taken any interest in football.
Old Barlow wants no urging on to wind up the Football Club. He's
absolutely set on it. He 's lost too much over it. If I could stop him
from winding it up, I might..."
"What?"
"I dunno."
She perceived that his idea was yet vague.
II
Not very many days afterwards the walls of Bursley sharply called
attention, by small blue and red posters (blue and red being the
historic colours of the Bursley Football Club), to a public meeting

which was to be held in the Town Hall, under the presidency of the
Mayor, to consider what steps could be taken to secure the future of
the Bursley Football Club.
There were two "great" football clubs in the Five Towns—Knype,
one of the oldest clubs in England, and Bursley. Both were in the
League, though Knype was in the first division while Bursley was
only in the second. Both were, in fact, limited companies, engaged
as much in the pursuit of dividends as in the practice of the one
ancient and glorious sport which appeals to the reason and the heart
of England. (Neither ever paid a dividend.) Both employed
professionals, who, by a strange chance, were nearly all born in
Scotland; and both also employed trainers who before an important
match took the teams off to a hydropathic establishment far, far
distant from any public-house. (This was called "training.") Now,
whereas the Knype Club was struggling along fairly well, the Bursley
Club had come to the end of its resources. The great football public
had practically deserted it. The explanation, of course, was that
Bursley had been losing too many matches. The great football public
had no use for anything but victories. It would treat its players like
gods—so long as they won. But when they happened to lose, the
great football public simply sulked. It did not kick a man that was
down; it merely ignored him, well knowing that the man could not
get up without help. It cared nothing whatever for fidelity, municipal
patriotism, fair play, the chances of war, or dividends on capital. If it
could see victories it would pay sixpence, but it would not pay
sixpence to assist at defeats.
Still, when at a special general meeting of the Bursley Football
Club, Limited, held at the registered offices, the Coffee House,

Bursley, Councillor Barlow, J. P., chairman of the company since the
creation of the League, announced that the directors had reluctantly
come to the conclusion that they could not conscientiously embark
on the dangerous risks of the approaching season, and that it was
the intention of the directors to wind up the Club, in default of
adequate public interest—when Bursley read this in the Signal, the
town was certainly shocked. Was the famous club, then, to
disappear for ever, and the football ground to be sold in plots and
the grandstand for firewood? The shock was so severe that the
death of Alderman Bloor (none the less a mighty figure in Bursley)
passed as a minor event.
Hence the advertisement of the meeting in the Town Hall
caused joy and hope, and people said to themselves, "Something's
bound to be done; the old Club can't go out like that." And
everybody grew quite sentimental. And although nothing is
supposed to be capable of filling Bursley Town Hall except a political
meeting and an old folks' treat, Bursley Town Hall was as near full as
made no matter for the football question. Many men had cheerfully
sacrificed a game of billiards and a glass of beer in order to attend
it.
The Mayor, in the chair, was a mild old gentleman who knew
nothing whatever about football and had probably never seen a
football match; but it was essential that the meeting should have
august patronage, and so the Mayor had been trapped and tamed.
On the mere fact that he paid an annual subscription to the golf club
certain parties built up the legend that he was a true sportsman with
the true interests of sport in his soul.

He uttered a few phrases such as "the manly game," "old
associations," "bound up with the history of England," "splendid
fellows," "indomitable pluck," "dogged by misfortune" (indeed, he
produced quite an impression on the rude and grim audience), and
then he called upon Councillor Barlow to make a statement.
Councillor Barlow, on the Mayor's right, was a different kind of
man from the Mayor. He was fifty and iron-grey, with whiskers, but
no moustache; short, stoutish, raspish.
He said nothing about manliness, pluck, history, or auld lang
syne.
He said he had given his services as chairman to the Football
Club for thirteen years; that he had taken up £2000 worth of shares
in the company; and that, as at that moment the company's
liabilities would exactly absorb its assets, his £2000 was worth
exactly nothing. "You may say," he said, "I've lost that £2000 in
thirteen years. That is, it's the same as if I 'd been steadily paying
three pun' a week out of my own pocket to provide football matches
that you chaps would n't take the trouble to go and see. That's the
straight of it! What have I got for my pains? Nothing but worries,
and these!" (He pointed to his grey hairs.) "And I 'm not alone;
there's others; and now I have to come and defend myself at a
public meeting. I 'm supposed not to have the best interests of
football at heart. Me and my co-directors," he proceeded, with even
a rougher raspishness, "have warned the town again and again what
would happen if the matches weren't better patronised. And now it's
happened, and now it's too late, you want to do something! You
can't! It's too late. There 's only one thing the matter with first-class
football in Bursley," he concluded, "and it is n't the players. It's the

