The Worker's House.

The proto-sociologist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl is best known in architectural history for the popularity that his organicist-functionalist dictum of "building from the inside out" received in early twentieth-century German architectural culture. However, less is known about Riehl's own writing on architecture in the context of his sociological theories. This paper discusses the importance of Riehl's thoughts on domestic architecture in giving theoretical elaboration to what, in the mid-nineteenth century, was a growing intellectual concern over the social position of workers. As the "worker" emerged as a distinct social type, and workers' welfare registered as an increasingly pressing issue, Riehl's call for a sociologically oriented understanding of architecture (capable of reforming the worker "from within") significantly altered the terms of the debate over housing policy in Germany. In examining his theoretical elaboration of the task of social policy and the role of architecture within it, this paper reads Riehl's work as a prelude to a new kind of logic about architecture's social agency that would come to underpin modern housing reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]