public—it's yourselves. You 're the most craven lot of tomfools that
ever a big football club had to do with. When we lose a match, what
do you do? Do you come and encourage us next time? No, you stop
away, and leave us fifty or sixty pound out of pocket on a match,
just to teach us better! Do you expect us to win every match? Why,
Preston North End itself—" here he spoke solemnly, of heroes
—"Preston North End itself in its great days did n't win every match
—it lost to Accrington. But did the Preston public desert it? No! You
—you have n't got the pluck of a louse, nor the faithfulness of a cat.
You 've starved your Football Club to death, and now you call a
meeting to weep and grumble. And you have the insolence to write
letters to the Signal about bad management, forsooth! If anybody in
the hall thinks he can manage this Club better than me and my co-
directors have done, I may say that we hold a majority of the
shares, and we 'll part with the whole show to any clever person or
persons who care to take it off our hands at a bargain price. That's
talking."
He sat down.
Silence fell. Even in the Five Towns a public meeting is seldom
bullied as Councillor Barlow had bullied that meeting. It was aghast.
Councillor Barlow had never been popular: he had merely been
respected; but thenceforward he became even less popular than
before.
"I 'm sure we shall all find Councillor Barlow's heat quite
excusable," the Mayor diplomatically began.
"No heat at all," the councillor interrupted. "Simply cold truth!"
A number of speakers followed, and nearly all of them were
against the directors. Some, with prodigious memories for every

combination of players in every match that had ever been played,
sought to prove by detailed instances that Councillor Barlow and his
co-directors had persistently and regularly muddled their work
during thirteen industrious years. And they defended the insulted
public by asserting that no public that respected itself would pay
sixpence to watch the wretched football provided by Councillor
Barlow. They shouted that the team wanted reconstituting, wanted
new blood.
"Yes!" shouted Councillor Barlow in reply. "And how are you
going to get new blood, with transfer fees as high as they are now?
You can't get even an average good player for less than £200.
Where 's the money to come from? Anybody want to lend a
thousand or so on second debentures?"
He laughed sneeringly.
No one showed a desire to invest in second debentures of the
Bursley F.C. Ltd.
Still, speakers kept harping on the necessity of new blood in the
team, and then others, bolder, harped on the necessity of new blood
on the board.
"Shares on sale!" cried the councillor. "Any buyers? Or," he
added, "do you want something for nothing—as usual?"
At length a gentleman rose at the back of the hall.
"I don't pretend to be an expert on football," said he, "though I
think it's a great game, but I should like to say a few words as to
this question of new blood."
The audience craned its neck.
"Will Mr. Councillor Machin kindly step up to the platform?" the
Mayor suggested.

And up Denry stepped.
The thought in every mind was: "What's he going to do? What's
he got up his sleeve—this time?"
"Three cheers for Machin!" people chanted gaily.
"Order!" said the Mayor.
Denry faced the audience. He was now accustomed to
audiences. He said:
"If I 'm not mistaken, one of the greatest modern footballers is
a native of this town."
And scores of voices yelled: "Ay! Callear! Callear! Greatest
centre forward in England!"
"Yes," said Denry. "Callear is the man I mean. Callear left the
district, unfortunately for the district, at the age of nineteen, for
Liverpool. And it was not till after he left that his astounding abilities
were perceived. It is n't too much to say that he made the fortune of
Liverpool City. And I believe it is the fact that he scored more goals
in three seasons than any other player has ever done in the League.
Then, York County, which was in a tight place last year, bought him
from Liverpool for a high price, and, as all the world knows, Callear
had his leg broken in the first match he played for his new club. That
just happened to be the ruin of the York Club, which is now quite
suddenly in bankruptcy (which happily we are not) and which is
disposing of its players. Gentlemen, I say that Callear ought to come
back to his native town. He is fitter than ever he was, and his proper
place is in his native town."
Loud cheers!
"As captain and centre forward of the club of the Mother of the
Five Towns he would be an immense acquisition and attraction, and

he would lead us to victory."
Renewed cheers!
"And how," demanded Councillor Barlow jumping up angrily,
"are we to get him back to his precious native town? Councillor
Machin admits that he is not an expert on football. It will probably
be news to him that Aston Villa have offered £700 to York for the
transfer of Callear, and Blackburn Rovers have offered £750, and
they 're fighting it out between 'em. Any gentleman willing to put
down £800 to buy Callear for Bursley?" he sneered. "I don't mind
telling you that steam-engines and the King himself couldn't get
Callear into our Club."
"Quite finished?" Denry inquired, still standing.
Laughter, overtopped by Councillor Barlow's snort as he sat
down.
Denry lifted his voice.
"Mr. Callear, will you be good enough to step forward and let us
all have a look at you?"
The effect of these apparently simple words surpassed any
effect previously obtained by the most complex flights of oratory in
that hall. A young, blushing, clumsy, long-limbed, small-bodied giant
stumbled along the central aisle and climbed the steps to the
platform, where Denry pointed him to a seat. He was recognised by
all the true votaries of the game. And everybody said to everybody:
"By Gosh! It's him right enough. It's Callear!" And a vast
astonishment and expectation of good fortune filled the hall.
Applause burst forth, and though no one knew what the appearance
of Callear signified, the applause continued and waxed.

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